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Alaska fashioned Bob into a successful dentist. It fashioned Barbara a barren woman. I didn’t struggle with infertility—both my daughters were conceived a bit too easily—so I admit to not fully understanding the struggle. And, by the time I was of birthing age, feminine identity had changed so much. Between Barbara’s generation and my own, Rosie the Riveter and the later waves of feminism had sculpted a different female, a woman who could wield more than just the muscles of her womb and her ease in the kitchen. Knowing this helps me to imagine, if not fully empathize with, her grief.
Camp Sullivan was a freezing hellhole surrounded by the fierce natural beauty of Prince Williams Sound. It rained and snowed over 400 inches a year, and the sun was a cruel tease. In the winter, mountains of snow appeared overnight between Barbara and Bob’s barracks and the commissary. Even their dog, a Malamute named after Bob’s father, despised the climate. During a wilderness survival exercise the men left the base and dug deep into the mud to sleep overnight. Jingles the Dog accompanied the soldiers as a bit of a mascot but eventually abandoned them for Barbara’s warmer quarters. He woke her up before midnight, scratching at the front door.
So the officers and their wives did the best they could with the place and the provisions. They held dances in the rustic Officer’s Club where Barbara played the piano and occasionally sang tunes she learned in high school. Jingles sat in the middle of the dance floor and wagged his tail while the couples danced happily around him. They had booze and plenty of food, and over time more and more enlisted men were allowed to bring their wives and families to base.
In the midst of this frigid cold, Bob was thriving like a plant in a hothouse. He was well respected by enlisted men and officers alike, and this put his performance anxieties to rest. He was the only dentist on base so he was in demand, unsupervised, and thankfully, blessed with steady hands. His work was neat and sturdy, so on one occasion his commanding officer asked for a set of dentures. The colonel’s teeth were full of gaps and he saw the chance to get the young dentist to supply him with an upgrade. So Bob took an impression of them and sent it off to Oliver Davis’s dental lab back in Kansas City. After the mold was back and the work was done, the colonel went home for lunch and his wife said to him, I thought you were going to get your teeth put in! To which he wiped his mouth with a napkin, smiled widely, and said, I did.
Even a hunting accident became a victory for Dr. Hayes. When he and a few other men went on an excursion to shoot a brown bear, he took a fall on some ice and broke his middle finger. After that, he was unable to practice dentistry for three months. But to keep him busy, his colonel asked him to take some of the men who were interested in boxing and form a team. Relying on scant knowledge from his dental school foray into the Golden Gloves amateur boxing league, he formed the squad. And he led those stevedores from one of the smallest bases in Alaska on a tour across the entire state—including the Aleutian Islands—until they eventually won the all-state tournament. In short, Bob laid nothing but golden eggs in the Last Frontier.
But for Barbara, there was less glory to go around. She could bask in her husband’s success and enjoy the friendship of a few officer wives, but there wasn’t much else to do. She craved sunlight and civilization. And most of all she wanted a baby. But month after month there was blood in the toilet bowl. She blamed herself and thought of this infertility as penance for her abortion.
I can see her alone, staring outside the window of her little barrack in Whittier. It’s white as far as the eye can see and it’s dusk in the middle of the day. All the colors of life have been drunk down by winter’s greedy mouth. The wind whips Sullivan’s flagpole ties incessantly while she sits and folds clothes and smokes a crummy cigarette. Then out the window she suddenly sees Bob leaning into the wind while walking up their driveway.
She blunts out her smoke and runs to the door.
Come in, she says, thrilled and unnerved by the interruption. She wonders if he’s here with bad news about the Korean War.
He takes off his hat and parka and combs back a wavy strand of hair. Then he smiles.
We’ve received orders. This hardship assignment is over.
She lets out a little yelp filled with joy.
Yep, no more snow for us. We’re moving to the desert. We’ll be going to Ft. Bliss.
Ft. Bliss? she says. Where is that again?
***
The only thing Whittier and El Paso have in common is a large military base. The glorious embrace of spruce and stone that is Prince William’s Sound was replaced by the Franklin Mountains, whose arid ridgeline runs like a crop of veins in the Chihuahuan Desert’s wrist. Gone were the buckets of rain and snow: Barbara and Bob’s new home was parched, barely getting by with ten inches of precipitation a year. I grew up in El Paso so you’d think I’d be accustomed to the arid plain. But to this day when I look out at the landscape it feels like my eyeballs shrivel up into raisins. It’s not ugly, but you have to cultivate an eye for its sable and olive and charcoal garb. If you work hard at it long enough a diamondback rattler becomes a (frightening) thing of beauty.
In 1952, my grandparents arrived there like many other members of the white professional class. They had no appreciation for what the indigenous people had endured through the coming and going of white men tracing all the way back to before the English Pilgrim’s Thanksgiving. They took the local population, people who’d given the place stability and warmth for centuries amidst the wheeling and dealing of nation-states, for granted. Bob and Barbara didn’t truly see those who look like the landscape: earth-toned and resilient, humble and adaptive. What they saw was a place to put down roots and people who would help them do it.
So Bob and Barbara arrived and became Texans and bought a house on the east side of town where many military families lived. After they bought a house, they did what most white people did in that border town: they joined the local Methodist or Baptist or Presbyterian Church and hired a live-in maid, dirt cheap. Barbara went to a department store downtown called the Popular, and she bought all the furniture, appliances, and china that were expected of a dentist’s wife. She got involved in the local federation of dentists’ wives and found a decent bridge club. At home, her housekeeper pressed fresh tortillas on a grill pan and made up the bed with medical corners, then crossed the border so she could go home and feed her own children in Juarez, Mexico.
When Barbara continued to struggle with getting pregnant, she found a good gynecologist who promptly carried out a D&C on her stifled womb. On the way home from the procedure she stared out the window at the yucca, creosote bush, and pronghorn cacti that lined the roadway. Thank God it was daytime and not raining, and that Bob was driving her home this time instead of a suspicious cabdriver. But it still seemed a tad surreal that the cramp and sting in her abdomen were supposed to fix her problem when she believed that a similar action had caused it.
And then the following month she no longer bled and she took that and her morning sickness as a sign her penance was over. She budded in the Land of Sun, her roots digging deep, her stems flowering. She hummed songs her mother had hummed when she was a child. And she made up the nursery in blue, bullish and hopeful in her color choice. Bob was elated and smoked more cigars than normal. He was sure that his son would be a scratch golfer and an oral surgeon one day.
But his joy at her hard-fought fecundity was eclipsed by dissatisfaction with her small sexual appetite.
I used to take him lunch at his dental office on Alameda Street, she said to me in a recent phone call. She paused, There was a motel not far from there that he’d occasionally stay at when he worked late. Anyway, when I was pregnant with Bobby, Jr. he stopped asking me to bring him lunch. I think he was taking women to that motel and shacking up. That was better than a tuna sandwich, she added bitterly. Anyway, that’s when he began to be a playboy, and that’s when what fire I had left for him after John burned out. Too many nights he came home with a rumpled collar.”
That sequence of events wasn’t written down in a linoleum-covered baby book. What she did write was that Harold Robert Hayes, Jr. was born in 1954, followed by Susan Kathleen 14 months later, and finally Heidi Elizabeth Hayes, my mother, in 1959.
It seems immensely cruel to me—maybe even demonic—that cheaters surrounded her everywhere. First her father, then her first husband, and next my grandfather. And the fact that the pattern became so clear when she’d finally overcome the shame of barrenness is salt in the wound. I’ve spent long seasons being angry with her for the way she parented my mother several years after this part of her womanhood. But I think I can see the full shape of things now. Her womb had opened, but her heart was freshly torn.
She couldn’t or didn’t know how to stop the bleeding.