I am a woman who writes. My writing goes back to those times when I was a young girl on a farm in North Texas, when survival was a Prime Objective. I must have grown up in the same town, and maybe even in the same family, as Larry McMurtry, Larry L. King, and Horton Foote. We all seem to have shared tough land, tough religion, and tough times. We all hail from small, mythic towns like Bountiful or Archer City or Odell.
My writing really started with my mother although she never read my stories or whispered in my ear that I should be a writer. She was not creative, unless you count the ways she knew how to survive. She made survival an art. She fought boll weevils and floods and droughts and the sickness that took away my father; she patched and mended and made do; and she taught me to keep on because there was nothing else to do.
My earliest pictures show me to be a round-faced child with blonde curls, but underneath the innocence, there is a wistful, yearning look in my young eyes. Standing solemnly beside my three sisters, I seem to be slightly out of focus. This characteristic of being present, but not belonging, seems to have followed me throughout adulthood.
I learned how to read when I was five and thought it was pure magic how those funny marks on a piece of paper could transform my life into a fairy tale. I would have read more than I did, but my mother considered reading a waste of good daylight hours when I could be feeding the Rhode Island Reds, weeding the carrots and onions, or mopping the kitchen floor.
“Those books you read aren't real,” she said. “This is real.” The sweep of her hand took in the house and yard and cotton fields.
Mother didn’t need to speak out loud very often. Most days she didn’t need to do more than look and sigh to convey her thoughts. And if you knew my mother, you’d know the misery of a glance that speaks louder than words.
My daddy was a sharecropper on a cotton farm in the early thirties and forties near the Red River in North Texas. I was only seven when he died, and I hardly knew him. He’d been dying as long as I could remember. This early awareness of mortality shaped my sensibilities and gave my life a tentative aura. Nothing in life seemed permanent. We were all just passing through. Today, when I try to recall my daddy, I see a dark-haired man sitting on the porch of an unpainted frame house in a cluster of cottonwood trees where neatly plowed rows come right up to the yard. One leg, crippled from polio, is propped on a stool. His Sears Roebuck walking stick is hooked over the arm of the cane rocker, and he’s reading Capper’s Weekly or a Zane Grey western. I see him talking to Lucien about deep plowing and planting dates. “Mind you, plow a straight row,” he’d say. “It’s a sure sign of the kind of farmer you are.”
Left with a stack of medical bills to pay and four young girls to bring up, ages seven to fifteen, Mother sat up nights and made notes by the light of a kerosene lamp, figuring out how we could work the farm without Daddy. She knew how to raise cantaloupes and chickens, but she couldn't drive a car, much less plow straight rows with the John Deere.
“I never thought I’d need to know these things,” she cried. “Oh, if only I had a better education.”
We had little time for mother/daughter talks, but she told me while we picked okra and shelled black-eyed peas that when she was a young miss in dotted-Swiss pinafores, she wanted to work with her papa in his grocery store. “I’m good with figures,” she told him. “Better than my brothers.” But her papa would allow no such thing. So, her mama taught her to crochet lace doilies for the parlor, to put up spiced peach pickles, and to play I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair on the piano when the boys came a-courting. “It's all a woman needs to know,” her papa said. My mother, who died in her sleep at eighty-four, talked about this with great anguish all of her life.
Our landlord asked us to pack up and move after we laid Daddy to rest in the little country graveyard. We moved to town where Mother got a job in a boarding house, making yeast rolls, berry cobblers, and pecan pies. I was delighted to live in a white frame house, have running hot water, and to live ten blocks from a county library of 40,000 books. And to have a blessed, indoor flush toilet!
Any time I feel nostalgic about my childhood, all I have to do is remember that throne of my youth. In case you missed the pleasure, let me explain that having an outhouse those first few years gave me a reference point from then on. Throughout my life, whenever things got really bad, I could always ask, “Is this as bad as having to trek through a dark, rainy night filled with boogie men? Or through the snow on a cold morning when the Sears catalog is missing and the tender skin of my frozen rump sticks to the toilet seat?” Nothing was rarely that bad, and it gave me an advantage that city kids lacked.
I hated being small and felt I had to do something to make people notice me. Having skipped two grades in grammar school, I was not only the youngest at home, but I was also two or three years younger than my classmates as well. I had to run faster, try harder, and last longer. I always felt a little out of breath from trying to keep up.
When I reached high school, I became totally awe-struck with the older girls in my class. They wore pastel sun dresses and smelled of White Shoulders cologne. They stood in front of the mirror for hours, fiddling with their Toni-permed hair and talking openly about boys’ you-know-whats without blushing. They practiced putting on blue eye shadow, even though they weren’t allowed to wear it. They spent their summer afternoons draped around the country club pool, sipping soft drinks and posing as Esther Williams; they slow danced in the evenings to Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. They made C’s and D’s in geometry, but no one seemed to mind. They played tennis like they suffered from eternal spring fever and lumbago, making it the only game I could play with them and win.
I watched those Big Girls with consummate envy. They held all of the class offices and were voted best everything. They played the piano and the flute and sang soprano in the school choir ever so casually, as if they picked it up on their way home from the A & W Root Beer Stand. During football season, the bouncy-haired cheerleaders waved their pompoms and turned cartwheels across the field before leading out the home team. Then, at half-time, the high-stepping twirlers strutted in their white boots with the marching band, swishing their satin skirts and tossing their batons in the air so easily it hurt me to watch.
Oh, how I wanted to be like them—any one of them—more than anything else in the world. I wanted to be anyone except who I was. They led much more interesting lives than I did. Their families looked picture perfect. Even though I hated feeling disloyal, I envied the carefree life of my classmates.
With stars in my eyes, I walked from school to the boarding house, where Mother worked over her dough board. I daydreamed of some distant day when I would miraculously win football sweetheart and become senior class president. I helped out in the dining room by serving iced tea and coffee and drying the dishes. Then I walked home with my mother in the warm twilight, smelling the lilacs in bloom and hearing the kids playing Annie Over. During that fourteen block stretch, Mother talked about her oft repeated prayer that she would be able to bring up her girls to adulthood. She was horrified if anyone thought she needed assistance. Being the only one still at home, I was in a big hurry to help her prayer come true. I sat up until midnight and practiced my Gregg Shorthand and looked to the day I would leave this town behind and fly away to a wonderful adult world. Growing up would answer all of life’s problems.
What an energy saver it would be if all kids could know what they wanted to be at birth and would waste no time making wrong turns. I used to know a little girl who lisped through missing front teeth at age seven, “I want to be a teacher when I grow up.” After graduation from college, she began teaching English. Forty years later she retired from the high school staff and went on to tutor young immigrants. No derailment or side tracks for her.
I know another woman who started writing at age 14. By the time she was in high school, she had already published her first story in a major publication. Critics pointed out her unusual plot, her true-to-the ear dialogue, and her original characters. They declared her to be a born story-teller of mythic proportions. When I was her age, I was busy learning to survive. I was already different enough. I wanted to belong. I wanted to melt, merge, and disappear into the teen look-a-likes at school.
My earliest memory of a career decision, besides wanting to become an adult ASAP, occurred at the Sunday afternoon movies when I watched Ann Sheridan play a big city newspaper reporter. I liked her perky hair cut and her snappy repartee, and I was impressed enough to sign up for journalism and work on the high school newspaper. The other students moaned and labored over their writing assignments, but I could hardly wait to turn in mine. Feeling inferior in every other class but English, I watched their agony with glee. At the end of the year, I won the Who’s Who award in Journalism for a story I wrote about all the big girls and boys in school. I meant it as a farewell glossolalia, a final sticking out of my tongue at those whom I envied so much. My teachers thought the story was very original and sent it to the local newspaper. The kids, of course, didn’t catch on to the tongue-in-cheek symbolism and never recognized my talent. It figures.
My desire to write was only a half-formed wish in those days, but I often wonder what I could have done if there had been someone to get me started on the road. I knew no journalists, other than Ann Sheridan, and girls like me had to concentrate on making a living.
I knew that staying in Vernon offered very little other than working at the Waggoner National Bank, so the next week I went with my minister to visit his Alma Mater in Abilene. Set on the West Texas plains, the college didn’t look like the ivy covered walls I had visualized, but it was a first rate college, and a very expensive one at that. Having no idea how I might afford it, I borrowed five dollars from the kind minister to reserve a room in the dormitory for the upcoming school year.
“Now, let’s get you a job,” he said, eager to help me out. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to an old friend who practically runs this place.”
The Bursar shook my hand. “Yes,” he said, “we’ll be needing an accountant here in the business office when school starts.”
“I know accounting,” I said, sitting tall in my chair and smoothing the pleats in my plaid wool skirt. “I took bookkeeping last year and made A.”
He looked at my school record lying on his desk and nodded. “Too bad we hire only seniors.”
“Hey, I'm better than any senior you have,” I said.
I went home that day with the job, a room reservation, and an application for a small Jones scholarship. I didn’t know this wealthy man named Jesse H. Jones, but it was a good thing he was doing, and I wrote him a warm letter with a promise his scholarship money wouldn’t be wasted if he awarded some to me.
The last week of my senior year in high school I learned that I had just missed being named salutatorian by less than one-eighth of a point. I did not even know I was close, and I tried not to think about the scholarship I missed. The girl who beat me did not go on to college.
In one sense, my mother was proud of my get-up-and-go. “Oh, if only I had a better education,” she said over and over, like a mantra. But she fell back to her Victorian background when she reminded me that my three sisters were already married and having babies.
The day I left for college, barely sixteen years old, I had a battered suitcase filled with some clothes and a cardboard box containing a set of sheets and a quilt. At the last minute an old friend of the family gave me twenty dollars. I am sure he had no idea it was all the money I had except for a few dollars I had saved in a coffee can.
After I arrived and went through placement tests and registration, I found out that the university I chose had no journalism department. Nonplused, I sat under the trees with the advanced English class and read Keats and Shelley. I raced from American history to work, from psychology to the library, then back to the dorm and on to typing and shorthand classes. The next day I did it all over again. There was so much to learn and so little time. When the dorm lights blinked out at ten o’clock every night, I read Shakespeare under the red exit light over the stair well or sat in the third floor bathroom and worked algebraic equations.
I made many friends that year and today I remember the whole college experience as one of the great influences on my life. But I mostly walked around smiling to myself. I was finally a college student. All you big girls back there in Vernon, eat your heart out.
Working for the college gave me certain advantages that other students didn’t have. Each year I could charge my room, tuition, and books. My paycheck from my work in the Bursar’s Office gave me money to eat on. That first year Mother also sent me a check for five dollars each week from her meager earnings. Then she moved to Dallas to live with my sister.
At the end of each school year, I went to Dallas and worked. Each month I sent my pay check to apply on my bill. By the time the summer was over, I was free of debt and ready to start a new year. This went on for three years. Tuition and fees went up, and I began to get behind. I decided to drop out and work so that I could get out of debt and come back with enough money to finish my last year
I told my boss my plans. “I hate to see you drop out,” he said. “Did you know that less than one percent who leave college don’t return. You’ll never be back, Jackie.”
“Yes, I will,” I said. “Watch me.”
The next two years I worked for a newsmagazine in Dallas, then as a legal secretary. Each month I sent a big check to pay off my loan at school and then began to save so that I could return for my senior year. Mother remained strong in her belief that I’d marry a nice young man and raise geraniums and little girls with dimpled knees. I was planning to return at the end of the second year when I met the man who became my husband. He was just out of the Navy and wanted to go to school at Abilene too. He had finished two years at Texas A&M in Engineering before he went to the Navy. So we got married and went to Abilene together.
When I walked into the Bursar’s Office that day, I was beaming. “I told you I’d be back,” I said. “Not only that, I brought you a new student.”
I worked every hour I wasn’t in class and finished my last year of college, which turned into three years instead of one when I picked up another major field of study. My husband and I graduated cum laude and received our Bachelor of Science degrees together with similar majors in Religious Education. It was the tradition for graduates to select the one who had meant the most to them to march with them in the graduation exercises. My mother, wearing her white gown, proudly walked beside me in my black gown that hot August day in 1958. As she looked at my diploma, she shook her head in disbelief. “I thought it was impossible that day when you first said you wanted to go to college. Then I prayed that you could at least finish out one year.”
When I married, I forgot about my interest in writing. When my mother marched beside me in the graduation ceremony and in later years proudly introduced me as her baby girl with three degrees—B. S., M. A., and M. R. S.
Over the next few years, I helped my husband complete several advanced degrees and assisted him with his teaching. I read Cat in the Hat to my two young sons, joined the PTA, and baked brownies and blueberry muffins. It was what wives and mothers did in the fifties and early sixties. We lacked a role model for any other life. Occasionally I heard the distant piping of a dream, but I lacked sufficient courage and time to find my way through the maze.
I did not write again until we lived in Brazil. There I wrote long letters back home about our life in Sao Paulo. Some of these turned into feature stories published in the English-speaking newspaper as well as neighborhood weeklies in the states. When we returned home a few years later, I wanted to do something other than bake chocolate chip cookies for Little League and teach at Vacation Bible School.
As my sons joined the Cub Scouts and played in Little League, I wrote a few stories and secretly began to collect rejection slips. Lots of them. Then one Friday an editor of Christian Science Monitor called me at Lockheed Electronics. “I don't know what you're doing working for a NASA contractor when you really should be writing full-time. The article you sent is first rate,” she said. When I hung up the phone, the ache in my gut had vanished. Someone was actually validating my ability to write. There was hope that I might find my rightful place in the world.
For the next five weeks, I came home every Friday and opened envelopes with acceptance checks from major publications. My work was finally getting recognized. Although my articles, poems, and stories brought in very little money for the time spent, they were nevertheless valuable and serious work to me. I felt they earned me the right to my own time and space, a room of my own. I pushed myself mercilessly, afraid I would stop altogether if I slowed down. Daily I struggled with guilt, worried that my family would think my stories meant more to me than they did. I tried to explain that I did not need to live through them but had dreams of my own. They seemed to understand that I had work that I cared about passionately.
I completed a nonfiction book on personal and spiritual growth, All the things you aren’t…yet, which Word Books accepted for publication. My first book! That important, worth-confirming, primal verification that I was a writer. I’d reached nirvana, the land of milk and honey, and the gates of St. Peter. Now, I thought, I am finally launched. Surely, when my book comes out, my writing will be taken seriously by family and friends.
With renewed energy, I finished my master of arts in creative writing and literature and co-edited the university’s literary publication. For my master’s project, I delved into my farm roots and wrote a novel, WHAT DEATH CAN TOUCH. I told about a young girl growing up in the country where nothing seemed permanent. I had previously taught high school and community college in Portland, Oregon, and now I signed on to teach for three junior colleges in the Houston area. My life was finally beginning, the one I was supposed to live.
Then, one sunny August morning my father-in-law went into the bathroom and shot himself. His suicide was an anguished, life-changing event for the whole family. Later, on a Sunday evening, while on his way to a youth meeting at church, my older son miraculously escaped death in a motorcycle accident and prematurely aged all of us during the eight weeks he was in the hospital and the year of his long recovery. My husband of twenty-four years quietly announced he didn’t love me anymore, breaking up what I (and everyone else) thought was a storybook marriage.
In the midst of this, after numerous delays that had stretched into several years, my book finally came out. I immediately found out that my romantic illusions of publication did not lead to Paradise. It did not make me eternally happy or cause my problems to disappear. All the things you aren’t… yet appeared on the shelves the same week the doctor said I had colloidal carcinoma of the right breast. I attended two book signings and checked into the hospital that afternoon. I feared I would die of cancer, but I secretly worried more about my inability to promote my book. While I recovered, I got some good reviews, but my friends mostly reported they couldn’t find my book in the bookstores. In the months that followed, I stained every page of my book with my tears because I had written in glowing terms about my marriage and my life, which was falling apart more every day. A few weeks after surgery, I went through six weeks of cobalt radiation therapy and was pronounced fit to re-enter life.
Meanwhile, my personal life was a shambles. My husband divorced me, and instead of the fine model I hoped my life would be, I teetered on being a weepy, bad example. My sons went away to college, and I was all alone with the empty nest. I hated to leave teaching because it fitted well with writing, but I needed a steady income. At this point, whenever I looked at my bookshelves and writing files, all I could do was mourn the writer I might have been.
I lay my head on the cool surface of my desk and sobbed like a crazy woman. “Lord,” I prayed, “after the hard times I went through as a child, I thought nothing bad would ever happen to me again. I thought you held me in the palm of your hand.” I mourned more than a broken heart and a broken family. I wept because growing up was such a disappointment. It had not solved all of life’s problems.
I put on survival gear and re-entered the business world. There I met a mechanical engineer. The next year we combined our talents and started a small engineering company, specializing in real estate inspections. My partner was both brilliant and tireless, and we worked whenever there was work to do—days, evenings, weekends, and holidays. Outwardly busy with managing the office and editing engineering reports, I remained encased in a block of ice. I searched for a connector cord between my present and my past. I mourned that other gal with her boundless energy and enthusiasm, her belief that she could be famous someday. Obviously I’d never been a real writer because I couldn't write any more. The voices inside my head were choked off in mid-sentence. Their silent tongues rattled around in my head.
When I couldn't sleep, I roamed the dark house. The copies of my book, already out of print, taunted me. The picture of the author on the book sleeve was a maiden from a fairy tale.
After aerobics class one afternoon, a friend in the midst of her own crisis wiped the sweat from her face with a towel and asked, “How did you get through these last years, Jackie? How did you survive?”
“I don’t know that I have,” I said.
She smiled. “You’re still here, aren’t you?”
I sighed and kicked off my Reeboks. “I’ve just been putting one step in front of the other.”
“At least you and your ex are still friends.”
“We’ve always been best friends,” I said as I turned toward the showers. “I don’t see how I could bear it if it were otherwise.”
The next day I typed a file label that said, SURVIVING CRISES. I felt the frozen mass thaw a bare trickle. Then I laughed without mirth at the idea that I might even consider writing a how-to book on a subject that still had me by its grip. I needed to read some good advice on survival. My own was too shaky to want to examine it too closely. The file stayed empty. I had survived, but I couldn’t thrive.
One late afternoon I went to the grocery store for a package of spaghetti. The cashier, smiling when she saw my purchase, rang up the sale. “Bet I know what you’re eating tonight,” she said. “My first husband was Italian. Wanted to eat nothing but spaghetti, spaghetti, spaghetti. For five years, I cooked it every night.” She winked at me and added, “My second husband likes to eat out.” I laughed even though my face hurt from the effort.
The word divorce resonated in my head all the way home. This was not a simple division of bank accounts, bed linens, and photo albums I had gone through even though it was an amicable one, and we were both long since married to people we loved and respected. It was like someone had split the head between the eyes with a meat cleaver all the way down to the crotch, leaving the two pieces with half a head, half a beating heart, and one arm and leg.
Putting away the groceries, I scribbled a note on my calendar: “Today I laughed at the d-word for the first time. It was horrible. I felt like a Jew joking about the holocaust.”
Meanwhile I typed and edited endless engineering reports about cracks in building foundations and improperly installed roofs. I baked birthday cakes when the kids came to visit. But I was still disconnected and detached from all the familiar anchors I’d known. I drifted with the flotsam of my dreams, the trashed plan I thought God had intended for my life.
Awakening at two a.m., I paced the floor. Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall. And nothing could put Humpty-Dumpty together again. My emotional wounds couldn’t seem to heal. I couldn’t let go of the hurt because I kept trying to figure things out—why it happened and who or what was to blame. I didn’t know that acceptance, not struggle or fight, activated the healing system. My thoughts were locked in the past, and I wouldn’t leave my wounds alone. I picked at the scabs and flailed at the bruises, keeping them fresh and raw. I was a cracked eggshell, drowning in self pity. I knew I must let go of my pride. I had failed, but I had to believe that it was not too late.
Sometimes I felt I was traveling on a long journey down an endless pipeline with no exits. I didn’t know where I was going, but as long as I furiously pedaled along, I was too busy to notice the darkness around me. I worked on, hoping to see the light reappear some day.
Up to this point, I was a woman who only knew how to write in a cave. I thought it would be impossible to put three creative words together in a busy office. I had always needed large blocks of time in order to write. Now, I learned again that old adage about necessity being the mother of invention. I didn’t have hours to spare, so I had to find a way to do it in minutes. For the next ten years, even though I worked long hours for our company, I managed to write in ten and fifteen minute segments, something I considered impossible in the years before.
I pulled out the novel I’d written for my master’s project and re-wrote it into a novel, THE SOUND OF WINDMILLS. A young friend was kidnapped, raped, and abused for twelve days by a respectable businessman. I was so frightened and angered by her account that I got caught up in the writing of her bizarre story, SCARRED FOR LIFE, which occupied me for several years. I wrote BEHIND CLOSED DOORS, a novel about a female engineer who is kidnapped when a corrupt builder hires a contractor to get her out of the way while he covers up his shoddy workmanship. Set against a backdrop of the funny-frightening aspects of the inspection business, the story says a woman can succeed in a man’s profession, but she’s more vulnerable.
By now I could literally paper the walls of my new house at Lake Livingston with rejection letters from agents and publishers, who in various mealy-mouthed, clever, or smarmy ways said, “Thanks, but I wouldn’t know how to market your books.” Some wrote nice words before the but clause: “I wish I could evaluate your manuscript in terms of how much I enjoyed reading it.” “You must be a very nice person.” The last comment stopped me dead in my tracks: “Your work just misses being very good.”
I downshifted to our new home on Lake Livingston and left the city life behind me, but I can never leave my past behind. And I can never leave my unfinished dreams behind. They’re written in every DNA, every cell of my body. They are always there within me. Crying, laughing, mocking. Beckoning, urging, and pursuing me. What does my late beginning in writing and the starts and stop s have to do with my writing today? I don’t know. But I intended to find out. I had many words to write, and nobody could write them but me.
I lived at Lake Livingston, mostly by myself, for almost eight years. I did my work for our company and managed to complete SEX, LIES, & STORIES while I was there. I learned a lot about myself and my ability and my relationships, but through my writing I gained a peace, I managed to stretch it out to nearly twenty years. I finally came to the decision to move to Austin when I retired in May 2000.
It has been over 30 years now since All the things you aren’t…yet was written. It is so long out of print it has become a collector’s item. If I were to write it today, I would say it somewhat differently. But this book is important to me because it represents my thinking at the time it was written. As Robert James Waller wrote in the preface to Old Songs in a New Café, “We come, we do, we go, and I think we should not take ourselves more seriously than that.”
I’ve written what I wanted in that book, and there have been a lot of kings who couldn’t say that.
It was a lifetime ago when I sat in the movies behind those Big Girls, eating buttered popcorn and wanted to be a journalist like Ann Sheridan. It took me a long while to start writing, but I know now that I will always write.
Have I become the professional writer I always dreamed of being? No. Neither have I traveled everywhere I wanted to go to or read all the books I wanted to read. Absolutely not. But there’s still time.
My place in the sun may yet come. If not today, tomorrow. I’ve always believed in Gatsby’s green light. It eludes me, but that’s no matter. “Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther..and one fine morning—.”
I leave you with my favorite quixotic thought. It comes from the musical, Man of La Mancha, by Dale Wasserman and Joe Darion:
Too much sanity
may be madness.
And the maddest of all,
to see life as it is
and not as it should be.
Georgetown,
