That was the world in which my grandparents had been raised, the dab-smack, landlocked center of the country, a
place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the
potential for unblinking cruelty. They had grown up less than twenty miles away from each other-my grandmother in
Augusta, my grandfather in El Dorado, towns too small to warrant boldface on a road map-and the childhoods they
liked to recall for my benefit portrayed small-town, Depression-era America in all its innocent glory: Fourth of July
parades and the picture shows on the side of a barn; fireflies in a jar and the taste of vine-ripe tomatoes, sweet as
apples; dust storms and hailstorms and classrooms filled with farm boys who got sewn into their woolen underwear at
the beginning of winter and stank like pigs as the months wore on.
Even the trauma of bank failures and farm foreclosures seemed romantic when spun through the loom of my
grandparents' memories, a time when hardship, the great leveler that had brought people closer together, was shared by
all. So you had to listen carefully to recognize the subtle hierarchies and unspoken codes that had policed their early
lives, the distinctions of people who don't have a lot and live in the middle of nowhere. It had to do with something
called respectability-there were respectable people and not-so-respectable people-and although you didn't have to be
rich to be respectable, you sure had to work harder at it if you weren't.
Toot's family was respectable. Her father held a steady job all through the Depression, managing an oil lease for
Standard Oil. Her mother had taught normal school before the children were born. The family kept their house spotless
and ordered Great Books through the mail; they read the Bible but generally shunned the tent revival circuit, preferring
a straight-backed form of Methodism that valued reason over passion and temperance over both.
My grandfather's station was more troublesome. Nobody was sure why-the grandparents who had raised him and his
older brother weren't very well off, but they were decent, God-fearing Baptists, supporting themselves with work in the
oil rigs around Wichita. Somehow, though, Gramps had turned out a bit wild. Some of the neighbors pointed to his
mother's suicide: it was Stanley, after all, then only eight years old, who had found her body. Other, less charitable,
souls would simply shake their heads: The boy takes after his philandering father, they would opine, the undoubtable
cause of the mother's unfortunate demise.
Whatever the reason, Gramps's reputation was apparently well deserved. By the age of fifteen he'd been thrown out
of high school for punching the principal in the nose. For the next three years he lived off odd jobs, hopping rail cars to
Chicago, then California, then back again, dabbling in moonshine, cards, and women. As he liked to tell it, he knew his
way around Wichita, where both his and Toot's families had moved by that time, and Toot doesn't contradict him;
certainly, Toot's parents believed the stories that they'd heard about the young man and strongly disapproved of the
budding courtship. The first time Toot brought Gramps over to her house to meet the family, her father took one look at
my grandfather's black, slicked-back hair and his perpetual wise-guy grin and offered his unvarnished a****sment.
"He looks like a wop."
My grandmother didn't care. To her, a home economics major fresh out of high school and tired of respectability, my
grandfather must have cut a dashing figure. I sometimes imagine them in every American town in those years before
the war, him in baggy pants and a starched undershirt, brim hat c***ed back on his head, offering a cigarette to this
smart-talking girl with too much red lipstick and hair dyed blond and legs nice enough to model hosiery for the local
department store. He's telling her about the big cities, the endless highway, his imminent escape from the empty, dustridden
plains, where big plans mean a job as a bank manager and entertainment means an ice-cream soda and a Sunday
matinee, where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams so that you already know on the day that you're born
just where you'll die and who it is that'll bury you. He won't end up like that, my grandfather insists; he has dreams, he
has plans; he will infect my grandmother with the great peripatetic itch that had brought both their forebears across the
Atlantic and half of a continent so many years before.
place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the
potential for unblinking cruelty. They had grown up less than twenty miles away from each other-my grandmother in
Augusta, my grandfather in El Dorado, towns too small to warrant boldface on a road map-and the childhoods they
liked to recall for my benefit portrayed small-town, Depression-era America in all its innocent glory: Fourth of July
parades and the picture shows on the side of a barn; fireflies in a jar and the taste of vine-ripe tomatoes, sweet as
apples; dust storms and hailstorms and classrooms filled with farm boys who got sewn into their woolen underwear at
the beginning of winter and stank like pigs as the months wore on.
Even the trauma of bank failures and farm foreclosures seemed romantic when spun through the loom of my
grandparents' memories, a time when hardship, the great leveler that had brought people closer together, was shared by
all. So you had to listen carefully to recognize the subtle hierarchies and unspoken codes that had policed their early
lives, the distinctions of people who don't have a lot and live in the middle of nowhere. It had to do with something
called respectability-there were respectable people and not-so-respectable people-and although you didn't have to be
rich to be respectable, you sure had to work harder at it if you weren't.
Toot's family was respectable. Her father held a steady job all through the Depression, managing an oil lease for
Standard Oil. Her mother had taught normal school before the children were born. The family kept their house spotless
and ordered Great Books through the mail; they read the Bible but generally shunned the tent revival circuit, preferring
a straight-backed form of Methodism that valued reason over passion and temperance over both.
My grandfather's station was more troublesome. Nobody was sure why-the grandparents who had raised him and his
older brother weren't very well off, but they were decent, God-fearing Baptists, supporting themselves with work in the
oil rigs around Wichita. Somehow, though, Gramps had turned out a bit wild. Some of the neighbors pointed to his
mother's suicide: it was Stanley, after all, then only eight years old, who had found her body. Other, less charitable,
souls would simply shake their heads: The boy takes after his philandering father, they would opine, the undoubtable
cause of the mother's unfortunate demise.
Whatever the reason, Gramps's reputation was apparently well deserved. By the age of fifteen he'd been thrown out
of high school for punching the principal in the nose. For the next three years he lived off odd jobs, hopping rail cars to
Chicago, then California, then back again, dabbling in moonshine, cards, and women. As he liked to tell it, he knew his
way around Wichita, where both his and Toot's families had moved by that time, and Toot doesn't contradict him;
certainly, Toot's parents believed the stories that they'd heard about the young man and strongly disapproved of the
budding courtship. The first time Toot brought Gramps over to her house to meet the family, her father took one look at
my grandfather's black, slicked-back hair and his perpetual wise-guy grin and offered his unvarnished a****sment.
"He looks like a wop."
My grandmother didn't care. To her, a home economics major fresh out of high school and tired of respectability, my
grandfather must have cut a dashing figure. I sometimes imagine them in every American town in those years before
the war, him in baggy pants and a starched undershirt, brim hat c***ed back on his head, offering a cigarette to this
smart-talking girl with too much red lipstick and hair dyed blond and legs nice enough to model hosiery for the local
department store. He's telling her about the big cities, the endless highway, his imminent escape from the empty, dustridden
plains, where big plans mean a job as a bank manager and entertainment means an ice-cream soda and a Sunday
matinee, where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams so that you already know on the day that you're born
just where you'll die and who it is that'll bury you. He won't end up like that, my grandfather insists; he has dreams, he
has plans; he will infect my grandmother with the great peripatetic itch that had brought both their forebears across the
Atlantic and half of a continent so many years before.