A Ticket to the Circus (9 page)

The labor went on for eight hours. I was groggy the whole time and don’t remember much. I had brought my art history book thinking I would study for a test. Can you believe it? I do seem to remember floating penises in the pictures of the ruins at Angkor Wat—which frankly I wasn’t interested in at that point—and a lot of Buddhas, but not much else.

At one point they gave me an enema, and just as I sat down on the pot beside the bed, the entire ladies’ auxiliary of the church trooped in with their flowered dresses and big smiles to give me their support. I screamed at them,
“Get out of here!”
and threw toilet paper rolls at them, poor things. They scurried away, and I felt bad, but really—this Christian business of visiting the sick is just too much. The sick just want to be left alone to fart at will, or to get up in a backless johnny with their butts exposed and go to the bathroom without having to entertain somebody who is underfoot praying over them.

I had a spinal for the last big pain, and they whisked my baby boy away before I had a glimpse of him, because he had mucus in his lungs that had to be suctioned (he was probably zonked out on the painkillers, too, poor baby), and then I passed out. So I don’t remember seeing him until later, when I went to the incubator, and there he was, the spitting image of Larry. At least people could stop counting on their fingers the months Larry had been away. He was so beautiful—lots of dark hair, an adorable little monkey face, and he was huge! Nine pounds, with rosy cheeks hanging like ripe peaches. My friends Matthew and Larry from creative writing class bounced in to congratulate me, totally stoned, and were like, “Cool! Awesome, man! Look at his little toesies!” when they saw him. The nurses’ eyes were the size of dessert plates. Obviously, I hadn’t had a husband there with me, so I’m sure they were whispering, “I wonder which one the daddy is. I wonder if she knows.” I named him Matthew Davis, but not because of my friend. Larry and I had already picked out the name before I’d even met Matthew in class, but it was a nice coincidence, the Matthew and Larry thing.

By October 1971, Nixon had started to withdraw some of the troops early, and Larry got to come home two months ahead of schedule. I met him at the airport, and I truly don’t think he recognized me. The look on his face still haunts me, as if he were looking at a not particularly attractive girl and then realized it was me. Matthew was six weeks old at this point, and I was still carrying around a lot of the baby weight and had cut my boob-length auburn hair into a Jane Fonda shag because it was so hot and miserable. We were happy to see each other, it goes without saying, but a little like strangers for a while, as if we were acquaintances who had bumped into each other at the airport and started a romance. Matthew was the biggest thing in my world, and Larry had seen only pictures of him. We had to remake our life together.

We moved to Perryville, about thirty miles from Atkins, where Larry got a job teaching physics in the high school. I was doing my practice teaching in the art department at Subiaco Catholic Boys’ Academy, fifty or sixty miles in the opposite direction over winding country roads, and it was just too tough a commute for me, so before we had time to even hang curtains, we moved back to Atkins, which was in the middle, and we each had a commute. I dropped the baby off with my mother—bless her sweet heart—in the morning and picked him up in the afternoon. Matthew had big serious brown eyes, and he was precocious at everything. He walked at ten months, and I took him off the bottle at a year, as he was eating and drinking from a cup. I was so harried I wanted to make things happen as fast and as easily as possible. Looking back, I’m sorry I did that. Babyhood goes by so quickly that I wish I had just taken the time and let him be a baby instead of pushing him to be a big boy.

Being a working mother, I never got enough sleep. I remember rocking Matthew all night and crying, saying, “Please, Matthew, just go to sleep for an hour. Let me get just one hour’s rest before I have to go to work.” Sometimes we had to put him in the car in the middle of the night and drive him around so he would go to sleep. But while he wasn’t a great sleeper, he was a great eater. He could eat four eggs at a time if I would give them to him. Once, though, he was taking such a long time getting the eggs down that I lost patience and, late for school, started rushing him, cramming in the spoonfuls as he slowly and carefully chewed and swallowed. After he ate the whole plate of eggs, he
leaned over and spat out three paper clips. I nearly fainted, thinking of how close I had come to choking him. I tried to have more patience after that.

I finally lost the weight, my hair grew back, and life settled down a bit for us. After graduation, I got an art teaching job in Clarksville, which was about twenty miles from Atkins, and Larry decided he wanted to do something other than teach that brought in more money, so he got a job selling insurance, which put him on the road a lot.

Baby Matthew and Larry.

It was during this time, when I was all by myself, exhausted from lack of sleep and harried from working, taking care of the baby, and dealing with the minutiae of life, when a little voice whispered in my ear, telling me I had missed the parade.

I
n Clarksville, I was assigned to teach lower-school art in the morning, then a seventh-grade English class before lunch, and in the afternoons I drove to the high school, where I taught art. The only thing I enjoyed was the high school. English class was my least favorite. Seventh graders are at that curious age when they are still children but hormones are hijacking their bodies. Some of the boys had a crush on me, some saw me as the enemy; some of the girls were bored, some thought I was cool. Nobody had the foggiest idea what a noun or verb was, and none of them wanted to find out. I was also from time to time a surrogate mother to them. One girl was quietly crying during class, and when I asked her to stay after and talk to me, I learned she had kissed a boy, he had put his tongue into her mouth, and she was terrified she was pregnant. I gave her a quick lesson on how the body reproduces, and she was much relieved.

I was only four or five years older than some of my high school students, and it was difficult to maintain the teacher-student relationship. I have former students who became lifelong friends whom I still see today, thirty-seven years later. For most of them, art was a blast, a break from “real” classes. I would do a demonstration of, say, printmaking and pass out the supplies, then they would start their own versions, with me walking around the room making suggestions when they needed it but never actually laying hands on their work—the first sacred rule of teaching art. We did weaving and stitchery (everyone wanted to embroider something on their bell-bottom jeans and denim jackets), copper enameling, sculpture in various mediums, and, of course, drawing and painting. We worked a lot in clay, sculpting, hand building, and throwing pots on the wheel.

Our budget was limited and we were always trying to find ways to do things on the cheap. We combed the garbage dump searching for treasures to use for sculptures or to stamp into interesting shapes on clay, or for printmaking. We went to the lumberyard to get scraps of Masonite or wood to paint on or to use for sculpture. We went to the
grocery store dumpster for scavenged cardboard, egg cartons, or vegetables and fruit past their prime to use as printing stamps. (Did you know that the cut end of a bunch of celery is a perfect rose?) With old newspapers and wallpaper paste we made giant papier-mâché sculptures, animals mostly.

When one of the girls and I took our huge baby elephant to an art show in Little Rock in the back of a Ford Ranchero, the rope broke and the elephant flew out of the truck bed like Dumbo. Two state troopers passing by thought it was a foreign car rolling down the highway, turned, and chased after it, sirens blaring. They were most helpful, catching it and tying it securely back down for us, but we had to find a store that was open on Sunday, buy paint and paste, and do some quick repairs before the show.

I announced on the first day of class that there would be no written tests, just a display of student work twice a semester, which elicited cheers, and I brought a cassette player to class so they could work to music, as we had done in college. The music made for a cheery, fun atmosphere, and a lot more work got done. The superintendent—we’ll call him Mr. Birch—didn’t like my methods at all and was constantly coming into class, telling me to turn off the music and make the kids sit quietly in their seats, which was impossible if they were working. We had a constant battle going on, but I was the hero to the kids, who were my coconspirators. One of them was always on the lookout, and when we saw Mr. Birch sneaking down the hall, we would quickly turn off the music and sit in our seats. It was a great game to the kids.

The only problem in my life, looming ever larger, was that more than ever I didn’t want to be married. Larry and I had grown apart after he’d gotten home. For me, there was the stress of working and taking care of the baby—along with housekeeping, grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, paying bills, servicing the car, and never getting enough sleep. As for Larry, he was on the road several days a week, and his unhappiness at doing yet another job he didn’t like took its toll. He was not a natural salesman. He didn’t have the gregarious kind of personality it required; he had to force himself to get up and do it every day. He hated everything about it—the travel, being away from home, the phoniness of it all. Not to mention the memories he brought back with him from Vietnam, which he seldom spoke about. He had been
quietly and deeply affected by the cruelty, brutality, and indifference to life over there, and the few details he shared with me were more than I needed to know. He told me of one incident that nearly cost a lot of people their lives, including his.

He was the paymaster and normally gave out the money in the afternoons, but on this day, for no particular reason, he decided to pay in the morning. So everyone was at one end of camp getting their money, while at the other end, a driverless, booby-trapped garbage truck was rolled into the compound and exploded. Most of the hooches where the men lived were destroyed, and the woman who cleaned the officers’ quarters was in Larry’s hooch and was killed. His quarters were destroyed. If he hadn’t decided to pay early that day, a huge number of soldiers would likely have died. Running back and finding the maid in the rubble of his quarters was horrific for Larry.

He also told stories of being out in the field for weeks, living in a tank without a shower or clean clothes, so constantly wet in the rainy season that when they finally came in to base and took off their boots, their skin came off with the socks. They always had to be alert, even when asleep, and they never could trust anyone. The man who gave you a haircut in the morning could be the one setting out booby traps at night. The Vietcong even strapped bombs to children begging for food, who would then explode in the middle of a group of men handing out candy bars. Someone might leave a lighter on a bar top one night, and the soldier who picked it up and flicked it on would have his hand blown off. No one can live like that and be the same person he was before. Larry was not one to display his emotions, even to me, and Vietnam stayed buried deep inside him, where it gnawed a big ragged hole, one he tried to ignore.

Not long after he came home, his mother died. She’d had colon cancer and had worn an ostomy bag for quite some time, but it was still a shock for us. She was a funny woman, always cracking jokes and making fun of her bag, trying to make the best of things. She had raised nine children on a farm, and was a tough old bird. She’d had a soft spot for Larry, her baby boy, and he loved her a lot.

We and several other members of the family were in the hospital waiting room, taking turns going in to sit with her. Matt was a baby, and I was trying to amuse him while we waited. The doctors had told
us Larry’s mother didn’t have long, but somehow we couldn’t accept that—as one never does, I suppose. Her daughter was in the room with her, holding her hand when she died. It was frightening, and of course the daughter ran out into the hallway calling for the nurses and doctors, who came running with the crash cart, put the paddles on her chest, and shocked her back to life. It was so insane. They knew she was going to die, she had no hope, but they just wouldn’t let her go. Doctors seem to look upon every death as a personal failure, when it is just simply nature. We don’t play God when we take terminal patients off life support; we play God when we put them on it.

After she came around, we all crowded into the room, crying and nervous, but she was calm and peaceful. “I lifted up out of this bed and went to the most beautiful place,” she told us, with a faraway look on her face, “where there were flowers in colors I never saw before, and there were trees and creeks that were like the ones here, except a hundred times better. I can’t even describe them. I was on a path walking through this beautiful country, and I felt so good. I didn’t have any pain at all, I had a lot of energy. I felt young. Across the path was a fence, and behind the fence were my mother and daddy and my relatives and all my friends who have already died. They were so happy to see me and I was happy to see them, and just before I got to the fence, I was jerked back here. Please don’t let them do that to me again. I want to go back. I’m not afraid. I want to go.”