Spoken from the Heart (7 page)

Papa would stop, lift Bully out of the truck, and send him running toward the river. Bully would plunge in and paddle about the placid Rio Grande. Then he'd get out, shake, and run after the truck until he had dried off, and Papa would hoist Bully back in. To a six- or seven-year-old, those late-afternoon rides seemed like the greatest adventures in the world.

There was a wildness too in the upper valley that did not exist among the imported trees and rectangular subdivision grids of Midland. Once, behind the orange house, I came upon Bully shaking a rattlesnake to death in his terrier teeth. I watched as the rattler's body broke into pieces, one portion of his scales flying through the open window of the truck cab. It was terrible and mesmerizing at the same time.

In the evenings, we'd sit in our clean, "dressed-up" clothes in Grammee and Papa's living room and talk. Then Grammee would fix supper, usually a bowl of cereal or a dish of ice cream, which we ate at the kitchen table. The kitchen of my childhood memory is a large and spacious room; only much later did I step inside and discover that it was quite small.

The whole house was small. It was a four-square house, only four rooms--two bedrooms, the living room, and the kitchen--with a little center hall. There was an evaporative air conditioner set up on the roof over the center hall to mitigate the heat, a "swamp cooler," we called it. Papa would finally turn it on around four in the afternoon, when the heat had become almost unbearable. But at night, because of the desert, the house was cool. We slept with the windows open. I spent the night on a double bed in the little guest room, but I was not alone. When the lights went out, Grammee would slip in wearing her plain cotton nightie to sleep with me. I can still remember how great it felt to lie there in the quiet dark, with only a sheet resting on top, as the cool desert breeze wafted in.

And I remember too the unspoken comfort of those nights as we drifted off and Grammee held my hand, not letting go until long after we were both asleep.

Grammee and Papa had a pattern to their life that I liked, and I could imagine living like that, in the quiet of the valley, with the sand and the river and the sun. Sometimes, particularly when Mother and Daddy came, we went for longer drives, following the valley out into neighboring New Mexico, heading past the acres of pecan trees at the Stahlman Farm and past San Miguel, with its tiny church built entirely of black volcanic rock, all the way up past the rich farmland to Las Cruces. I would sit in the back of the car, the bright light radiating through the window, and daydream about living on a ranch in the upper valley, raising hot green chilies, onions, and pecans.

For years, every visit to El Paso included a McGinney and a trip to Ju'rez. The McGinney was Papa's own creation. He liked to drink a beer before lunch, and when I visited, he would fix me what he called a McGinney, a little shot glass filled with a swallow of cold, foamy beer. I drank Papa's McGinneys until I turned seven. That year, I signed the temperance pledge card that sat in the back of every seat in the pews at the First Methodist Church in Midland. Worshipers were expected to sign the pledge and drop it in the collection plate. Once I signed, I gave up McGinneys, at least for a little while.

But I did not give up Ju'rez. When they visited, Mother and Daddy would go over at night for dinner or to sit in a club with their El Paso friends. In the daylight, it was my turn to cross into Mexico, with Grammee and Papa and sometimes with Mother and Daddy as well. We'd drive to El Paso, park the car, and walk across the barbed-wire-laced bridge with the river draining below. On the other side, Grammee and Papa would stop for a Mexican beer; then we headed for the open-air market, which beckoned with baskets, embroidered cotton tops, hand-hewn guitars, and wooden puppets. The pottery was my favorite. I ambled from stall to stall, comparing brightly painted birds and red and green leaves on miniature tea sets, carefully selecting my purchase. Today, at home in Crawford and Dallas, I have cabinets and shelves lined with vibrant Mexican jugs and bowls.

Afterward, we'd make our way back across the bridge, bundles tied and clutched in our hands. But before we could reenter El Paso, each of us had to speak to a U.S. Customs officer. Grammee and Papa made me thoroughly rehearse "I am a citizen of the United States," so I would not suddenly go mute or say the wrong thing. As much as I relished those excursions, the returns always seemed a bit perilous, with the specter of being stuck for days on that bridge, in a concrete and barbed-wire limbo between the United States and Mexico.

El Paso continued to call to me long after I had grown. I decamped there for a summer in college, taking classes at Mother's old Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy, which was now Texas Western and has since been renamed for a third time as University of Texas at El Paso. I came again as a woman in my forties and my fifties, to talk to writers, stroll through art galleries, take in the city and the land. With my friend Adair Margo, I climbed the rugged trails of Mount Cristo Rey to the great cream limestone carving of Christ on the cross, which sits above what had been a favorite mule watering hole for the northern-bound Spanish conquistadors. The last Sunday in October, devout religious pilgrims will crawl on their knees up the same rocky trails to demonstrate their fealty to God.

There remains something mystical about El Paso, built into a mountain pass that divides Mexico and Texas, sliced by the Rio Grande in its winding journey into the Gulf of Mexico. But perhaps other factors account for the city's magnetic pull. In 1971, a Texas biochemist declared the city's groundwater to be heavily fortified with lithium in its natural state. Some of my longtime El Paso friends say that people who move away invariably find themselves moving back. Because they're not happy anywhere else but in El Paso.

For much of my early childhood, I was on my way to becoming partially blind. I could not make out anything that was not directly in front of me. I could not see the line of the curb or down the sidewalk or over to the corner. Shiny bikes, birds in trees, all were equally a blur. I finally got glasses in the second grade, and even then it was partly by accident. Midland public schools required their students to read an eye chart. When it was my turn, I could barely make out the biggest letters, and the school nurse sent an official letter home to mother, informing her that I had failed my eye exam. My mother berated herself for allowing me to walk around in this particular fog. She shook her head and said it should have been obvious to her. My mother is also extremely nearsighted. We have the same thing, progressive myopia. By her seventh-grade year, Mother's vision had so deteriorated that Grammee and Papa kept her out of school for a year and sent her to Arkansas, to live with Hal's old-maid sisters, Gertie and Kitty, and "rest" her eyes. The cure failed. Her glasses were as thick as bottles. Mine would be the same had I not been fitted for contacts at age thirteen.

I still remember leaving the eye doctor's office, my first pair of glasses perched awkwardly on my nose. And then I looked up. I was shocked to see individual leaves on the trees. I knew that trees had leaves, but I had not realized how distinct each one looked, even those of the squat mesquite that brushed over my head as I darted about those vacant lots on Estes Avenue. Midland suddenly came into focus on that sidewalk. But I think this partial blindness and the knowledge that one cracked lens could temporarily plunge me back into that narrow, myopic realm made me more cautious physically and less of a risk taker. When you do not know where edges begin and end, you are frequently surprised by what is hard or sharp.

My first school was Alyne Gray's Jack and Jill School, which she taught in her modest backyard inside a wooden lean-to shack, where the wind whistled right up against the wood. I started there when I was not quite five years old. It was Alyne's first year of running a school. Alyne's mother, Mrs. Odom, was a friend of Grandma Welch's in Lubbock. My mother recalls how Daddy had been instructed to look out for Alyne when he moved to Midland, and Alyne was told to look out for Harold Welch. They found each other when Mother introduced herself to Alyne across the fence alongside their first tiny home, before they moved to Estes Avenue. That was the shrunken world of Midland.

Alyne's husband died young, and the school was how she supported herself and her children, Jane and Robert. Daddy later built a new cinder-block school for her on a sandy patch along Garfield Street, in a newer part of town. Because the public schools didn't offer kindergarten, Jack and Jill was the first school for many Midland kids. I met Susie Marinis there among the paste and waxy crayons, and, a few years after me, Alyne would teach a smiling boy named Jebbie Bush.

Most kids left after one year, but because I was a November baby, I was too young to start first grade. I was five and three-quarters when September arrived, and the schools would not admit any five-year-olds into first grade. Susie was the same, having been born in late October, so we spent another year at Jack and Jill. When I was not yet seven, my parents enrolled me at North Elementary in the Midland public schools. There were, apparently, no rules about how old you had to be to enter the second grade.

As a result, I was always the youngest in my class, right up through college, when I graduated at age twenty-one, and I think I was a bit immature compared to the other kids, constantly trying to catch up and never quite succeeding. But I loved school. I adored my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Gnagy; I stayed in touch with her until she died. She and her husband rented a house from Mother and Daddy on that Estes Avenue block. Her husband worked as a geologist for Phillips Petroleum in Midland; he had fought in the war and then headed off to college in Kansas on the GI Bill. I don't know whether it was because she lived on our street or because I simply loved school--I loved the bright lead pencils and the thick practice paper and the readers and how letters and numbers would appear and then disappear across the vast blackboards--but I believed with all my second-grade heart that I was Mrs. Gnagy's favorite.

At recess, when the other kids were running on the dirt in their flat-bottomed canvas sneakers and leaping over whooshing jump ropes, I would stand with Mrs. Gnagy. She would wrap her arms around me, and I would lean against her. The other second-grade teacher, Mrs. McQuestin, would stand next to Mrs. Gnagy and hold her arms around another little girl, Gwyne Smith. Gwyne and I, nestled in the reassuring arms of these teachers, would look at each other while the two adults talked above us and the playground rang with the noise of races and bouncing balls.

I so wanted to be like Mrs. Gnagy, who was all of twenty-two and a newlywed when she gathered me in her arms. At home, I played school, lining up my dolls on the floor of my room for instruction and Scotch-taping pictures to my little mirror so that it would look like a classroom bulletin board. I taught my dolls writing and reading and solemnly held up picture books in front of their bright, painted eyes. I always wished that I had brothers or sisters who might sit at their imaginary desks for the lessons, but I happily made do with my dolls.