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C H APTER 1 8 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 Burning the Sofa My Sister Slept On AT THE END OF EACH SUMMER SPENT AT MARSHALL HALL, I CAME BACK HOME to Texas, resumed my role in the family, went back to school, and in all visible respects was not changed a hair in behavior or character. I was still what I was, and I knew where I properly and duly ranked in the social scheme of my life inside and outside of the high schooL No dramatic departures from the usual ever occurred. The changes made by my time in Maryland were not recognized by me then, for they were internal and hidden from the world and my consciousness. I still wanted to be like all those around me; I still was not. I knew I never would feel at home where I had never felt at home before. I talked to people in PolkCounry about what I'd seen and what I'd done. I bragged aboutdating Yankee girls, going to Washington, DC, seeing Ted Williams play baseball against the Washington Senators, and did all I could to present myselfas a seasoned and sophisticated traveler. I told about drinking beer and parking with girls in my cousin's English car. I wore to school the clothes and suede shoes I had bought in Maryland with money I had made while I lived in a JOO-yearold mansion. No one wanted to hear those stories, driving me by their indifference to spin greater and grander lies. Those I told the lies to and I myself knew that what really mattered was not what happened anywhere outside Livingston High Schcd and Polk CoW1ty, Texas. We knew where we lived, and we agteed without having to say a word about it that I was still the skinny boy who read all the time, couldn't play any kind of ball, and had no claim in the sexual hierarchy that ruled the day. I did my best, though, to convince all who would give me attention that I was one of them, and one incident illustrating the failure of that ongoing campaign came when in an eleventh-grade English class one day the teacher 80 BURNING THE SOFA MY SISTER SLEPT ON 81 asked all of us what we intended to do upon graduation in a year or so. When my tum came to testify, the teacher prefaced her question to me by saying, "I expect Gerald will be way up there in Maryland going to college when the time comes." I protested that vigorously, saying I would be a college student at Texas A&M, the dream of every male in that part of Texas in those days, and one which probably still lives today. My classmates hooted that down tllltil Mrs. Peace made them hush, and I shrank back behind my desk, knowing that I would never be able to go to A&M, much less any college outside the state of Texas. But a big change was coming, even as I listened to my classmates remind me ofwho I truly was, no marter how I lied about it. In 1956, late in the summer just after I returned home from another sentence in the Round Stand at Marshall Hall, my father found a job back in Nederland, the Eden from which we had fallen into East Texas those years before. We would leave the three-room house with no plumbing in the piney woods near Camp Ruby and the Baptist Church and Estoll Collins's COtllltry store, and we would do so without informing Carl Vinson, from whom we rented our home. But we would leave, we would leave, and I knew I'd be leaving for good and not come back. The physical distance between the Old South cotton culture of Polk County and the petro-chemical GulfCoast plain ofJefferson County is only a little over seventy miles, but the psychic change that my sister Nancy and I felt as we rode in the bed ofthe truck carrying all our worldly goods toward our once and future home in Nederland was immense. Our parents and our sister rode in the cab with the driver, and Nancy and I were so agreeably stunned to be leaving the smothering pine barrens of East Texas that we rode without a munnur of ptotest among the bedsteads and mattresses and boxes and chests of drawers open to the view of anyone who might want to see us. The sofa on...

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