That was the first time I realized that the light around our house had changed. The house and the old pecan tree poked up sharply into the big, blue sky, the setting so stark I thought for a moment my father had moved the house to another neighborhood. As we rounded the back corner I saw that the cool, deep shadows of the orchard behind the house had been totally wiped away—all the hiding places; the perches from which we cousins had bombed aircraft carriers and Tokyo; all the safe harbors; all the secret bowers—gone.
I stood still as a banker gaping at a ransacked vault.
“What do you think?” my father prodded. “How does it look?”
It looked immaculate, a carpet of green as even in color as the rugs used to hide gravediggers’ mounds from the mourners. It stretched from the foundation of our house straight back to the curb of Washburn, the next street over—a small area really, nothing but one lot behind our house, not the vast wilderness I had explored as a child, just a long, green rectangle.
“Once I got all the stumps out I was able to bring in a back hoe and a dump truck,” he said. “Remember that big caved-in spot behind the old garage, that old root cellar, a hole I could never fill up before? Stoop down and look.” My father demonstrated by squatting and laying his head close to the ground. “Absolutely level.”
Finally, I was able to say, “Looks like a putting green,” and that seemed to satisfy him. He turned back toward the carport to collect the luggage. Mother and Sandy were standing near the back door staring at the flood of green. Daddy would probably want to show this to Josh.
“So what happened to the hundred and sixty acre claim?” Sandy asked Mother, a plain question, an obvious question, one I’d never voiced.
“Cecil joined the army as a second lieutenant shortly after we married, and we moved to Ft. Dix in New Jersey. When we came back for my father’s funeral, these two lots were all that was left.”
A relative or a friend would have said, “Oh well,” and quickly moved to a more felicitous topic, but Sandy made no gracious covering murmur.
My mother, a woman who could always slather incompetence, disappointment or agony with gooey praise, rushed on to say, “My father was very generous, helping all his family, especially my mother’s younger brother Wendell who tried to start up a chicken farm with a whole processing plant.” Mother laughed her mirthless, phony laugh. “Neither one of them knew much about chickens or business. Wendell died of influenza.” Mother turned away from the flood of green. “There used to be a creek out front, right where the street is now.”
* * *
“What a practical dress,” Mother said when I showed her the short, nylon navy shift I was going to wear to the bridal shower. “You can dress it up or down.” Then she proceeded to bring me an array of pearls, pins, necklaces and scarves with which to lift the first dress I’d bought in years to the highly accessorized level of her friends.
Mother was a lovely lady who managed a difficult life by keeping the surfaces smooth. This was going to be pulling teeth for both of us. I believed the wedding itself was a concession to my parents, that my coming out here to tie the knot in the family church should be enough to make my mother forget a few of the details. She obviously assumed that I, having been the dutiful daughter all my life, would naturally fulfill all the bridal roles my younger sister, Olivia, had escaped when she convened a hasty nuptial in a cow pasture and ran off to live in a rural commune. Since that rustic occasion, there had been intermittent pressure on me to redeem the family image.
* * *
That night Sandy and I slept in my childhood bedroom, under the roof on the shady side of the house, Sandy occupying the twin bed formerly slept in by Olivia. I did not sleep well. I tried to fantasize about Josh and me tumbling around on our mattress in the shelter of the grand piano but I felt dull, not like the funny, sexy woman Josh had fallen in love with. Something had happened when that Oklahoma heat hit my face as the door to the plane opened. Except for short Christmas visits, I hadn’t been home since graduating from college.
1970 was not a good year for peace—either in Vietnam or on the home front. In Washington I fought hard on the war issue as a lobbyist employed by the Council for a Livable World—a venerable organization started in the 1940’s by a Hungarian atomic scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Through the years the Council had become part of the American Left establishment, focusing on arms control and other issues of world peace. In the past year we had put together some good votes for peace and reason in the House and the Senate, but Nixon won all the big ones.
Since the first of the year a bunker mentality had reigned in our little office near Capitol Hill. I loved it. I was the person I had always wanted to be. The one with the fast comeback or the wink that made the gang laugh. We worked nights and ate hamburgers while we poured over the
Congressional Record
, Pentagon briefings, treaty protocols. We only stuck our heads out to shower and change clothes if we had an appointment with a congressman or his legislative assistant. I would put on my one dress; each man would put on his one tie. We wanted to look respectable and respectful. But back in the office we were ostentatious in our lack of grooming. No decent peace activist shaved her legs, and this summer, when we began to go sleeveless, the other females—Sandy, as well as our secretary and the college interns—made it clear underarm hair had become an emblem of political sincerity, identification with the Third World, and rejection of the false values of our mothers. And so with stomach-knotting ambivalence I, the scruffy, nearly thirty-year-old political activist, had to clean up in order to go back to Oklahoma to get married.
* * *
I lay in bed the first morning home listening for the birds in the orchard which had waked me throughout my childhood. But the orchard was gone, replaced by a meaningless rectangle. What I heard instead was the rustle of tissue paper. Sandy, who’d made an early start on her two packs a day, was puffing away and wrapping her shower present.
“What is it?” I asked.
The cigarette dangling from her lips, Sandy kept her square body between me and the gift.
“You better show me,” I said raising my head
“Oh, no.” She gave me a leer of sexual mischief.
Mother poked her head in the bedroom door. “I’ve made you girls appointments for hair and nails this morning.”
“Oh thanks, but no thanks.” I said letting my head drop back on the pillow.
“Sandy? Shampoo and set?” Mother asked.
“Guess not. I’ll just give it a shake.” Like her political opinions, Sandy’s curly hair bristled, a Greek girl’s Afro. She stood beside my bed, short and stout, a hedgehog between Mother and me, my buffer. I couldn’t have faced the wedding without her.
Mother inhaled a cheerful, “Okay,” and went off to cancel the appointments. I didn’t want to be peevish. But just being in this house, breathing the close, August air, made me clench my teeth. It would have been nice to fulfill all Mother’s wedding fantasies, but too much pretending would enrage me.
Josh and I could have held the wedding in Washington, of course. Our friend Moh Chatah, who owned the club where Josh played the piano weekends, offered us everything—the room, the food and drinks.
“Do you really want to go back and get into all that?” Moh had asked, his luxuriant black eyebrows and mustache wincing sympathetically as though he’d grown up a Methodist on the bank of the Red River instead of on the banks of the Mediterranean. He knew how weddings brought all the chickens home to roost. But I couldn’t imagine my parents eating plates of Kifta Kabobs and drinking Arak in the midst of the gyrations of my rowdy, hairy friends. And to bring a minister—if we could find one who’d marry a Christian and a Jew in a Syrian Restaurant—would have seemed a sacrilege to Mother. I was a little squeamish myself. Better to go home and get this over with. I would tell my Washington colleagues the photographer forgot to load the camera, just to keep down the hilarity in the office over seeing me in a long white dress and matching shoes.
Before I could get out of bed, my father, whom we kids still called The General, came to stand in the doorway and stare into my room with a wistful frown. He wore a crisp sport shirt and creased slacks, ready for any project public or private, that might need taking care of this busy day before the wedding. For a second our eyes locked and I felt how distant and irrelevant he had become, more so even than ten years ago when I had written him off after I saw him on the porch of a shabby bungalow holding a strange woman’s hand.
Sandy, still in the T-shirt she’d slept in, stared at her host with no welcome whatsoever in her eyes. He frowned right back. It took me a second to figure out that it was probably not the impending marriage of his elder daughter that caused my father’s frown, but the presence of this strange guest named Cassandra who had been sleeping in his daughter Olivia’s bed.
Olivia was his favorite. Whenever she was in the room, he could look at nothing else. Until she and I started going on dates I envied all the attention she got, but after I watched Daddy greet each of her prospective boyfriends with his hands on either side of the doorframe as though he weren’t going to let them in at all, I became glad he didn’t care who I went out with. He always waited up for Olivia and would greet her with some judgment on the guy. “Someone ought to tell that boy to stand up straight.” Or if the guy had longish hair, “He’ll make someone a good wife.”
After an unsmiling “Hi,” to Sandy, The General pivoted and left. Sandy closed the door. “He does that a lot, just gape into your room uninvited?”
I let out a loud sigh and got up to get dressed.
* * *
Since we didn’t have to begin a long morning of grooming, Sandy and I had time for a leisurely breakfast. We sat at the round oak table in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating cinnamon rolls. Mother had again repapered the walls with a pattern of cups and saucers. No more pink roses. She’d painted the woodwork a slate blue. The table, once pink then white, was now blue also.
My father was preparing to leave to double check everything for the reception downstairs at the church. Mother had done this yesterday, but The General announced this morning he should check the electrical system as well. He was, after all, the city engineer and a former ordinance officer.
I could see him through the music room, standing at the door of the room where my brother was sleeping surrounded by my wedding gifts. Ernest had arrived late last night from a camp in Minnesota where he was teaching portage to underprivileged boys. The vision of thirty urban, would-be delinquents carrying canoes over their heads, trekking through the forests of Minnesota with my tall, bearded brother in charge, made me proud. Ernest was a natural with kids, quiet but firm.
“As the bride’s only brother, of course you should help transport the gifts,” my father insisted through a crack in Ernest’s bedroom door. Ernest’s voice came through as a low rumble.
“Okay, then.” The General sounded delighted. “Departure at 16:00.”
“How the hell does anyone out here know what’s going on?” Sandy asked brightly, mashing her cigarette butt on her saucer. She was trying to read the
Daily Oklahoman
.
Mother, always sensitive to comments about Oklahoma, turned from the sink. “Well, Sandy, we have exactly the same television news shows you have in Washington.” Thinking this sounded harsh, she added, “I guess. I don’t really know what you all are watching.”
Sandy, thinking she’d finally gotten into a real conversation with my Mother, countered, “But just listen to this totally biased report of the demonstration at Stanford.” She folded back the newspaper in preparation to reading aloud.
“Cut it out, you two,” I said. Sandy, who believed mouths were created for argument, stared at me.
Mother looked apologetic. “I bet you girls would like a rest from politics, and I hope this whole weekend will be a lot of fun for you.”
* * *
“Here comes our bride,” Mrs. Worth sang out when Sandy, Mother, Grandma Vic and I walked into the shower. Mrs. Worth was the right one of Mother’s friends to hold this event. She had a big air-conditioned house, cushy, expensive furniture, and a jolly disposition, which could be counted on to smooth over any rancor on the part of the stingy bride who’d told her mother one bridal shower would be more than enough.
Taffeta slips rustled against nylons and baroque pearls swung on silk bosoms as the guests rushed forward to take my hands. My mother’s friends were restrained, gentle of voice, and fragrant with scents that flung me back into church—Channel No. 5, Estee Lauder’s
White Shoulders
. These women didn’t feel politically compromised by eye shadow or nail polish, and my first thought was how glad I was I’d put on stockings and lipstick, the better to impersonate the girl they thought I was. I did care about their feelings. I was redeeming not just my family, but my generation. I felt like the only bride in America.
Mother helped Grandma Vic to an armchair in the circle. My grandmother was the only woman wearing a hat. Having been a milliner all her life, she kept up with changing styles, but she was also 96 years old and knew what looked good on her—in this case a fine lavender straw with rose silk violets. She wore an ivory linen dress with lace inlay that could have been a chemise from the ‘60’s or the ‘30’s, but looked perfect on her. In spite of the grinding work and physical suffering of her life, this widow sat erect, maintaining the presence of a grand dame. The netting on her hat trembled with palsy, and she kept both hands clutched on the head of her cane, driving it into the carpet for stability.
Sandy had also bought a new dress for the shower, blue denim in a western motif. She had a natural swagger in her walk, so the fringe along the shoulders and sleeves swung with authority. I believed she sincerely thought when she bought it, that this cowgirl outfit was what Oklahoma ladies wore, and I felt grateful to the other guests who greeted her warmly ignoring the dress and the untamed hair.