This is the seventh weekly release of my memoir manuscript. If you’re new here, start at the beginning or you’ll be confused.
Hi Honey, she says in a muffled tone. But there’s something more in Granny’s voice than her usual mumbling.
Hi!, I say, conjuring a sweet, welcoming tone so she’ll say more.
Do you still want to talk to me? she asks, followed by a nervous giggle.
Now I understand. The last time we spoke I’d asked her to tell me everything she’d not told me about Grandpa when I was younger, to spell out what was behind strange gaps in the storyline, awkward pauses in the telling of it.
To do that, she took me back to the period right after her father discarded his family like an old, worn shoe. She’d been dating Roger Burns at the time, and then, cast aside by the only other man of significance in her life, Roger became her entire world.
At 17, he convinces her to get married, and then late in World War II, he’s drafted into the Air Force. After graduating high school, she follows him to bases all around the country, sometimes living with his parents, sometimes with him, working as a dressmaker and a secretary and at one point driving a two and a half ton truck in the Army Motor Pool.
As she tells it, it was an exciting time to be in love despite the death and rationing and complete uncertainty of the future. The chaos of war was balanced by the camaraderie; the poverty of teenage marriage was outmatched by their passion. And then just as Roger’s sent out to a port of embarkation on his way to Japan, it’s VE Day and they suddenly get the chance to settle down and make a peaceful life together.
But they do what many people do when they’re young and foolish and haven’t a clue how to chart their own course: they return to what’s familiar. So they head back to good old Hickman Mills, and Roger becomes a technician in Barbara’s father’s dental laboratory. She hopes for redemption in this, she hopes that the past has fertilized this soil instead of poisoned it, and for a short while she sees tender greens shooting up from the ground.
Until Maxine.
Maxine is the blonde Sunday school girl who works at the dentist’s office right next to Oliver’s laboratory. Naturally the lab technician and the dentist’s assistant cross paths. But then they start going to lunch together while Barbara’s at home ironing his shirts and preparing the deviled chicken. And so it goes, and so it goes, and this is the Universe’s gall: that there amidst the crowns and bridges, in that same place where I’m just sure Oliver Emit Davis took his own homewrecker fling, Barbara and Roger become Maxine and Roger.
So they divorce and Barbara’s stone of grief keeps rolling. And as a dash of salt in the wound, Roger remains employed at her dad’s laboratory while she has to go find a job in Kansas City. On her bus ride to work each day she sees him walking to the laboratory and it’s as if the bitter wind cuts her heart as it rolls over his coat. The war is over and she wishes it wasn’t.
***
After Roger and Barbara separate, she rents a room in a house owned by a married couple, and one rainy fall night they drag her to the Playmore Dance Hall, hoping to brighten her spirits.
I imagine her at a tallboy table watching the fun and foreplay of others as the Big Band music plays, wishing she could be miserable at home instead of out in public. As a divorced woman in the 1940s, she can’t shake feeling like an object of scorn and pity.
The dance hall doors open and admit a handful of brawny men all wearing wet leather jackets. One of them heads to the bar for a beer. He has thick curled hair tamed into submission and blue eyes that are at once kind and searching. The bartender serves him his drink which he lifts to his lips but then he sees her there, with those black pin curls and that bosom, and he doesn’t want someone else to ask her to dance so he sets the drink down and walks over.
She looks up just as he reaches the table and he sees the steel blue in her eyes, glittering and mournful. The color reminds him of the oil derricks in Burkburnett, and they remind him of his mother. For a second he falters, as if he’s had a premonition, and then he asks her to dance.
His mouth, his nose, his ears: everything’s set right and proportioned well, so she puts her broken heart on ice for a moment and says yes.
And he can move, baby.
So they dance and dance until the wheel of attraction completes its first circuit and the dance hall is about to close. The rain has subsided and he looks at her and says, I’d like to take you home. Her heart flutters and she smiles and she hardly recognizes herself when she gushes, Well gee, do you think that’d be alright? And he smiles and puts his coat over her shoulders and offers her his arm.
When they meet, Bob’s enrolled in the Army and earns a second lieutenant’s pay during dental school. Things progress quite nicely between the two of them, so with a bit of his money he buys her a train ticket so she can meet his parents at Christmastime.
She worries they won’t approve of her since she’s divorced and he’s their only son. But her mother taught her to be useful around the house so she helps in the kitchen and cleans up after dinner. She paints his mother’s nails while they chat.
Fortunately, and somewhat strangely, that Christmas the Hayes’s are sheltering a neighbor’s grand piano, a piece they couldn’t have purchased on their own. And it's an unexpected grace since Barbara’s quite the pianist. Like everyone else in the Depression, she grew up poor as dirt and her family couldn’t afford lessons on a real piano. So she’d learned her scales and school girl songs on a cardboard replica of piano keys.
Bob brags about her talent and Jingles, his father, asks her to play.
She swallows all the shame and scarcity of her past and walks over to the piano. She bends over the keys, arching her back like my mother arched hers, and whispers a thank you to her own mom for helping her develop just this one accomplishment. Then she drills into Chopin’s Polonaise in A Major, and when she’s done she looks up from the keys and sees how straight and proud Bob is standing.
Later on that night, behind the chicken coop in the backyard, he tells her that he loves her. And when she kisses them all goodbye at the train station his mother says out loud, You can marry this one, Bob.
But he didn’t marry me, she told me and her eyes looked away from mine. And what she confessed is so predictable, so predetermined, that I blushed with rage, not embarrassment, while hearing it.
So when she asks over the phone if I still want to talk to her after sharing this burden she’s carried for seventy years, I say emphatically, Yes, Grandma, yes I still want to talk to you.
And I know now why she was so hellbent that my older brother be born in a nuclear family. It was a chance to atone for a sin, an old one, but one so palpable, so incarnate that even in her 90s it laid its downy head on her silk pillow each night and remained there when she rose each morning.
I feel like I’m part of this story as you write. It’s like I’m there, thank you for sharing your gift of writing and your family story with me.❤️