A Ticket to the Circus (6 page)

The sex got better as we learned together. I think he had been with one other girl before me (one of the bad girls we all talked about, not Sharon), which had been a disagreeable experience, so we were pretty
much on the same level. From then on, along with playing cards with his brother and sister-in-law, sex was the big thing on our dates, and people began to treat us like an old married couple. Several of my friends got married right after graduation. A few had gotten married while they were still in school, with babies on the way. That, of course, was a constant worry, but for some reason I never got pregnant, even though we didn’t use birth control. Perversely, I began to wonder if I could have children.

I did indeed go to Tech instead of State Teachers, rooming with Larry’s twin sister, Linda, and even managed to get an academic scholarship, which I lost my second semester after getting a C in chemistry. I normally would never have gone near chemistry, but I was required to take it for my major, and I wanted to get it over with. My lab partner was inept, too, and we once set the lab on fire, which didn’t endear me to my professor.

I was the center of everything in high school, but college was a whole new experience. There were more people at Tech than in the entire town of Atkins, half of them were boys—half of those were cute, and I wanted to date them. Having my boyfriend’s twin sister as my roommate was a little tricky, though; even if I’d wanted to cheat, she knew where I was every minute. So I didn’t cheat, but I wanted to, and even that made me feel guilty.

I started off as a home economics major, since I had loved my teacher in high school, Mary Gay, and couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do. Then, along with chemistry, one of the required courses for the home ec major was basic art, and I fell in love with it. The art teacher, Helen Marshall, convinced me I was good at painting, drawing, clay, and other studio arts. Art was so much more fun than anything else I had tried; there were no tests, just displays of our work, and so I changed my major and became part of the art crowd, which was also, de facto, the hippie crowd. In 1967, boys were just beginning to grow their hair long in Arkansas, and most of them were art majors.

I also entered my second beauty contest, for Miss Arkansas Tech, but I only got fourth runner-up, even though I did great on my song, “I Wanna Be Free” by the Monkees. After that, encouraged by my friends, I entered the Miss Russellville competition, but unhappily on
the night of the pageant, I got a stomach virus and had to keep running backstage to throw up. Not too attractive, coming out onstage in a white bathing suit with a green complexion. Or singing “What Now, My Love,” which was partly in French, while trying to keep from barfing. Although I worked hard on learning the lyrics by rote with a French teacher, it was a big fiasco when I switched to French on the second verse and got mixed up on the words. The audience sat there, stunned, not having a clue what I was saying or what language I was saying it in. As an added bonus, it was slightly off-key, just enough to make you grind your teeth, so that was the end of my pageant life. Still, the contests nudged me a little bit further into the limelight at school. Guys started asking me out in greater numbers, and I hated to have to tell them I was going steady, but I was.

Larry was a wildlife biology major, was in ROTC—with his hair shorn into a military buzz cut—and we were already beginning to grow apart. More than anything, he loved fishing and hunting, things I couldn’t bear. (One of his favorite fishing spots was called the Snake Hole. The name pretty much said it all.) When I went over to his house, I never knew if the boiling pot on the stove contained dinner, or if it was six or eight decapitated roadkill heads he was cleaning for a skull collection in one of his classes. (Well, actually, it wasn’t
that
hard to tell the difference.) Once, I was looking in the freezer for ice cream and saw, poking out of Reynolds Wrap, the feet of a mink he was going to use for taxidermy class.

I tried to take an interest in hunting and fishing. He got out the shotgun and gave me a lesson, but it had such a kick that it sent me flying backward and bruised my shoulder. I went with him once to the deer woods, getting up in the early morning dark and tracking around in the freezing snow, but I made so much noise that he sent me back to the car. He thought I did it on purpose so the deer would hear me and run away. He was a state champion archer, but when I tried it, I couldn’t hold my arm properly and kept hitting it with the string until my arm was one bruise from my shoulder to my wrist. I tried to go fishing with him—I at least liked to eat fish—but he had to bait my hook. I just couldn’t put that sharp thing through the eye of a minnow or thread a worm onto it, and it was so boring that I would bring a book and read. Once we went out for what I thought was going to be a romantic boat
ride on the lake. We took only a flimsy rubber raft, but we weren’t going far from the shore. It was a clear night with a full moon, and I quickly discovered he really had fishing on his mind, not romance. I was bored, sitting in the dark, looking up at the sky, when a dark object flew across the moon. “Oh, look, Larry! That’s so weird. There’s a bird flying at night!”

“That’s no bird; that’s a bat.” He ignored it and kept throwing his line out, trying for a huge catfish, which are easier to catch at night or something. The lake, usually romantic from the front seat of the car, was creepy in the light rubber boat. Frogs croaked a lonesome song, and things splashed in the water next to our raft with slithery sounds. I looked up, and the bat flew across the moon again, this time lower. I hunkered down in the boat as the thing starting circling us, and soon it was flying close enough to make us duck. Larry swung the paddle at the bat, and I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my head so it wouldn’t get hung up in my hair. I’d heard that had happened once, and the girl had gone crazy, as I suspected I would, too.

“This thing is acting strange. It might be rabid,” he said, slightly out of breath. “Let’s get out of here!” But getting out of there entailed paddling, and he couldn’t paddle and swing at the bat at the same time. It came so close that I felt it brush my head, which really flipped me out. Larry paddled as fast as he could, taking time to flail at the bat as it passed over us. Instead of the bat going away after we got on land, it was still attacking us. We ran down the road, the bat chasing us, dive-bombing our heads, and finally, panting with fear and exhaustion, we got to the car. Larry jumped in and locked the doors before he realized I wasn’t in the car, too, and there I was, without my shirt—which was wrapped around my head so I could hardly see—pounding on the windows. He quickly let me in, and I slammed the door just as the bat smacked into the window. It fell to the ground, but we didn’t stop to see if it was dead or not. I’m sure it was rabid. Bats just don’t attack humans unless they are. So that was one more reason for me never to go out night fishing again. As if I needed another one.

Larry, on the other hand, had absolutely no interest at all in my artwork. He said that art was just playing, it wasn’t even a real college major. Still, we were together, having great sex. In God’s eyes we were married, as I convinced myself, still fending off my nightmares of hell,
and we did have fun. He had a great sense of humor, and he could make me laugh, which was a fine attribute.

   
I WORKED AS
secretary to my adviser, Helen Marshall, who became my mentor. She was my inspiration as an artist and as a woman. She had lived in Puerto Rico, had traveled all around the world, and told me I had talent and could do anything I wanted to do if I just wanted it badly enough. There were two other girls, Aurora Young and Jean Jewell, who worked for Mrs. Marshall as well, and we became like the Three Musketeers. Aurora was from the Philippines but had moved here when she was three, so she was as much a hillbilly as the rest of us. Jean was from Little Rock, a gentle mother earth type who had honest blue eyes and long hair that was already beginning to gray at eighteen, and she practiced Buddhism, getting up early in the mornings to chant.

As well as being Mrs. Marshall’s secretary, I posed for figure drawing class (in a bathing suit) and worked in a little art shop she owned. I didn’t make much money at the shop since there was always some goodie like a handwoven poncho or a silver ring I wanted to buy instead of taking the salary. But with the money I had saved from working at the pickle plant the previous summer (I worked there three summers) it was enough to pay my tuition, although not quite enough for my room and board, so I moved back home for my second year, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as living in the dorm. Larry was set to graduate at midterm to join the service as a second lieutenant and I convinced him we had to get married before he left. I was afraid he would be killed in Vietnam, and then, of course, there would be no possibility of getting married, and what we were doing in the backseat of his blue Chevy Nova would send me to hell. Larry, God knows why, went along with me, even though I really don’t believe he wanted to, and we got married August 15, 1969. He was twenty-two and I was twenty.

I had nightmares about the wedding for weeks before it occurred. In every dream, I would be walking down the aisle in some bizarre, creepy setting, like an abandoned warehouse, or the train tracks late at night. Then I would step up to take his hand and discover it wasn’t Larry at all but some monster. I was obviously feeling a little unsure
about the whole thing, but I forged ahead anyhow. My cousin Carla Watson and my best friend since the age of five, Susan Gibson, were my bridesmaids, and when I told them I wanted yellow to be my color, neither of them felt like they looked good in yellow, so I agreed to have blue, even though it is one of my least favorite colors. I bought fabric and had a wedding gown made by Ruby Eakes, a nice lady from the church who sewed for people, for twenty-five dollars. It was a satin Empire waistline dress with a lace mantilla, and I carried daisies, so at least I had a touch of yellow. A friend, Martha Bowden, made the cake, and we had punch and nuts and mints at the reception. I think the whole thing must have cost less than fifty dollars.

Larry and me at the altar with Brother Bob Rackley.

As my father and I were standing in the vestibule of the church, waiting to walk down the aisle, he turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, “You don’t have to go through with this. You can leave right
now and it will be okay.” I was crying myself, but said, “No, I have to. It’s too late.” He knew why I was doing it, I’m pretty sure, and knew I was making a mistake, but I was saving my soul from hellfire, so down the aisle we went.

We didn’t have a honeymoon. I had quit school and taken a job as a secretary in a small steel company to support us until Larry graduated in January. Then I was going back to school to finish the year while he went to basic training. I would join him after school was out in May. The job was an absolute fiasco. I had lied and told them I could take shorthand dictation, and while I was a pretty good typist, I had three male bosses who each piled so much work on me it would have been impossible for one experienced woman to do it all, much less an untrained girl. I had to make coffee for them all day, copy blueprints, and do all the billing. (They taught me to change the way I wrote numbers: eights were to be two O’s stacked on top of each other like a snowman, sevens had a line across the leg, twos never had a loop on the bottom, fours came to a peak at the top and were never open. I still do them that way.) I had to answer the phone, type up the contracts and letters with four carbons (so I couldn’t make any mistakes or I had to retype them), plus whatever else there was to do. I preferred to doodle portraits on the desk pad while answering the phone, which I thought were pretty good, but the bosses were unimpressed. We were located a couple of miles from town, too, and one of the bosses who was a chain-smoker kept me running into town for cigarettes for him (using my own car and gas, which I resented). I was simply overwhelmed and in way over my head.

Larry and I had gotten married on a Friday, and on Monday, as he did every week, the big boss came in and added more stuff for me to do. He was probably around thirty-five, an old man to me, but looking back, he was rather attractive in a slick diamond-pinkie-ring way—buffed nails, blinding white shirts, and bright ties. I was bending over the file cabinet (wearing a miniskirt, as was the fashion then and probably the reason I was hired in the first place) when I felt a hand placed intimately on my rear end. Without thinking or checking to see who it was, I whirled around and clocked him. His face turned purple red with anger, and while I was shocked by what I had done, I was more angry at him. Without a word, he stormed out, and later in the afternoon, the
next in command called me into the office and fired me. I asked him why, and he answered, “Mistakes.” I wasn’t such a good secretary that I could defend my work. Maybe it was legitimately work mistakes. But I don’t think so.

I had been married for three days and had lost my job. We had rent to pay, groceries to buy, and no income. So I drove directly from the steel company to the employment agency and was sent to the shoe factory, where I immediately got an office job. (I was still wearing the miniskirt.) I think it was even for more money. I had been making around fifty dollars a week at the steel company, which was minimum wage—$1.30 an hour—and I think I was making $1.35, maybe even $1.37, at the shoe factory. And the bonus was that we could get shoes at wholesale—every girl’s dream!