Spoken From The Heart Part 4

clothes in the sink and hung them on lamps and curtain rods to dry. Bobbie Jo applied for a position at Garfinckel's department store. I went to Capitol Hill and interviewed with my local congressman. George Mahon had represented Midland since 1935. He was a lawyer from Lubbock who had been born in northern Louisiana. In 1969, he was almost seventy years old. I called his office and got an appointment.

One late July morning, I walked through the marble-halled warren of congressional offices, where earnest young men and women labored behind piles of paper on their desks. I sat down in a leather chair in Congressman Mahon's office, wearing my nice dress, my purse perched on my lap, as he looked over my resume and asked me if I could type or take shorthand. I could barely type; I had taken a quick course during summer school but hadn't paid much attention. I didn't think that I needed to type because, in a burst of intellectual sn.o.bbery and a bit of feminism, I had decided that I wasn't going to be anyone's secretary, and I wasn't going to waste my high school cla.s.s time on typing lessons. Congressman Mahon then asked me if my father would consider sending me to secretarial school to learn how to type professionally and take shorthand. I thought about what my father had already spent to send me to SMU and said no again.

And Congressman Mahon gently suggested that, without being able to do either, I really wasn't qualified for a position in his office. Had I been a typist, however, in the summer of 1969, I might very well have become a congressional staffer in Was.h.i.+ngton.

Bobbie Jo decided to remain in Was.h.i.+ngton. Her boyfriend, Chuck, was in Vietnam, and she couldn't bear to spend the year in Texas, seeing her friends arm in arm, hand in hand. She wanted to, as she put it, "go into exile." I left her to board in a rooming house, with her job at Garfinckel's, and drove back to Texas, alone, driving for hours during the day and sleeping each night in neon-lit motels that dotted the highway. My SMU friend Janet Kinard had moved from Dallas to Houston. All summer, she had been calling and saying that she needed a roommate. I repacked and set off for Houston. When I got on the Katy Freeway bound for downtown, traffic came to a halt. A wrecked truck was blocking the freeway. People rolled down their windows and got out of their cars to sit on the roofs and the hoods because it was August and it was hot, that hot, humid air from the bayous and the Gulf of Mexico that hangs over Houston the way it does over the Mississippi Delta to the east. I sat on the roof of my car listening to people mill around and talk until the authorities had cleared the accident and we could move again. I hoped it wasn't some sort of an omen that, as I drove into Houston to begin the rest of my life, I got stuck on a freeway and waited for hours in the August sun.

Dallas was a newer city. As late as 1860, it had a mere 678 people. By that same year, Houston had briefly been the capital of Texas and was already sporting the beginnings of a port and a rail system, with more than four hundred miles of track laid in the surrounding ground. But over a century later, in 1969, Houston seemed younger and brasher. The city's buildings were a hodgepodge across the skyline. There were no zoning regulations, so it was possible to have a gleaming skysc.r.a.per on the lot next to a funny old house that had stood in that same spot for decades. I moved in with Janet and joined the ranks of young, professional women by getting a job at a brokerage house.

Prior to that job, my closest brush with high finance had been when I was around fifteen. One Sat.u.r.day morning, Daddy put on his nicest suit and tie, Mother wore her best dress, I spent hours with spray and hard rollers to get my hair to billow up over my head, and we drove downtown to a photography studio for a formal family portrait. After he saw the pictures, Daddy smiled his big, broad grin and said, "I think I look like a Philadelphia banker." His idea of a Philadelphia banker came from the old black-andwhite Katharine Hepburn movie The Philadelphia Story, The Philadelphia Story, but for someone from Lubbock, but for someone from Lubbock, Texas, it was the look of success.

I, however, was not cut out to be a banker. I was dreadfully bored at the brokerage house and longed to return to the cla.s.sroom. Within a couple of months, I was teaching again, taking over the cla.s.s of a teacher who had left to have a baby. My school was the John F. Kennedy Elementary School; my cla.s.s was the fourth grade, and our princ.i.p.al was Mrs. Gunnells.

At first, I hated it. I was starting in the middle of the school year, the cla.s.sroom was in chaos, and after my sweet cla.s.s in Dallas, I was unprepared for this group of nineyear-olds. My students were wild, screaming, talking back, hiding erasers, wadding up pieces of paper and lobbing them across the room. They were determined to see just how far they could push a new teacher. Every weekend, I would get the "Sunday sads"; I dreaded returning to my cla.s.sroom on Monday morning. When I pa.s.sed construction workers with their hard hats and lunch pails, I envied them. They did not have raucous children to deal with, particularly two rambunctious brothers, whom I thought of as the "dynamic duo." The older brother was in my cla.s.s; his younger brother was a first grader.

Whenever the first grader grew bored, he would sneak into my cla.s.sroom, jump out from behind the desk, and scream, "Boo." All the children would laugh, and whatever tenuous control I had a.s.serted to get them to pay attention would vanish all over again. Gradually I started to read the signs of restlessness and learned to spot the little brother before he reached the door. I would send one or both brothers on an errand to deliver a note or sharpen pencils, giving them a chance to get up and move around.

The Kennedy School sat on a busy commercial road; trucks, cars, and buses rattled outside the windows. The students, nearly all of whom were African-American, lived for the most part in small, run-down houses behind the school building on narrow side streets, which eventually dead-ended alongside warehouses and the train tracks. The houses were tiny and old; they had clapboard siding with peeling paint and loose asbestos s.h.i.+ngles on the roofs. Parked in front were rusting cars, whose tire treads dug into the yards. Most of the parents worked, but there were few opportunities available to them.

Poverty, lack of education, even alcohol abuse lurked behind too many doors.

It was only the mothers who came to school; the dads never did. Most of our students qualified for free lunch and a breakfast, if they got there early enough. For a few, these were often the only regular meals they had. They would arrive in the morning, bellies rumbling, and pile their plates with food. After lunch had pa.s.sed, they endured the slow burn of hunger until the next day. I can't imagine how they navigated the holidays and weekends. One of my students was so hungry that he could not stay awake; he spent part of the day with his head resting on his desk. He was a talented artist, able to draw lovely and elaborate pictures. Once, his mother came to a meeting at school, and I gingerly mentioned that her son spent a lot of time sleeping at his desk. She told me very matter-of-factly that she left quite early in the morning, and the kids "just had to make it on their own." It was not her choice; there was just no alternative. I don't remember that she ever came back to school after that. We were used to partly empty back-to-school nights and the ghosts of parents who failed to sign the notes we dutifully sent home with their children. But in the early 1970s, teachers were not expected to reach into families'

lives. We could only try to teach our students before they moved on. Corporal punishment was still in use in the Texas school system; I had seen it at Longfellow. I could have spanked a hungry child or smacked his knuckles with a ruler, and the school would have been obligated to take my side.

There were some students we did help. At Longfellow, I had a pet.i.te girl who was constantly jumping up and down and trying to attract attention. Then we did the eye chart and found that she was just like me: partially blind. She was the way I would have been if I hadn't had gla.s.ses. I moved her to the front row, and the school nurse sent a note home saying that she needed gla.s.ses. Her mother refused to get them, but the nurse did not give up. Eventually, the child got gla.s.ses. And John F. Kennedy Elementary, despite the pressures of the neighborhood, was a well-run school. The faculty, white and AfricanAmerican, was dedicated; many had taught for years. But too often at other city schools, teachers were put in rooms with twenty or more students and simply told "good luck."

I've always been struck by how teachers were the last professionals to get phones on their desks, and how hard it has been for them to stay in contact with parents. Today, of course, they have e-mail and cell phones, but for years, parents and teachers in huge urban school districts coexisted in a perpetual state of mutual isolation.

Not all contact was good, however. Once a student's mother stormed into my cla.s.sroom and yelled at me over something she thought had happened to her son. The entire cla.s.s watched with their mouths hanging open. I was stunned, but Mrs. Gunnells, the princ.i.p.al, quickly came to my defense--she was very strict with the parents too. From the wild fourth grade, I moved to the second grade and had the younger brother of my dynamic duo, the little boy who had so loved sneaking in my cla.s.sroom door. I stayed with that cla.s.s for third grade, which meant more story time after lunch, but it also meant that every subject I was weak in, like math, my students were weak in too. They became very dependent on one adult, me. For much of their fourth-grade year, they told their new teacher, "We don't have to do that, because Miss Welch didn't say that we had to."

While I was figuring out how to be a teacher, I was also learning how to be a grown-up in Houston. I knew Houston from summer trips with Mother and Daddy. One of my college boyfriends had been from Houston, and even Regan's mom, Wanda, had moved there.

In our little apartment, Janet and I would host dinner parties and fix King Ranch chicken, a famous ca.s.serole of tortillas, cheese, chicken, and three different cans of soup.

Janet's mother had sent her off with the Abilene Junior League cookbook, and we thought it was a good cookbook, since most recipes called for several cans of creamed soup. We hosted our dinner parties, inviting our boyfriends and their friends, with everyone crammed onto our few pieces of furniture, eating from plates perched on their laps. We went to the Athens Bar & Grill, an old Greek place along the s.h.i.+p channel. At the other scarred tables were sailors from the far corners of the world; their s.h.i.+ps had docked in Houston. We drove to Austin for football games and headed west to Laredo, on the banks of the Rio Grande, one of the oldest border crossing points between the United States and Mexico. We went to bars to drink and restaurants for dinner, because there is only so much King Ranch chicken that anyone can eat. A couple of our friends had sailboats, and we would spend afternoons blowing about on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, traversing the foul-smelling, oil-covered Houston s.h.i.+p channel to sail. Another close

friend of mine from SMU had an old family beach house that we visited out on the barrier island of Galveston. It was built of weathered wood and sat up on stilts to give it a slim chance against the fierce hurricanes and blanketing tides that would periodically rip through.

In Houston, after my brief flirtation with working in a brokerage house, I dated a stockbroker while, one by one, my friends settled down. Regan, who had bounced from house to house and even from state to state during her growing up, was one of the first to say "I do," with Billy Gammon, who worked in his family's insurance business. Then Peggy married Ronnie Weiss, and Janet married Fred Heyne. Right after their wedding, Regan and Billy moved east, to New York, so he could train at a top insurance firm. In the fall of 1970, my stockbroker boyfriend invited me to New York, where he had meetings, and we went out to dinner with Regan and Billy. The next day, my boyfriend took Regan and me, in our fas.h.i.+onable miniskirted dresses, down to Wall Street. We walked onto one of the brokerage trading floors with him to get a glimpse of high finance. I saw a sea of desks and agitated men grabbing at ringing phones, until some guy yelled out, "Hey, who are the bimbos?"

We thought it was hilarious. Regan was a newlywed and newly pregnant. As for me, how many bimbos are able to moonlight as second-grade teachers and school librarians?

In Houston, I lived in the place for singles, the Chateaux Dijon, a sprawling, block-long apartment complex with several swimming pools and turrets rising on each side. With its sloping gray roof, it had pretensions of being a brown-brick Versailles. My suite was a revolving door of four roommates, including Jan Donnelly, one of my Midland friends, who moved home in 1972 to marry Joey O'Neill. One summer, I spent nearly every day at the pool reading the cla.s.sics of Russian literature, traveling through the frigid, snow-laden novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in the swampy heat of Houston, where by midmorning you could break a sweat simply by stepping outside.

Reading and books were my pa.s.sion, and I began to think seriously of enrolling in graduate school for library science. Also, as much as I loved Houston, I wanted a change.

Like my parents moving from house to house, I had uncovered a similar restlessness, from teaching to setting off for the East Coast, moving to Houston, working in a brokerage house, going back to the cla.s.sroom. I had so many options that I was seeking an anchor to ground myself. Here my married friends had it almost easier; they had already made their choices, and a quadrant of their lives was settled. I was determined to settle on a job, and I wanted to be surrounded by books.

I applied to the library science program at University of Texas and was accepted.

But before I left for Austin, I wanted to take two of my favorite students from Kennedy to AstroWorld, an amus.e.m.e.nt park near the baseball stadium. My boyfriend, Ralph, and I arrived on a Sat.u.r.day morning to pick them up. One of the boys was waiting, all dressed, with his sister; their mother obviously hoped that we couldn't resist an outing for the two of them. And we couldn't. We put both in the car and headed over to the other boy's house. He opened the door in his underwear and couldn't manage to get dressed while we were there. He was nine and going into fourth grade. We could hear his mother in the back of the house, but she never came to the door. I hugged him good-bye with an extra squeeze. There were many kids like him. The disarray of their parents' lives repeatedly

spilled over into their own.

Three decades later, in 2003, a couple of days before Christmas, the John F.

Kennedy Elementary School found me again. I was sitting in a television studio in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., with the then host of NBC's Meet the Press, Meet the Press, Tim Russert. We were Tim Russert. We were taping his Christmas show, and the other guest for the morning was Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the president. The red lights on the cameras were lit, and their giant eyes were swiveling just out of sight in the set when Tim announced, "In 1969 and the early 1970s, you taught at the John F. Kennedy School."

And I turned to Caroline Kennedy to say that I had once taught at a school named for her father.

My first apartment in Austin was a hand-me-down from my friend Bobbie Jo, who had come back to Texas after her year of self-imposed exile. She had left the world of department store retail to return to school to earn a graduate degree in education. Like me, she had spent that first year out of college teaching in Dallas.

The apartment was on the second floor of an old wood-frame house. I had to walk up a metal fire escape that groaned and clanged to reach it. Once when I stepped into a tiny storage s.p.a.ce under the eves, my leg sank through the cheap Sheetrock into the apartment below. Bobbie Jo left behind a kitten from her cat's litter. I named her Dewey, for the Dewey decimal system, a library staple. My home was now two rooms, a living room in front, a bedroom in the back, and a slim pa.s.s-through kitchen in between. I painted the cabinets cobalt blue. My painting jobs were never as good upon completion as they were in my imagination. My furnis.h.i.+ngs were secondhand pieces from junk shops.

The library school was located in the Harry Ransom Center on the UT campus, a treasure trove of rare ma.n.u.scripts from Shakespeare's First Folio to ma.n.u.scripts by the Bronte sisters and John Keats and the page proofs from James Joyce's Ulysses Ulysses. I was learning about the conservation of books in a place with some of the most beautiful pieces of literature in the world.

In January of 1973, the day after Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second term, Lyndon Johnson died in his bed at his ranch. His flag-draped coffin was brought to lie in state at the Johnson Presidential Library on the UT campus. I was one of thousands who lined up to file past the casket of "our Texas president." One of my library professors had wept that day in cla.s.s, saying, "President Johnson made it possible for me to get the money to go on to graduate school." Lady Bird Johnson and her daughters, Lynda and Luci, stood at the entrance, shaking hands with everyone who walked through that afternoon. I extended mine, never imagining that someday we would meet again.

After I got my degree, I returned to Houston. My plan was to work in a public library, which would have a far more extensive collection than a school. I envisioned working in the main, downtown branch, where I could help readers and researchers and where I might meet an eligible man on my lunch hour. I was offered a post in the Kashmere Gardens Neighborhood Library, in an African-American section of Houston, sandwiched between a rail line and an industrial building corridor. Instead of businessmen looking for mystery novels, I helped families find books, and as soon as school ended, we were overrun with children who had no place else safe to go; I was their de facto caregiver. I read stories and devised activities, and I began to visit the neighborhood elementary schools to lend them library books for their cla.s.srooms. When the library was quiet, I read. Inspired by my mother and Lady Bird Johnson's love of wildflowers, I devoured books about landscaping. I read every book in the library with advice about how to quit smoking, and I read stacks of literary cla.s.sics. One of my library colleagues invited me to join her women's consciousness-raising group, and I did. We talked about sisterhood and read still more books, including Sisterhood Is Powerful Sisterhood Is Powerful and and works by Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer.

But I missed Austin. I missed being able to gaze up at the edge of the Texas Hill Country, where at dusk the sun cast a violet crown around the rising land. I enjoyed Austin's small s.p.a.ce, its lake and trails. And I missed working in a school. In the summer, I quit my job in Houston and returned to Austin, to a tiny apartment in another old, converted house near the downtown, and began applying for jobs. Regan and Billy had also moved to Austin from New York, and Regan and I slipped back into the easy flow of friends.h.i.+p that had been the compa.s.s of our teenage lives. Indeed, I was in Regan's house, borrowing her iron to press my skirts and watching television on the afternoon when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.

Countless other afternoons, I would head to Regan and Billy's around five o'clock and watch as Regan cooked dinner; I really learned to cook in her kitchen. Billy often invited friends over, and we would eat and then I would head home. Other nights we wandered to Armadillo World Headquarters to hear country music or rock 'n' roll. Austin in those years billed itself as the anti-Nashville, showcasing music without the corporate side, and the Armadillo was the central symbol of its musical underground. Once, I took my parents to eat in the Armadillo's beer garden, where Daddy ran into Johnny Hackney's daughter, Mandy. The shocked look on her face told me that I was one of the few people to ever take their parents anywhere near the Armadillo World Headquarters.

I had a new job working in a library, this time as the school librarian for the Molly Dawson Elementary School, in a largely Hispanic neighborhood. Now my day was spent with children and books, and each cla.s.s was my much-loved story hour. For many small children, there is a fine line between reality and fantasy, and it's easy for them to cross back and forth, just as little boys trot off to face imaginary bad guys in their Superman capes. Books and their stories help children do just that. I wanted these children, like the ones at John F. Kennedy, to dream of possibilities beyond their web of city blocks and brick school walls.

Unlike other urban schools during that era, Dawson was lucky enough to have music, art, and physical education teachers, along with a librarian, and we were the only educators who had a chance to work with every student in the school. But we went a step beyond that. Dawson's music teacher came up with the idea of applying for a special grant to develop and teach an entire interdisciplinary curriculum based on the nation's bicentennial. We taught our students about American history not simply with textbooks and time lines but through the music, art, and literature of the Revolutionary period.

During gym, the students played Revolutionary-era games and learned colonial dances.

We used grant money to take the children on field trips to the historic sites of Laredo and San Antonio. Many of our kids had barely been out of the confines of greater Austin.

My life had found its routine: work in Austin, visits to Midland a few times a year. Although while at Kennedy I had spent the summer of 1971 taking a University of California course in England, living in Oxford, where I studied the schools in Bath and

Exeter and took quick jaunts out to the English countryside, now my summer vacations consisted of a week or two of visiting Mother and Daddy and trips around Texas to visit friends. I was back on the flat asphalt highway between Austin and Midland, bisecting the geography of Texas, the Big Empty, as it is often known. And I was thirty years old.

For at least a year, my friend Jan Donnelly's husband, Joey O'Neill, had been telling me that he wanted to introduce me to one of his friends. Jan had gone to Lee High School and had lived with me in Houston at the Chateaux Dijon. After spending a few years in San Francisco, Jan and Joey had come home to live in Midland. Joey was working in his dad's oil business, and his childhood friend George Bush was working as an oil landman, scouring county courthouse records for land that might be leased for drilling wells. Joey talked up George every time I stopped by to visit with Jan.

I was in no rush. I had a vague memory of George from the seventh grade, almost twenty years before. I knew that his dad had run for Senate and lost in 1970, when I first moved to Houston, and I a.s.sumed that George would be very interested in politics, while I was not.

It was late July, one of those high heat days when, come dusk, the sun had, as Willa Cather wrote, "left behind it a spent and exhausted world." I put on a blue sundress, drove the car around the corner, and walked up to the door of Jan and Joey's brown-brick town house. Even the roof was a cedar-shake brown. The cicadas were droning, and overlaying their vibrating wings was the steady whir of air conditioners to keep the baking-hot houses cool. Joey was at the grill. It was not some elaborate party; it was just the four of us--Jan, Joey, George, and me--sitting out back, eating hamburgers. We laughed and talked until it was nearly midnight. The next day, the phone rang. It was George saying, "Let's go play miniature golf." And so we did, with Jan and Joey tagging along as our chaperones.

The miniature golf course is one of the prettiest places in Midland. It was built among a veritable forest of old elm trees, which had grown tall and graceful even in the West Texas ground. We played golf under the stars and laughed again. Then I went back to Austin, and George started visiting on the weekends. Sometimes he would fly over on a Friday night, or he would drive, but he came every weekend, except for the very end of August, when he left for Maine to see his family. Bar Bush loves to tell the story that George spent exactly one day in Kennebunkport that summer. When he called my apartment, she says that "some guy answered, and he raced for a plane and flew right back down."

I returned to the library at Dawson and worked all through September. By the end of the month, George had asked me to marry him. We had been dating only six or seven weeks but our childhoods overlapped so completely and our worlds were so intertwined, it was as if we had known each other our whole lives. I loved how he made me laugh and his steadfastness. I knew in my heart that he was the one. I looked at him and said yes.

That Sunday night, when George arrived in Midland, he headed to Humble Avenue to speak to my parents. A week later, early on a Sunday morning, George and I drove to Houston for his niece Noelle's christening. Jeb and Columba Bush had a little house in Larchmont, a neighborhood just past the Chateaux Dijon. The senior Bushes and their good friends Susan and Jim Baker were already there. I said h.e.l.lo to the Bakers first, and then George took my hand and led me to meet his parents. He introduced me with the news that we were getting married.

After lunch at the Bushes' home, George's dad pulled out his pocket calendar and looked over each weekend that fall. In a few minutes, we had picked a wedding date: November 5, 1977, one day after my birthday, one day before the anniversary of the awful accident, and only about three weeks away. There was no time even to order printed wedding invitations. Mother wrote and addressed all of ours by hand.

I gave my two weeks' notice at Dawson and went wedding dress shopping with Regan in Austin. I had been in a number of large Texas weddings, where the brides wore long, white gowns and elaborate, lacy veils and had acres of bridesmaids. George and I wanted a very simple celebration. I bought my dress, an ivory silk skirt and blouse, at a store called Maharani's, where most of the clothing came from India or Afghanistan. I would carry a bouquet of gardenias and pin gardenias in my hair. We had no groomsmen or bridesmaids and invited only our immediate family and close friends, about seventyfive people, a very small wedding by Texas standards.

Far more nervous than either the bride or the groom were Jan and Joey O'Neill.

Joey and Jan had dated for years before they got married. Neither had dreamed that their invitation to dinner would lead us to the altar in a mere three months. And perhaps it wouldn't have if Joey had introduced us when we were growing up in Midland, or when George and I had lived on opposite sides of the sprawling Chateaux Dijon in Houston, or at almost any other moment prior to that night. But at that particular moment, on that warm summer night, both of us were hoping to find someone. We were not looking for someone to date but for someone with whom to share life, for the rest of our lives. We both wanted children. We were ready to build an enduring future.

Those were the facts of our lives when we went to dinner that night. It was the right timing for both of us.

Of course, not everyone in Midland agreed.

As I was packing to leave Austin, Regan and Billy were selling their house. A week before the wedding, the mother of a friend of mine from Midland came to see Regan and Billy's house. She was thinking of buying it for her daughter. She didn't recognize Regan, but Regan recognized her and said, "We're going to be in Midland next weekend. We're going to Laura and George's wedding." And without a second's hesitation, this woman said to Regan, "Yes, can you imagine? The most eligible bachelor in Midland marrying the old maid of Midland?"

Regan was speechless. But I thought it was funny. After all, I am four months less two days younger than George.

The movers loaded up my few things. After the last box was stowed, my cat, Dewey, and I began the drive that I had never quite imagined making, back to live in Midland. Right outside of San Angelo, I came upon a few scattered trees lining the edge of the road. Now, on the verge of November, the frost had already settled on the land, and their leaves had fallen and blown away. Trunks and branches stood dark and empty against the sky. Suddenly, from one naked tree, a great ma.s.s of winged birds lifted up, feathers pulsing, air swirling as they rose. I slowed and watched in silence as they beat their migratory way south, then glanced back at the unremarkable tree that had extended its branches for rest and refuge. The sight was like a beautiful wedding gift on the long road toward home.

We were married on a Sat.u.r.day morning at the First Methodist Church in

Midland, the church I had gone to all my childhood, where I was baptized as a baby, where I had learned to sing in the choir, and where my mother still went every Sunday.

Methodist weddings are brief, and ours was particularly so. There were no bridesmaids to add a few extra minutes as they walked down the aisle. It was perfect for the "old maid"

and the "eligible bachelor." The rehearsal dinner had been held the night before in the windowless bas.e.m.e.nt ballroom of the new Hilton Hotel. Bar and George Bush had hosted it, and the menu was chicken and rice. When dinner was served, my mother blanched. Our wedding reception was to be a post-ceremony luncheon at the Midland Racquet Club the next day, and Mother and the caterer had settled on chicken and rice.

Mother and Bar had never thought to compare menus. The next morning, Mother called the caterer at the crack of dawn to see if something could be changed, pasta instead of rice, anything. But the meal was already in motion, so our guests ate chicken and rice all over again.

The morning after my thirty-first birthday, I stepped into the chapel on my father's arm. George was waiting at the altar. The night before, when George stood to give his toast, he'd wept. George and his father are deeply sentimental men. In years to come, to others, the cool remove of television would frequently obscure the depth of their caring, how much and how deeply their own hearts open. George Herbert Walker Bush didn't even try to give a toast. Only Bar spoke.

That morning the stained-gla.s.s windows sparkled with light, casting pretty patterns over the simple wooden chapel pews. It was, I later learned, exactly thirty-one steps down the aisle and into the rest of my life.

We chose the beaches of Cozumel, Mexico, for our honeymoon. We drove from our wedding luncheon to Mother and Daddy's house to pick up my bags. On the driveway, we posed for our last round of wedding photos. Mother was our photographer, and she was so nervous and nearsighted that she would hold up the camera, think she had taken a picture, and then hold it down toward the driveway to advance the film. When they were developed, all of our honeymoon departure photos were shots of the driveway and the tips of Mother's dainty feet.

We arrived at the Midland airport for our flight to Houston, only to find the entire Bush family--parents, brothers, and sister--plus all our guests from Houston waiting for the same afternoon plane. It looked as if the Bush entourage was following us all the way to Mexico for our honeymoon. But they disembarked when the plane landed in Houston.

We went on to Mexico City and then the next morning to Cozumel, once a thriving Mayan enclave that for centuries was nearly deserted. Pirates sailed its waters, and Abraham Lincoln apparently toyed with the idea of purchasing it to serve as a home for freed slaves. In 1977, it was a quiet island resort. We rented a car and drove around the island, marveling at the ever-present iguanas, who clung to everything, including the bottoms of billboards. In the afternoons, we sat on the beach and drank margaritas. By about the third day, we were drinking Pepto-Bismol. The mid-November weather had turned, so we spent most of the rest of the time in bed--playing gin rummy. Thus did my marriage begin, with a deck of cards, playing a game that led my father to keep a couple of hundred dollars cash in his pocket in case he spotted one of his Midland friends ready to deal him in for a hand.

We returned home to George's new, single-story town house on Golf Course Road, a street named for Midland's first and now long-vanished golf course. George had furnished the house by trading oil leases with Charlie Knorr of Knorr's furniture. One lease had gotten him a brown leather couch. Otherwise, he hadn't done much; in his yard, a small forest of weeds had grown up as tall as the roofline. Indeed, George had hardly done his laundry at home. He used to go to Don and Susie Evans's home for dinner; Susie was Susie Marinis, my kindergarten friend and George's second-grade friend. As he ate, he would do his laundry in the big commercial machines on the first floor of their garden apartment complex.

But we were not destined to hang around home. A few months before George and I met, Representative Mahon had announced his retirement from Congress after fortyfour years in office. The seat was open, and George was trying to win it as a Republican.

Politics was in his blood. His grandfather had been a U.S. senator, and his father had lost twice running statewide for the U.S. Senate in Texas. But from 1967 to 1971, George H.

W. Bush had served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. Almost from the moment we arrived home, George and I hit the campaign trail, covering a big swath of West Texas.

We drove up and down the back roads and asphalt highways of the Texas panhandle, from Midland at the southern tip up to Plainview and Hereford in the north, with the New Mexican border running alongside. We spent nearly a year on the road, and in many ways the bonds of our marriage were cemented in the front seat of that Oldsmobile Cutla.s.s. When George and I met, it was as if two parallel lives suddenly converged. Our childhood memories, the places we had known, even many of our friends overlapped. We were like the last two pieces of a puzzle, our similarities and contradictions sized to fit. George was boisterous and loved to talk, while I've always been quieter. And George came from a big family. It was an unexpected answer to my childish wishes on all those stars. On my side, George got to be the only son-in-law. But these layers of connections and commonalities forged a deeper, richer bond. We never worried that any long-buried fact about the other person would appear and surprise us.

From the start, our marriage was built on a powerful foundation of trust. We had been cut, as it were, from the same solid Permian Basin stone. So we drove and we talked and we laughed and we dreamed in the front seat of George's Oldsmobile.

Campaigning in West Texas is an exercise in retail politics, shaking every hand, knocking on every door. Many mornings, we'd head off to small farm towns where a friend would host a coffee to meet the candidate and invite all of his or her neighbors.

We'd arrive, the coffeepots would be set out, along with plates of one hundred homebaked chocolate chip cookies. The morning would pa.s.s, and just three or four people in pickup trucks would drop by. George and I would smile and eat through the mounds of cookies as fast as we could.

The Nineteenth Congressional District was a traditionally Democratic district, even if its voters had chosen Republicans for president for the last twenty-five years.

Eisenhower and Nixon may have carried Midland, but Congressman Mahon was a Democrat, our governors and our state representatives were Democrats. Across the graphlike lines of its square-grid counties, the sheriffs, the county commissioners, the mayors, every local officeholder was a Democrat. Most people, including my parents, were registered Democrats, and the Democratic primary usually mattered more than the general election. As George H. W. Bush used to joke when he started the Republican Party in Midland in the 1950s, only three people voted in the Republican primary, Barbara Bush, himself, and a drunk Democrat who had wandered into the wrong side of the polling place.

George knew all of this. He has an amazing intuitive grasp of politics, not just the people aspect of it but the numbers, the vote totals that a candidate needed in each part of the district to win. He understood the science of politics in a way that was quite sophisticated for a candidate in 1978. But he had been working in politics for years.

Beyond his dad's races, he'd handled Gerald Ford's presidential run in Midland County in 1976, and he had worked for candidates in Florida and Alabama. From the start, George knew that the numbers were stacked against him, but he also knew that the Nineteenth was a conservative district with an open seat. The election could be very close. It was a "what the heck, why not" run for George. We both knew that we could just as easily live in a Midland ranch house for the rest of our lives as we could move to a Georgetown town house, the kind of place where I imagined that all bright young congressmen and senators resided.

But first we had to make it through the primary.

Because the district was large and spa.r.s.e, candidates went out to meet the people, and all five of the candidates, the two Democrats, Kent Hance and Morris Sheets, and the three Republicans--George, Jim Reece, and Joe Hickox--would cross paths almost every week. Most of the time it was at local forums, held on the lawns of the county courthouses, the same courthouses that teenage boys and girls would cruise past in endless circles on a Sat.u.r.day night.

It was in one of these towns, Levelland, Texas, where the land lay every bit as flat as the name, that I gave my first speech, a few months after George's famous pledge to me that I would never have to give a speech. Not ever. It was the only promise he made to me that he ever broke.

George couldn't be at this particular candidate forum, so I went in his place and sat in a folding chair with all the other candidates in front of the courthouse. A local official introduced me, and I got up to give my speech. I planted myself behind the podium, grateful for the heavy, thick wood because my legs were shaking. And then I looked up. Everyone in the audience and even the other candidates were nodding their heads, encouraging me the entire time. When I finished speaking, I wasn't particularly eager to do it again, but it also wasn't nearly as bad as I had antic.i.p.ated. In fact, it wasn't much different from reading a story to my students. People have an image of a librarian as someone who says, "Shh," but a children's librarian talks all the time and is constantly trying to engage students by reading and telling stories. Suddenly, all my old story hours had a very different use. Out on the campaign trail, I discovered that politics is really about people, and even though I was more reserved than George, I liked meeting the oilmen, the farmers, the moms, and the store owners. I wanted to be with them and listen to their stories.

During the long months before the primary, we got to know Kent Hance, the Democratic front-runner, who was funny and smart and understood in his bones that this was a rural district. Then George won his primary, and Kent won his. And the real hardnosed politicking began. Kent launched an ad that said, "In 1961, when Kent Hance graduated from Dimmitt High School in the Nineteenth Congressional District, his opponent, George W. Bush, was attending Andover Academy in Ma.s.sachusetts. In 1965, when Kent Hance graduated from Texas Tech, his opponent was at Yale University. And when Kent Hance graduated from the University of Texas Law School, his opponent--get this, folks--was attending Harvard. We don't need someone from the Northeast telling us what the problems are." Never mind that George had spent nearly half his life in Midland, he couldn't combat the ad. It was devastatingly effective.

On election night, George won 77 percent of the vote in Midland County. He also won Ector and Andrews, the two other oil-producing counties in the district, but he lost in the cotton-farming sections. George knew he'd lost the race when the Lubbock vote came in. He had not won enough votes in that county. Overall, he lost to Kent Hance by some 6,600 ballots, or about 6 percent of all the votes cast. We were sad but not particularly disappointed. Whatever plans we'd made in our minds, we'd simply have to make new ones. It's a bit, I suppose, like breaking up with a boyfriend. When you are together, you map out your future with that person in your life. When you separate, every plan for that future is changed. But George and I still had each other. We were living in a town where nearly every voter had voted for George, where our friends were, and where my parents lived.

George went back to being a landman in the oil business, going to an office every day, and I began to set up our new home. It was 1979, my thirty-fourth year, and I had no strollers or baby buggies to park in our garage. I was hoping now, with the campaign behind us, all that would change.

Our lives in Midland moved along at much the same pace as our parents' had; men worked, women largely stayed home, and there were dinners out on Friday nights and dinner parties on Sat.u.r.days with our circle of friends, Susie and Don Evans, Jan and Joey O'Neill, and Penny and L. E. Sawyer, who had gone to Andover with George and had come to Midland to work in the oil industry. There were times, at first, when I missed campaigning, the thrill of setting off, just the two of us. When George came home and dropped his wet towels on the furniture, I had to remind myself of how terrific he'd been when he gave speeches. I came to overlook the fact that he also wasn't a great handyman around the house. With his usual single-minded focus, George set out to build his small oil business. He had gone from trading land leases to starting an exploration company of his own. But to drill wells, he needed capital, so as much as we were at home in Midland, we were also traveling to other parts of Texas, to New York, even to Scotland, so George could line up investors. And in just a few months, we were back to politics. George Herbert Walker Bush was running for president.

This time, though, I was on the periphery. George left to do some surrogate speaking, but once Ronald Reagan wrapped up the nomination, we returned to our lives in Midland. We didn't even bother to go to Detroit for the Republican convention.

Instead, we were in New York. It was a weeknight, and George and I were having dinner with some investors at the "21" Club, waiting like everyone else for the official announcement that Ronald Reagan had selected former president Gerald Ford to be his vice president. Suddenly a couple of white-jacketed waiters muscled a television over to the corner where our group was sitting. The dial was turned to CBS. Correspondent Leslie Stahl reported that George H. W. Bush was Reagan's vice presidential pick.

George leapt up from the table to call his dad, and then we raced back to the hotel and left at the crack of dawn the next morning to fly to Detroit. There wasn't a hotel room to be found; we slept on a rollaway in one of George's brothers' rooms. And suddenly, we were

back on the campaign trail, this time stumping for Reagan and Bush.

Election night was November 4, my birthday, and we gathered in Houston. I went out to lunch with friends and then went to the Bushes' house on Indian Trail before the family drove to a big hotel ballroom for the results. Reagan-Bush won in a landslide.

Days before, many commentators had predicted a second term for Jimmy Carter.