Machine Dreams

and had a child to support—there was no one to help but me. At that time we still thought she’d recover, but I didn’t want her to be alone. I was twenty years old, almost an adult, and felt I should earn the money to support us, the money to get her whatever treatment she needed. And that’s what I was doing two years later, just barely, when I met your father.
    How did I meet him? I met him at a VFW dance. Veterans of Foreign Wars had fixed up an old house down near Main Street. There was a bar and jukebox and no furniture in the parlor so couples could dance on the hardwood floor. He was there with Marthella Barnett—she was wearing a purple sweater with cheap pink glass buttons down the front—and he left her and asked me to dance. I don’t remember who I was with; I was dating Bink Crane and Jimmie Darnell at the time. I was always going out with older fellas, but not as old as Mitch Hampson, and I was a little scared of him. What year was it? 1947. And he was thirty-eight, a man about town since the war was over. He was so much older that even though he’d gone to high school in town I’d never heard of him, and no one I knew had heard of him, except he was related to the Bonds who owned the hospital. He was wearing anice suit and drove his own car, and asked me to lunch. I said no; I didn’t have enough time, my lunch hour was too short.
    But we must have had lunch, because we certainly started going out. I remember him then as very patient, a perfect gentleman, none of the cussing and bad temper he was full of later. Of course it’s not hard to be a gentleman for a three-week courtship. Three weeks, and we were married! Drove to Oakland, Maryland, with a wedding party of eight people. I wore a white suit I’d bought on sale and altered, and a white broad-brimmed hat I’d done in pale blue net and sprays of silk honeysuckle. What little fool would marry a man after three weeks? I should have had my head examined. But it seemed the right thing at the time. Mother said from her bed, “What’s your hurry?”
    She and I had been through a lot those years she was sick. Mitch and I were married in June and she died in December. He really was good to her. Every evening he went down to the drugstore to get the paper, and he’d go into her room before he left, sit and talk to her about the weather or the news, ask if she wanted anything.
    She was bedfast about the time I started seeing him, and I guess I felt the ground going under me. We were alone in that big house, living mostly on my salary. I did office work for Maintenance at the State Road Commission; I balanced the payroll, answered phones.… I kept a telephone on her bed so she could call me if she got in trouble. The cancer had gone clear through her and her body just didn’t work. She was so afraid she’d offend people. She’d drag herself to the bathroom every day and wash herself out with a syringe. I kept a big bowl of gauze pads on the table right next to her, gauze cut to measure from long strips I bought at the hospital. She kept herself clean with them all day, and every night I washed them along with her sheets.
    Sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if she’d never gotten sick. I didn’t want her to die thinking I was alone. It seemed the least I could do for her, but really I suppose I was scared for myself. I had no idea what I would do without her.

    I’ll never forget the day she found it. One of those first warm days in early April, and a woman had come from Winfield to measure the couch for slipcovers. She’d spread material samples a yard wide, five yards long, all around the living room—a bright blue and a pale blue, a green floral, a beautiful off-white cream they called “oyster.” I was standing in the dining room doorway looking in at the colors. Mother came out of the bathroom and said she was spotting. She was fifty-one then, just past menopause. She said she would call Dr. Jonas just to be safe. The seamstress had opened a window and there was a smell of mown grass from across the street.… We chose the cream; it really was lovely, textured with raised threads and very rich. A little more expensive, but Mother said the material would make the room seem lighter, summer and winter—and later we could have the chairs done in a print, maybe the floral.
    Those slipcovers were the last thing but necessities we bought for three years, and the last housewares I bought until she was gone and the