Spoken from the Heart (9 page)

Instead, I was the one who was going away. For months, Mother and Daddy had planned to send me to Camp Mitre Peak, a Girl Scout camp outside Alpine, Texas, where there were mountains, including the sixteen-hundred-foot-tall Mitre Peak, which looked like a giant arrowhead covered with green, scrubby brush. I left only a week or two after Mother lost my sister.

I was so homesick the feeling was almost crushing. Stuck in a completely unfamiliar place, I missed my parents dreadfully. Camp was nothing like being in El Paso; at night, there was no Grammee to hold my hand. I sent one letter home. I sat on my bunk and with my schoolgirl penmanship wrote to Mother and Daddy reminding them to pick me up on Saturday. When I addressed the envelope, I wrote "Estes Avenue," but forgot "Midland, Texas." The letter came back on Friday afternoon. The counselors gave it to me during mail call, and I sat holding it in my shaking hands. I was convinced that if my parents didn't get that letter, they wouldn't remember to pick me up the next morning. I envisioned spending days, perhaps another week, alone in my bunk under the shadow of the mountain. Sick with worry, I threw up, and the counselors put me to bed. The next morning, Mother and Daddy showed up exactly on time, and for years they would tell the story about how I started off running toward Daddy's side of the car and then stopped and hurriedly turned toward Mother's door, wanting so desperately to hug them both at once.

I went to Camp Mitre Peak again after seventh grade and adored it. But at age eight, I preferred home.

When I came through the door in the afternoon, I was greeted by the soft rustle of book pages and my mother, her feet propped up, book open on her lap. My mother loved to read. Her canon ranged from the traditional to the eclectic, writers like John Marquand and Somerset Maugham. She loved Willa Cather, especially
Death Comes for the Archbishop
. She read eagerly about the Southwest; it didn't matter whether the story was set in far West Texas or New Mexico or Arizona. She read books about anthropology, native peoples, and early explorers. She delved into naturalists, like Loren Eiseley. And she read to me, her voice weaving its spells of character, plot, and place, until I too yearned to decipher the fine black letters printed on the page. Once I did, I read with my friends, swapping well-thumbed copies of Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, and Nancy Drew with Georgia Todd, who owned the complete collection. We loved Nancy not for her independence or her car--we expected to have the same when we reached eighteen--but for the twists and turns of the mystery plots and the depictions of friendship. And, like me, Nancy was an only child making her way in the world.

We did not buy many books; instead, we borrowed from the Midland County Public Library, located inside the county courthouse, the biggest and most important building in the city. The courthouse sat in the center of downtown Midland, in a lush square with watered green grass. But the library was particularly interesting because of its location: the basement. All of the houses and many of the buildings I knew in Midland had no basements and hardly any stairs. To enter the cool, dark library, Mother and I had to walk down an entire flight of stairs. Each visit was exciting before we ever looked at the books.

If she wasn't reading, my mother wanted to be outside. Jenna Welch was nearly blind, left-handed, and woefully uncoordinated, but she loved nature. And she was an extremely knowledgeable self-taught naturalist. She remembered the name of every wildflower and was passionate about birds. Her fascination began when I was ten and she volunteered to be my Girl Scout leader. One of our requirements was to earn a bird badge. The best location for bird-watching in Midland, aside from Rose Acres, the euphemistic name given to the city's sewer ponds, where bird-watchers congregated despite the overwhelmingly noxious smell, was the yard of Ola Dublin Haynes, one of Midland's school librarians. She had let her place grow wild with scrub brush and prairie grass. We would stand silently with our binoculars, or sit Indian-style, and wait for the birds to swoop down and alight on the mesquite and prickly stubble. We were rarely disappointed; each year thousands of birds poured through Midland, which sits along one of the West's north-south migratory paths.

Mother began carrying binoculars in the car. On almost every long car trip when I was a teenager, the routine was the same. I would fall asleep, and Mother would gasp, "Look, there's a hawk" or "Did you see--it's a painted bunting!" and wake me up to see. I was invariably irritated, but the announcements took. Today I scan the trees for the swish of wings and am waiting for a screech owl to roost in the owl box nestled atop our live oak in the front yard.

Once my mother spotted a rare bird, a northern varied thrush, in our backyard. He had apparently been blown off course during a windstorm and had taken refuge in the trees. Mother identified it and then called her friends at the Mid-Nats, the Midland Naturalist Society. For weeks bird-watchers showed up at our front door, hoping to glimpse the bird and add it to their list. Come lunchtime, geologists and scientists would arrive and head into the kitchen with their sack lunches to sit at the Formica counter and wait for the elusive thrush. The few times it appeared, everyone in the room would jump up and hug each other and hug Mother, thrilled to have seen this small bluish gray bird, which resembles a robin. My dad would look around and shake his head over all the fuss, but he never minded driving Mother around with her binoculars to look for whatever might be there.

The sky, however, was another matter. Mother and I loved the sky. From almost as far back as I can remember, on a particularly spectacular summer night, Mother would gather a blanket and we would go outside to lie on the ground and gaze up at the sky. The wool of the blanket would scratch at our arms and legs, and we could feel the prick of the hard, sturdy grass blades below.

In Midland, the sky sits overhead like a flawless dome, bowing up from the earth at the edge of each horizon. The land does not pitch or rise but remains perfectly flat, without bright lights or tall buildings to obscure our view. So complete was the darkness that all we saw were the stars and the inky blackness. Above us, the constellations hung like strands of Christmas lights waiting to be plucked, and I would lift my little-girl arms to try to touch the glowing orbs. Lying beside me on the blanket, my mother pointed out Orion, the Little Dipper, Cassiopeia, and the planets, the glowing pink of Venus or the distant fire of Jupiter, as her mother had done for her. And she would say, "Laura, look at the sky, because it won't look like this again for another year.

"Look up," she would say, "Laura, look up."

But I wasn't the only one gazing up at that all-encompassing sky. Amid baseball diamonds, backyard slides, and sandlots, another child was listening to the croak of frogs and watching for the stars. That boy was George W. Bush. My Midland childhood was his as well. We were the same age, and only about ten blocks separated our two homes, his on Ohio, mine on Princeton. My elementary school friends Mike Proctor and Robert McCleskey played catch with George; his dad, George H. W. Bush, coached the local Little League. The Bushes lived in Midland from the time George was three until the year 1959, but the closest he and I ever came to meeting was passing each other in the hallways of the seventh grade at San Jacinto Junior High.

By age twelve, I was old enough to ride my bike on a Saturday morning to the Rexall drugstore for a ham sandwich. But, like most twelve-year-old girls, I longed to do more grown-up things.

In Midland, our first escape came directly from Hollywood. For two hours in the plush seats and darkened rooms of the downtown movie houses, we were transported to Europe or back in time. The women were glamorous and the men dapper, everyone was a wit, and there was almost always a happy ending. We never imagined that the Wild West was actually a movable set on a back lot, that each looming mountain was the backside of the same Hollywood hill, or that the acres of picture-perfect New England snows were manufactured under blue California skies by giant ice machines. Our lives grew as large as those on the celluloid reels that filled the screen. We went to the movies nearly every weekend.

On Saturday afternoons, Mother would load my friends and me into the car and drive down to the Yucca Theater, where we would rush to the ticket line. The Yucca showed mostly family fare or westerns. But we vaguely knew there was more to Hollywood. Once, as soon as Mother had waved to us and driven out of sight, we raced around to the other downtown theater, the Ritz, to watch the film
Blue Denim,
about teenage pregnancy, a subject that was all but taboo in Midland. Carol Lynley, the star, played a fifteen-year-old girl. She herself was only seventeen.

Boys and girls paired off early in Midland. Before elementary school ended, a small frenzy had built around trading disks, flat circles engraved with our names. In the sixth grade, I was convinced that a boy was going to ask me to trade disks with him. After school, I dragged Mother to the Kruger Jewelry store to buy a gold-plated disk. He never asked. Another boy, Robert McCleskey, did invite me to the Yucca Theater to see
Gone With the Wind
and still remains one of our best friends.

By seventh grade, boys began calling for what we dubbed "Daddy dates." Girls sat in the backs of the cars with their adolescent escorts while the boys' fathers drove. I had one "Daddy date" after I turned thirteen, which not coincidentally was the year I traded in my thick glasses for hard contact lenses that sat right on top of my blue eyes. My date was Kevin O'Neill, whose brother Joe would be the one to introduce me to George W. Bush almost twenty years later. Kevin invited me to a dance, and his father, Mr. O'Neill, a wealthy oilman who had come to Midland from Philadelphia, drove us. By age fourteen, chaperoning parents became increasingly superfluous. Fourteen was the age when most Texas kids got their driver's licenses.

Regan Kimberlin was my best friend at San Jacinto Junior High, and she loved being behind the wheel. She had raven black hair, green eyes, and a throaty laugh, and she had attended almost every school in Midland, including second grade at Sam Houston Elementary with George. Regan's mother, Wanda, was on about the fifth of her seven marriages. She married and divorced Regan's dad two times. Indeed, Wanda believed in divorce almost as much as marriage, and she moved with each tying or untying of the knot. By the time Regan was in junior high, Wanda was married to Jerry Cooper, whom she would marry and divorce three times. We thought Jerry was the perfect stepfather. Jerry and Wanda had bought a red Thunderbird convertible for Jan, Regan's older sister, in the hope of persuading Jan to annul her hasty marriage to Mike Morse, who in the infinitely small world of Midland, was the son of Ann and Joe Morse, our next-door neighbors on Princeton Avenue. Jan ignored the car and stayed married to Mike, and Regan was given the keys to the Thunderbird. Regan had that Thunderbird longer than Jan had Mike. Regan first took it for a spin when we were still thirteen years old and in the eighth grade, before we got our official licenses. We used to drive around in that or in her mother's pink Nash Rambler, a stubby car that we nicknamed "the pink pig."

After we got our licenses, all of my friends went out driving. We drove to the three drive-in movie theaters that ringed Midland. Whoever was behind the wheel would pull over before we reached the entrance, and half of the crowd in the car would squeeze into the trunk to avoid paying the admission fee. After we parked, one of us would have to sneak out and open the trunk to release the stowaways. We drove to the drive-in restaurants, like Agnes's or A & W. Sometimes Regan and I headed out alone to Mr. X's, on the dicier south side of town, where they served taquitos, steak fingers, and fried chicken livers and where, as we grew older, we could smoke without being seen.

But if we wanted to be seen in Midland, we went to Agnes's. Friday and Saturday nights now consisted of trips to the movies and Cokes at Agnes's. Agnes herself was a strong, stocky West Texas woman with a broad back from bending over hot stoves and steel gray hair wrapped in a knot on top of her head. Once I watched her raise her hand and slap a boy across the cheek in the parking lot because she thought he was being smart-alecky. But every night Agnes's would fill with cars. No one ever got out; we sat in our seats and waited for the carhops and eased the wheels forward or back as new cars pulled up and old ones drove off. Sometimes we went twice in one night. When couples left, it was usually to go out in the country, to the dark, flat stretches of unpaved road past the city loop, to park and then head back, so they could tell their parents the truth, that they had just come from Agnes's.