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. )
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