A Ticket to the Circus (5 page)

Me in the sixth grade with my cat’s-eye glasses.

Of course, I was my mother’s at-home practice dummy, and for a year or two after she started school, I had short perm-fried hair that embarrassed me. So when I was thirteen, I put my foot down and told her I was never letting her cut or perm my hair again. I felt bad about hurting her feelings, but that hair, along with my thick rhinestone cat’s-eye glasses, made me the ugliest girl in the sixth grade. At least one of them.

Mother loved everything about her little
Steel Magnolias
shop. She had people to talk to all day, the work wasn’t odious or odiferous or backbreaking, and she made decent money. The going rate in 1963 was a dollar and a quarter for a shampoo and set. (Your hair was rolled on brush rollers and you were put under a hair dryer that looked like a space helmet. It roared so loudly it made you deaf, while hot jets of air cooked your ears.) Another dollar bought you a haircut, and ten dollars got you a perm, cut included. She named the shop Gay’s Beauty Shop, which was lovely until the term “gay” for homosexuals became popular, and then some kid or other was always prank-calling her, thinking they were so clever. She worked in that little shop until she was in her eighties, and then when my father passed away, she moved to Cape Cod to live with me.

Just about the time my hair grew out in seventh grade, I fell at the skating rink, my rhinestone glasses flew off and slid across the floor, and somebody skated right over them. I had to wait two weeks to get new ones, groping in a fog of nearsightedness and squinting at the blackboard. I went to a basketball game in the gym, where the concession stand was up on a high stage, and when I started back down the stairs, I missed the top step and fell about seven feet to the gym floor, flinging my popcorn and Coke out onto the court. They had to stop the game and clean it up. I was bruised from the fall, but was more humiliated as everyone clapped and cheered while I slunk out. But the strangest thing was happening: without the glasses, all of a sudden guys were taking another look at me and started asking me out.

My first real date was with a boy named Jimmy, who played cornet in the band. I had come down with hepatitis A the summer I was fourteen and had to stay in bed for six weeks. That was 1963, and Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” and a Japanese song called “Sukiyaki” played over and over and over on the radio until I thought I would lose my mind.
As I was contagious and could have no visitors, Jimmy used to come and stand outside my window and talk to me for hours. Then one day he slipped his silver band medal through a crack in the screen, and we were going steady. It seemed that I was forever going steady, but in that little town, after you dated someone a few times, everyone assumed you were a couple and the other boys didn’t ask you out.

Gaynell in her beauty shop.

After I recovered from hepatitis, we double-dated with Larry Aldridge, a friend of Jimmy’s who was sixteen and had his own car—a 1958 blue-and-white DeSoto with huge fins. We went to church or the movies or places like Al’s snack bar for great hamburgers and curlicue french fries, or to the Freezer Fresh, which was the kids’ favorite hangout owned by a couple—Winnie and Leon, who had only one arm. It was amazing how he could do everything like make milk shakes and flip burgers with that stump. Then we’d drive around the streets, and wind up the evening by parking out by the lake or up on the bluffs of Crow Mountain. That was about the only thing there was to do in Atkins, although there was a skating rink and a bowling alley and
a movie theater twelve miles away in Russellville, and a drive-in movie in the summer. After a year or so, Jimmy fell in love with a friend of mine named Ann, and he broke up with me, although she was a year older than he was and only thought of him as a little brother. Of course, I was devastated, although now I really can’t remember quite why I was so taken with him.

Now that I’m writing my memoir, it will be clear to those of you who have read my novels that I’m shattering a lot of my crystals. Norman had a great image he called the crystal to explain a tool for writing fiction. You take the crystal of your experience and beam the light of your imagination through it, and the story comes out in a different direction, in different colors, but the basis is the same experience. One situation might serve as the crystal for several scenes in your fiction, and I have done that throughout my work. You will probably recognize certain things in this book if you have read
Windchill Summer
and
Cheap Diamonds.

After Jimmy, I started dating a boy I’ll call Rex. Rex and I went steady as well, when all I really wanted was to be free and date a lot of guys, but he kept on putting his ring on a chain around my neck, which felt more like a dog leash. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I finally went along because it was easier than arguing with him. Nobody else was asking me out anyhow. Rex was jealous and big and was a star football player with a reputation for being somewhat of a tough guy.

Then a boy named Jerry came to visit his aunt and uncle for the summer. He was from California and had actually surfed, which was a huge deal at the time, as the Beach Boys were at the height of their fame, and the Mamas and the Papas’ monster hit “California Dreamin’” made us all long to go to, or at least
know
somebody from, California. He wasn’t in the least afraid of Rex. Jerry and I went to the drive-in with another couple, where
A Summer Place
with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue was playing. Sitting in the backseat with Jerry was such sweet torture. I wouldn’t let him kiss me, as I was going steady, and I guess I thought if we didn’t kiss it wasn’t really cheating, but we would almost kiss, our lips getting so close we could feel the heat. It was exquisitely painful. Then we stopped at a gas station on the way home, and while the attendant was filling up the tank, Rex happened by
and saw us. What bad luck. I can’t remember if actual blows were exchanged or not, but there was a fight of sorts.

After that, there was no reason not to kiss Jerry, so I did and fell hard for him, as only one can at fifteen with an older boy of seventeen. After the summer, he went back to his family, who had by then moved to Kentucky, which was not nearly as glamorous as California, but he promised he was going to come back at Thanksgiving vacation and we were going to run away to California and get married. I didn’t take it too seriously, and I frankly don’t know what I would have done if he had pulled up in the yard and said, “Hop in. Let’s go,” but I did desperately want to see him again. One day, right before Thanksgiving, the letters we had been exchanging every few days just stopped. My old boyfriend Rex dropped by to give me a cryptic message. “Have you heard from Jerry?” he asked, smirking a little.

“Not in a while,” I said. I never was any good at lying.

“Well, I just wondered. You might want to call him.” That was weird. He seemed so happy about something.

I got Jerry’s father on the phone. In those days, it would never have occurred to me to call a boy, especially long distance, but I was really worried. “Could I speak to Jerry, please?” I asked.

“He’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s gone to get his marriage license.”

“Oh,” I said, when I could finally speak. “Well, can you give him a message for me? Tell him Barbara Davis called and said for him to drop dead.”

What an ugly thing to say to his father! But I was so angry I didn’t know what else to say. I never spoke to him again, but years later I heard that he became a professional wrestler and then a preacher (or maybe it was the other way around). He and the girl, whose name, I think, was Barbara, had four children and are probably still married, and I thanked my lucky stars it wasn’t me who bought that license with him.

I
had known the boy who would become my first husband, Larry Norris, most of my life, but we weren’t friends, as he was two classes ahead of me and had gone steady with a girl in his grade named Sharon for most of high school. He was popular, a good football player, a track star, and an all-around athlete. Sharon wore his little gold track shoe on a delicate chain around her neck, and I remember being a little envious of it. Then she fell in love with a boy named Bill and broke up with Larry, breaking his heart. She and Bill got married, and Larry went off to Arkansas Tech. The summer before my senior year, he was working for the school, going around to all the seniors in the area and trying to convince them to go to school there. I had already decided to go to Arkansas State Teachers College in Conway, and I even had an academic scholarship promised, but Larry showed up at my door early one summer morning.

I was still asleep, and looked out the window when his knock woke me up. I threw on some clothes, ran a brush through my hair, and answered the door in less than two minutes. He looked a little like Burt Reynolds, with ultramarine blue eyes and dark hair. He was funny and convincing, and I decided Tech might not be such a bad place to go after all. I said I’d think about it. Before he left, he asked me out to the movies. His family lived up on Crow Mountain and grew watermelons as a cash crop. He was paying his way through school on an ROTC scholarship, so it was a foregone conclusion that he would be joining the army when he graduated. This was 1966, and Vietnam was just beginning to get hot but wasn’t yet the explosive war it became in the next couple of years.

When I started dating Larry, I was still seeing Rex off and on, and occasionally a few others as well, such as a boy named Audie Ray, who had a tiny Triumph sports car and a broken left leg. He had to drive with his cast out the window, so we worked out a routine where he would use the clutch and brake with his right foot and I would work the gas pedal. I can’t believe we didn’t wreck the car. One memorable
afternoon, Audie Ray was at my house, Larry stopped by, and Rex showed up. We all sat in the living room trying to talk, them waiting one another out. I wanted to sneak out the back door and leave, but I was too much of a good Southern hostess, so there we sat, drinking Cokes, them talking about football like they had all come there specifically to hang out with one another. Finally, after what seemed like hours, Audie Ray left, then Rex, and Larry was the winner. That got him a lot of points.

I had promised Rex I would go with him to the homecoming dance months in advance, and he held me to the promise even though I was seeing more of Larry at that time. I don’t know why I just didn’t say no, but I had some weird, strong ideas about keeping my word, and Rex was emphatic that I couldn’t back out on a promise. I was the homecoming maid, and since Rex was the captain of the football team and had to escort the queen, another football player named Robert Lee (whom I wasn’t dating) escorted me across the field.

It was the biggest thrill of my high school years. Although I never got to be a cheerleader, which the most popular girls were, I made good grades in class, was in most of the clubs, edited the school newspaper, and sang in the glee club. I was a good kid who didn’t smoke or drink, and was certainly not going to have sex until I married. At least that was the plan.

Larry wasn’t happy that I was at homecoming with Rex, but he came with another girl named Janet and we spent the entire night gloomily looking at each other across the dance floor, dancing with the wrong partner. It was my last date with Rex. From then on, Larry and I were going steady.

Our dates consisted for the most part of going to his brother and sister-in-law’s house to play cards. If you remember, cards were on the sin list (Larry didn’t go to church, so he didn’t have a sin list), but we never played for money, just for fun, so I didn’t worry too much about it. My mother and father had relaxed a bit, knowing it was impossible to ask me to stay home from movies. They knew I went to parties but never asked me head-on if I was dancing, and I never said. Needless to say, Mother, Daddy, and I never once discussed sex, or even said the word out loud.

When I was thirteen, I of course knew I would start my period
soon. Several of my girlfriends already had theirs, and one had gotten hers in the fourth grade. We all used to accompany her to the high school bathroom where they had a Kotex machine, and stand guard while she put in her nickel and got her pad. We felt grown-up, indeed. Finally one summer day, when my mother was outside in the garden, I found a spot of blood on my underwear. I was thrilled and frightened, and although she had never once mentioned anything about it to me, I needed her to know it had happened. I went out and said, “Mother, I think I’ve just started my period.” She stopped hoeing the weeds for a minute and said, “Well, go take care of it,” then continued chopping. I went back in and found her box of pads and some safety pins and took care of it.

My friends and I never discussed sex like friends do today, their role models being the
Sex and the City
girls, ours being Nancy Drew and Sandra Dee. We talked about girls who were sleeping with boys as being tramps, and if any of us were doing it, or anything close to it, we never admitted it to one another. I think most of our crowd in the senior class were virgins. Most of the boys were, too, in spite of what they bragged about. The furthest I had gone with anyone was kissing and wrestling in the backseat, and a little light boob petting. I was, of course, determined to save the big moment for the honeymoon. But at seventeen, hormones seemed to kick into a higher gear, and when Larry and I had been going steady for a while, the life changing experience occurred. I was wearing a pink Bobbie Brooks skirt and sweater, and the main thing I remember was worrying that it would get blood on it. I really liked that skirt. While I was worrying, the event came and went. Or went and came, as the case may be. I remember thinking, “Is that IT?” I felt like I had gotten distracted for a moment and missed it. There was a small amount of blood—a spot the size of a silver dollar—on my underwear, but my skirt was fine. I remember going to bed that night thinking, “Well, now we’re married in the eyes of God.” That was a popular rationalization. It meant that as long as you intended to get married at some point down the road, sex wasn’t a sin. Or as much of one.