Harriet and Ed Fred Go to Florida

There were several built-in problems. Doing it in August (even to celebrate their fourth anniversary) was one thing. It was hot enough in Shelby and bound to be even worse in West Palm Beach. Going in the small black un-air conditioned MG 1100 sedan compounded the problem. It was even questionable whether the car would make the 1500 mile round trip. Although only six months old there had already been major issues. But in 1965 lack of air-conditioning was not unusual. And although not the most reliable thing in the world the car was fun and cute.

The big issue was Harriet herself. She was nervous about leaving her collection of cats (12 at that time - all the spawn of Mama Cat who showed up one morning while Ed Fred was in the Army) and her mother, Hesentine, with whom she and Ed Fred lived in the slowly falling in house on Blanton Street (Ed Fred, who resented having to live with his mother-in-law did not do a very good job keeping things up).

Harriet worried that her mother would not feed the cats properly, or that she might drink too much and do something.

But more than anything, Harriet simply hated getting ready. She could get ready for work every morning - taking a bath, putting on a slip, fixing breakfast for she and Ed Fred (when he was at home and not staying at the rooming house in Charlotte), spending 30 minutes applying makeup and fixing her hair - which never seemed right - and then finally pulling on the rubber girdle which she didn't really need to control her 105 pound figure, only to hold up her stockings, slipping on a skirt and blouse and getting in her old Volvo and driving flat out down US 74 to the highway department (ugly two story red brick building across from the fairground on the edge of town). She could do that five days a week because it was familiar and she was going somewhere she wanted to go.

What she hated was getting ready to go someplace different. What would she wear? How would she look? What would people think of her? Would she embarrass herself, say or do something undignified? Ed Fred even drew a picture of her getting ready. She is standing in front of the mirror in the little run-down bathroom on Blanton Street, dressed in pedal pushers and a short sleeve top, her hair still in a net. Her eyes are hollow and her face is tragic. She is cursing - herself, fate, or possibly Ed Fred who waits in the bedroom across the hall, feeling his own intestines roil, swearing to himself never again, never again. He doesn't depict this, but sometimes she comes out and bangs her slender and otherwise desirable hips with the palms of her hands, telling him she is fat, smiling when he sputters in protest.

But - and this was true for most of her life (even to her penultimate day), if Ed Fred persisted and nagged, Harriet was OK once she got in the car. That was their salvation. They went out almost every night, to drive-in movies, to drive-in restaurants - or just to drive. Harriet was happy in the car and if Harriet was happy poor old Ed Fred was happy.

The trip to Florida was like a continuation of one of their drives. Even before they were married, Ed Fred enjoyed tracing the first 70 miles or so of his father's route to West Palm Beach. His family had moved there in 1956 after his mother died. They came back to visit Shelby two or three times a year. The last trip had been in June of 1959 when they returned for good. Although not especially happy in West Palm Beach Ed Fred dreamed of returning with his lovely wife, not only to see the place but so that the place could see him with her. Now after four years of marriage, Harriet agreed to go.

The trip down took two days, with a stop in Daytona Beach. Through South Carolina and Georgia the roads were mostly two lane black top without much traffic. Conversation tended to be sporadic. The driver, Harriet or Ed Fred, got lost in the rhythm of the road as the little car hummed up long hills, raced down the next hills, swept around curves, slowed though nameless little towns. The passenger often dozed. Warm air billowed through open windows. Both smoked and ashes whirled like motes. They stopped at Stuckey's for bathroom breaks and soft drinks.

They spent the night in an anonymous motel in Daytona at the edge of pine woods and scrubby palms just off Highway 1. Initially on leaving the sanctuary of the MG, walking across the gravel parking lot to the designated concrete stoop , Harriet was edgy and suspicious. But after unpacking, they drove out to the beach and she liked that. (The room was paneled in knotty pine and retained the odor of all the people who had been there before. Ed Fred thought the place had a carnal air; Harriet just thought it smelled bad and added her own smoke to the varied history of the smoke that preceded them.)

Early afternoon the next day, they arrived in West Palm Beach. Nothing seemed quite real to Ed Fred. It was like a waking dream.

They went over Flager Bridge across Lake Worth to Palm Beach. Ed Fred pointed out places he knew from before - the Everglades club where his friend Ken's father had been a maitre de, the public beach where Ed Fred and his sister Mary sometimes went swimming, the Breakers hotel - which no longer seemed so impressive. Harriet's eyes, bright and alert darted back and forth. She smiled but did not say much. She was trying.

Driving to the south end of Palm Beach, beyond the rich section of the island, they got a room in a pleasant but modest hotel.

Then they went back to West Palm Beach to revisit old haunts.

They proceeded with funeral slowness past Palm Beach High school, a Moorish style structure presiding over the only hill in this part of Florida. (Hiding in the library on the third floor Ed Fred had been able to see the ocean across Lake Worth and Palm Beach.) The school and surrounding neighborhoods were sometimes featured in Ed Fred's dreams. He did not tell Harriet about the dreams, just that here was where he went to high school to which she replied yes it is a pretty place.

They went west out Okeechobee Road to Belvedere Homes, a development of two and three bedroom concrete block houses on the edge of town just beyond the dog track near the Air Force base. (Ed Fred had been able to hear the crowds at the dog track through his bedroom window. Once a Word War II vintage B-24 bomber missed the runway and crashed not far from their house. He went to see that. Usually he only ventured out to school and movies, and to drive his father's 57 Chevrolet as fast as it would go down the empty roads beyond Military Trail and sometimes on A1A through the northern part of Palm Beach .)

Belvedere Homes still existed as did the little house on Pine Street. But Okeechobee Road no longer skirted the edge of the Everglades. Now there was a Ford dealership and what appeared to be 500 stucco houses. Ed Fred tried to explain to Harriet how it had looked before, how going to and from Palm Beach High he had imagined the expanse of swamp and grass to be a savanna and the palms in the distance to be the edge of a tropical jungle. A place of adventure. Peering at the pastel-colored houses with distant eyes, Harriet nodded and said yes she could see it. She was doing her best.

That night, Ed Fred had no favorite restaurants from before to recommend for supper. Harriet was adamant about not going anywhere fancy. She would be embarrassed. After driving around for a half an hour and not finding anything suitable they ended up in a pizza place on Highway 1 in the southern part of West Palm Beach. It was a modest establishment in a modest neighborhood of small houses and small businesses. There were not many people and the pizza was disappointing. Traffic could be heard marching up and down the highway. Ed Fred had hoped for something better. Harriet did not say much.

Back at the hotel, Harriet stayed on her side of the bed and said that she missed her cats. She watched the Late Show until the test pattern appeared and then searched the channels for something else. The next morning Ed Fred said that they would return to Shelby, leaving that day, after breakfast. Ed Fred said that he was disappointed with West Palm Beach, that the development along Okeechobee had spoiled it for him.

Harriet was sympathetic and said she was sorry it had not worked out. They ate on the patio of the little hotel and looked out over the ocean. Harriet enjoyed her cheese danish pastry. It would become her favorite breakfast food. She seemed happy. But when Ed Fred suggested that maybe after all they could stay another day Harriet's face darkened and she said no lets go on. Safely in the car she was interested when Ed Fred pointed out the Merriweather Post estate.

They drove straight through without spending the night. Every time it came up Harriet said lets keep going. The heat seemed worse than before. The sky was intense blue. The car was like an oven. They did not talk much.

About 280 miles north of West Palm Beach Harriet was driving when they got turned around in Jacksonville and went across the bridge twice. Ed Fred laughed. Harriet laughed.

At 1:30 in the morning of the next day, driving through a small town in South Carolina, the throttle of the MG stuck open and in order to make a curve Ed Fred had to speed through a service station parking lot surprising a man who had stopped to check his tires. Reaching down, while steering with his left hand, Ed Fred freed the pedal and the car was OK for the rest of the trip.

They pulled into the gravel driveway at Blanton Street at 3:00 AM. Hesentine got up long enough to welcome them back then returned to bed. Harriet seemed to drop right off to sleep. Ed Fred's hands and feet would not stop tingling and whenever he shut his eyes he could see the endless uneventful road.

Forty five years later, after Harriet died, Ed Fred went back to West Palm Beach. When asked why it took so long he told people what he had told Harriet and what he had said ever since - that the development along Okeechobee had spoiled it for him.

Celanese Years 1963-68

As I've noted before in other posts, these work-related divisions - such the "Celanese Years" are just my arbitrary way of lumping time.

I don't know how Brenda would have figured the 1963 - 1968 period, if she would have felt the need to create categories.

A few events were certainly important enough for her to associate with a particular year.

There was the Kennedy assassination in 1963, a month after Curtis died and we moved back to Blanton Street. I don't know how or when Brenda heard about it. I was coming back from lunch to the labs at Celanese when somebody met us at the door and said that Kennedy was shot, maybe dead. This person laughed and said that he hoped so. Brenda and I watched the little TV in our bedroom all weekend, joining the national observance.

Probably the trip to West Palm Beach. I know that the trip happened in 1965 because we were in the 1965 MG 1100 sedan which we bought new and which only lasted for a year. I know that the trip was in the summer because the little black car did not have air conditioning and the heat - in North Carolina and especially in Florida was intense. Perhaps we went late in August to celebrate our anniversary - it would have been our fourth. The trip was not especially successful. There was the heat and the distance. Even in four years since my last trip, West Palm Beach had changed for the worse. Brenda was anxious - I suppose about her cats and her mother - which made her even less than normally romantic. (But breakfast outside at the hotel by the beach was nice. We sat outside before it got hot and ate danish pastries for the first time. They became Brenda's favorite.) We only stayed one day in West Palm Beach (Palm Beach actually) and made the 720 mile trip back to Shelby without spending the night. It took 16 hours.

(There were other cars. We parked the 48 Plymouth in the back yard and got Brenda her second, second car, a 1959 Volvo PV544 coupe which she named Bridgette. In 1966 we traded the MG for a new Volvo 122S sedan which she named Greta. I commuted in it for a year and then Brenda drove it for many years afterward. She loved the car and we kept it for 40 years before giving it to Bill Harris because we knew that he would never get rid of it.)

Maybe the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 was memorable to Brenda. I recall sitting in my room at the boarding house listening to a sound coming from across the hall. Click-click-click, click-click-click. Getting up, glancing through the open door into the other room I saw a man sitting on the bed, holding a rifle working the bolt - click-click-click, click-click-click.

But I can't think of anything else. Certainly nothing as arbitrary as my jobs.

Brenda's work?

It was during this period that the Right of Way Department took over the entire top floor of the Highway Building (red brick, two story, located on the edge of town, across highway 74 from the Fairground, around the corner from Cleveland Community College - which itself occupied the land where the county home used to be).

Margaret Bowen came to work as the new secretary. She and Brenda and all the file cabinets and the break room table moved to what had been the big drafting room at the end of the second floor. Brenda and Margaret, a neat little woman with a wicked sense of humor had fun together. They told jokes and laughed so hard they cried. Periodically they got up from their desks on one side of the room to move to the common table on the other side, to join the men and continue the jokes - being told now mostly by the men. Everybody smoked. Occasionally there was homemade wine.

This was a period of expansion; a number of new men came to work for the Department as Right of Way agents. Some of the men stayed until they retired 30 and 40 years later; some worked for a few years and moved on. Over the years I met and became friendly with most of these who stayed. Carl Acker might have been the boss during this period; maybe Dean Bridges began his long tenure as supervisor.

Politics continued to be a factor. Brenda met several gubernatorial candidates who came by the office looking for votes. Bob Scott, the Democrat stopped Brenda in the parking lot, shook her hand and said to her, "You know why I am here."

Brenda traded in her old manual typewriter for an electric and complained that she could not type as fast as before, beginning a long-running war with technology. It was during this period that she came to be regarded as a de facto agent and the expert regarding policies and procedures.

Collectively all of this was memorable - to Brenda and by then to me. But it was part of a flow, a continuum. No event stands out. Time just happened at the office.

Our life together?

Isabel continued to get drunk. In the first few years she brought men into the house, but that seemed to diminish after I bloodied one man's face and threatened another with a hammer. To avoid strangers coming to the house I would pick up her vodka and beer on my way from Charlotte.

To break up the daily 90 mile commute I spent two nights a week in a rooming house in Charlotte. On those nights Brenda and her mother would go out, sometimes with Linnie the neighbor lady. Often they would ride over to Kings Mountain or Gastonia. They seemed to enjoy my nights in Charlotte.

I tried to have fun. I ate out, went to movies, and a few times went to bars with Dieter and Juan, the German and Peruvian who worked in the labs at Celanese. Dieter and I went to see Dr. Zhivago and 2001 A Space Odyssey. But none of it seemed right. And at night in the room I had to leave the TV until morning to avoid feelings of depersonalization when I got outside of myself and worried about getting back.

We continued our habit of going out at night, to drive-in-moves (summer or winter, rain or dry) and to drive-in restaurants. Frank might have started to join us in this period, drinking coffee with us in our car or his, adding his contribution to the cigarette smoke boiling out of the window. (The first place we gathered was the Little Moo across the street from the Presbyterian Church. Every night a small tractor trailer mail truck whipped around corner at about 9:00 PM, prompting one of us to make a comment. We might have visited the Dairy Queen during the Celanese period, beginning our long association with the Rachels family.)

There is more but it is all part of the same flow, the same continuum. Brenda and I had a shared life on Blanton Street, Brenda had her life at her office and I had my life at various jobs (my lumped life), and of course my secret life of quiet grandiosity. We were getting along OK. There was affection. Nobody was thinking about leaving anybody. I was grumpy about living on Blanton Street but Brenda seemed relatively happy.

(Since this is supposed to be more Brenda's story than mine, my various lives are not in play. Celanese was just the place where I had modest adventures and dreamed grandiose dreams. It was where I worked with Frank McCain whom I would learn 20 years later played a famous role in the civil rights movement and whom I learned 40 years later knew the little girl in that I had known in Baltimore when I was a child - multiple lifetimes prior to all this. The Army was just the Army. The story in the Red Clay Reader, the articles in the Observer, the night classes and correspondence courses, the modular building system, the aborted stories and aborted novels. That was all just me.)

Curtis Died

I was (and still am) obsessed with accidents of fate. What if I had not glanced up that day to see Brenda in my rear view mirror? What if Curtis had not died? I even construct elaborate fantasies in which fate becomes altered and the universe takes a different turn. My novel REDUX is about that.

Brenda was more passive about life and fate. What happened happened.

Curtis started having chest pains in late summer or early fall of 1963. He went to a doctor, probably Heywood Thompson (the doctor who monitored my broken arm, who attended me when I was a child and prescribed sulfa drugs even though he knew I was allergic to them which caused him to be the object of my mother's ire). It was diagnosed as a heart condition. I expect Curtis was told to stop smoking and drinking, to take it easy. Maybe he did cut back on the drinking. But nothing else changed.

I don't know how concerned the family was, how seriously the condition was regarded. I recall being at the house one evening when Curtis came in after driving a used car to a dealer in another town. He was tired, maybe in pain. Brenda and Isabel were concerned about him but also anxious that he had not been there to hear what they needed to tell him. Isabel seemed almost frantic as she fluttered around him recounting things that had gone wrong during the day. Brenda hovered anxiously near them. I hovered near her.

Later that night or another night Curtis lay on the brown Naugahyde sofa in the long narrow den (the sofa where Brenda and I played before we got married, where Curtis stood at the door one night and with some embarrassment noted that it was time for me to go home). Brenda, her mother and I gathered around. Brownie the cat might have been sitting with Curtis, maybe on him. Brenda and her mother would have liked that, would have said "how sweet". Although obviously uncomfortable, Curtis seemed serene, at peace. For some reason, perhaps anxious to act out my part as a caring family member, I patted him on the head, the way you would pat a dog. His hair was greasy and slick. His head felt strange to the touch. He looked at me pityingly.

We got the call about eight or nine Friday evening November the 8th, 1963. It was from Isabel I guess. Curtis had gone to a Shelby High football game, which he loved to do, and had had an episode. He was at the hospital. We needed to go there.

Isabel and I went to the admitting office. Brenda was taken by somebody to the treatment area.

The hospital was crowded that night. Brenda said she found Curtis lying on a bed (a gurney?) in the hall. I don't know if he had the final heart attack there or in a room. I don't know if he said anything to Brenda. She said that he clutched the sheet; his face turned yellowish purple and he died. Maybe he gurgled. He was 51 years old. I don't know what happened then. I don't recall if Brenda or someone else told Isabel and me. I don't remember Brenda's face. But I do remember that some people wanted to pray with us and I threatened them, ran them off. Isabel might have screamed.

The blur continued for the next days. Details are sketchy.

I recall that Brenda's uncles on her mother's side asked me to accompany them to the funeral home to pick out a casket. I represented the immediate family, felt out of place, inadequate. I recall that I liked the car that we rode in, a new Buick.

I remember that Isabel wailed "What will happen to me?" and that I was offended because I thought she should be thinking about Curtis at this time and not herself.

I remember - and this probably happened after the funeral - Brenda told me she could not leave her mother alone on Blanton Street. If I wanted to live with her I would have to
come with her. I don't remember how easy or how hard it was for me to decide.

I remember giving away the little dog Purp and thinking that it was my life we were giving away.

Nine Months - 1963

By my job-related way of reckoning time, this was the year I worked for my father and went to work for Celanese in Charlotte. By Brenda's more personal way (if she had a way) this was the year we moved to Sunrise Circle, she got her own car, her father died, and we moved back to Blanton Street.

By any reckoning, it was the year of a Fall.

The year started for me when, arm still in cast from the arm wrestling accident that happened in my last months at Fort Polk, I went to work for my father's construction business. I found that I could hold a paint bucket with my right hand sticking out from the cast and wield a paint brush with my left hand. I could also drive the Corvair and scared everybody but Brenda when I grasped the steering wheel with my right hand while reaching across with my left hand to manipulate the floor mounted gear shift. I continued working for my father after the cast came off - now driving nails as well as painting.

(My father also gave my Uncle Bob Weathers, who was going through a rough period, a painting job. He was a home spun raconteur and I enjoyed working with him. Over the years my father gave many people - including me - jobs when we most needed them. Though the inscription "A Generous Man" that my sister and I had inscribed on my father's grave marker was half ironic it was also more than half true. )

I don't remember what was going on with Brenda during this period. She went to work, came home. I think she kept the car during the day, dropping me off at the job site in the morning, picking me up in the afternoon, sometimes stopping by at lunch. Seeing her smiling shyly in her neat office attire in contrast to my rough construction clothes made feel especially virile and in love with her.

I also don't remember how things were on Blanton St with Brenda's parents. Maybe it wasn't so bad.

In April somebody recommended me for a job with the Celanese application development labs in Charlotte. Possibly because I said something unexpectedly intelligent during the interview I got a job as a technician. Which meant that I would be assigned to an engineer to assist in whatever development he was doing. I went to work in May - maybe May 1st, Brenda's birthday. Again since this is mostly her story, I will not go into what happened to me at Celanese. However, I will note that everyone was pleased that I got the job. Curtis, who took a sad sort of pride in knowing Charlotte, showed me the best way to get across town to the Celanese labs and main office building (located near where South Park would be 10 years later). I will also note that it was at Celanese where my grandiosity bloomed.

Although I don't remember the exact timing it wasn't long after I started doing the nearly 90 mile round trip commute to Charlotte that Brenda and I moved from Blanton Street to a little rental house on Sunrise Circle. The house was owned by her mother's brothers. These brothers, who operated Lackey Buick/Pontiac/Cadillac where Curtis worked also sold us a second car for Brenda to drive to work. It was a hulking black 1948 Plymouth sedan. The car was clean and shiny but left behind billowing black clouds of burned oil.

I don't remember many details from that six month period on Sunrise Circle - before tragedy happened and we moved back to Blanton Street.

Somebody, maybe Bill and Loretta went with us in the Plymouth to the drive-in movie and were nearly asphyxiated by the odors coming from the rear of the vehicle.

I stopped at Joy Creme doughnuts on the way home from work and would eat three doughnuts in the car on the way to the house.

We met our neighbors; some people might have actually entered our house.

A stray dog, whom we named "Purp" took up with us and unless confined would race down highway 150 behind our cars.

Sometimes Brenda and I ate supper at a place (Lingren's?) where Brenda's humble style of placing an order got to be a joke "Please let me have filet of flounder, cole slaw, potato salad - please." Once when eating there with her parent's I, in response to a perceived slight, stuffed my roll in my water glass. I was told later that Curtis had to restrain his natural impulse to hit me. He had a similar impulse the night we were eating with them on Blanton Street and I made a crack about Brenda being my wife now and not his daughter.

I don't know what was going on with Brenda. There was her job, her family, and me - maybe in that order. (It was about this time that I learned Brenda had been giving part of her salary to her parents to help them get by.)

We looked at houses in Charlotte. (A 90 mile commute seemed impossible then although now in retrospect it wasn't so bad - there was very little traffic.) Her mother and father went with us to examine one funky old house (which came known in the mythology of our lives as the "Thrower House").

I don't know how serious the house hunting actually was, whether it was just another fantasy, whether Brenda would have actually left her parents. It seemed that we were growing apart. If my memory (not really a memory, just an impression) is correct Brenda was becoming indifferent - almost hostile. Perhaps I was that way with her. I might have even consciously wondered at the time if somehow - in some odd way, Blanton Street had held us together.

But another way of looking at it was that we might have actually been growing up in this time. Perhaps the perceived hostility and indifference was just us trying to find our way as separate individuals. That is what I like to think. I like to think that we would have moved to Charlotte, made it past that period, reconnected, become a sane and healthy couple. That is what did happen - at least in part - 13 years later when Yancie was born.

But in the meantime Curtis died and we moved back to Blanton Street.

Eight Months - 1962

A time-related aside.

I don't know how Brenda figured time - what memory markers she used to distinguish old years as new years went by, to divide her life into manageable segments.

For me, it was mostly jobs (after the first couple of years of marriage and except for a few really memorable dates - like 1976 the year Yancie was born). I worked for Celanese from 1963 to 1968, Croyac from 1968 to 1970, Cardinal from 1971 to 1973/74, etc. If asked about 1962 my first answer might have been that it was the year I quit Fiber, worked for my father, spent six months in the Army. (Of course my second answer would have been more complicated.)

For Brenda the the job - or at least the place of employment never changed. New people came to work in her office, some left, some died - but Brenda stayed until she could not stay any longer.

Maybe in her mind those changes were enough to make a year memorable. She must have remembered the year Marget Bowen joined her as the other secretary, or when Genie Moss came. I am sure she knew when her original boss, Hilton Eades left, when Carl Acker became her supervisor, when Vernon - her friend until the end came, when Dean Bridges took over the office. Probably she remembered the slow year when Steve was furloughed and she and Margaret spent most of their time working jigsaw puzzles. And of course the year that they moved to the big open area at the other end of the building and the year the Right-of-Way branch moved into separate quarters in downtown Shelby would have been memorable.

But I'd guess that her memory markers were more personal, less professional.

If Brenda had been asked about 1962, she might have cited something that happened at the office. But more likely she would have said that 1962 was the year she moved back home from the Lafayette apartments. To herself she might have added that 1962 was the year she ended her brief affair with Hal Gardner. (I don't know how she regarded that. Maybe as a lifeboat to which she clung, until it sunk. She might have asked herself why she ended the affair and not the marriage - why, when I said I was going, she stopped me. She might have answered love, might have told herself what she told me, that poor old Hal was not her type anyway, not a flawed "silly shit" like me. I know that he was not the lost love of her life. She even mentioned him casually from time to time over the years - and there was never regret in her voice.)

Also she would have probably mentioned the death of her cat Tom (variously known as Tom-Tom and Tom-Rat). Tom had been her companion through the bad years. When she was alone in the house at 3:00 AM he was the one she held. When Tom died I tried to comfort her, not knowing what to say or even feel. But she wanted nothing to do with me.

Enough of time.

It was probably late winter - February or March when we returned to Blanton Street.

We stayed in her old bedroom. We brought the little rabbit-ear TV from the Lafayette apartment, stored most everything else. (I think we stuffed it all in the living room of the old house that Frank Hamrick owned in downtown Shelby.)

During this period, her parents continued to get drunk. Her father brought home revelers who cavorted in the bedroom next to ours where we stayed with the door shut and the TV turned up as loud as it would go. I learned to sleep when there wasn't anything else to do. I would have left but by this time I was convinced that Brenda would not survive without me (and maybe I suspected that I would not survive without her). I suppose it also occurred to me that it was my fault - at least partly - that we were here.

It was during this period that we got into the habit of going out at night. We went to drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants, anywhere to get away from the house.

Although I had no steady job my father had by this time started to build houses. I worked for him, doing whatever manual unskilled labor there was to do. Using a pick and shovel I dug the foundation footing by hand on the first house. It was maybe 150 feet of ditch one foot wide and in some places several feet deep. I hated it. This physical work might have been the reason I lost weight dropping from 165 to 138 pounds. Depression might have also been a factor.

To avoid the draft I joined the Gastonia unit of the Army Reserves. (I toyed with the idea of joining the Coast Guard - the man at the employment office offered to put in a word. But I toyed with a lot of ideas.) I went in for six month of active duty in July of 1962. Since this is mostly Brenda's biography, not my autobiography, I will not go into great detail about my military experiences. I will note that the first week at the induction center was one of the most miserable times of my life. But on the last morning there, sitting propped up against the side of a truck, waiting to be hauled to our basic training unit I had an epiphany. I discovered that I was not worried about anything that had ever happened to me before. I wasn't worried about Brenda because there was nothing I could do for her. I wasn't worried about anything that might happen later because there was nothing I could do about that. I was content to be sitting half asleep against that truck.

I had a few more such epiphanies while I was in Fort Jackson SC and then at Fort Polk Louisiana. Although I hated the Army, it was a good experience. I gained weight returning to 165 pounds. I learned to care but not care. The trick stuck with me for the next five years or so. I even had one more epiphany.

I also think Brenda was OK during this period. For some reason her parents didn't drink as much. She drove the little red Corvair ("Little Lulu") and made the monthly payments from her own meager salary, squirreling away the cash in reserved sections of her pocket book. I assume that Jerry Carpenter and Hal Gardner might have called, even shown up. I didn't ask. And if they did come by, they didn't stay.

I think we saw each other three times in this period. I had one weekend pass, riding the bus from Columbia to Charlotte and then in my uniform easily thumbing a ride to Shelby. I remember lying beside Brenda under the open window, not sleeping, knowing where I was going the next day, feeling the cooling breeze over our exposed touching skin, marveling at how smooth she was. I almost didn't make it back to the base in time. With Brenda and my sister Michal along to keep Brenda company on the return trip I drove to Columbia as fast as the Corvair would go.

Brenda visited me on post two other times. Once she rode down with my parents in their new 1963 Chevrolet (my father's building business was beginning to pay off). Another time she rode down with my sister. Fixing my sister up with a date (a boy named Noble Slaughter - improbably the son of a general) Brenda and I went somewhere on post. But there was always somebody in sight and she refused to let me touch her.

Despite breaking my arm in a half drunken arm wrestling contest with Gerald Tucker, a big boy from near Plains Georgia, I finished active duty as scheduled not long before Christmas, 1962. My arm still in a cast and sling I rode the bus for 24 hours from Alexandria La to Gaffney SC, where I got a cab for the last 18 miles back to 722 Blanton Street in Shelby.

First Six Months 1961-62

August 19th...

It was Saturday. We were married in the afternoon.

Earlier that day, before I was supposed to drive over to Brenda's house (my family was going in a separate car), I discovered that I did not have a clean white shirt to wear with my one good suit. I rushed to Wray's in downtown Shelby. I never felt more alone in my life.

I don't remember much about the ceremony. There weren't many people, just family. No friends. Brenda's cousin Carol was there. The night before she had made ribald jokes which Brenda seemed to like. Neither Brenda nor I went to church. We were married by my step-mother's relative - a preacher named Lawrence Roberts. We said our vows at the end of the living room. Brenda entered from the hall, escorted by her father, who was crying. Her mother did not cry.

Brenda was story-book beautiful. She smiled and seemed happy. I felt coarse, oafish, sweaty in my stiff new shirt.

There was a reception at the other side of the house, in the dining room. Brenda did not seem to want to leave her parents, but somebody suggested that we change out of our wedding clothes and get on our honeymoon. My friends might have tied cans to the back of the Corvair, soaped the windshield with suggestive sayings.


(We had no photographer; Brenda's cousin Carol might have shot this picture, which has been in my billfold for more than 48 years, folded so that only Brenda appears. Brenda seems oddly pleased. I have no idea what is going through my head. I notice that the cast in my left eye is especially pronounced. One eye staring out, the other looking in. I think that Brenda's dress was made for the occasion from special fabric, maybe antique silk.)

Honeymoon...

We stopped in Columbia SC the first night then went on to Charleston. We stayed on Sullivan's Island in a little motel across the road from the beach. After an uncomfortable start the honeymoon went well - they way they are supposed to go. We got sunburned. Brenda went in a restaurant for the first time in years and liked it. I discovered the pleasure of sharing a bed with a half-naked beautiful woman (although almost any half-naked woman in bed is likely to be beautiful). As we were driving back home through rural South Carolina and Ray Charles was singing something on the radio - maybe "Hit the Road Jack" Brenda half turned toward me, leaning against the door, the wind blowing her hair and smiling secretly the way she did moved almost imperceptibly to the music. (Hit the road Jack don't you come back no more no more hit the road Jack don't you come back no more.) Some months before she died Brenda surprised me by saying that our honeymoon in Charleston was the best time of her life. I probably never understood her.

Little Episodes...

One night in the Lafayette apartment Brenda fell asleep on the sofa and would not get up and go to bed. I picked her up and started to carry her into the bedroom. She became enraged and insisted that I put her down. I considered dropping her on the floor. She stormed back to the sofa. Maybe I did not know then that she and her father used to fight when she fell asleep curled up into a knot on a chair in the den and he tried to get her up.

While walking down Lafayette Street to the Carolina Dairy soda shop we stopped to see "Cousin Agnes and Ruby". The two old sisters sat on the front porch of the big white Victorian house and smelled of pee dribbled into damp cushions. One had lipstick smeared only in the vicinity of her mouth. One bummed cigarettes which I lit for her and which she smacked with gusto. I think the sisters gave Brenda and I the tapestry from WWI depicting warships in a harbor - Bremerhaven maybe.

We took our clothes to a laundromat around the corner from the apartment. Washers and dryers were lined up on the wall and in the center of the room was a long table for folding clothes. The place was clean and smelled good. In the winter it was warm. Brenda and I tried to fold sheets together. She held two corners and I held the other two corners. But we could not agree about who was supposed to go which way and got into a argument.

Brenda was diligent about writing thank you notes to the people who had given us wedding gifts. Her note to Coleman and Nancy included the phrase "Thank you for the lovely trivets." For some reason I thought this was funny and brought it up over the years - maybe in the last year of her life. She smiled but was puzzled and failed to see the humor.

We went to our first indoor movie together. It was 101 Dalmations playing at the State Theater in Shelby. Brenda liked it. (The theater was renamed the Flick, was empty for a while, became an antique mall and most recently was reinvented as the Don Gibson music hall - in honor of that notable and otherwise dead Shelby native.)

Sometimes we drove to Charlotte - usually for no reason and on the way back would stop at Stiwalt's Furniture on Wilkerson Blvd. At that time the location was regarded as being on the edge of Charlotte (not far from the big steel fabrication plant where Brenda dreamed that she rode in an overhead crane with Little Orphan Annie). We liked to browse through the store and imagine what we would buy if we could afford to furnish a place the way we wanted. Once leaving the store Brenda got confused and almost got into a blue Falcon instead of our red Corvair. As jealous as I was then I am surprised it only now occurs to wonder if she did not have an association with somebody in a blue Falcon.

Sometimes lying in bed, just before going to sleep we would describe to each other our half awake visions, drifting off to the sound of the other's voice.

Brenda loved her job as a secretary with the Department of Transportation. She had been there about one and one half years in the Fall of 1961 Her job gave her meaning and purpose. It was a safe haven from home, from me even. She was valued there. Her boss, Hilton Eades taught her how everything worked - more than she needed to know just be to a secretary. When she told me about the people at "the Highway" she used their first names as if I knew them, which annoyed me but after a while I did know them. She commented when seeing Department of Transportation trucks and if she saw trash in the road would often say that she should really stop and pick it up although we never did. Sometimes as a joke we would sing "highways are happy ways...". Brenda typed fast and hard. Hearing her on one of those old manual Underwoods was like listening to a machine gun.

Brenda was the first girl I had ever fought with. We made up for lost time. Once we were having a fight about something when I was pulling into the parking lot at the apartment. I slammed on the brakes so hard that she was thrown forward into the dashboard. She accused me of doing it on purpose - of trying to hurt her. I wasn't trying to hurt her then but another time I was. She said something so painful that without thinking I threw the paperback book I had been reading at her. She was shocked at what I had done and said that she was going to leave me. I don't remember what I said or why she didn't go. (That was the only time I ever tried to physically hurt her.)

Still another fight occurred the night we drove to Charlotte looking for Christmas presents. It was in a warehouse store on South Blvd. The place was thronged with people. Both of us got anxious. She might have asked me about something about which I had no opinion and got mad at me when I told her that. We had this same argument many many times over the next 48 years.

First Christmas...

I worked Christmas day in the chem lab at Fiber Industries, earning 2 1/2 times my base salary. Brenda went to her parent's house. They might have had dinner without me. That evening or another day we went to my parent's house. Brenda didn't want to go. She hated getting ready, hated going places where she would have to interact with people although she got a lot better after Yancie was born. (It was funny though, once she got somewhere she was often OK. She was OK the night we ate with my parents and my father reached over to fork the piece of steak that she was still eating - saying she was through with that wasn't she? She thought it was funny when he farted and my prim stepmother pretended not to notice. And she was OK the night I rolled her into the Hospice House, although she knew she was going to die.)

My parents gave Brenda a form fitting red skirt for Christmas. Although she normally didn't wear clothes that enhanced her figure she wore the red skirt a few times and looked sexy in it. Occasionally I would catch my father admiring her rear when she walked by in the red skirt (maybe be picked it out).

Hal Gardner...
(This part still hurts. I am not sure how wise this is. Call it an exercise in self-awareness - in something.)

I'll never know how far the affair with Hal Gardner really went. She said it never got more physical than kissing. She said she never loved him but that the marriage was closing in on her. She felt trapped. I suppose that I believe her.

It was late winter of 1962. We had been married about six months.

Hal worked at the Department of Transportation. He was a tall good old boy type from out in Cleveland County - seemingly a nice guy. Not like me at all. Not even like Jerry Carpenter, Brenda's former boyfriend.

I don't remember how he managed it but Hal actually became friendly with me. We went together to get our pre-induction physicals for the draft. He told me how I was lucky to have Brenda, how he envied me. That made me suspicious.

It all came crashing down the night I came home late from work and spotted a person that I thought was Hal driving away from the area around the apartment. Brenda was inside in her slip ironing clothes. I accused her of having an affair. I don't remember if she admitted it then or later.

I am not sure of the sequence of the events that followed.

I yelled, shouted. I put my fist through the glass of the antique china closet. I nearly broke my hand pounding the tile wall in the bathroom. Brenda may have shrieked.

I stayed home from work and drove down to Gaffney and got a bottle of liquor then came back to the apartment and drank the whole thing getting blind drunk. I drove around town that way.

I called into Fiber Industries and quit my job, could not face people. (But I never liked the job anyway.)

I went to my parents (who by this time had moved into a new house just out of town on the Fallston Road) and told them that I was leaving Brenda and that I wanted to come back home. Somebody, maybe my stepmother, talked me out of it.

Brenda stayed at the office one day at lunch and I went out there and Hal stopped in the hall outside her door and started trying to explain or apologize or something. I pushed him away perhaps told him that I would kill him and he scurried off. Mayo, Brenda's coworker, later told Brenda that I acted more manly that day than I had ever acted - which must have been an issue in somebody's mind.

I told Brenda that I was leaving and she cried and begged me to stay.

At Brenda's insistence I went to see Tom Guy my boss's boss and tried to get my job back at Fiber but they were never happy with me anyway and Tom said no thanks. He was a tall distinguished man. I think I might have told him that I was going to be writer. He said something vague about the arts being valuable.

The money soon started to run out. I walked to the little grocery store down Lee Street and got the deposit on our empty Coke bottles. We moved back in with Brenda's folks on Blanton Street. Her mother was pleased. But her father knew that it was a bad move.

(During the time that Brenda was having her affair with Hal Gardner I was working in the lab with Ann Bowen. She was a pretty smart brunette who once described the bubble trapped underneath the vial in the constant temperature bath as being "egregious". I really liked her, liked to talk to her and when she got pregnant took a proprietary interest in her. She was married to Dickie Bowen, who was or would become a pilot with Piedmont Airlines. They lived next door in the Lafayette Apartments. After Brenda's affair I tried to insinuate myself with Ann but she was having none of that and I felt relieved because my pass had an obligatory air anyway. Some years later when Ann was in her 40's she dropped dead with a brain aneurysm. Years later Dickie is said to have killed himself. )

Courtship

We started dating in March or April of 1961 and got married on Aug 19th of that year. It was serious almost from the beginning. We were together or on the phone almost every night.

Telephone calls were all originated by me from the kitchen of the little house at 430 Leander Street where I lived with my father, stepmother and sister. I don't remember what we talked about.

Phone episodes...

One night after I had been talking for a long time, there was no response from Brenda. Her end of the conversation had gone quiet. Fearing something had happened to her I rapidly drove the mile or so from our house to Blanton Street. It was late. Her house was dark. I rang the bell. She had fallen asleep while I was talking.

Another night, while we on the phone I got hungry and opened a can of food - potted meat or vienna sausages. I was standing at the kitchen counter, near the sink. Engrossed in my own grandiose talk, I didn't think when pulling up on the can's lid, which slipped and cut my thumb badly. Brenda seemed nicely concerned. The scar is still there, going diagonally from just beside the thumbnail around to the base of my thumb.

And another night, probably later in the relationship, there was an incident with her parents. They had gotten drunk, maybe gone out and not come home. Brenda was frightened and lonely and although she didn't ask, I came over anyway and stayed with her most of the night, maybe holding her. She seemed to want me. I felt needed and helpful, which was an odd sensation for me. I got home about the time people were getting ready to leave the house. I said something had happened at Brenda's. My folks seemed concerned - for her and for me.

Doing Things...

That summer of 1961 we did some - but not all - of the things dating couples did then. Brenda did not like going in places where there were other people so we did not go out to eat in restaurants. The first time I kissed her she said it must be like "kissing a stone". Maybe it was but that got better.

We went on picnics carrying elaborate baskets packed by her mother who seemed to be following a protocol for Southern Picnics which she was anxious that we follow and which Brenda, who hated all protocols, resisted. We visited abandoned old houses which Brenda loved and which I grandly proclaimed that I could fix and make livable.

We rode around in my red Corvair coupe which Brenda named "Little Lulu". For some reason during this period and for several years afterward, I drove (or thought I drove) extremely well. Although I had flipped the Corvair end over end not long after buying it, I could now push it to the limit around fast curves. Strange roads, strange towns, driving at night in heavy rain, nothing bothered me. But Brenda's father was bothered. Hearing me downshift coming up the hill to their house he would comment that I was going to tear up that car.

Brenda also drove very fast. One night in retribution for my driving the previous evening, we went out in her family's 56 Buick, "Speedo" she called it. We went around a long curve at 90 MPH. It was my impression crouched rigid against the passenger door that she almost lost it, but she said (a smug little smile on her face) the car was always in control. Although she was a good driver, I never trusted her after that.

Our travels extended in about a two or three hour radius from Shelby. One route took us 50 or 60 miles south of Gaffney SC following the path my father had established as the best way to get to Florida. We played with the idea of going on, not coming back, but neither of us dared - we both had jobs and she had her family. (Once on this road, traveling at night, I hit a rabbit. I did not even consider stopping until Brenda made a scene, forcing me to return and at least get the animal out of the road. Up until that moment I had no idea of the strength of her will - how powerful another human could be.)

She also raised my awareness in at least two other ways. Sitting at drive in restaurants I would throw trash out the car window. It never occurred to me that this was not acceptable behavior. When Brenda criticized me I said that I was providing employment for somebody - but I soon quit the practice. Another time, after I had worn the same shirt to her house on three or four consecutive nights she gently informed me that the shirt (green I think) was beginning to have an odor.

Feelings...

I don't know how she felt about me. She probably would have said that she "loved" me. I certainly told her that I loved her - attributing whatever I felt to that word. But then and now the word seems inadequate. I was consumed with her; I had to be around her, to talk to her. It wasn't just her beauty, although glancing over at her sitting beside me in Little Lulu I often marveled at how lovely she was. She was the only person I had ever met, would maybe ever meet, with whom I could be myself. Or better yet, with whom I could forget myself, could escape my nagging internal dialog.

Of course when I say that I could be me with her, it doesn't necessarily mean I was a pleasant me, or a better me. With her I could be a worse me - an angry me - maybe even a slightly insane me. For instance there was the time she spent several night's at the house of her step grandmother Marion Moser. I don't remember the circumstances - if it was because Brenda needed company (maybe Brenda's parents were out of town) or if Marion needed company. I don't remember seeing Marion (who had been my second grade teacher) - maybe Brenda was house sitting. But I do remember being with Brenda in the living room of the big elaborately furnished house and getting into a discussion that involved me getting mad and burning the back of my hand with my own cigarette. I think Brenda was threatening to hurt herself - maybe even kill herself to which my response was to show her - in a sick sort of competition that I could be hurt too. As I recall she was not moved by my sacrifices and did nothing much more than nod at my burned hand. The next day at work when someone laughed and said I must have gotten drunk and burned myself I did not argue with them.

I probably asked her to marry me in June or July - after we had only been dating a few months. We were standing on her front porch when I gave her the ring. The sun was shining through the big oaks on Blanton St. I think it was Saturday afternoon. The ring was in a little velvet covered case. She seemed surprised and pleased - but said that it was too soon and that she did not need to be married to anybody. She said her family would be too much of a burden, that she would be too much of a burden - that it would not be fair to me. But I was possessed by a strange force of will that would not accept any answer other than yes. So after noting that I was making a mistake and that she had warned me, she said yes and told her parents who were doing something in the side yard.

The next step was picking a date for the wedding. I don't think I was in a hurry. I know Brenda was not in a hurry. But for some reason, her parents pushed us to decide. Maybe they wanted to get her out of the house, for her sake. Possibly I got involved, exercising my new found (and temporary will) in forcing the issue. Brenda felt pressured and resentful. But somehow the date August 19 was selected.

The remainder of the summer we attended various prenuptial events which Brenda mostly hated but which her mother and father as more-or-less drunken keepers of tradition pushed her into.

There was the obligatory dinner with my concerned parents and curious sister. It actually went well until my friend Coleman Doggett dropped in announced. Although it was a dumb thing for him to do, it was what we did, without thinking - just show up at friend's house. I was probably glad to see him, anxious to show off my lovely girl. But Brenda mistook his curiosity and interest for criticism and was offended.

There was a party thrown by Brenda's parents for my friends. I don't know who was there, maybe Coleman and his finance Nancy, maybe Frank Hamrick and Bill Harris. Maybe not. Brenda was horrified that her parents would get drunk and would make a scene. She also felt that she was on display and one point in the evening separated herself from the gathering and had to be brought back like an errant child by her parents. But they behaved even if she didn't.

There was the outing with Coleman and Nancy. We went to Lake James then drove up near Table Rock mountain which is visible from the lake. I don't remember Brenda's reaction but she might have actually enjoyed the occasion. Nancy was a California girl - certainly a child of privilege but open and kind. She had a nice laugh and smile. Coleman in her presence was slightly subdued - as I was around Brenda. (Although Brenda claims she never liked Coleman he would show up at our house over the years and I got the impression that he might have had a crush on her.)

Inexorably, inevitably, the day approached.

We looked at several apartments around Shelby and ended up selecting the Lafayette Apartments where Brenda had lived as a child about 12 years earlier. Brenda's uncles on her mother's side furnished a variety of second-hand furniture, much of it quality antiques that had once belonged to Brenda's grandmother Lackey. My father had one of the chests refinished. I still posses some of the items (like the White Tower coffee mugs) after almost 50 years.

This might not be true (maybe none of it is true) but as I recall, Brenda did not seem interested in furnishing the apartment - as if she did not want to think about her upcoming nuptials. But her parents pushed her - telling her she ought to do this, should do that. Maybe I joined in.

Then August the 19th happened.