A Fighting Chance (2 page)

Mother barely acknowledged my presence. But as she wrestled her way into her girdle and fastened her hose, she began talking. She wasn’t going to lose this house. She would walk to Sears. She would make only minimum wage, but that was a whole lot better than commission. Betsy could take care of herself. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or just to herself, so I didn’t say anything.

She tugged the dress over her head, struggling to get it over her shoulders, across her belly, and pulled down over her hips. Sometime during her forties, after giving birth to four children, the slim beauty my daddy married had given way to a thicker version of herself.

I stood looking at her while she tugged on the zipper. She held her breath. She worked the zipper. The tears dropped off her chin and onto the floor. At last, she got the zipper all the way to the top. She rubbed her eyes with another Kleenex and blew her nose. She stood still for a while.

Finally, she lifted her head and looked straight at me. “How do I look? Is it too tight?”

The dress
was
too tight—way too tight. It pulled and puckered. I thought it might explode if she moved. But I knew there wasn’t another nice dress in the closet.

And that was the moment I crossed the threshold. I wasn’t a little girl anymore.

I stood there, as tall as she was. I looked her right in the eye and said: “You look great. Really.”

I stood on the front porch and watched her walk down the street. It was quiet at that time of day. The sun was hot, and she was wobbly in her high heels, but she walked straight ahead.

She got the job answering phones at Sears. Later, Daddy left his job as a salesman at Montgomery Ward—or maybe he was let go, I don’t really know. He got work as a maintenance man cleaning up around an apartment building. My parents held on to the house until after I graduated from high school, and then they gave it up and moved to an apartment.

My mother never had it easy. She fought for everything she and my daddy ever had. And when things got really tough, she did what needed to be done.

Dreams of Flying

My family stories set the direction of my life long before I was born.

In the 1920s, my daddy had big dreams. He wanted to fly airplanes. I grew up hearing about how he was barely out of high school when he rebuilt a little two-passenger, open-cockpit airplane and taught himself to fly above the prairies of eastern Oklahoma. I always pictured him landing and taking off in vast wheat fields, a tiny plane in an immense blue sky.

But there was something he loved even more than an airplane: he loved my mother. She was fifteen when he noticed her, a whisper-thin, dark-haired beauty who was lively and funny and whose beautiful low voice made her a favorite to sing at weddings and funerals. She would sit for hours in an empty room and play the piano and sing. My daddy fell completely in love with her. His parents bitterly opposed the match because my mother’s family was part Native American and that was a big dividing line in those days. But that didn’t stop my parents. They eloped in 1932, when Mother was nineteen and Daddy had just turned twenty.

They survived the double blows of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression in the small town where they had grown up. Half a century later, both my parents still talked of bank failures and families who lost their farms.

By the time World War II came along, they already had three young boys. Daddy tried to enlist to be a fighter pilot in the war, but the Army Air Forces (as it was known then) said he was too old, or at least that’s the explanation I heard. Instead, they took him on as a flight instructor, so the family moved from the little town of Wetumka, Oklahoma, to the bigger town of Muskogee. When the war finally ended, Daddy desperately wanted a job flying the new passenger planes for one of the fast-growing airlines like TWA or American. But that didn’t work out either. My mother told me that those jobs also went to the younger men.

After the war, my parents wanted to go back to Wetumka, where they had grown up. But now that my mother and daddy had been away, my grandfather said that my daddy no longer had a job in the family store. He would have to find work somewhere else.

So my daddy scraped together what cash he could and joined up with a partner to start a new business selling cars in Seminole, another small town in Oklahoma. Daddy had always been handy, so he did the car repairs, while his partner worked the front office and handled sales. But the partner ran off with the money, or so the family story went—maybe he just ran the business into the ground. My parents had to start over again.

After that, Daddy moved from one job to another and my parents moved from one little rental house to another. My three brothers grew up, and I was the late-in-life surprise, born in 1949. Daddy used to say that after three boys, I was “the cherry on the whipped cream.” Mother used to say that she was a member of the PTA “longer than any woman on God’s green earth.”

By the early 1950s, our family landed in Norman, and my parents put a down payment on a tiny tract house on a gravel street at the edge of town. It had two bedrooms and one bath, with a converted garage where my three brothers slept. One by one, each of my brothers headed off to the military—the air force for the oldest two, Don Reed and John, and the army for David.

The summer I turned eleven, we moved the twenty miles to Oklahoma City. Mother had lobbied Daddy to move to the city in the hope that I’d be able to go to a really good school. By then, Daddy was selling carpet at Montgomery Ward, and eventually my parents found a house that they liked. Daddy kept his tired old Studebaker, but he bought a used station wagon for Mother. To me, that station wagon was luxury itself: it was a glowing bronze color, with leatherette seats and an automatic transmission. It even had air-conditioning.

Book of Colleges

Like a zillion other families, we got by.

My family had been through plenty of ups and downs over the years, and after Daddy’s heart attack, it took both my parents’ paychecks to manage. But things steadied out over time and we regained our footing. They kept the house and I got to stay in the same public school. I took on babysitting jobs, waitressed in my aunt Alice’s restaurant, and made money by sewing dresses for my aunts. I even sold puppies: Daddy borrowed the neighbor’s little black poodle and introduced him to Missy, and the result was a litter of adorable puppies that I sold in a single weekend.

Like a million other teenagers, I hated high school. Classes were okay, and I liked my teachers. I tried hard to fit in, joining the Cygnets Pep Club and the Courtesy Club, but I wasn’t good at
high school
—friends, parties, football games. We still had the old Studebaker, now pocked with rust, and my daddy used to drop me off a block away from the school. We both said it was to avoid the traffic, but the traffic was an endless stream of shiny new cars. At the time, I was sure I was the only kid in the entire school whose parents struggled with money. By now I’m just as sure that wasn’t true, but the teenage me didn’t have much perspective.

My senior year, I checked out a book about colleges from the high school counselor’s office. When my mother saw the book, she gave me a hard look. “You aren’t thinking about going away to college, are you?” Maybe that had once been her plan for me, before Daddy’s heart attack changed everything, but now it was out of the question. She pointed out that we couldn’t afford it, that she and Daddy just didn’t make enough money. Besides, she argued, I needed to set my sights realistically. It was harder for a woman with a college education to find a husband. “Find a husband” was clearly the goal for any young girl, and I was a pretty iffy candidate.

But later she came back to the topic. If I really wanted to go to college, I could live at home, get a job, and go to school part-time somewhere close. She knew I wanted to be a teacher, and she figured that kind of ambition would probably get pushed aside once I got married and real life set in, but maybe I could go to college until I snagged a husband.

I had a different plan.

Girl with a Plan

It was the fall of 1965, and I was only sixteen, but because I’d skipped a grade, I was now a senior in high school. The way I looked at it, I wasn’t pretty and I didn’t have the highest grades in my school. I didn’t play a sport, couldn’t sing, and didn’t play a musical instrument. But I did have one talent. I could fight—not with my fists, but with my words. I was the anchor on the debate team.

Debate let me stretch as far as I could go. We researched hard topics—free trade, collective bargaining, nuclear disarmament, Medicare—and I started to understand that I could tackle things I didn’t know and teach myself a lot. But most of all, debate was about self-discipline and never giving up. I might get battered, but not beaten.

I figured that debating was my shot at college. So I sat in my room with the door closed, and I read every description in the college book, looking for schools that bragged about their debate teams. I hoped I could find one that would offer me a scholarship. I found only one school—Northwestern—that featured debate in its description. Then I got another lead from a boy who was a year ahead of me on the debate team. After graduation, he had gone to George Washington University. He told me GW had a great debate team—and a debate scholarship.

Two possibilities. The way I figured it, two was a lot more than none. This plan could work.

I sent away to both colleges for applications, then raced home from debate practice every afternoon a few minutes ahead of my mother to intercept any mail. When the forms arrived, I filled them out, bought money orders at the 7-Eleven, mailed them off, and then settled in to wait.

I had the idea that I would get a great scholarship and then present it to my parents as an accomplished fact. If I could go to college for free, how could they say no?

But the plan hit a snag. As I filled out the college applications, I realized that to be eligible for a scholarship, I also needed a financial disclosure form from my parents. I’d applied to college, but there was no way to get the help I needed without telling them what I was up to.

I waited until dinner one night. As the three of us sat quietly at the kitchen table, I suddenly said very cheerfully, “There are lots of scholarships for people who want to go to college.” I probably had the same forced merriment of the woman selling floor wax on a television commercial. When no one said anything, I said in a quieter voice, “I want to try for one.” I didn’t mention that I’d already sent off applications to two faraway colleges.

My mother repeated that we couldn’t afford college, but I was ready. I argued. I pleaded. There are scholarships that make college free. Why couldn’t I try to get into one of those?

My mother kept saying no, but then Daddy surprised both of us, saying: “Let her try, Polly.”

And that was how I ended up with my parents’ tax returns. As I filled in the financial aid forms, I was surprised by the numbers. I divided their income by 52 and saw how little money they earned each week. I knew money was tight, but were we
poor
? My mother had always claimed that we weren’t poor, but I felt very unsteady.

I gave Daddy the forms to sign and handed back the tax returns. No one talked about the forms again.

One afternoon in the spring, two letters arrived on the same day: both schools had accepted me, but the money wasn’t the same. Northwestern offered some help, but George Washington went all the way—a full scholarship and a federal student loan. If I was careful with the money they were offering, I could afford to go. I was thrilled. Good-bye, Oklahoma City—GW, here I come!

My mother responded to my news with equal parts pride and worry. She would say to friends: “Well, she figured out how to go to college for free, so what could I say? But I don’t know if she’ll ever get married.”

First Comes Marriage

College was a whole new world for me. I had never been north or east of Pryor, Oklahoma. I had never seen a ballet, never been to a museum, and never ridden in a taxi. I’d never had a debate partner who was black, never known anyone from Asia, and never had a roommate of any kind. But the most remarkable part was that in college I wasn’t poor. I had sold my parents on the idea of college being free, and although it turned out I was a little too optimistic, I had my loans and a part-time job, and I worked all summer. I still kept cash in a white sock tucked in the back of a drawer, but now I knew I had enough to get me through each term. I had a taste of security, and it felt like heaven.

Two years into college, Jim Warren popped back into my life. He was the first boy I’d ever dated—and the first to dump me. He was seventeen and I was thirteen when we began dating; he was a high school junior on the advanced debate team and I was a freshman just beginning debate. Now he had graduated from college. He had landed a good job with IBM in Houston and was ready to get married. He told me I was cute and fun. Best of all, the guy who had dumped me said he wanted to marry
me
. He seemed so sure of himself, so confident about what life should look like.

I was amazed—amazed and grateful—that he had chosen me. I said yes in a nanosecond.

Less than eight weeks after Jim proposed, I gave up my scholarship, dropped out of college, sewed a wedding gown, and walked down the aisle of Oklahoma City’s May Avenue United Methodist Church on Daddy’s arm. It was the fall of 1968. I was nineteen.

Jim and I packed up his little sky-blue Mustang and moved into a small apartment in Houston. I got a temp job the first week. The money was good, but I wanted to go back to school. I still dreamed of being a teacher, and that meant I needed a college degree.

I now had what Jim jokingly called a “reverse dowry”—I owed money on my student loans from GW, even though I hadn’t gotten a diploma. But I had a plan. If I could finish college and get a teaching job, I could make a steady salary
and
the government would forgive some of those loans every year. The University of Houston was about forty minutes away, and tuition was only $50 a semester. I persuaded Jim that it would make sense for me to go back to school.