Fragments III: Dottie remembers

(This fragment incorporates a few stories from the marriages of relatives of mine, altered a little bit. I also wanted to try to do a different "voice," that of an older woman. I am not sure how successful it is. Also, Dottie's story - especially of her early life - unfolded in a TOTALLY different way than I expected when I started writing, but I think it kind of fits with some of the things in the earlier part of the story)

They say that time heals wounds. I think that’s true, I don’t hurt as much as I did three years ago or even three months ago. It’s getting to the point where it is nice to remember things. Things about him.

We got married just after I graduated college and just before Jack started medical school. That seemed like the best way to do it. These days, I see a lot of kids who get married while they are still in school – kids who are nineteen or twenty, who have big student loans, who don’t really know what they want to do with their lives. And I want to say to them: wait. Give it some time. My daughter works in a registrar’s office at a big college down South and she says she sees it all the time: girls coming in one year to change their name to their new husband’s. Then the same girls back, some the very next year, to change their name back to their maiden name because they got divorced. It’s sad. I think part of it is that kids are pushed to be grown up so fast and all at once. And I think there are a lot of them who think that the first person they ever really date very much is the person they should get married to. I don’t know if it is because they think they are somehow obligated to this person. Or maybe – and this could be because it’s the South and kids are still pushed to be “good girls,” it’s because they don’t want to wait any longer to have sex.

I want to tell them: you can wait a little longer if you have to. Or you even really don’t have to wait, not these days, not with the pill and no more stigma really attached to condoms and things like that. Girls don’t have to worry about getting pregnant any more. Not like when I was dating – there were things you could do to protect yourself but a lot of them were pretty humiliating and sometimes, you couldn’t get them unless you could prove you were married. So what I would say to those girls today is: enjoy your freedom. Date a few more men. Wait until you know who you are. I dated around a little before I met Jack. I didn’t fool around though but then most boys didn’t really expect that, at least not until you had been dating a long time.

But after dating Jack I knew that he was the one. And we waited until after we were married for that other thing, too – I don’t really know how many girls did in those days, it was the 1950s and we didn’t really talk very much about those things. Or at least the way I was raised we didn’t really talk very much about those things. Maybe if we talked about those things more it would have been better. I don’t know.

After Jack and I got married, I started working as a secretary in a law firm to pay for our apartment and food while Jack went to medical school. I’ve heard a lot of stories since then about how women do that while their husband is in medical school or law school or something like that, and as soon as he gets his degree, he turns around and divorces her. I think that’s despicable but I also wonder if maybe it’s another symptom of people getting married too fast. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen to Jack and me and it didn’t. We stayed married all the way, until he died three and a half years ago. But I don’t like to think about that. I like to think about the way it was, especially at first, before the children came.

I was working as a secretary. I liked some parts of the job. Some things were important: you had to type well and you had to be able to take dictation and understand all the legal terms. I had done a business degree so it was a little bit different but not that much. And you had to talk to clients on the phone, sometimes. I was good at calming people down who were angry before I transferred their calls in to the lawyers. I was proud of that, that I could protect the lawyers from angry unreasonable people. And probably, I protected the clients too, because the lawyers might not have wanted to help them if they had been all worked up and rude.

But there were other parts of the job that were not so good. I had to go in very early in the morning, around 7:30, so I could make the coffee and water the plants and bring in the newspaper and make sure the office was clean and not dusty from the day before. I guess women working as a secretary today don’t have to do that kind of thing, but when I was working it was kind of expected.

I hated getting up that early in the morning. When I was in college I managed to work it so I never had a class before 9:30. But for my job, I had to get up at 6, and I hated it.

So Jack started doing something. Jack always could get up early, he was always good at it. In fact, once we had the children, they usually went to him when they had a bad dream or wet the bed early in the morning because it was so much easier for him to get up early and he wasn’t cranky with them the way I was sometimes.

Anyway, Jack started getting up early, before my alarm would go off, and he would wake me up a little early and have me start getting dressed. He would let me get dressed up to the point of having my stockings and my slip on, and then he would say, “Okay, Dottie, you can go back to bed for twenty minutes now.” He had woken me up early so I could have more time back in bed. The first time I was kind of angry with him for doing it but it sure felt good to get back into bed. Later on, I figured out that if I picked out my dress or my blouse and skirt the night before, and set them all out with the shoes and hat and purse and gloves I was going to wear, I could sometimes get an extra forty minutes of sleep and that was really nice.

Jack also took over making breakfast. I never said anything to him but I kind of didn’t like it when he made scrambled eggs, because he never mixed them quite as much as I did and sometimes there were rubbery pieces of cooked white and streaks of unmixed yolks in them. But like I said, I never said anything to him because he was going to the trouble to make breakfast for me. Some of my friends say they would have complained if they had been me, but I kind of thing that when someone does something for you, and they’re being nice, but it’s not quite perfect, you shouldn’t say anything because they took that trouble.

And anyway, with his help I was able to get a little bit more sleep first thing in the morning and that was good.

I usually got home before Jack in the afternoon because of his classes. I would start dinner. I usually made something like stew that would hold over well because sometimes Jack had to stay late. A lot of the time I knew in advance – he was good about telling me. And sometimes he phoned if something came up, if he could get to a phone. It was really bad when he was a resident. It was worse than when he was a student. I don’t think it’s really fair the way they treat residents; it’s almost like they don’t want them to have families.

But Jack and I made it through his time in medical school and through his residency. We argued sometimes but I think all husbands and wives do and I think it’s more healthy to let it out and then forgive the other person than it is to keep it in and keep thinking about it. Sometimes Jack would get very angry and say, “I need to go for a walk” and he would walk out of the apartment. But he always came back within fifteen minutes and he was usually in a better mood.

I remember one time we were arguing. I think it was about money; it was usually about money in those days because we were trying to live on my salary and whatever Jack could save up over summers when he worked at his parents’ hotel. But anyway, Jack took a deep breath and said to me, “I’m too angry right now, I need to go for a walk.” And he left. But when he came back he had a bouquet of flowers and he told me he was sorry he was being such a bear and that he was just too tired from his classes.

Now that I think about it, it was funny that he bought flowers when I think he was the one arguing against spending more money in the first place. But the flowers did make me feel a lot better.

Later on things got better when Jack got his M.D. and got into a practice with other doctors. There was more money then and we stopped arguing about it. Jack was still a “bear” sometimes, like he said, when he was tired, but I knew that when he got angry it wasn’t really at me. And he never really said anything too bad to me. And he never hit me. If he had, I would have gone to stay at my sister’s, at least for a while. I think he knew that but I also think Jack was the kind of man who would never hit another person just because he was angry.

Jack changed when the children started coming. He asked the other doctors he worked with for fewer evening hours and he sometimes started telling them “no” when they wanted him to take Saturday hours. That was probably risky because Jack was the new doctor, but I think the other two understood. One was a bachelor and the other was an older man whose children were almost all grown up. So I think they let Jack have the time with his family even though they could have told him “no.” And I am grateful to them for that.

Jack was a good father. He liked children and he knew how to talk to them. I didn’t always know how to talk to them or play with them. I sometimes think all that talk of women having more of an instinct for how to be a parent is not true. I know Jack was a better father than I was a mother. I wasn’t always very patient with the children.

Some of the best times were when we all took a vacation. Jack would plan out a trip somewhere, call up the motels and get us places to stay, plan out a route, and pile us all into the car. Sometimes he didn’t even tell us where we were going and we would spend a lot of time laughing and guessing and coming up with silly things that he might be taking us to see.

We went to a lot of zoos and a lot of museums and things like that. There weren’t as many amusement parks around as there are now and I don’t think Jack liked them anyway, he said some of them were “deathtraps” and you didn’t know which ones were safe. But the zoos were fun and it was really fun when we went camping. Jack took care of everything, even getting the food, and I kind of got to be like another one of the children. I didn’t have to do anything! Those times were a lot better than any gift he could have given me. They were better than the flowers he brought home or the jewelry or a new car or a fur coat or anything.

You see, one thing that Jack knew about me was that I really hadn’t ever been able to be a child. Maybe when I was really little but I don’t remember that. But my mother and father died when I was six and my little brother and sister and I traveled between different relatives. For a while it was like no one really wanted us. Finally we wound up living with an aunt and an uncle who had a farm, but they really didn’t take that much care of us. I kind of had to be the mother to my little brother and sister. I knew how to change diapers when I was barely out of them myself. I had to stay out of school sometimes when they were sick even if I wasn’t because my aunt didn’t want to take care of them and she said my uncle was too busy with the farm.

And we never went on vacations anywhere, not even camping. And camping doesn’t cost very much money. I know.

I guess I didn’t have a very happy life growing up but I don’t like to think about that. I like to think about how when I was a teenager a family at my church saw my name in the paper for the honor roll at school and they told me I must be smart because I did well in school “despite everything.” And they had a lot of money, I guess, and they only had the one son, and he was in the Army. So they asked me if I wanted to go to college and I said yes. By that time my brother and sister were old enough to take care of themselves. In fact my brother was doing a lot of things on the farm, more I think even than my uncle.

But anyway, Mr. and Mrs. Henderson said they would pay for me to go to college and get a degree if I wanted it. I guess a lot of the girls at school were either jealous of me or didn’t understand because they made fun of me for that or they asked me if I thought I was too good to marry one of the boys in town. I wanted to tell them that I was through taking care of people, and it seemed like that would be what the rest of my life would be like if I married one of the boys in town – he would work in the coal mines or on a farm like almost everyone else, and he would expect me to do everything around the house, and he would expect us to have lots of children. And at that point I wasn’t ready for that. I had already had experience with being like a mother and I wasn’t sure I wanted it again.

But later on, after Jack and I had been married for a while, I decided I wanted it again, and we had Susan and then Thomas and finally Matt. And Jack helped me raise them all and he was a good father. And even though he was busy he didn’t expect everything to be perfect. He wasn’t one of those men who came home at six and picked up his newspaper and griped if dinner wasn’t on the table by 6:30. He would come into the kitchen and talk with me while I cooked and he would cut up things. We used to joke about him being a surgeon when he cut up the carrots and things.

The first part of my life was hard in a lot of ways, but Jack made things better. The first eighteen years of my life were not very good but the last fifty – up until the day he died- were. And I am thankful for every day I had with Jack. I just wish I had had more. I wish that he had gone to the doctor when he first started having pains in his chest. Maybe they could have done something. But I guess they say that doctors make the worst patients. And anyway, if he had lived, he probably wouldn’t have been able to do much, and Jack would have hated it. At least he had enough time after the heart attack for me to say good bye to him, and for Susan and Matt too. Thomas lived too far away and his wife was in labor when it happened. I know he’s sad about that – I mean not being able to say good bye to his dad – but that is the way life is sometimes. I didn’t get to say good bye to my mother and father.

It’s funny. Right after Jack died I couldn’t bear to think of him. I couldn’t stand the fact that I wouldn’t come home and find him sitting there, or hear the door open and hear him call out a hello to me. And I couldn’t stand the fact that that would never happen again. But now that time has passed I realize that I had fifty years with him and that I had an awful lot of good times in those fifty years. Probably more good times than most people get in their whole life. So now when I think of him I am happy.