My First Five Husbands (3 page)

“Who’s that comin’ down the street with that organ grinder’s beat? Da-dee-ah…”
I sang for the ladies being primped and permed in the beauty parlor.
“He’s the greatest rhythm king with that organ grinder swing! Da-dee-ah
…
”

Mother enrolled me in tap-dancing lessons at the Armory when I was four, but I hated it. The only child in a class of adults, I was lost in a forest of legs wearing clickety-clackety tap shoes and wanted nothing to do with it. A year earlier, my first appearance in front of an audience had been a fiasco. I was supposed to be the ring bearer at a fancy Lebanese wedding, a big family whose sons were Bill’s best friends. Decked out in an adorable dress, I sailed through the rehearsal in the empty church, but the next day, the music started, the church doors swung open, and—well, you remember the old nursery rhyme: Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and
see all the people
! Nope. Not me, nohow. No matter how they cajoled.

But by kindergarten, I’d gotten over that and was cast as Mother Cat in “The Three Little Kittens.” We all knew our lines and were ready to perform. But those three little kittens giggled instead of saying their lines, ruining the illusion. I was disgusted. “We’re cats! We’re not little girls! Stop that giggling!” Oh, it was all too childish. Someday, I’ll do “The Three Little Kittens” again and do it
right
.

Even as a child, I was more than disenchanted with that sleepy Oklahoma town, which I assumed to be the whole world. No one spoke the same language as me, so to speak. One summer night, gazing down on Main Street from our apartment above the beauty parlor, I watched cars driving from one end of Main Street to the other (all of about a block and a half). They’d slowly cruise down the main drag, turn around, cruise back again. June bugs buzzed through the air, sticking to the grilles of the cars, crunching under the feet of people on their way to the movie theater. Monotony beyond bearing. I specifically remember realizing:
I’ve been born into the wrong world! A terrible mistake has been made!

“I want to learn to read,” I kept begging Mother. My friend, Emma Jane Irving, a year older, started school and shared her penmanship exercises with me on the beauty parlor floor. I learned the alphabet and was delighted to discover how letters fell together to form words.

This is Jane. This is Dick. See Jane run. See Dick run.

Thrilling! Action
and
romance!

In 1939, Mother was expecting, and for months I waited with bated breath for the new arrival, fervently wanting a baby sister. One day, in mid-August, when Mother was almost due to deliver, I was doing acrobatics and broke my arm. Aunt Irene whisked me up and ran lickety-split down the street to the doctor, followed by a waddling, distraught Rheua-Nell. I was given ether and promptly died right there on the table. Doc Cantrill revived me, set the arm, and sent me home. Quite a trauma for poor Mother, nine months pregnant, but wonderfully dramatic from my perspective. Just like a movie, only I was the star!

I awoke a couple of weeks later to find she’d been taken during the night to the Ardmore hospital twenty-five miles away. The wall phone rang, and Aunt Irene answered with me at her feet. Finally, she looked down and said, “Well, Frosty, the baby’s here.”

“Oh, Irene!” I was bursting with hope. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A girl.”

Oh, joy! Trumpets blow! I had a baby sister, Melinda Lou! That night, Bill drove me to the hospital. I clambered onto Mother’s bed with my broken arm.

“Frosty! Get down! Don’t shake the bed!”

Oops. Big goof. Embarrassed, I climbed down. Mother smiled. The little bundle, face all squinched up and red, was a miracle to behold. I was bursting with happiness and didn’t want to leave, but Bill took me to a rooming house to spend the night. I had never spent a night away from Mother, never slept away from home, except at grandparents’ houses. And I had certainly never slept anywhere with just my dad! Bill turned off the light and rolled over to go to sleep. Feeling lonesome and scared, I said, “Bill? Can we talk for a while?”

“Frosty, this is not the time for talking, it’s the time for sleeping.”

Watching headlights sweep slowly across the faded wallpaper, I felt panicky, my chest tight with fear in that dreary, empty room.

In a few days, Mother and Melinda Lou came home and I was allowed to hold her, even with my arm in its sling. Melinda looked up blindly toward my face and scratched my forearm with her sharp little nails. I wondered if she liked me. I was certainly proud to pieces of her. But Melinda scratched a lot. She wasn’t a terribly affectionate baby and didn’t appreciate the tenderness I lavished on her.

“If Eddi-Rue had been the baby and Melinda had been born first,” Bill has been heard to say, “Melinda would have killed her.”

There was no jealousy or sibling rivalry. I simply and unabashedly adored her, and she was the best possible playmate. As we grew older, we became great pals and I never thought of her as “the baby.” She was extraordinarily bright and able to grasp pragmatic things (as one might expect from a future Ph.D. in radiation biology). She was vivacious, flirtatious, and self-assured, but she could be stubborn. When she was two, she dropped something or other on the bedroom floor and created an all-out battle of wills with short-tempered Aunt Irene.

“Melinda Lou, pick that up and put it in the wastebasket this minute!” ordered Irene.

“No!” Melinda flatly refused, determined to defy Aunt Irene.

“I’ll spank you!”

“No!”

Irene ended the standoff, seizing Melinda’s hand and forcing her to put whatever it was in the wastebasket. And then she spanked Melinda—
pat! pat!
—on the bottom.
Oh, why wouldn’t one of them just pick it up?
I fretted. Mother did not believe in physical punishment. She simply told us what was expected and, because we loved her so, we did it. About the harshest reprimand I remember receiving from Mother was for talking too much in the beauty parlor one day.

“Eddi-Rue,” she finally said in exasperation, “go sit on that chair and be quiet for five minutes.”

I obediently sat, eyes fixed on the clock, but I thought it was a minute between each number. After an eternity, the minute hand had traveled from twelve to five, and I said timidly to Mother, “It’s been five minutes. Can I talk now?”

“Why, Eddi-Rue!” Mother exclaimed. “Are you still here? You were so quiet, I forgot all about you.”

Not surprisingly, that was the day I learned to tell time.

A
n ambitious man, Bill was determined to find the best work he could, building derricks in the oil fields and later constructing “corduroy” roads in Louisiana through swamps to the drilling sites. Corduroy roads are made of logs, like log cabins, cheap and quick to construct. He drove us out one day to see his work—
bumpety bump bump!
What fun!

My first day of school in Lafayette, Louisiana, I lowered my head on my desk and bawled, unspeakably terrified to have been dropped off by Mother in a strange place with a strange accent. The one thing I remember is learning the verse “To market, to market to buy a fat pig.” At home that afternoon, I asked, “Mother, what’s a
mahkit
?” The second half of the first grade we moved to Bishop, Texas, just after they’d had a flood, which was more fun, because I got to walk to school in knee-deep water. We put on a recital in which I was supposed to deliver a patriotic speech. I memorized it while hanging upside down on the closet clothes rod while Mother was doing housework. But on The Day, I saw all those people looking at me, launched forth, and went stone blank. Maybe I should have tried it upside down. My teacher gently prompted me from the front row and I continued, but oh, I was embarrassed.

A year later, Bill landed a general contracting job in Houston with Mr. Curtis B. Kelly. It must have been a real step up. “Kelly” recognized Bill as unusually talented and intelligent; we were often at his home, a house I found fascinatingly big and spacious—and spent the next fifty years trying to duplicate. I spent the first semester of second grade in Houston, then skipped to the first semester of the third grade, having been double-promoted, along with my two boyfriends, Pat and Charles, who walked me home from school every day. Pat was tall and pudgy with a sweet, open face. Mischievous Charles had bright red hair and a most wonderful talent: He could fall straight backward to the ground, stiff as a stick. A remarkably brave, if foolhardy, thing to do. I don’t know how he kept from killing himself, but it delighted me so, I guess the pain was worth it.

In Houston, I studied ballet for a year with Miss Emma Mae Horne. Oh, how I loved ballet class! For our recital, I was in a maypole dance with sixteen little girls weaving crepe paper streamers, all of us in striped dirndl skirts over gathered white net petticoats, flowers in our hair. I also danced a duet with another girl, a lyrical little tippy-toe piece of fluff done in short purple velvet tutus. Mother made my costumes, and I felt like a fairy princess. Nothing was more magical than dancing.

I won three contests that year in Houston. One was for the longest list of words made from the letters in “Constantinople”—on which Mother, Irene, and I labored for a week, and I felt secretly guilty for having had help. The
Houston Chronicle
held a contest for the best essay on
The Jungle Book,
and my prize was two tickets to the movie. For drawing the best Thanksgiving turkey—well, I tied with one of the boys. The winning boy and I were called up to Mrs. Butler’s desk to receive a special lollipop each, and I was given first choice. One was a huge, jolly clown face, the other a small green Christmas tree. I very much wanted the clown, but I figured the boy would think the Christmas tree girlish and obviously second best, so I reluctantly took the tree—but dammit, it pissed me off to be so noble.

After Pearl Harbor, Bill enlisted in the CBs (the Construction Battalion branch of the military). I never asked why. Perhaps patriotism, perhaps a better salary. Thirty-four with a wife and two children to support, he moved our family to Durant, Oklahoma, and went off to serve his country, gone for three years, till the war in the Pacific was over. Mother worked all day, came home after dark, and went out “with the girls” several nights a week. During this time, I developed a daily panic that came on at dusk and plagued me well into my thirties. Other people would say, “Oh, isn’t dusk a lovely time of day!” while my throat tightened and my chest ached. Many nights in high school, while my family was asleep, I got up and wandered around the house in the dark, touching furniture, trying to connect, going outside to traipse around the yard, looking at the moon, wondering why I felt so anxious and what on earth was wrong with me.

Getting double-promoted in Houston was wiped out the following September in Durant, which had just plain old third grade. It turned out to be a blessing, however, because we had the theatrical Cecil McKinney up front as our homeroom teacher, and sitting in the back was brown-eyed Benny Frank Butler, with whom I was smitten. Yvonne Mayberry and I were best friends right off the bat, inseparable until fifth grade, when her family moved to Pauls Valley, about eighty miles away. Other side of the moon. Yvonne and I wrote frequent letters, still thick as thieves, but she got married in the eleventh grade to a boy named Coy, and I never saw her again.

Mother sent us up the street to Mrs. Lemon’s house for piano lessons, starting when I was eight and Melinda only three. I did well, but Melinda had a real knack. She can still play the heck out of any piece of music. I continued taking ballet, Melinda took tap, and Mother taught us to sing barbershop harmony. Every car trip was filled with “Lay That Pistol Down” and “White Cliffs of Dover” and other wonderful songs. We sang all the way to Dallas to shop for hats, gloves, and Easter getups and all the way to visit Mother’s folks, strict “hard-shell” Southern Baptists. There was no swimming, cards, or checkers allowed on Sunday. Only Chinese checkers. Why? I don’t know. But we played
a lot
of Chinese checkers. Pee-Paw and Maw-Maw owned the local telephone exchange in tiny Achille, Oklahoma, so all the children took turns running to get whoever had a phone call. Only the town doctor and a few other folks had a phone at home. Everyone else came to Maw-Maw’s to take the call at the switchboard.

Our homeroom teacher in the fourth through sixth grades was Velma Moore, a stern-tempered redhead who lived in the duplex adjoining ours and kept a horse in her backyard. Many’s the happy hour I spent pulling up clover to feed him through the back fence. Both Miss McKinney, a sweet-tempered little brunette, and fiery-haired Mrs. Moore were wonderful teachers who loved putting on shows. Cecil composed her own lyrics and music and dances, and every December, Mrs. Moore performed an entire chapter from the children’s book
A Birds’ Christmas Carol
for us, playing all the roles herself, from memory. And she was
good
!

“Mrs. Bird opened her eyes and drew the baby closer. It looked like a rose dipped in milk, she thought, this pink and white blossom of girlhood, or like a pink cherub, with its halo of pale yellow hair, finer than floss silk.”