Chapter 3: Overcoming Life's Catastrophes

Brian’s birthday was in October. The cutoff for starting school was September 15, so he spent another year in kindergarten. I tried to negotiate getting him admitted to first grade, but with his small size and somewhat sickly demeanor, the school wouldn’t budge. Even among children that were all younger than he was, he was the smallest in his kindergarten class. I worried about his socialization. For as small as he was, he was far more mature than his classmates and spent nearly all his time reading.

It was no better at home.

“Aaaah! Mommy!” I rushed into the kitchen to find my eldest with a bloody nose. “Ja-Ja-Jessica hit me!”

Oh dear. I thought for once we were going to have a peaceful spring. Drew was finishing first grade, Jessica was finishing second grade, and Betts was finishing fourth grade. At long last, Brian was going to get out of kindergarten. Unfortunately, I knew there was more to the story than Betts was giving me. Our sweet little next-door neighbor girl simply did not go around hitting people. She was the girly-girl of the neighborhood and in second grade already knew more about applying makeup than I did. Getting into a fist fight was not likely. Still, I resisted the urge to ask my daughter what she’d done to deserve getting hit. After she was cleaned up and the bleeding stopped, I took her back outside to investigate the crime.

Jessica was helping Brian learn to ride his bicycle. He was still so small that we’d only just found a bicycle this spring that we could adjust low enough for him. He flat-out refused to ride his trike any longer.

“Jessica? Did you hit Betts?” Jessica stopped Brian’s bicycle and made sure he had his feet on the ground before she turned to face us. She ignored me and ignored my question. Instead, she marched straight up to Betts, who cowered beside me.

“You push Brian off his bicycle again, I’ll bloody both your noses!” she screamed. Then she spun around to face her brother who’d just about made it to Brian with a look of mischief in his eyes. “That goes for you, too, brat!” she yelled. “I’ll make you cry.” Drew stopped and became intensely interested in a stick he found on the ground. Waving it around he ran off whooping and pretending to shoot.

I walked over to where my son was still straddling the bike frame standing on his tiptoes so he wouldn’t crush himself on the crossbar. I looked at his torn slacks and scraped knee.

“Why didn’t you come in the house when you got hurt?” I asked.

“Um ... Betts got hurt.” He said that as if it explained everything. I suppose it did.

“Jessica, I appreciate you trying to protect Brian, but don’t you think we might find some ways that don’t involve hitting each other?” I asked. Jessica scowled at Betts. I’m not sure what she was going to say because Brian came up to us right then.

“Is your hurt better, Betsy?” he asked. She nodded and then hugged him. She was a full head taller than her brother but she permitted the familiarity. Brian turned around and ran back to his bicycle, followed by Jessica. He mounted up while she steadied the bike and he started pedaling with her running along beside him.

“Yuck! Boy cooties!” Betts growled. She stomped off toward the barn calling for Silk.

Let me see. Betts is three-and-a-half years older than Brian. I can’t get rid of either one until they are eighteen. That means I’ll have been a parent for twenty-one years before they’re both out of the house. That is not nearly enough time for me to learn how to raise children.

The summer was shit from hell. Excuse my French.

We were in a new world. Hayden got up each morning and went to work at the electronic components factory in South Bend. God knows we needed the factory. We all thought it would close by the end of the Vietnam War when the aviation parts they manufactured were no longer needed. The Studebaker plant closed three years before we graduated from high school. Ball Band had been purchased and the Mishawaka Woolen Mills name had already been dropped. We weren’t sure how our other industries would survive. Our whole area had been in depression for ten years. Classmates had found it difficult to get work and moved to Elkhart, Chicago, and Fort Wayne. We’d been insulated for the most part. Hayden had worked on the farm. His father shared the profit with him. I could do my part-time work as a church secretary even with a baby. Our social lives revolved around each other, our parents, the Barnes family, and the church. Those were all the people we ever saw.

I guess I didn’t realize how much losing his mother, stopping work on the farm, and going to work in a factory affected Hayden. I was so wrapped up in refereeing between our children that I didn’t take note of his problems. It just seemed that no matter how much overtime he put in, we were still behind on the bills. As much as I’d revitalized our sex life with my realization of how much he loved me two years ago, I was thirty-one years old and knew I wasn’t the pretty teen he fell in love with. I was always tired and I guess I complained a lot.

No guessing about it. I was becoming every bit as much a bitch as my daughter.

It was late at night—for us. Probably ten o’clock. In the summer, the kids stayed up until nightfall and we collapsed soon after. Hayden had to be at work by seven. I was nearly asleep when he spoke, nudging me awake.

“Marilyn, we need to talk.”

“Not now, Hayden, I’m too tired. I promise we can have sex tomorrow night.” I guess that had become a pretty standard response to his overtures over the past year. The truth was that I was ashamed of my body. I wasn’t exactly fat, but two babies had left my stomach soft and puffed out. My breasts were still okay because I never breastfed a baby, but they were beginning to soften and sag as well. I was too tired to shave my legs and armpits regularly. My hair hadn’t been professionally done in a year. I couldn’t see how Hayden could possibly find me desirable. It was easier to push him away.

“I had an affair, Marilyn.”

I lay there suddenly awake but unmoving. My husband? The only man I’d ever kissed? The father of my children? Rutting with some faceless bimbo when I thought he was working?

I couldn’t breathe.

I wanted to sob and scream and run and hide. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I gasped for air.

“I ended it, Marilyn. I never thought it could ever happen to me—to us. I swear it’s over. But we’ve been so ... far apart. I never should have quit the farm and gone to the factory. I’m ... I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry!” I exploded. “We took wedding vows! I gave you everything. And you’re sorry? What did you do? Accidentally run into her on the assembly line and decide to put some parts together? How could you do this to me?”

I rolled out of the bed and grabbed my pillow. I went to the sofa in the living room and then went back to grab the sheet off the bed to wrap up in, leaving Hayden in his pajama bottoms uncovered on the bed. His hairy chest was heaving with sobs. It’s funny how the thing I noticed at that moment was that he had more hair on his chest than on the top of his head. I curled up in a ball on the sofa with the sheet pulled over my head and cried the rest of the night.

I considered taking the children and moving across Mosquito Road to my parents’ house. But I was too ashamed to tell anyone that I wasn’t a good enough wife to keep my husband at home.

He got up in the morning and went to work. He was home promptly after work. It went on like that for several days with neither of us saying more than “Here’s your lunch bag,” or “How were the kids today?”

Summer hours at the church were cut to Saturday mornings when I typed up the bulletin and ran it on the mimeograph. Once a month, I typed the stencil for the newsletter, ran it off, and mailed it. It was simply one day after another. An existence that I survived.

We were old. I was old. I wasn’t a young pretty girl any longer, so it made sense in my screwed-up brain that Hayden would want someone younger. Prettier. More willing. Someone who didn’t push him away every time he reached out to her.