Spoken From The Heart Part 2

Both Mother and Daddy had grown up in rural enough towns that the table was set by what was coming off the vine or out of the field. They both looked forward to the corn coming in each summer, and we loaded up on bags whenever we stopped in Lubbock or El Paso. They bought sweet, juicy Pecos cantaloupes, and some years, Daddy planted tomato vines. He also had an onion patch in the backyard because he liked to pull an onion or two for dinner. He grew squash, long and thin and a little bit tough because it never soaked up enough water, even with the hose, to swell up tender and plump. All summer, my mother made squash and chilies for lunch or supper. She called it a famous Texas recipe, but it was squash, green chilies, and Velveeta cheese baked together in a ca.s.serole. Or she would make fried squash. In high summer and early fall, we hardly ever ate anything out of a can.

My mother considered herself a dainty eater, and for her entire life she has been tiny and bird thin, but my dad liked everything, even the jar of pickled pigs' feet that he kept in the refrigerator. He would eat anchovies or smoked oysters on a cracker, and sometimes the raw ones as well. Once or twice, Johnny Hackney, who owned Johnny's Bar-B-Q, would order big barrels of oysters s.h.i.+pped on blocks of ice from the Gulf Coast. Daddy and Johnny and their friends would sit out on a back porch and eat oysters as fast as Big Daddy, who worked the grill at the Bar-B-Q, could shuck them. Mother wrinkled up her nose at the anchovies and the oysters, but I tried them all and loved most of them.

We ate out too. The fanciest restaurant in Midland was the Blue Star Inn, where they served delicacies like fried shrimp and grilled sirloin. But Daddy said that he loved his Jenna's cooking best of all. He wasn't like the other downtown men, who ate lunch out at a restaurant or ordered at the counter at Woolworth's. And so Mother would listen each day for his car to come humming up the street right around noon.

I had largely forgotten about those lunches until my wedding. When George and I got married, George was also working in downtown Midland. Daddy stood up at our rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding to give a toast. He ended it by looking at George with a quick wink and saying, "If you go home for lunch, make sure that when you go back to the office, you have on the same tie."

The main streets in Midland were named Wall Street and Texas and Broadway.

From there, they were christened for distant states, like Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri, and also for some of the old ranching families, like the Cowdens and the n.o.bles. But gradually, as the town spread out into a city and men from the East began to drift in, the street names changed. First they were named for universities, like Princeton and Harvard, and then for the oil companies, Gulf, Humble, Sh.e.l.l, and Sinclair. And then, in the later boom years, when the crosshatch of streets pushed farther into old ranchlands and cotton fields, they had names like Boeing and Cessna, and eventually lofty English names, like Wellington and Keswick and Coventry, which graced subdivision cul-de-sacs.

We lived on Princeton Avenue now. Our neighbors were mostly company and professional families, whose fathers put on ties to go downtown. Many were geologists and scientists and chemical engineers, men who had studied the science of oil. A few bankers wore suits. But even the roughnecks who worked on the wells in the fields and

came home covered with grease didn't walk around in their heavy boots and Wrangler jeans when they came into Midland. The most you might see was the black oil under their nails, which were almost impossible to scrub clean.

People dressed up to go to church and to go out. At the Blue Star Inn, women wore dresses and did up their hair, while over at Johnny's Bar-B-Q, men wore jackets and ties to sit at the rough picnic tables covered with plastic cloths and drink from cold, dripping pitchers of ice tea. Midland remained a dry town. It wasn't legal to order a mixed drink at a restaurant with lunch or dinner. Johnny Hackney's friends circ.u.mvented the rule by wandering back into the Bar-B-Q's kitchen to pour their own drinks from a jug of vodka that Johnny kept in a cabinet.

Midcentury Midland was, however, far from a cultural wasteland. The Yucca Theater, which ab.u.t.ted Hogan's Folly, showcased musical acts before it was taken over by the movies. My mother remembers dancing to Guy Lombardo and his orchestra when they came through Midland on the train from Dallas and stopped for a night to play before moving on to El Paso. By the mid-1950s, Midland had its own symphony. But the city was small; it was a place of ice cream sundaes at the Borden dairy and Sat.u.r.day morning pony rides around a nearby lot. My own little world didn't extend much beyond the same four blocks that I walked each morning to James Bowie Elementary School or the blistering hot metal swings, merry-go-round, and slide at the Ida Jo Moore Park.

During most of my childhood, drought paralyzed West Texas. I recall wind but very little rain. In a wet year, Midland averages fourteen inches. What few rainstorms we had became spectacular events, with water rus.h.i.+ng down the streets in fast-moving torrents. Certain roads were built like natural arroyos, with dips in the middle to channel the runoff into the big parks, like A Street Park, which for the majority of its historical life had been a buffalo wallow and filled up, lakelike, when it rained. Then, at dusk, the low places would teem with frogs that had congregated in the damp. We heard their rhythmic croaking as we fell asleep. They were usually gone by dawn when the sun rose to bake the ground back to dryness. And every night, the cool air carried the piercing call of train whistles as miles of freight cars rolled past Midland on the rails.

I was a homebody even as a child. My mother enrolled me in ballet, piano, and Brownies, but I was happiest at school or at home. The absence of brothers and sisters had another side: it cemented the deep bonds between my parents and myself. We were a tightly knit unit of three. My parents took me out to dinner, took me driving. Our lives intertwined, and I wanted to be with them. I felt my greatest sense of contentment lying on the couch in our den. I had no desire to stray too far from home or from Mother and Daddy.

The summer when I was eight, Mother was pregnant with the baby who would have been my sister. The baby was not due until September, but on July 15, Mother went into labor. Daddy drove her to Midland Memorial, and I was sent to stay with Alyne Gray and her daughter, Jane. It was Alyne who told me that my sister had died, that no baby would be coming home.

Instead, I was the one who was going away. For months, Mother and Daddy had planned to send me to Camp Mitre Peak, a Girl Scout camp outside Alpine, Texas, where there were mountains, including the sixteen-hundred-foot-tall Mitre Peak, which looked like a giant arrowhead covered with green, scrubby brush. I left only a week or two after Mother lost my sister.

I was so homesick the feeling was almost crus.h.i.+ng. Stuck in a completely unfamiliar place, I missed my parents dreadfully. Camp was nothing like being in El Paso; at night, there was no Grammee to hold my hand. I sent one letter home. I sat on my bunk and with my schoolgirl penmans.h.i.+p wrote to Mother and Daddy reminding them to pick me up on Sat.u.r.day. When I addressed the envelope, I wrote "Estes Avenue,"

but forgot "Midland, Texas." The letter came back on Friday afternoon. The counselors gave it to me during mail call, and I sat holding it in my shaking hands. I was convinced that if my parents didn't get that letter, they wouldn't remember to pick me up the next morning. I envisioned spending days, perhaps another week, alone in my bunk under the shadow of the mountain. Sick with worry, I threw up, and the counselors put me to bed.

The next morning, Mother and Daddy showed up exactly on time, and for years they would tell the story about how I started off running toward Daddy's side of the car and then stopped and hurriedly turned toward Mother's door, wanting so desperately to hug them both at once.

I went to Camp Mitre Peak again after seventh grade and adored it. But at age eight, I preferred home.

When I came through the door in the afternoon, I was greeted by the soft rustle of book pages and my mother, her feet propped up, book open on her lap. My mother loved to read. Her canon ranged from the traditional to the eclectic, writers like John Marquand and Somerset Maugham. She loved Willa Cather, especially Death Comes for the Death Comes for the Archbishop. She read eagerly about the Southwest; it didn't matter whether the story was set in far West Texas or New Mexico or Arizona. She read books about anthropology, native peoples, and early explorers. She delved into naturalists, like Loren Eiseley. And she read to me, her voice weaving its spells of character, plot, and place, until I too yearned to decipher the fine black letters printed on the page. Once I did, I read with my friends, swapping well-thumbed copies of Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, and Nancy Drew with Georgia Todd, who owned the complete collection. We loved Nancy not for her independence or her car--we expected to have the same when we reached eighteen--but for the twists and turns of the mystery plots and the depictions of friends.h.i.+p. And, like me, Nancy was an only child making her way in the world.

We did not buy many books; instead, we borrowed from the Midland County Public Library, located inside the county courthouse, the biggest and most important building in the city. The courthouse sat in the center of downtown Midland, in a lush square with watered green gra.s.s. But the library was particularly interesting because of its location: the bas.e.m.e.nt. All of the houses and many of the buildings I knew in Midland had no bas.e.m.e.nts and hardly any stairs. To enter the cool, dark library, Mother and I had to walk down an entire flight of stairs. Each visit was exciting before we ever looked at the books.

If she wasn't reading, my mother wanted to be outside. Jenna Welch was nearly blind, left-handed, and woefully uncoordinated, but she loved nature. And she was an extremely knowledgeable self-taught naturalist. She remembered the name of every wildflower and was pa.s.sionate about birds. Her fascination began when I was ten and she volunteered to be my Girl Scout leader. One of our requirements was to earn a bird badge. The best location for bird-watching in Midland, aside from Rose Acres, the euphemistic name given to the city's sewer ponds, where bird-watchers congregated

despite the overwhelmingly noxious smell, was the yard of Ola Dublin Haynes, one of Midland's school librarians. She had let her place grow wild with scrub brush and prairie gra.s.s. We would stand silently with our binoculars, or sit Indian-style, and wait for the birds to swoop down and alight on the mesquite and p.r.i.c.kly stubble. We were rarely disappointed; each year thousands of birds poured through Midland, which sits along one of the West's north-south migratory paths.

Mother began carrying binoculars in the car. On almost every long car trip when I was a teenager, the routine was the same. I would fall asleep, and Mother would gasp, "Look, there's a hawk" or "Did you see--it's a painted bunting!" and wake me up to see. I was invariably irritated, but the announcements took. Today I scan the trees for the swish of wings and am waiting for a screech owl to roost in the owl box nestled atop our live oak in the front yard.

Once my mother spotted a rare bird, a northern varied thrush, in our backyard. He had apparently been blown off course during a windstorm and had taken refuge in the trees. Mother identified it and then called her friends at the Mid-Nats, the Midland Naturalist Society. For weeks bird-watchers showed up at our front door, hoping to glimpse the bird and add it to their list. Come lunchtime, geologists and scientists would arrive and head into the kitchen with their sack lunches to sit at the Formica counter and wait for the elusive thrush. The few times it appeared, everyone in the room would jump up and hug each other and hug Mother, thrilled to have seen this small bluish gray bird, which resembles a robin. My dad would look around and shake his head over all the fuss, but he never minded driving Mother around with her binoculars to look for whatever might be there.

The sky, however, was another matter. Mother and I loved the sky. From almost as far back as I can remember, on a particularly spectacular summer night, Mother would gather a blanket and we would go outside to lie on the ground and gaze up at the sky. The wool of the blanket would scratch at our arms and legs, and we could feel the p.r.i.c.k of the hard, st.u.r.dy gra.s.s blades below.

In Midland, the sky sits overhead like a flawless dome, bowing up from the earth at the edge of each horizon. The land does not pitch or rise but remains perfectly flat, without bright lights or tall buildings to obscure our view. So complete was the darkness that all we saw were the stars and the inky blackness. Above us, the constellations hung like strands of Christmas lights waiting to be plucked, and I would lift my little-girl arms to try to touch the glowing orbs. Lying beside me on the blanket, my mother pointed out Orion, the Little Dipper, Ca.s.siopeia, and the planets, the glowing pink of Venus or the distant fire of Jupiter, as her mother had done for her. And she would say, "Laura, look at the sky, because it won't look like this again for another year.

"Look up," she would say, "Laura, look up."

But I wasn't the only one gazing up at that all-encompa.s.sing sky. Amid baseball diamonds, backyard slides, and sandlots, another child was listening to the croak of frogs and watching for the stars. That boy was George W. Bush. My Midland childhood was his as well. We were the same age, and only about ten blocks separated our two homes, his on Ohio, mine on Princeton. My elementary school friends Mike Proctor and Robert McCleskey played catch with George; his dad, George H. W. Bush, coached the local Little League. The Bushes lived in Midland from the time George was three until the year

1959, but the closest he and I ever came to meeting was pa.s.sing each other in the hallways of the seventh grade at San Jacinto Junior High.

By age twelve, I was old enough to ride my bike on a Sat.u.r.day morning to the Rexall drugstore for a ham sandwich. But, like most twelve-year-old girls, I longed to do more grown-up things.

In Midland, our first escape came directly from Hollywood. For two hours in the plush seats and darkened rooms of the downtown movie houses, we were transported to Europe or back in time. The women were glamorous and the men dapper, everyone was a wit, and there was almost always a happy ending. We never imagined that the Wild West was actually a movable set on a back lot, that each looming mountain was the backside of the same Hollywood hill, or that the acres of picture-perfect New England snows were manufactured under blue California skies by giant ice machines. Our lives grew as large as those on the celluloid reels that filled the screen. We went to the movies nearly every weekend.

On Sat.u.r.day afternoons, Mother would load my friends and me into the car and drive down to the Yucca Theater, where we would rush to the ticket line. The Yucca showed mostly family fare or westerns. But we vaguely knew there was more to Hollywood. Once, as soon as Mother had waved to us and driven out of sight, we raced around to the other downtown theater, the Ritz, to watch the film Blue Denim, Blue Denim, about about teenage pregnancy, a subject that was all but taboo in Midland. Carol Lynley, the star, played a fifteen-year-old girl. She herself was only seventeen.

Boys and girls paired off early in Midland. Before elementary school ended, a small frenzy had built around trading disks, flat circles engraved with our names. In the sixth grade, I was convinced that a boy was going to ask me to trade disks with him.

After school, I dragged Mother to the Kruger Jewelry store to buy a gold-plated disk. He never asked. Another boy, Robert McCleskey, did invite me to the Yucca Theater to see Gone With the Wind and still remains one of our best friends. and still remains one of our best friends.

By seventh grade, boys began calling for what we dubbed "Daddy dates." Girls sat in the backs of the cars with their adolescent escorts while the boys' fathers drove. I had one "Daddy date" after I turned thirteen, which not coincidentally was the year I traded in my thick gla.s.ses for hard contact lenses that sat right on top of my blue eyes.

My date was Kevin O'Neill, whose brother Joe would be the one to introduce me to George W. Bush almost twenty years later. Kevin invited me to a dance, and his father, Mr. O'Neill, a wealthy oilman who had come to Midland from Philadelphia, drove us. By age fourteen, chaperoning parents became increasingly superfluous. Fourteen was the age when most Texas kids got their driver's licenses.

Regan Kimberlin was my best friend at San Jacinto Junior High, and she loved being behind the wheel. She had raven black hair, green eyes, and a throaty laugh, and she had attended almost every school in Midland, including second grade at Sam Houston Elementary with George. Regan's mother, Wanda, was on about the fifth of her seven marriages. She married and divorced Regan's dad two times. Indeed, Wanda believed in divorce almost as much as marriage, and she moved with each tying or untying of the knot. By the time Regan was in junior high, Wanda was married to Jerry Cooper, whom she would marry and divorce three times. We thought Jerry was the perfect stepfather.

Jerry and Wanda had bought a red Thunderbird convertible for Jan, Regan's older sister, in the hope of persuading Jan to annul her hasty marriage to Mike Morse, who in the infinitely small world of Midland, was the son of Ann and Joe Morse, our next-door neighbors on Princeton Avenue. Jan ignored the car and stayed married to Mike, and Regan was given the keys to the Thunderbird. Regan had that Thunderbird longer than Jan had Mike. Regan first took it for a spin when we were still thirteen years old and in the eighth grade, before we got our official licenses. We used to drive around in that or in her mother's pink Nash Rambler, a stubby car that we nicknamed "the pink pig."

After we got our licenses, all of my friends went out driving. We drove to the three drive-in movie theaters that ringed Midland. Whoever was behind the wheel would pull over before we reached the entrance, and half of the crowd in the car would squeeze into the trunk to avoid paying the admission fee. After we parked, one of us would have to sneak out and open the trunk to release the stowaways. We drove to the drive-in restaurants, like Agnes's or A & W. Sometimes Regan and I headed out alone to Mr. X's, on the dicier south side of town, where they served taquitos, steak fingers, and fried chicken livers and where, as we grew older, we could smoke without being seen.

But if we wanted to be seen in Midland, we went to Agnes's. Friday and Sat.u.r.day nights now consisted of trips to the movies and c.o.kes at Agnes's. Agnes herself was a strong, stocky West Texas woman with a broad back from bending over hot stoves and steel gray hair wrapped in a knot on top of her head. Once I watched her raise her hand and slap a boy across the cheek in the parking lot because she thought he was being smart-alecky. But every night Agnes's would fill with cars. No one ever got out; we sat in our seats and waited for the carhops and eased the wheels forward or back as new cars pulled up and old ones drove off. Sometimes we went twice in one night. When couples left, it was usually to go out in the country, to the dark, flat stretches of unpaved road past the city loop, to park and then head back, so they could tell their parents the truth, that they had just come from Agnes's.

We were lucky in Midland to have so many places to drive. In other, smaller West Texas towns, there were no drive-ins or movies. Night after night, restless kids cruised the town square, making endless loops around the local city hall and the courthouse.

No one ever thought we were too young to drive. At age thirteen, we attended driver's education cla.s.ses in the San Jacinto Junior High auditorium to prepare for the written test. Some boys got cars when they turned fourteen, not because their parents were wealthy but because they worked at jobs after school. They had '57 Chevys and old Fords, whatever they found cheap or used. The rest of us simply borrowed from the garages of our parents.

Around Easter of my fourteenth year, my mother lost the last of her babies, another boy, this one too early even to name.

When he took my mother to the hospital, my father left her car keys for me. One evening, I carefully backed Mother's Ford Fairlane out of our driveway and drove down the side streets to Agnes's. I pulled in, placed my order, and then I had to move. That part I was not prepared for. I managed to get the car into reverse, only to back straight into a pole in the parking lot.

Chastened, I studied for my written test, making notes with my No. 2 pencils, and I practiced in the car with my mother. She took me to the one place near our house where the roads were guaranteed to be quiet, the Midland cemetery. I learned to accelerate, brake, and turn among the somber rows of crosses and polished headstones, where the

paths were peaceful and the speeds slow, never once knowing what this place and a single automobile could mean for my own future.

At age fourteen, I, like everyone else, got my driver's license.

If we weren't driving, we were trying to figure out other ways to get out of our homes. Almost every weekend, I went to a slumber party. We were a gaggle of girls, Regan, my friends Peggy, Jan, Beverly, Cathie, and the twins, Sharon and Susan, and we thought we were sort of wild. In truth, we weren't wild at all. We wore loafers and bobby socks and dresses or skirts and blouses or sweater sets to school and Bermuda shorts and pants only on the weekends. Once, when Wanda moved Regan to Norman, Oklahoma, for a semester, Regan came back with four perfect wool skirts and sweaters that had been dyed to match. We were all very impressed. Girls, or at least my group of girls, started wearing lipstick in the seventh grade, but there were rules. Gwyne Smith's mother had decreed that the only appropriate color was Miss Ritz, a pale pink from Charles of the Ritz. My mother would never buy Charles of the Ritz lipstick, and certainly not for a seventh grader. I had a pink shade from the drugstore.

In the summers, Regan, Cathie, and I would sun ourselves by the pool at the Ranchland Hills Country Club, where Jerry Cooper belonged. Ranchland was a bit farther out, but the Midland Country Club was stricter. It wouldn't allow anyone by its pool who wasn't a member. My mother silently threw up her hands at our quest to turn our pale skin to ever-darker shades of bronze. She still drove with long sleeves and white gloves even when the temperature pierced one hundred degrees, to keep the sun from marking her hands and arms.

Girls in Midland didn't drink at all in high school. Boys only drank beer, when they could get it, which wasn't that often. But we did smoke, holding our cigarettes out the window and blowing out long, smooth streams of smoke, trying to look like 1960s movie stars. It seemed that everyone smoked back then, except for my mother. My dad smoked, and so did most of my parents' friends. Within twenty-five years, so many of the women would be dead, their lungs, larynxes, and hearts giving out one by one. By the time I was seventeen or eighteen, I was smoking in front of my parents, although once when my father found a cigarette pack in the clutch purse on my nightstand, I immediately swore that it belonged to my friend Cathie. I was adamant that it wasn't mine. As Khrushchev sparred with Kennedy and the world contemplated a nuclear missile exchange, we trailed around in pale gray clouds laced with nicotine.

Our parents' generation might have been glued to the radio for news and the somber-toned voice of Edward R. Murrow from London, but in Midland, the radio and later television were our gateways to music and our Edward was simply an Ed, Ed Sullivan. I was not quite ten when Elvis Presley first sang and shook on The Ed Sullivan The Ed Sullivan Show, and I remember watching him at Gwyne's house. Her parents were out for the and I remember watching him at Gwyne's house. Her parents were out for the evening, and we had a babysitter. The two of us were alone in her den, and when Elvis got up and began to swivel his hips, we did too, s.h.i.+mmying as the King crooned and danced on the grainy black-and-white screen.

We were raised on rock 'n' roll, and the adults didn't complain. Buddy Holly was from Lubbock, and Roy Orbison was from another West Texas town, Wink, so we felt as if the music was almost homegrown. Late at night, after Mother and Daddy had gone to bed and all the local radio stations had signed off, I'd shut my door, prop open my school books, and listen to Wolfman Jack play hits out of Nuevo Laredo or tune in to KOMA Oklahoma City, whose signal carried across the skies at night on the AM radio, reaching as far away as Wyoming and the Dakotas in the north, or west to Arizona, on the cool, clear air.

I had some records, and I bought the Beatles' first American alb.u.m when it was released, but Regan was the one with what we considered a priceless collection of 45s, which her mother boxed up and sold for pennies on the dollar at a garage sale once Regan was grown and gone.

To be truly daring, we snuck out of the house on sleepover nights. We would tiptoe out of a bedroom and quietly open the front door. The more daring kids might climb out a window and drop down--no one ever had a second-floor bedroom and at most you risked hitting a low bush. Then we would walk around the neighborhood streets in our pajamas under the faint glow of the streetlights. When we went to Peggy's house, we crossed over to the big Cowden Park, which had once been a buffalo wallow and now became a lake when it rained, with frogs that called to each other deep into the darkness.

Some girls snuck out of doors and windows to go to their boyfriends' houses, and some took their parents' cars as well. I never did any of that, although I did ride around one time with my friend Candy after she put her parents' car in neutral and rolled it out of the garage. She made it around the neighborhood on numerous nights until our friend Mike Jones opened the car door as we pulled into the driveway. Candy kept driving and smashed the car door into the side of the garage. The door closed on Mike's foot, and the garage wall left a huge dent in the door. Candy sat there in total shock; until that moment she had always gotten the car home without a scratch.

My one foray backing into the pole at Agnes's at age thirteen had cured me of any desire to sneak our car out, and I was a cla.s.sic only child who never wanted to disappoint Mother and Daddy. My biggest acts of teenage bravery were trotting along Midland's sidewalks in checked pajamas.

After San Jacinto Junior High, I should have attended Midland High, but instead I went to the brand-new high school, Robert E. Lee, because we had moved again. Every other school in Midland was named for a Texas hero or event, from Jim Bowie, Sam Houston, James Fannin, Mirabeau Lamar, Davy Crockett, William Travis, and Lorenzo de Zavala to San Jacinto and Alamo, for the famous battles against Mexico. Looking back, there were likely a lot of reprobates in the Texas group, but they seemed so much more distant from our own time and place. And of course, in Texas, they were venerated and then some. As John Steinbeck once mused, "Like most pa.s.sionate nations Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts." It is almost impossible to be raised in Texas and not know that Texas was once an independent nation. To make sure that no one in Midland forgot, we studied Texas history in the fourth grade and again for the whole of the seventh, and every morning, we crossed under our heroes' names emblazoned on the brick or concrete block of our school buildings. The only outside hero was George Was.h.i.+ngton Carver, whose name adorned the segregated high school where Midland's black students went. But now there was Robert E. Lee.

Midland had not existed during the Civil War, and it seemed both absurd and wrong to name a school for a Confederate commander in the year 1960. At the time, my mother told me that one school board member was adamant about calling it Robert E. Lee and with a shake of her head just let it go. And I did too. No one I knew protested; it was simply considered to be out of our hands. As kids, we lived in our own little world, where we could ride our bikes wherever we wanted and sneak out in our pajamas because Midland was a safe town and we were safe within its limits. Our parents were not afraid for us to dash outside the minute school was over and play until the front porch lights and streetlamps flickered on and it was time to come in and eat. We lived our lives in a kind of easy oblivion and ceded the important decisions to the adults.

At Lee, they played "Dixie" at the football games, and we were expected to sing when we heard the first chords. Our teams were called the Rebels, our annual was the Rebelee. But it bothered me. It bothered me from the moment I went.

I went to Lee because Daddy had sold our house. It wasn't even for sale. One afternoon, a real estate agent came to the front door and rang the bell. Daddy answered, and the woman asked if she could buy the house. She had a client who was willing to offer Daddy a very good price, and on the spot, Daddy said yes. It is the one time I remember Mother being upset and disappointed. She loved that house and did not want to leave, but we did. We packed up and moved to a spec house that Daddy had recently built on Hughes Street and then, a couple of years later, to another home over on Humble Avenue, the last house that Daddy ever built for us, our "nice" house.

It was in our nice house that one afternoon I answered a knock at the door.

Standing on the front step were two men in suits. They held up their badges and said, "We're from the FBI." The next thing they asked was, "Is Harold Welch at home?" Daddy was taking a nap, and I was quite nervous to go wake him. But I did. The FBI men were in the process of "busting a bookie," as they put it, and they wanted to know if Daddy could come downtown and help identify him. Daddy shook his head. "No," he said. "I've only talked to him on the phone. I don't know what he looks like." The men thanked him politely and left. Betting itself apparently didn't bother them.

Our Humble Avenue house sat at the intersection of Humble and Lanham, but it was so quiet that if a car cruised down the street late at night, the low rumble of its engine would wake me from a sound sleep. On Humble, Regan and I spent a lot of time in my room, which stood at the end of the house, adjacent to the sidewalk and the street. At night, when the streetlights began to glow, we would prop open the window--the same one that blew in during a particularly fierce dust storm, spraying gla.s.s, sand, and grit all over my room--and our boyfriends would tiptoe along the side yard to stand on the gra.s.s and talk to us through the screen. One of my neighbors, d.i.c.k Taylor, preferred to shoot out the streetlight with his .22 gauge hunting rifle and then amble over in the dark to stand at the window and talk. Each time he shot it out, Mother would call the city and say, "You need to replace the streetlight, somebody else has shot it out." But it was only d.i.c.k with his .22. The city would put in a new light, and d.i.c.k would wait a week and then shoot it out again. My parents made no real effort to investigate; they liked d.i.c.k.

And my mother was waging her own stealth battle with the lamppost. She had joined the Audubon Society and eagerly devoured its magazine and mailers, which were crusading against the pesticide DDT. Quietly around our blocks, bright yellow Ban DDT b.u.mper stickers began appearing on utility poles and light posts. Mother was hardly in a position to turn d.i.c.k in. Still, I'm sure if I had ever crawled out that window, Mother and Daddy would have done far more than make another call to the city authorities.

But living on Humble Avenue meant that I was no longer in the Midland High School district, and from that, so much else changed.

All of Lee's home football games were held at the Midland High Stadium. I had been going to the Friday-night games since I was a fifth grader at Bowie. There was something thrilling about those Friday nights. Everyone went, parents and children, people whose children had long since moved away, even people with no children at all. It was football and Friday night in Midland. I would watch neighbors stream out of their houses and walk down the streets or more often see lines of cars snaking toward the parking lot. The stadium rose up out of the ground like a great bowl, and everyone had a place in it. Kids did not sit with their families; they sat with their school and their grade.

The fifth and sixth graders from all the city's elementary schools sat in the bleachers on the elementary end in one end zone. The other end zone was reserved for the junior high students, in seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. The high schoolers sat together in the middle of the stadium; the adults sat around them. If anyone bothered to look down at either end zone, it seemed as if the whole stadium was levitating, because most of the kids didn't sit still, they spent the entire game jumping around and talking. The boys would race to the top row and pretend to leap off the top of the stadium or would flutter their arms and kick their legs as if they were about to fall off into the inky dark night. All around them, the girls had their eyes trained on the boys. I think Midland and Lee had good football teams all the years I was there, but I can't recall who won or lost each game.

By high school, the game watching changed. A boy might invite you to a game, but most girls hoped they would be dating a football player down on the field. If you were going with someone on the team, he would send you a big mum with his number on it; for Midland High, it was a big gold chrysanthemum with the player number twisted in purple pipe cleaners and adorned with long purple and gold ribbons. Lee High School players sent white mums with their numbers in maroon pipe cleaners and trails of maroon and white ribbons. Football players' girls pinned these chrysanthemums to their jackets or sweaters so everyone could see them. For several years, I dated a boy who played for Midland. He couldn't afford to send me a chrysanthemum for every game, but he did have one delivered for the big contests, and I pinned it on my clothes and then brought it home to wilt for months afterward on my bulletin board.

The biggest game was between Midland and Lee high schools at the end of the season, but otherwise on Friday nights, the two teams played the Odessa schools, Odessa Permian and Odessa High, and teams from San Angelo and Abilene and other towns in the district. The visiting teams would ride in big buses with convoys of cars, fans who came to cheer for their school.

Midland hardly ever has a fall. Occasionally, we would get just the right mix of rain and cool to turn the red oaks a bright, rich russet, but most of the time, summer with its s.h.i.+mmering heat would linger well past October. Then suddenly, around November 17, the cold would barrel in on a tight, hard wind, and the gra.s.s would freeze. There was very little in-between. But because Midland sits at the edge of the desert, the nights, even in the baking heat, would be cool. It was possible to actually feel cold when you went to a football game, sitting under that enormous, star-laced sky. The blazing stadium lights couldn't dim the vast display of stars overhead, an arc of light beaming back down upon us.

I loved school. I was a good student with good grades. I learned to write in a style that Mrs. Stallings, my senior English teacher, called the Dr. Guthrie style, after the sermons of Dr. Guthrie, the minister at our First Methodist Church. You stated your argument, found examples to support it, and then summed up your point all over again. I took mostly honors courses and earned five points for my grade point average if I made an A, four if I made a B. I was always in Honors English, where we read the early 1960s definition of the cla.s.sics: Jane Eyre, Ethan Frome, Jane Eyre, Ethan Frome, Shakespeare's plays, Charles d.i.c.kens, Shakespeare's plays, Charles d.i.c.kens, and George Eliot's Silas Marner Silas Marner. But I loved to read books, all the time, in any cla.s.s.

During the hours we spent on math or science, I would perch my textbook on my desk to look particularly studious, while behind its thick cover I was hiding my latest book. In one case it was Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lady Chatterley's Lover, which for 1963 Midland was quite risque. which for 1963 Midland was quite risque.

Before I was out of junior high, I had devoured William Goldman's The Temple of Gold The Temple of Gold and Margaret Mitch.e.l.l's Gone with the Wind Gone with the Wind. I looked for any opportunity to read. I also took a course that was reserved for the top students in the school called History of Western Thought. It was a philosophy course that started with Plato, and at the end of the school year we had to write a big paper, like a thesis. I loved it, reading Plato and Socrates and St. Augustine in the middle of West Texas.

I was not the most popular girl in high school, but I got asked to dances, which had moved from the San Jacinto Junior High cafeteria, where the dance committee would hang green and white crepe paper streamers from the ceiling and girls by the dozen would troop off to the bathroom or mill about at the edge of the linoleum floor, to the newly built youth centers adjacent to Lee or Midland High. They were real dances, with hired bands and couples twisting and turning on the dance floor. Before each dance, most boys sent a corsage of roses or gardenias, sometimes orchids if the date was very special.

After the girls had worn them, they tacked the corsages to droop and dry on the bulletin boards that were staples in every bedroom and that held such other prized possessions as the folded-up paper notes that were pa.s.sed in cla.s.s and occasional pictures of friends. I pinned my dance corsages next to my shriveled gold football flowers.

Mother was the one who always thought "what if," and the "what if" invariably came back to the same thing, what if she and Daddy had never sold the big house on Princeton Avenue? What if we hadn't sold that house and had just stayed there? If we had stayed on Princeton, I would have gone to Midland High rather than Lee, and then in her mind everything would have been different. Everything was the night of November 6, 1963, two days after I had turned seventeen.

That night, I picked up the car keys and my purse. I stopped in the kitchen to tell Mother and Daddy good-bye. They were standing around the breakfast bar with some of their friends, the smoke drifting up in slow, lazy curls from the ends of four or five halfsmoked cigarettes. I was smiling. Everything felt unbelievably light and happy, and someone called back, "Have fun." I walked through the utility room door as I had done hundreds of other times, pulled the car out of the driveway, and headed off down the smooth street to my friend Judy d.y.k.es's house. She was one of my good high school friends; her dad had been a friend of Daddy's from Lubbock. We had made plans to go to the drive-in movies, though in typical seventeen-year-old fas.h.i.+on we hadn't bothered to look in the paper to see what was playing. We decided that we would drive by and see what was there. So I left Judy's house and headed to the loop, which back then was a little country road with no streetlights circling around Midland.

We talked as I drove along the pitch-black road. I knew in my mind that somewhere ahead was a right turn for Big Spring Street, where the drive-in theater was, because the loop almost dead-ended at Big Spring. Beyond the turn the asphalt stopped, and there was nothing more than a trail of unpaved dirt and dust. Most drivers turned right, toward town. I knew there was a turn, but where that turn was seemed very far away until suddenly, off in the middle of a field, I glimpsed a stop sign with the corner beam of my headlights. At that moment, I heard Judy's voice: "There's a stop sign." And I just couldn't stop. I was going along, a little below the speed limit, which was fifty-five miles an hour. The next thing I knew, I was in the intersection, and immediately in front of me was another car. It came rus.h.i.+ng out of the darkness, and I was right upon it, without a second to turn the wheel. All I heard was the horrible sound of metal colliding, the catastrophic boom that occurs when two hard pieces of steel make contact.

The next thing I knew, I was rolling on the ground, in the dirt, holding my head. I had been thrown from the car with a force so great that I didn't even hit the asphalt on the road but was tossed clear over to the hard, dry ground alongside. In those awful seconds, the car door must have been flung open by the impact and my body rose in the air until gravity took over and I was pulled, hard and fast, back to earth. I have no memory of being thrown or of raising my hands to my head; it must have been an automatic reaction.

Eventually, I stopped rolling and simply lay there, completely stunned. And then slowly Judy got out of the car, and I got up.

My face was banged up; I had a cut on my knee that bled in a long red gash, and my ankle was broken, although no one knew it until several days afterward. The doctors didn't find it in the emergency room. In the distance, I saw headlights, and someone else stopped. It was a family from Midland, and they came over and put their arms around Judy and me. We stood there, embraced by them. But I knew we were not the only ones in the crash. There was another car.

The whole time, I was praying that the person in the other car was alive too. In my mind, I was calling, "Please, G.o.d. Please, G.o.d. Please, G.o.d," over and over and over again. Then more cars pulled up, and someone must have gone for help, because eventually we heard the wail of sirens and glimpsed the rotating, flas.h.i.+ng lights of ambulances and police cars.

One driver who arrived was a man I recognized, Bill Douglas, the father of my very good high school friend Mike. The Douglases lived up beyond the loop, in a small neighborhood about four long city blocks past that corner of Big Spring Street. We considered it almost a country neighborhood because there was nothing around the houses except the bottom tips of ranches and open land. But, on a quiet November night, that block of houses with their long, wide yards was close enough to hear a thunderous crash at the edge of Big Spring. And I saw Mr. Douglas lean over whomever had been in that other car.

Judy and I were waiting to get in one of the ambulances, and Judy kept saying to me, "I think that's the father of the person who was in the other car." And I said, "No, that couldn't be the father. That's Mr. Douglas."

I was still pleading with G.o.d as I lay in the emergency room, waiting for the doctors to st.i.tch my knee. The lights were bright, and I could hear the scurrying of the nurses' flat-soled shoes on the floor, but no one was paying attention to Judy or to me because our injuries were cuts and bruises, sc.r.a.pes and strains. I was still thinking, lying there, that Mike could not have been in that other car. And then, on the other side of the hospital curtain, I heard a woman start to cry, and I knew that it was Mrs. Douglas. But I couldn't stop asking G.o.d, over and over in my head, to please keep this other person alive.

It was Mother and Daddy who told me that Mike had been driving the other car, after I was home, in my own bed. But by then, I already heard the sounds of his parents'

choked sobs ricocheting in the far recesses of my mind.

November 6 was a Wednesday, but we were out that night because Thursday was a school holiday. Mike was on his way into town for a date with Peggy, whose house backed up to Cowden Park, where the old buffalo wallow was, and where we would climb out the window and sneak around in our pajamas. He had dated Regan for a long time before that. He was a handsome boy with a beautiful smile, and he was a top athlete at Lee. He was not my boyfriend, although for a decade some in the press have claimed that he was. But for years, he was my very close friend. I have images of Mike in my home movies, the movies that Charlie White, who lived behind us on Estes Avenue, took every Christmas because the Whites owned a little movie camera. The Whites were good friends of Mike's parents, and that's how Mother and Daddy knew them, long before we were in high school. I can still see a gap-toothed Mike in at least one of those old Christmas movie reels, where years later, everything looks slightly tinged with blue or brown.

All through high school, Mike and I were good friends; we talked on the phone for hours, and Mike's circle of close friends included nearly all of my own. And so it was unbelievable to me that it was his car in that almost always empty intersection. It was a small car, a Corvair Monza, Detroit's version of a compact, economy car designed to compete with the Volkswagen Beetle. It was sporty and sleek, and it was also the car that Ralph Nader made famous in his book Unsafe at Any Speed Unsafe at Any Speed. He claimed the car was unstable and p.r.o.ne to rollover accidents. A few years later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration went so far as to investigate the Corvair's handling, but it didn't reach the same grim conclusions. I was driving my dad's much larger and heavier Chevy Impala. But none of that would ever ease the night of November 6. Not for me, and never for the Douglases.

So many lives were wrecked that night at that corner, which was known as a particularly dangerous place. Already that year, two other people had lost their lives in crashes where the loop met Big Spring Street. After Mike's death, the city did install a much bigger stop sign and posted warnings. But it was too late for us.

A dangerous intersection, a less than safe car, and me. I don't see well, I didn't ever see well, and maybe that played a part. Or perhaps it was simply dark, Judy and I were talking, and I was an inexperienced driver who got to a corner before I expected it.

I didn't have to tell anyone what happened. Every single person in Midland knew.