Chapter 23
Russ’s mother wanted us to have what she herself had only dreamed of: an autumn wedding at Sunken Gardens, with guests invited to sit under shade trees and watch us take our vows beside a waterfall with flowers blooming all around.
She paid for the service, along with the reception at the Yacht Club, where every table had an orchid for a centerpiece.
By then, she’d sold their land to the developers, and she had no trouble thinking up the names of almost a hundred old enemies and new friends she wanted to see the kind of celebration she could now afford.
That was fortunate, because aside from my family, my only guests were three of my coworkers from the library.
Irene and Roberta had both sent congratulations and regrets through the post.
But Janet was thrilled to serve as maid of honor, and Shirley, carried by Mae, was an only somewhat fussy flower girl. My father, looking as proud and happy as I’d ever seen him, walked me down the aisle.
Bobby merely attended. I doubt Mae gave him a choice.
As newlyweds, Russ and I started out staying with his mother while looking at houses for sale in town.
But then a contractor tipped him off about lots for sale on a soon-to-be-created island by the Gulf-side beaches to the west of town.
This new island, called Paradise Island, would be a twenty-minute drive from downtown, which in those days was far.
Russ had always wanted his own dock, and the contractor said the island would be shaped like a tree, the dredged sediment packed and shaped in thin branches so every lot would have direct water access.
Russ immediately grabbed a half acre on Dolphin Drive, one of the island’s cul-de-sacs that jutted out into the intercoastal waterway.
It turned out he was smart to do it. By the time our house was built and we moved in, every lot on Paradise Island was spoken for, and we had new houses going up on either side of us.
You could see by the frames they would be like ours, wide ranches with attached garages.
From dusk to dawn, I heard the buzz of saws and the pounding of hammers.
Dolphin Drive, being so new and not yet fully populated, wasn’t on the paper route yet, but I listened to the news on the radio.
I knew the war in Korea was still going on, and that Mrs. Lifton had been too optimistic about the negotiations.
I assumed Leonard was still in the prison camp, missing his mother’s lasagna while his true love waited patiently in Japan.
I still hoped we wouldn’t resort to an atomic bomb on North Korea, as I didn’t actually want Leonard and his new love vaporized, let alone all the innocent people who’d die along with them. But that was the extent of my caring.
The house on Dolphin Drive was the first place I’d ever lived with air-conditioning.
The fifth day of March 1953 might be widely recognized as the day Stalin died, but for me, it will always be the day Russ installed a window unit in the bedroom, and another in the dining room.
Hail to thee, great AC. Russ bought a third unit to give to Mae and my father, an early Christmas present.
Mae called Russ a prince, and said she’d never slept so well in her life.
I still did better in the heat and humidity than most people, but there were long stretches of summer when I was glad to have December at the turn of the dial.
Russ also bought me an automatic washing machine, no wringing required, and an electric dryer as well.
So I had plenty of time between chores and cooking where I could just crank up the cold, lie on the couch, and read.
The library, like every place that hired females, reserved jobs for the unmarried.
They were right that I no longer needed the paycheck, and really, I didn’t even need to go to the library at all anymore.
If I wanted any specific title, I could just tell Russ how much I wanted to read it, and the next time he was downtown, he’d stop and buy it.
I read some of the big novels I’d always wanted time for: Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Les Misérables.
One day Russ dropped me off at Haslam’s while he went to play pool, and I found a hardback copy of Black Boy by Richard Wright.
I purchased it, along with a magazine, and had the cashier put both in a bag.
The next afternoon, while Russ was at work, I started in on Black Boy, and I learned that Mr. Wright had been born in Mississippi—not so long ago, not so far away.
It was an uneasy feeling to read about, and then to understand, his dread of white people, as I knew that would include me and everyone I loved.
One thing I underlined was Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books…
. Reading was like a drug, a dope. I got that Richard Wright didn’t mean an environment like being a married white lady sitting in electrically chilled air on a couch all afternoon, but when I looked up from his book and out our windows, at the skeleton house frames and bare soil of our yard, all I wanted to do was lower my gaze and turn another page.
Richard Wright’s mother had a paralytic stroke when he was ten years old, and she had more strokes after that.
He wrote that watching her suffer when he was young set the tone for the rest of his life, both shutting his heart and forever opening it to others, making him both tender and violent, both caring and hard.
My mother hadn’t suffered before she died, or if she did, I didn’t see it.
But I understood what Richard Wright said about the pain you feel when someone you love suffers, and how that can change you into a different person.
Because when I imagined my daughter suffering somewhere, alone and helpless, it was like the hammering and sawing from next door and across the street were coming from inside my head.
I’d tell myself she was happy and safe with the piano people, and that I’d done the right thing, giving her up to them so she could have a good life.
Or I’d try to focus on the words of a book.
Usually, none of that worked. I just had to wait for the spike of worry to pass.
I couldn’t talk to Russ about her. Once, when I’d had too much to drink, I’d made the mistake of bringing her up, and all that did was get him started on who the father was, and why wouldn’t I give him a name, and how he’d like to kill whoever it was, et cetera.
He got pretty worked up when I wouldn’t say who—he’d knocked back a few beers himself—and then I had the added problem of trying to calm him down while still feeling as bad as I did in the first place. Lesson learned.
Mostly I was fine, content with our life, the two of us sharing a home and seeing my family on Sundays. That was enough, what I wanted. So all was well, in some ways. But I remained sure there was something unnatural about me, something cold. Having done what I’d done.
—
The following summer, the war in Korea really did end, and I heard on the news that all the UN prisoners, including the Americans, were being released.
I assumed Leonard and his girlfriend would get married before they came back to St. Pete, which was still small enough that our paths might eventually cross.
So it was another good reason to stay home as much as possible.
By then, St. Pete had finally joined the twentieth century and gotten a television station, WSUN.
(Why Stay Up North? the jingle asked.) Russ had to go all the way to Tampa to get a television set, just in time to watch the World Series.
I’m sorry to say that once he did that, I felt I’d found the real drug, the real dope.
I still read, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that when Russ was at work, I could carry the ironing board out into the living room during my favorite shows.
I particularly loved Betty White’s show.
She had visiting guests and a live band, but most of all I liked Betty, always so cheerful and put together.
She’d come out at the beginning to tell riddles like What’s the difference between a kiss and a sewing machine?
One seems so nice, and the other sews seams nice.
Once, when Russ was sick, he stayed home from work and watched Betty White with me.
He thought she was okay, but he said if he was going to watch a woman on television, he wanted her to look like Marilyn Monroe.
We’d gone to see Niagara earlier that year, and he immediately started begging me to bleach my hair and to wear it short with big curls like Marilyn’s.
I did it, and I ended up really liking it.
Having my hair that way didn’t make me look like Marilyn, but I did look like a different person.
When I went to show Mae, Shirley started crying—she thought I was a stranger.
And it was an easy enough hairstyle to manage.
I’d put it up in rollers under a kerchief when Russ was at work, and I’d take them out before he got home.
The big curls around my face really did look pretty, and because I stayed inside with the AC, they typically held.