The Hundred Story Home Page 2

  My dad never saw it coming. No one did.

  My parents’ old-fashioned love story began when they were college sweethearts and academic all-stars. My dad, John Leighton Green Jr., grew up in El Paso, where, in addition to being an all-state tennis player, he set a high school record for the highest GPA ever achieved. Dad did this while skipping two grades and finishing high school early at age sixteen. After graduation he traveled eight states away to attend Davidson College in North Carolina, where he eventually met my mom, who was attending Queens College thirty minutes away in Charlotte.

  My mom, Lindsay Louise Marshall, went to high school in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and was equally gifted. Mom was top of her class, an all-state violinist, and a talented painter. She chose Queens because she was promised to her high school boyfriend, and he had been accepted to nearby Davidson. They agreed going to universities in proximity would keep their love alive until their inevitable marriage. My mom’s parents disapproved of this boyfriend, so when the relationship ended her freshman year, Granddad said simply, “We’ve been praying for this for a long time.”

  She met my father during her sophomore year. Her friend arranged a blind date and they went to a movie in Charlotte. During this first date, my dad told her he was debating going into either the law or the ministry. My mom, who was rigidly religious and majoring in Christian education, told him flatly, “Anyone going into the law has no business being a minister.”

  Dad was not deterred by her opinion or by the fact that Mom seemed extremely uninterested in him. He arranged a second date and sent her a dozen red roses.

  “Do you know why I sent you the roses?” my dad asked.

  “Why?” my mom asked.

  “Because I love you!”

  “Well, I am not sure how I feel about you,” she said, but Dad didn’t give up.

  Growing up, I used to be teased by my sisters about making “a Dad face” when I was really concentrating. A wrinkling of the brow, a narrowing of the eyes, and a clenching of the teeth. I can imagine my father making this face in his dorm room at Davidson, trying to decide how he would get this soft southern beauty to love him.

  On Valentine’s Day they went on a special date, and Dad was prepared. This time, he brought his Bible along and read aloud to her from 1 Corinthians 13: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

  She thought it was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for her and that night told him, “I love you too.”

  They saw each other every weekend. One night, in a corner of the Davidson Kappa Sig house, Mom said, “You know I have no idea where El Paso is!”

  “Why don’t you marry me and then you won’t have to wonder?” Dad replied.

  That was how Mom found herself transferring to the University of Texas at El Paso in January of her junior year. My dad had graduated and was completing military service at Fort Bliss outside of El Paso. Mom would finish her degree in Texas and they would marry that summer. When they were packing her things in the dorm, Mom’s English professor had chided my dad, “Don’t you take her away from Queens until she graduates. She has one of the best minds I have ever seen.”

  Neither of them listened.

  They married on June 9, 1956, the day after my father’s birthday, because he said it was the best birthday present he could ever have. On their first anniversary and every anniversary and Valentine’s Day after, Dad sent her another dozen red roses, and they would read 1 Corinthians aloud to each other.

  Fully in love, Mom resolutely finished her studies at UTEP. During that drive to her new home 1,663 miles away from North Carolina, I am sure Mom thought hard about what she had done for love. The name El Paso refers to “The Pass in the Mountains,” and the city itself wraps around the soaring but treeless Franklin Mountains. Cacti and tumbleweeds are commonplace, and there are more signs in Spanish than in English in this border town.

  As foreign as El Paso looked to her, my mom never expressed regrets. My father was the answer to her prayers—the promise of a life filled with God, love, family, and service. She couldn’t have foreseen the turns her life with my father would take. Dad switched from divinity school to law school and worked long hours toward his partner track. Mom appeared unstoppable in creativity, motherhood, and civic responsibility. But that new home they had saved for years to buy would become the setting for a much different story.

  That year of my perfect cartoon party, 1969, would be the year my mother’s brilliant mind shattered for the first time—a blindsiding collision that left all of us with collateral damage.

  two

  DO GOOD. LOVE WELL.

  Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.

  —Pico Iyer1

  Both my father and my mother would tell you it was faith that allowed us to survive the crash.

  My parents were devoutly Christian, both from long lines of Presbyterian ministers and missionaries. My family went to church not just every Sunday but almost all day Sunday. There was Sunday school, then Big Church service, then afternoon youth group, and youth choir.

  Every week in Big Church we sat in the same family pew in the First Presbyterian Church of El Paso. There was no plaque or official designation, but everyone reserved it for us anyway. We usually sat in the same order too. First, Poppa, a respected doctor in El Paso for over fifty years. He had delivered babies and then those babies’ babies, all while serving at the church and on the local school board. He was so passionate about public education that an elementary school eventually would be named after him, and every child in that school would carry a card to remind them of Poppa’s famous motto:

  You are as good as anyone; you are better than no one.

  Nestled next to Poppa in the pew was Gigi, which stood for Grandmother Green. I adored her. She had enormous brown eyes set under a cloud of silver-blue hair. When she wrapped her arms around me, she would say my name with a playful twist: “Katarina, how are you?” And she truly wanted to know. Always. When she listened, she made me feel as though whatever I had to say was the most vital thought she had ever heard. In her presence, I always felt not merely loved but adored.

  We all knew why. Although she was one of five children, Gigi was much younger than her four older brothers. By the time she was five, both of her parents had died, leaving her an orphan whom none of her brothers could care for. Gigi went to live with Grace Walker, from whom I received my middle name.

  Grace lived on an estate where she worked as the caretaker of an unmarried heiress. While this was a luxurious setting to sleep in, Gigi grew up in this extravagant home where she was not quite family and not quite servant. She became part of a traveling entourage that moved every three months to catch the best climate in each of the heiress’s four estates across the United States and Canada. Gigi was constantly uprooted from school. She grew up with few friends and no sense of family, describing herself a “poor little rich girl.”

  As a result, Gigi treasured the family she created: two sons, two daughters-in-law, and five granddaughters. My cousins lived in San Antonio, so my sisters and I were the grandchildren Gigi spoiled weekly with sleepovers and long lunches. We would each get invited to her house for our own special dates, and Gigi would feed us her famous chocolate-mint sticks, a secret recipe she never shared, even when the Junior League wanted to put it in their cookbook.

  I would curl up next to Gigi on her nubby pink couch and rub my fingers on the raised squares in the upholstery as I talked to her. Gigi patiently listened to all I had to say. She would hold my hand and look at me with those round chocolate eyes that gave her, even in her eighties, a perpetual look of childlike wonder. And she was always wondering. Wondering about me, my sisters, and, really, everyone she met. She truly wanted to know about a person—where you came from, what your story was—because she knew everyone had a story worth telling.

  Next to Gigi and Poppa in the pew were my dad, mom, and
us three Green Girls. Mom made me sit next to her so she could pinch my leg to keep me still if I started squirming. It was hard not to squirm in church.

  Usually I kept my mind busy by staring up at the dark oak ceiling forty feet above my head and wondering how they changed the light bulbs. The timbers curved up in huge arcs on either side of a central beam, and it looked as if I were inside Noah’s Ark, which had been flipped upside down. Light bulbs were not supposed to be what I was pondering. I was supposed to be listening to the word of God. But I never felt like he was talking to me.

  I only behaved in Big Church because I knew the best part of the day, really the best part of my week, came after: lunch at Gigi’s. My grandparents’ home was tan brick on the outside with thick stucco walls and arched doorways on the inside. Stepping inside was like entering a sanctuary that smelled of roasted potatoes with browned butter. Gigi’s weekly offering of lamb, mint jelly, potatoes, green beans with almonds, and angel-food cake with caramel sauce was a feast for my soul. It fed me more than any sermon.

  Each Sunday we would gather for lunch at the dining room table while Poppa, who thought education was the most important thing a man or woman could have, always asked about our week, our lives, our future.

  “Kathy, what’s your favorite subject?”

  “Allyson, tell me about your poetry.”

  “Louise, what colleges are you thinking about?”

  Those Sunday lunches were not fast-food or drive-by affairs. We could easily be at the table for an hour and a half. And really, this was my Sunday school. Poppa discussing his work with the board of education, Gigi’s commitment to the Junior League, Dad’s service with the El Paso Cancer Treatment Center, and Mom’s work with the Girls Club.

  Mom used to take the three of us when she drove into south El Paso to do work with the Girls Club. To get there we had to drive along the interstate, I-10, which was bordered on one side by El Paso and on the other by Juarez, Mexico. The interstate ran alongside the Rio Grande River, the natural dividing line between the United States and Mexico. Translated from Spanish, Rio Grande means “big river,” but the place where the river washes into El Paso is not grand at all. In most parts of the city, the river is a muddy twenty-five-yard trench—yet this river plays God.

  Babies born on the northern side of the river go from hospitals to homes with electricity and indoor plumbing, luxuries unimaginable to babies born a mere fifty yards away on the other side of the river. Babies born on the southern side of the river live in shacks constructed of cardboard with dirt floors and lit by kerosene lanterns.

  Mothers on the wrong side of the river risked crossing the border to work as housekeepers in middle-class El Paso homes, where they could earn ten times the available wages in Juarez. This meant leaving their families and going home to visit only every few months—if at all. Fathers in Mexico waded thigh-deep in water each day so they could work in construction or landscaping in El Paso and provide some semblance of a decent life for their families.

  Growing up in El Paso, I experienced a sense of discomfort and even an inner shame because I lived on the “right” side of the river, born to the right parents and afforded the right opportunities. I also experienced a sense of helplessness about what happened on the “wrong” side of the river.

  I suspect my father felt the same way. Maybe that’s why my sisters and I weren’t just raised to be good; we were raised to do good. In the early 1970s, when daughters in the American South were still being raised with the primary goal of becoming wives and mothers, my parents, especially Dad, expected more. He raised us to change the world. His refrain to me was, “You can do anything, Kathy, really anything.”

  I cannot recall a single conversation with my father about marrying or having a family. We talked about college, career, and the ultimate goal—leaving the world a better place. Dad wholeheartedly believed each of us would do just that.

  It didn’t seem to matter to him that we were being raised a little off the grid in West Texas. Dad just accepted on faith that we would all leave El Paso someday to make an indelible mark on the world.

  While I may not have learned much in Big Church, I did take lessons from my childhood Sundays. I believed in two commandments. One from Dad: Do Good. The other from Gigi: Love Well.

  three

  NO CASSEROLES FOR CRAZY

  Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.

  —Frederick Buechner1

  That El Paso landscape so startlingly close to Mexico imprinted on me not just an unease of privilege, but also an unease of the desert.

  When there is no wind, deserts appear ancient, solid, immovable. But deserts are also deceiving. Unpredictable, remarkable natural phenomena occur there: mirages, flash floods, sandstorms—wicked sandstorms.

  Once, while I was in the first grade, my elementary school closed due to a particularly vicious sandstorm. Our mothers had been called to pick us up early, so we each waited in our classrooms several hundred yards from the parking lot. Our teachers formed a human chain to safety, bending in the violent winds while stretching long ropes in their hands. As our names were called, we left the comfort of our classrooms to clutch the one-inch-thick lines leading to the waiting cars. Along the way, we stopped to wipe our eyes, stung by the swirling sand.

  The morning had been clear with no warning that this drama would unfold. As I look back, what happened in my own home felt remarkably similar to this sudden, unanticipated storm.

  In the spring of 1969, three months after my perfect birthday, the first signs of trouble began to brew inside of my mother’s mind. She must have felt the winds stirring, and she tried to keep her world in order. Her first line of defense was the ever-present three-by-five notecards and four-color pen. As careful as a meteorologist tracking the currents, she would organize her thoughts into a logical order with perfect penmanship:

  Groceries

  Orange Juice

  Pepperidge Farm Bread

  Jolly Green Giant Green Beans with Almonds

  Chicken

  Carpool

  Tuesday—Jazz and Ballet, Louise, Allyson

  Wednesday—Piano, Allyson

  Thursday—Ballet, Kathy

  Cards

  Anniversary (Johnson)

  Birthday (Karen, Anne)

  Clear. Careful. She would make no mistakes. Her home, her daughters, her friends all needed tending. Dinner to be made. Carpools to track. Cards to send. There were always the cards. No matter how she was feeling, my mother was anchored in her Hallmark habit. Buying and sending greeting cards was a staple of her domesticity and a grounding force in her days. We girls had to make cards in the art studio, but my mother purchased all of hers from Hallmark. Each week she would faithfully mail greeting cards to mark birthdays, anniversaries, and major holidays for countless friends and relatives.

  My middle sister and I were in-house buddies and best friends. Allyson’s imagination was limitless, and we would be fairy princesses or magic pixies in kingdoms and faraway places.

  We kept our treasured collection of doll-sized evening gowns, daywear, swimsuits, and accessories in a small suitcase. We spent hours stretching the sparkling fabric over the impossibly perfect plastic figures, losing time in the magical land where our orange shag carpet in the downstairs den became a beach on faraway islands. One afternoon the sun we created from the den lamp burned a hole in Barbie’s skull because we left her basking against the bulb all day.

  Louise rarely played with us anymore, and on this day she was upstairs with her two best friends whispering secrets we couldn’t fathom. Louise was the exotic animal who lived in the bedroom next to mine but never spoke to me. She sprayed herself with Jungle Gardenia perfume and went on dates with handsome cowboys, and I desperately wanted to be exactly like her. Or at least have her notice me.

  Looking up from the wonder of Barbieland, I could see my mom outside in the backyard garden. The upside-down nest of her beauty-shopped
hair was just visible in the rosebushes as she moved intently through the leaves, oblivious to the thorns. Mom held clippers, but she seemed to have no clear purpose among the bushes. I could see her lips moving as she walked through the garden, so I stood up to see if she was discussing something with the neighbor.

  There was no one there.

  Allyson and I cracked the back door to listen to what my mother was saying. She moved earnestly from bloom to bloom, speaking only to her beloved roses.

  As we watched her, Mom at times appeared to see our faces, visible between the den curtains. But she looked through us with no apparent recognition.

  “We need to get Louise,” Allyson said.

  As we rushed up the den stairs toward the kitchen, we were confronted with other signs of disarray—an open can of frozen orange juice concentrate melting on the kitchen counter and dripping to the floor, old hatboxes taken down from the bedroom closet and left opened and abandoned. Mom was always meticulous in her housekeeping, but now the house was a tornado of confusion.

  We pounded on Louise’s door until she finally opened it a crack to peer at us with disdain.

  “What?!”

  “It’s Mom! Something’s not right,” Allyson cried. As she spoke she began to sob, and I stood behind clutching her arm, nodding.

  Louise rolled her eyes.

  “Really, Louise, you have to see!”

  Louise followed us down the hall, stomping heavily, but when she saw the floor of my parents’ bedroom strewn with orphaned hatboxes, Louise froze.

  “There’s more,” Allyson assured her.

  We hurried down the front stairs, pausing to observe the orange juice pooling on the linoleum.

  Perhaps the most obvious sign of Mom’s distress was the state of her desk, which took up part of the kitchen counter. The perfect script of her index cards was illegible and unintelligible:

  Store

  Lyrics songs

  Silver–hide

  Lucille Snoopy