Suburban Renewal (12 page)

“Honestly, I'm excited about it,” I told him. “It's right near the expressway and we need the money. The whole thing seems ideal.”

Of course it wasn't ideal. I was leaving the house at 4:45 a.m. The only other person out was the newspaper delivery boy. The preschool, in a westside working-class neighborhood, was filled to capacity. It was solely staffed by me and the cook for the first hour. During which time almost all of the shift workers and medical personnel dropped their kids off. It was nerve-racking to be so totally responsible for so many. Once my coworkers showed up it was better. By the time everybody had breakfast and the requisite morning crisis was resolved, we divided the children by age groups. The layout of the building was basically open. The different class groups had different sections, with the only differentiation being the color of carpet on the floor. In the center of the building were two enclosed rooms. One was the baby room, with its cribs and rockers. The other room was the preschool classroom. The two walls that were exposed to the day care were floor-to-ceiling glass. Which gave me the feeling of being forever in a fishbowl.

That was where the comparison stopped, however. While the day-care areas were replete with cheery rugs and wall hangings in bright primary colors, the preschool was dull and stark. Fourteen little brown desks sat in neat rows upon a tan carpet surrounded by white
walls. I had seen more style and energy at the Department of Motor Vehicles. It perfectly reflected the personality of the head teacher of the class, Clarissa Klempner.

Miss Clarissa was a real teacher. She was a graduate of Northern Oklahoma College in Tonkawa and held a state teaching certificate. But when she'd arrived in the real environment of public elementary education, the seven-year-olds that she was hired to teach were far too frightening for her timid soul. Miss Clarissa walked through the world on a path of endless eggshells.

After her scary experience with second grade, she'd retreated to the relatively insulated surroundings of Candy Cane School. She'd been teaching this class for five years.

And she wasn't terrible. She had empathy, a huge capacity for love and endless patience. The class was extremely well behaved. Perhaps because they somehow realized how upsetting boisterous behavior would be to her.

I liked Clarissa. I liked the class. In fact, I liked almost everything about my job. Getting up in the quiet darkness of my house, waking my husband with a kiss as I left, driving through the frosty mornings into the lights of the city. I loved that. It made me feel a part of things. All over the world people were getting up and going to work. And I was one of them. And I loved bringing home a paycheck.

Sam hadn't even got a nibble on a job. He was going door to door as a fix-it man for the old folks in town. On a good day he might bring home ten dollars. Half the time he was too ashamed to accept the money from the poor old widows he worked for. But I could walk
through the door with bags of groceries and change in my pocket. It was a totally victorious feeling.

But naturally, there would have to be a fly in the ointment. That came in the person of Candy Cane's owner, Fern Davis. I met Mrs. Davis after I'd been employed at the school about two weeks.

We were finishing up our classroom day. Miss Clarissa took the class to recess. They would play until the after-school program began when they would join up with the older kids. I was not a part of this. Coming in at 5:30 a.m. meant that I went home at two.

Trixie opened our door and handed a note to Clarissa. She read it and then came over to me.

“Mrs. Davis is here,” she said. “She wants to meet you.”

“Okay, as soon as I finish with Kaitlyn.”

“I'll take care of Kaitlyn,” Clarissa said. “Go ahead. Be sure to clock out
before
you go in to talk to her. And watch your back.” This last was spoken in a warning whisper.

I shrugged off the advice as just more evidence of Clarissa's chicken heart.

But I did clock out before going into the front office. That was fortunate, because it was the first thing she asked me.

“I hate having my staff sitting around jabbering with me paying for it,” Mrs. Davis said.

I could have pointed out that usually when people are off the clock they are allowed to go home, not obliged to sit and talk with the employer, but I thought perhaps our discussion was meant to be only a friendly, after-work chat.

However, it didn't really have that feel. In fact, the tone was more suggestive of a spotlight and rubber
hose. She wanted to know, in fine detail, who I was, who I knew and what I thought. After a lifetime of similar interrogations from my mother, I handled myself very well. Maybe too well. When the questions stopped and her subject matter turned to other employees, I relaxed.

She complained bitterly about the woman I was replacing. She had taken a big chance on Misty, given her a wonderful opportunity. She'd thrown it away to follow her out-of-work husband to his new job.

That didn't seem so terrible to me, but I had the good sense not to say so. Instead I tried to change the subject.

“Where did they go?” I asked her.

“Someplace up north,” Mrs. Davis said.

“Oh,” I said, nodding. “Like New England? Michigan? Minnesota?”

“No, one of those states with North in the name.”

“North Dakota?”

“No, not there. North Carolina, that's it.”

I thought she was making a joke. I laughed.

“What's funny?”

“You're kidding, right?”

I should have known that a woman like Mrs. Davis probably didn't have that much of a sense of humor.

“Kidding about what?”

“About North Carolina being north.”

“It
is
north,” she said adamantly. “Otherwise they wouldn't call it North Carolina.”

I didn't say anything.

“I'm right,” she insisted. “Admit that.”

I should have.

“It's certainly north of Florida and Georgia and South Carolina,” I told her. “But it's east of here, almost due east. And it's considered a southern state.”

My mother had warned me since childhood that being a know-it-all gets you liked by no one.

Mrs. Davis wouldn't give it up. She insisted that we consult a map, and then she couldn't find the state in the area where she thought it should be, up around Ohio and Indiana. When I showed her where it was, it was as if she didn't believe me or the map. She called in Trixie, who reluctantly verified that, indeed, North Carolina was exactly where the map said it was.

I left feeling queasy and nervous, but Trixie reassured me the next day.

“Mrs. Davis hardly ever comes in here,” she said. “They live in one of those big old mansions near Swan Lake. Most days the farthest she ventures out is to shop at Miss Jackson's in Utica Square. Just stay out of her way. She may never forgive you or forget it, but she'll not bother to do anything about it.”

I hoped Trixie was right, and as the weeks passed I got back into my routine and forgot all about my brush with the owner.

One afternoon, when I was feeling especially creative, I broached the subject of the preschool classroom's boring decor with Clarissa.

“I don't understand why all the group areas in day care are so bright and colorful and we have to work in the big, drab void.”

Clarissa glanced up, surprised.

“It's my fault,” she said, very quietly, defensively. “The teachers are responsible for the decoration of their area. I just…well, I couldn't decide what to do and I'm not very…well, artistic. So I just never got around to doing anything.”

“Would you let me decorate it?” I asked her.

She sighed with relief. “Oh, would you!” she said.
“I've been so afraid that somebody was going to say something. I kept thinking I should do something, because you can see right in here and it looks so…so unfinished. But I thought if I did something, somebody might not like it.”

“Don't worry about it anymore,” I told her. “I'll come up with something. Something that we'll both like perfectly.”

My plans for the room didn't come together that day or even that week. I let my ideas simmer in the back of my mind. I wanted more than just some paint and pictures on the wall. I wanted a theme that would inspire the students, enliven us as teachers and yet fit into the class image that we had already formulated for ourselves.

I was lying in bed with Sam, who was watching Jay Leno, his favorite comedian, guest host for Johnny Carson. I'm not sure if it was something Leno said, or just that all my musing finally came together. But it suddenly hit me.

“Fishbowl!”

“What?” Sam looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.

“That classroom is a fishbowl,” I told him. “So that's how I'm going to decorate it.”

Having no money proved to be as much a help as a hindrance. I went through leftover paint cans at my house and at my mom's. I even had Clarissa show up with hers. We had about four different kinds of blue. I thought about mixing them and then decided that the best was just to go from light to dark, as if we were in the ocean. The floor was perfect. Its tan carpet was the exact color of sand. I scrounged through Lauren's stuffed animal collection for sea creatures. I looked through books on the oceans and painted the lower
walls with undersea flora and fauna. I dabbed our bookshelves with wood putty and painted them as pink as a coral reef. Driving home one afternoon, I'd seen a huge pile of pallets used for hauling cement to well sites left as scrap. I loaded up the trunk and used the lumber to make shell-like fronts for the desks. The students, with the help of Clarissa and I, made fish of every kind and color, which I suspended from the ceiling, at a height unreachable by even a student standing on a desk. I even drew a snorkeler on the top of the water above us, peering down through his swim goggles at us.

The kids loved it. Clarissa loved it. The parents were delighted. The other teachers got excited about their own areas and began brainstorming with me about how they could liven things up. Trixie even showed up one morning with a colorful découpaged sign for the door that read: Preschool Fish Bowl.

Two short weeks after completion, Mrs. Davis showed up. Took one look at my handiwork and fired me on the spot.

“You've vandalized my building,” she told me. “It will cost me hundreds of dollars to have that monstrosity cleaned off the walls and the furniture. I'm taking that out of the pay that I owe you.”

I begged and pleaded, I cried. Finally she agreed that if I would spend the weekend repainting the walls white at my expense and cart out every piece of fishbowl decoration that we had made, then I could leave with my paycheck intact and two weeks' severance.

I thought of my husband, my children, our checkbook. I didn't have any other choice.

Sam went to paint it on Saturday morning. He told me just to stay home with the kids.

“This is something I can do to help,” he told me. “Just stay home, rest up, spend some time with the kids. I'll take care of it.”

I thanked him and watched him leave. I was so disheartened. But I tried to be strong. I tried not to think of the kids I'd become attached to and would never see again, or the wonderful classroom that was about to be destroyed.

Sam returned less than two hours later.

He handed me a disposable camera. “I took some photos for you,” he said.

“Thanks,” I told him. “I didn't expect you so soon. You really got it done quickly.”

“I didn't do it,” he said.

“What?”

“I didn't do it,” he repeated. “I left it exactly like it was.”

“But Mrs. Davis—”

“To hell with Mrs. Davis,” Sam said. “Corrie, that was the neatest, coolest classroom I've ever seen in my life. Painting over it would have been like…like painting over the Mona Lisa. If Davis wants to paint it over, she can do it. I won't. Besides, it gives the kids a few more days to enjoy it.”

“But the money,” I said.

Sam waved my concern away. “There're some things a guy just won't do for money,” he said. “And destroying something fabulous that his wife created, well, that's one of them.”

1988

I
n some ways, losing the business was just one tremendous relief. By the sheer force of my own will, I had been trying to keep things together. The stress had been overwhelming. Just the finality of knowing that there wasn't anything else I could do was a kind of reassurance. And I got Corrie back. From the moment I told her that it was all over, she became my partner again. The trouble rejuvenated her in a way that the antidepressants hadn't.

After her time at Candy Cane School, I encouraged her to think about going back to college. At first she acted as if I'd lost my mind. With no money and no jobs, it didn't seem to her like the time to be thinking about making education expenditures.

“Take a couple of classes,” I told her. “We can get them paid for with a Pell Grant. All it will really cost us is your time. And it seems to me with both of us out of work, there's a lot of free time available.”

So she started driving into the city three days a week to go to Tulsa Junior College. She loved it.

My situation was not as hopeful. With oil companies maintaining a hiring freeze and a hundred men applying for every job that came up, I became less certain
about my future. My skills were no longer in demand. And the high school equivalency I got in the army was not considered sufficient education for even the most menial jobs.

“I've got petroleum engineers flipping hamburgers,” one fast-food manager told me.

“If you're interested in getting a job,” a guy at the employment office told me, “then you should pack your bags and get out of here. All over the rest of the U.S. the economy is booming. People are getting rich. But living here is like being stuck in a Third World country. No matter how hard you work, there just isn't anything to work with.”

I thought about leaving. I heard guys on Main Street talking about Atlanta, Seattle. There were jobs in those places. They were screaming for hardworking guys like us.

I even talked to Corrie about it. Her pretty little brow furrowed.

“If that's what you want, Sam,” she said. “Then I'm with you. But I think we really need to think about the whole picture. Here we've got a place to live and my family to fall back on, if we need to. Out there…well, we'll just be out there.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess that's true.”

“And think of all the Michigan folks,” she said.

The so-called Michigan folks had come to Oklahoma during the 1970s when the automobile industry started closing plants and laying people off. They'd left their families and friends to come for jobs in the oil patch. By and large, they didn't seem to like it much. Michigan folks earned such a reputation for complaining about Oklahoma that among natives a new slang phrase was coined. When something was messed up, screwed up
or fouled up, we'd say, “I'll bet this is not how they do it in Michigan.”

“What about the Michigan folks?” I asked her.

“They gave up on where they lived and came down here and tried to start over,” she said. “Now, after spending a decade trying to settle in here, they're back in their cars headed elsewhere. Is that what we want for ourselves? Is that what we want for our kids? Just new-wave Joads looking for the next crop of grapes?”

It wasn't what I wanted.

But what I wanted wasn't about to come to pass. I wanted to turn the clock back ten years and make things turn out differently. How exactly, I wasn't sure.

For the time being, I could only do what I could do. I got up early every morning. I kept the house, the yard, the car, in tip-top shape. I was more involved in the children's lives than I'd ever thought possible. I assigned their chores, checked their homework, coached their soccer teams. When I got the near-hysterical phone call from Lauren, I scrounged through the secret caverns of unmentionable stuff under the bathroom sink. Carried emergency supplies up to the school, dried her tears and assured her that being the first girl in the fifth grade to get her period didn't make her a freak, it made her a woman.

All this while constantly looking for work, taking every low-paying labor job I could find, and fending off my son's incessant teasing about being Mr. Mom.

Nate was still very much Paw-Paw's boy. My relationship with my father continued to be little more than a nod in passing. He continued to live with Cherry Dale and had been unable to find work. His days were spent touring the local beer joints, and rumors about bruises on Cherry Dale circulated with
growing frequency. I tried to convince myself that it was more gossip than fact.

Dad told me he planned to sell Gram's house. Fortunately with the flood of real estate on the market, there weren't any buyers. In my daydreaming moments I fantasized about buying it but, of course, I would never have done that. I had given the house away for nothing. Well, technically, the agreement read
one dollar and other considerations.
But I hardly remembered any discussion with Dad about it, I couldn't even recall my thinking process. But I did sign the papers with no reservations at the time.

“Everything happens for a purpose,” Gram had always told me. “Sometimes we don't like what happens and don't understand the purpose, but that don't mean it's not there.”

I suppose if there was a purpose in me handing over that house, it must have been to allow me to recognize Floyd Braydon for the man that he was. It seemed like a high price to pay for seeing the light. Or maybe it was seeing past the light, the blinding glare of wanting a dad kept me from seeing the truth about the man who fathered me.

I wanted to protect my son from the same lack of vision. But it was an impossible task. It was hard to figure out where Nate's idolization of his paw-paw had come from. He didn't suffer from the lack of a father figure like I had. His own real, biological dad, me, had been in his life always. Maybe we weren't as close as some father/son teams, but we got along okay. And I had been, and continued to be, a permanent person in his life.

Then there was Corrie's dad. Doc Maynard was, in my estimation, about as perfect a grandpa as a guy
could have. He was smart, hardworking, easygoing and had a great sense of humor. He was an upstanding citizen with a prosperous business. He also liked to read and fish and play golf. I admired him tremendously. And he was crazy about Nate. But Nate far preferred braggart, foul-mouthed, ex-convict Paw-Paw. I tried to limit their time together as much as possible.

Which wasn't all that difficult. For all that the city limits of Tulsa were encroaching down Main Street, Lumkee was still a very small town and everybody knew what everybody else was doing.

Except, of course, for my brother-in-law, Mike.

Corrie's brother had invested in my business. The money had been a big boost when it came. It had freed up my own cash so that I could afford to buy a house for my family. I'd just begun to pay him dividends when the oil patch turned sour. Now his investment was down the tubes with mine. It had happened to a lot of folks. And I was sure that Mike had interest in other local companies besides mine. But we were family and that made everything different. In a big corporation, if some anonymous stockholder loses their life savings, you send them a form letter. In a small family business, when your brother-in-law loses so much as a nickel, you owe him an explanation.

Mike had lost more than a nickel.

I wanted to talk to him privately, away from the drugstore. But it was very hard to catch him. I went by his house dozens of times and never found him at home. I eventually realized that he was leaving work, driving straight to Tulsa and not coming back until the next morning.

That was none of my business. Ultimately, I just
called up and tried to make an appointment to meet with him. He put me off two or three times. When I persisted, he finally agreed to see me and then canceled at the last minute. The more he avoided me, the worse I felt and the more insistent I was on seeing him. He was Corrie's only brother. They were very close. I couldn't allow anything that I had done, any mistakes that I had made, to put a damper on that.

Finally we met for dinner one Tuesday evening. He suggested Gambling Steaks, a place out by the entrance ramp to the expressway. It had been a really popular place just a couple of years earlier. It was fixed up to look like a casino with lots of flashing lights and a salad bar set up on a craps table. It still looked good and I heard it served great food, but the owner had apparently lost this restaurant wager. There was a foreclosure notice on the front door and a sign on the marquee that read Last Big Week!

Mike ordered a steak. I just asked for coffee. The waitress gave me an exasperated look, but I didn't have a spare twenty to put down on a meal. And if I ordered something, Mike would probably try to pick up the check. With what I owed him already, I couldn't stomach that.

He was nervous, fidgety.

I assumed that he was as concerned as I was about the danger of this financial loss causing hard feelings in the family.

I took a deep breath and calmly began my presentation of the facts. I tried to put what had happened in the industry within a historical perspective. I tried to be very honest about how the business had been set up, assumptions that I had made and problems that I had not foreseen. Enough time had passed that I knew
he was aware of how dire the situation had become. I didn't delude myself that the loss was minimal to him. The price of crude had fallen on Wall Street, but ultimately it was Main Street where the crash was felt. If people in Lumkee didn't have jobs, then they didn't pay their bills, they didn't buy their drugs. I wanted Mike to know that I understood that. That I was aware of his own financial balancing act.

I'm not sure when I realized that he didn't seem to be paying much attention. But I suddenly knew that he wasn't. He was sitting there, politely, looking in my direction, but his eyes were completely glazed over as if he were a million miles away.

My initial reaction was to be annoyed. Here I was leveling with him in a totally honest and self-condemning way and he wasn't even listening.

Fortunately, I reminded myself that I was the one in the wrong and I was probably boring him to death with my explanations. I immediately moved to the summation.

“I take full responsibility for this debt, Mike,” I told him. “I know that it legally falls into the bankruptcy with everything else. But it is personal to me and I give you my word, I will eventually pay you back, but it may be years, even decades in the future.”

I stopped talking and just sat there. He was looking at me closely. I had no idea what was going through his mind, what he thought about my promise. Finally he spoke, and I was more confused than ever.

“I don't care about the money,” he said. “Forget about it. It's not important.”

“It's important to me,” I began.

He waved my words away. “Sam, I need you to do something for me.”

“What?”

He hesitated. I thought maybe my response had been wrong.

“I'll do anything you ask, Mike,” I assured him.

“I need…”

He hesitated again. He just kept looking at me so intensely.

“I need…” He stopped again, this time he shook his head. He jerked his wallet out of his back pocket and threw a couple of bills on the table. “I need you to eat the steak that I've ordered,” he said. “Don't worry about owing me anything. Take care of your wife and kids, that's all the payback I'll ever want.”

He got up to leave.

“Where are you going?”

“I can't…I don't feel like eating,” he said. “Please, eat the steak.”

Stunned, I watched him walk across the room and out the door. I jumped up and hurried after him. I didn't know what was happening, but I couldn't just let him go.

“Mike!” I called out to him as soon as I got outside.

He was almost at his car. He glanced back but kept going. I broke into a run.

“Mike! Wait!”

I was a few feet away when he turned toward me. I came to a halt and waited. He leaned against the car as if he was too tired to stand up.

“Mike, what's going on?”

He raised his chin and looked me in the eye.

“I have AIDS,” he said.

I just stood there staring at him. Until that moment, all that I had known about him, I didn't really know.
And suddenly, everything that I'd ever known or wondered or suspected about him made perfect sense.

“I don't know what to do,” he said. “I don't know how to tell them. I've been thinking about just killing myself, making it quick and sparing Mom the disappointment. But I want to live. Now, more than I've ever wanted to live in my life. Oh God, Sam, I didn't want to put this on you, but I don't know what to do.”

I stood there looking at him and thinking about Corrie. Corrie loved him so much. They shared more than just genetic material. They had shared a life together. They had been kids together in their backyard, running through sprinkler hoses, falling into piles of leaves, making snowmen. He had always been her heroic older brother, friend, counselor, protector. She had been his devoted little sister, always looking up to him, always trying to make him proud. I loved her. And losing him would hurt her so deeply, profoundly. It made my heart ache to think about it. My heart ached for Corrie. It ached for the Maynards. It ached for Mike.

I took the two steps that separated us and I wrapped my arms around my brother-in-law.

“Oh God, Mike, I'm so sorry,” I told him. “I'm so damned sorry.”

We cried then. We both cried.