This Last House: A Retirement Memoir

Chapter Two: All Those Way Stations

Chapter Two All ThoseWay Stations W hen I married Glenn—that’s what I’ll call him —I entered a life of perpetual moving. Partly, this was because of his enormous restlessness, but also it was just the way things were then. We were a mobile generation. But we were also a house-minded one. Trading up was the paradigm of the day. Our minds weren’t on being at home and making a life as much as they were on getting a better house—which meant a bigger, more expensive house. I don’t think we ever envisioned world peace as fervently as we envisioned separate dining rooms and wallpaper accents. If my count is correct, Glenn and I lived in eighteen different places in our twenty-four and three-quarters years together. Memories cluster around them all as I count through them, one by one—way stations along the trail of my struggle to become a person. The First Four Apartments Plus One After the wedding we went home to (#1) a garage apartment on Sycamore Street in Denton, near the campus of what was then North Texas State University. I was a freshman, Glenn a junior, and we had almost no money, so we had been relieved to find a place for forty dollars a month, furnished. I described it to Mother as “cute,” but it was actually pretty grim. Up tottery stairs over a garage behind the owner’s house, it was a faded, tattered, faintly grimy kind of place with window shades discolored to a crisp brown and peeling linoleum floors that billowed in windy weather. But even if it had been cute, I wouldn’t have known how to keep it. A pampered child who’d never done chores, how would I? My theory of taking out garbage was, ignore it and maybe it’ll go away. My theory of cooking was, open a recipe book and wait for magic. My dismay in the months we lived there was partly, then, at my own incompetence. But it was also at the kind of life I found myself living. Glenn’s temper blow-ups—yelling, name-calling, hostile body postures, clenched fists—began the first week. I knew I could probably get an annulment, considering my age, but it would have been so embarrassing to admit to parents, teachers, all those people who had sent wedding gifts, what a mistake I’d made. People had always seemed to think I knew what I was doing. What if they thought I didn’t have a clue? I couldn’t bear that. The next spring we moved to apartment #2, newly remodeled in a nice old two-story house. The rent was a little scary at sixty-five dollars, but this place really was cute—sleek and imaginative with tweed carpet and accent walls painted zingy colors and a sort of built-in dining table with bookshelf ends, neat as a pin. It also had a brand-new electric range and an air conditioner: my first experience of either. I don’t know if I ever again, in all the years of that marriage, felt quite so good about a place as I did this apartment. It distracted me from all the things I didn’t know how to handle. Also, it allowed me to retreat into my music. Mother and Dad bought me a piano— not the best thing for a young couple to have to move around, but very good for keeping me reminded of who I was. In January of 1958 Glenn graduated, and I dropped out of school. B.B.A. in hand, he took a job as manager trainee with Foley’s Department Store in downtown Houston, and we moved to (#3) a garden apartment in the Montrose section. Now a center of the arts community and gay life, Montrose was then just a tree-shaded neighborhood with stately older homes and a thick tree canopy. Only thing was, swarms of enormous roaches lived in those trees—a lesson, I suppose, in taking the bad with the good. 22 this last house I had vague thoughts of going back to college some day, but the goal right then was to make money and save up for a house, so I got an office job downtown. On Sundays we drove around and looked at houses. It was a common recreational pastime...