Mil & Steve
How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm
After they’ve seen Paree?
How ya gonna keep ‘em away from Broadway
Jazzin’ around and paintin’ the town?
Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis
.
Which came first, my mother’s rejection of me or mine of her?
I have a snapshot in my head of Stevie sitting on a tiny suitcase. When my brother was a baby, Mildred told the story this way:
“I was on my way to the hospital to deliver Ricky,” she would say, “and we had Stevie all dressed up and in his little cap with his little suitcase packed and all ready to go to Ray and Alma’s. He just sat himself down on his suitcase and refused to budge.
“I told him, ‘Come on, Stevie. Mom has to go to the hospital to bring you back a little baby. You get to spend the night with Phil,’ and he just sat there and folded his little arms and shouted ‘No! ’ ”
But there is no photograph in any of the family albums of Stevie in his little cap sitting on his little suitcase. There are vaguely contemporary photos of me in my cap (men wore hats in 1950, and boys wore caps), but nothing with a suitcase like my memory snapshot. I must have constructed the shot mentally after hearing the story too many times when I was quite young.
Later, she would say, “Rick was always the cuddliest little thing. He would sit in my lap for hours and never fuss. But Steve was always the wiggle-worm. He didn’t want to be hugged and loved. He liked me to read to him, but he never wanted a lap. He always just wanted to get down.”
*
So who did reject whom first? And why?
My Hypothesis Number One holds that I was a problem child from the moment of birth. Like Oedipus, the Greek fellow who, had he been born in 1947, would have become a biker type with a tattoo on his arm reading “Born to Kill Dad.” Or the puppy in every litter nicknamed “Killer.” The differences between Rick and me were too great to attribute wholly to birth order or environmental influences. Rick was always Rick from my earliest memories, as was Steve always Steve.
We still are.
Rick is still the family man and I am still the…the what? Not the anti-family man, certainly, for Marianne and Kristi have taught me much about family. The cynic? Maybe: the guy who has to think about whether he will let you into his heart and make a conscious decision to do so.
I think I would prefer to be Rick.
*
Hypothesis Number Two says little Stevie felt rejected when the new baby came along. In reaction, he rejected Mom, who, then feeling rejected herself, pinned all her love and hopes on the new baby, making Stevie feel even more rejected and round and round they went.
Number Two would probably be the more accepted theory in psychological circles, but I find it less likely. There is something there that is deeper than that.
Hypothesis Number Three: What if Rick were not really Dwain’s son?
Eureka! Or maybe, “Duh,” as the case may be. All is now clear. Number Three explains everything better than One or Two, while being simpler in the bargain. Occam’s Razor dictates that when multiple explanations are available for a phenomenon, the simplest version is preferred.
What if there had been a brief, doomed affair straight out of Hollywood with Mildred in a flowing dress blowing gently in the breeze and Him with black tie and cigarette nobly helping her into the taxi to go back to her husband and child – neither of them yet knowing that she was pregnant (or better still, perhaps He never would) – while Rachmaninoff played in the background?
This is the way Mildred would have romanticized it, even if the flowing dress were homemade from flour sack material, the black tie a pair of overalls or a seersucker suit and the nobility more a fear of social stigma. She was, after all, the one who wrote to Dwain during one of their first separations that “I sort of felt about you like I suppose a lot of girls feel about their favorite movie stars.”
Couldn’t she have been equally carried away with romantic fantasy for another man after learning the hard way that her Clark Gable/Randolph Scott/Alan Ladd husband was really Peter Lorre or Sydney Greenstreet?
What if Steve always reminded Mildred of the man who hurt her most, and Rick of the man she “loved” but couldn’t have?
Why do I look so much like Dwain and Rick doesn’t?
Except that it evidently didn’t happen.
A hypothesis has to be tested and re-tested against all observable facts before it can be promoted to the status of “theory.” Counselor Mark, who first suggested the possibility, looked over my family photo albums and decided he’d been wrong. Rick, he said, bears a strong family resemblance to the Dimicks, although I still don’t see it.
Not satisfied, I decided to go to the source. “I have to ask you something, Mil, and I really need to know the truth. Is Dwain really Rick’s father?”
Mildred was fairly gone with dementia. She may not have remembered what happened twenty minutes – or twenty years – ago, but she seemed unable to dissemble any more. Her world was a fantasy world and if the mystery man with tux and cigarette were part of that world, I believed she would tell me.
“Steve, how can you say that? Do you really believe I was having sex with someone else while I was married to your father?”
So Hypothesis Number Three failed every test.
But still.
It would have made a damned fine theory.
*
So Hypothesis Number Three is out and I revert to Number One. Just don’t call me “Killer.”
*
Mildred, Steve, Rick, 1951
“I think I always knew that I was the ‘favored child,’” Rick told me during the week of our stepfather, Bob’s, funeral. “I never knew why, but I knew.”
The subject had been raised earlier by Rick’s mother-in-law, Rhette – Fleurette, that is, a lady of good French stock who had married a Western Oklahoma dentist and raised two daughters on a farm in Shattuck, Oklahoma. Like Mildred’s memories of Prairie City, Shattuck will always be home and heaven for the Miller girls.
Bob had been in and out of the hospital for weeks, the positive prognoses (“we just have to tune up his pacemaker and he’ll be fine”), alternating almost daily with the negative ones.
Our telephone rang about 10 p.m. It was Rick: “Well…this is the call. Bob died about an hour ago.”
“Oh, shit. My calendar’s so jammed there’s no way I can go back there now,” I started, before noticing Marianne’s gestures in the background. “I’ll call you back.” Five minutes later, I was on the phone again. “We’ll be there day after tomorrow. I’ll call you when we get in.”
*
It had long fallen on Rick to look after Mil and Bob. He was happy to do it (up to a point, I’m sure), they were happy to have him and I was happy to let him.
Rick tried to include them in his family as much as possible. The four of them (and then the five and then the six of them) took short vacations together despite Mildred’s constant sotto voce complaining about how “strange” Susan was.
(“If we stop at a filling station to use the restroom? Susie always thinks she has to buy something to make up for it. Now, isn’t that the silliest thing? Those restrooms are for the public.”)
(“Don’t take it personally if she doesn’t even acknowledge you,” Susan warned Marianne the week of the funeral. “She’s never liked me.”)
As the folks got older, family road trips became less and less frequent, until they were abandoned altogether. But family gatherings continued on a major scale at every holiday and, on a lesser scale, weekly. Rick and “the boys” took the folks out for lunch nearly every Saturday. Mildred insisted on going to the same restaurant every week, and she and Bob ordered the same meal each time.
My poor nephews learned some of their etiquette from these get-togethers. If adults can demand the same thing at every meal, then it must be acceptable. There is, after all, little difference between “I’ll have the Number Three, but with only one waffle, margarine and strawberries” at every meal and “Chicken nuggets and a Coke” at every meal.
I never heard Mildred say anything derogatory about Grandpa Tom, Susan’s dad, but she was insanely jealous of Grandma Rhette. I heard about it on the telephone almost every holiday.
“Well! I just don’t feel like we belong there. Everybody dotes on Rhette and waits on Rhette and she’s the center of attention, and nobody pays any attention to me. I asked Bob to take me home early.”
*
In an inverse repetition of her feelings about her sons, Mildred also had a strong preference between her grandsons, while refusing to admit it or recognize it. Ask her and she would gush, “Oh, I just love those little boys! Rick has done such a fine job of raising them. They’re so well-mannered, and they love their little old gray-haired grandma.”
But I heard few details about Cabot, the youngest, from Mil. It was Carson, the oldest, to whom she wrote the poems and about whom she bragged.
“Rick brought the boys over, and they sure are cute. Carson is getting all A’s in school and will be playing football this year. Carson told me… Carson was so… Carson said… Carson will sit and play a board game with me, but Cabot is just so…fidgety.
“And Cabot wants to be just like his big brother!”
*
But week after week and holiday after holiday, Rick persisted. After Bob died and Mildred was moved into assisted living, he kept faithfully to his Saturday visits, sometimes with the “little boys” and sometimes without, and without regard to his knowledge that an hour later she wouldn’t remember whether or not he had been there.
My brother was – is – a saint.
*
I had moved half a continent away and had no interest in returning to Oklahoma until, on a whim, I decided to return seventeen years later for my 25th high school reunion.
Even then, things hadn’t gone all that smoothly. For seventeen years, Mil had begged me at least twice yearly to come back to Oklahoma “to see your sweet old gray-haired mother,” – even offering to pay for the plane tickets – and I had continually put her off. When I did decide to go back, I assumed she would be insulted if I didn’t stay at her house so that was what I planned.
Mil agreed, sounding thrilled, but less than a week later was back on the telephone. “Uh…Rick and I have been talking, and we’ve decided you’re going to stay with him. I’m having bridge on Wednesday night, and I just don’t think it will work out.”
Inconvenient.
I booked a hotel room the next day, which had been my preference in the first place.
*
What I found back in Midwest City was a Bob I hadn’t known before. Rick and Susan had only one son at the time, and another one on the way. Two-year-old Carson was a terror, but he loved his “Papa.” And Papa evidently loved him just as much.
The kid played a round of golf in the living room, throwing a golf ball around to watch it bounce – nobody stopping him – while Marianne and I envisioned windows and china cabinets and lamps and vases being shattered. Then it was “horsey” time: time for Papa to take Carson into the back yard, play the ancient “horsey” game, and be pulled around the yard in the special wagon.
This was definitely not the Bob I remembered.
*
First, however, we had to sit through a family meal: something involving watery boiled ham, white bread, artificial mayonnaise, margarine, vegetables boiled until practically puree, with no hint of flavor left…and Jello.
Southern cooking is based on English cooking, which means it is barely edible. What a Southern cook can do to a vegetable is considered a Class A misdemeanor in many countries. In France it is probably a low-level felony.
The Southern states annually consume approximately five gallons of ketchup per capita, the ketchup lubricant being necessary to allow the esophagus to accept what the cook has managed to do to the steak.
But even by Southern standards, Mil had always been a bad cook. I pushed the food around on my plate, pretending not to be hungry and remembering my pledge of years before.
When I left Mildred’s house to go to college, I clenched my fist, shook it at the heavens and made a solemn vow: “Life is too short! I will NEVER AGAIN eat Kraft Miracle Whip or any type of margarine! I WILL have real mayonnaise! I WILL have butter! I WILL have REAL ice cream!
“AND I WILL NEVER AGAIN EAT ANY FUCKING JELLO!”
Cue the orchestra.
*
Almost 18, I left her house in 1965, never to return except for brief periods, including the next three summers, but even those were only visits.
My drinking buddy, Warren Henthorn, his cousin and I went down to the Oklahoma City produce market just before high-school graduation and lined up advance jobs picking produce in California for the summer. “Fantastic contact,” each of us explained in turn to our parents. “The man even gave us his card and a name and telephone number to call when we get to Riverside. The jobs are guaranteed!”
But the jobs weren’t there, the contact was nonexistent and we were just three more Okie boys standing in line at a California labor office looking for piecework.
Hired on to pick oranges, we worked all of one day and later figured we had made maybe eight or ten bucks apiece. Without waiting for our wages, we loaded the entire back floorboard of the car with stolen oranges and spent the next two weeks bumming around California, living on oranges and bologna sandwiches, siphoning gasoline in the middle of the night and sponging off relatives up and down the state.
Then we returned to Oklahoma, tails meekly tucked under our legs. Warren could always work for his father, the printer. Mike signed on with the wheat harvest crew which worked its way north from Texas to Canada, following the ripening grain. I had given up a full-time job selling Kinney’s shoes and was taken back on a part-time basis. With no other prospects, I spent the rest of my time that summer in the local pool hall, where a rack only cost a nickle.
I had been gone from Mildred’s house for less than three weeks. When I returned, my bedroom furniture was gone, my desk and all my files were gone and what had been Rick’s bedroom was now a spare – and sparse – room with a daybed.
It reminded me of the day six years before when Mildred informed me, nonchalantly, after school that “Boots was very sick. I took her to the vet and had her put to sleep.”
The spare room with the daybed would be my camping-out place for three-and-a-half summers, but it would never be home.
The summer of 1965 finally confirmed to me my place in the family, but that confirmation was overshadowed by an even greater discovery: There was a world out there. Not just a magic-carpet world from my dreams or my books, but real. You could leave Midwest City. You could leave Oklahoma.
San Francisco, here I come.
*
Bob and I had never, what you might call, “got along.” Nothing evil, just your typical, tired stepparent story.
Almost as if consciously conforming to type, Bob wooed Rick and me the same way he wooed Mildred: “I’m not particularly exciting and the earth won’t shake, but I’m solid and dependable and I won’t challenge you. Have some peanuts.”
He took Rick and me fishing in his boat. Once. But after the marriage, when he found himself living with two pre-teen boys every day of the week, he realized that this wasn’t quite what he had bargained for. Luckily for Bob, only one of the two boys was much of a problem, the one who had previously been designated “man of the house.”
This was far from the stepparent relationships of fairy tales. Bob never hit me, disciplined me in any way or tried to turn his wife against me. He didn’t have the power to do any of those things. He merely disapproved and mocked. Probably out of helplessness, and certainly because he didn’t know how to deal with children.
Plus, I had opinions.
Bob disliked children with opinions.
I didn’t know when to shut up and was frequently rude and obnoxious. Mildred certainly didn’t know how to deal with me. Bob either wasn’t allowed to deal with me (I doubt I’d have let him, anyway) or had no interest in doing so. It was easier to be sarcastic and to belittle everything I said or did.
One of my worst failings was that I kept eating the peanuts out of the container that he kept beside his easy chair.
Growing up with Mildred and Bob was certainly better than had I grown up with my father. Dwain would have had an answer for me: brute force. Instead, I grew up with mockery from one parent and “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you; you’re just like your father” from the other.
Nobody was capable of saying, “Kid, c’mere. Sit down. Let’s talk.”
When I became a stepparent, I remembered. “Kristi, c’mere. Let’s talk.”
*
With Kristi, age 10
Bob almost never spoke of his background, rather like Charlie Phearman’s father. Had Bob been my father, I wouldn’t have known my own grandfather’s name, just as my Grandpa Charlie didn’t know his. We knew Bob was probably born in Colorado, that he had had a fair amount of horse experience in the past and had gone through a very bitter divorce, which estranged him from his two daughters.
Bob dutifully paid child support, was glad when it ended, occasionally received a Christmas card or birthday card from Jan or Roberta, but never wrote back and never called. But he started to soften the older he got, particularly after Rick’s first son was born. Slowly, he reconciled with his daughters, even to the extent of visiting them in Florida and Texas, and allowing them to visit him.
This was the Bob I met – my nephew, Carson’s, proud “Papa” – when I returned to Midwest City for the high school reunion. The Bob I had never known. Or had I?
*
Mildred had three rules for how to tell people that her sons had done something nice or something not so nice.
Rule Number One:
A. If Steve did something bad, “Steve” did it.
B. If Steve did something good, “the boys” did it.
Rule Number Two:
A. If Rick did something bad, “the boys” did it.
B. If Rick did something good, “Rick” did it.
Rule Number Three:
A. If the boys did something bad, “Steve” did it.
B. If the boys did something good, “Rick” did it.
Bob did stand up for me on a couple of occasions, and one that I remember in particular. I would have been about thirteen and Rick about ten or eleven and we were arguing, which was not all that unusual. This time, at least, Rick had started the argument and was being the unreasonable one. Bob had been there for the beginning, but Mildred walked in on the middle of the fight.
“Steve, shut up!”
“But I’m only trying to explain that – “
“Steve, SHUT UP!”
“But Mil, he’s trying to – “
“I said I don’t want to hear another word out of you! Go to your room and shut up!”
I didn’t take “shut up” well when I was in the wrong, and I certainly didn’t when I was in the right. It wouldn’t be too long until I got my own wheels, took over my own child-rearing and never stood for “shut up” again. But for now I was stuck.
Bob took me aside a while later – out of Mildred’s earshot – and said, “I told her it wasn’t your fault.” He seemed a bit embarrassed, or maybe he was only fearful of being caught talking to me.
I did thank him then, but never properly until years later.
*
With Kristi, age 18
During their California visit to attend our wedding reception (the same visit that gave rise to the family saying “They don’t even keep salt on the table! I had to get up and get my own”), I had to make a quick run to the grocery store to pick up a half-gallon of milk, with Bob along for the ride. It was the first time I had talked to him alone in more than twenty years.
Although he had been neither saint nor father-figure nor role model when I was growing up, I realized by now that he hadn’t been all that bad, given his own background and what he had to work with. Our personalities had been bound to clash.
If apologies were in order, Bob and I both had a lot to apologize for. But he was from a class and a generation who could never say, “I screwed up. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
For me, a verbal apology wasn’t necessary. He had already redeemed himself by becoming the doting (or rather, “ga-ga”) grandfather of my brother’s two sons, by reconciling with his own daughters and by striking up an instant relationship with my stepdaughter, Kristi. “Krazy K,” he called her.
Nor would he have been able to accept an apology. So I skirted around the subject.
“I love that kid, but we sometimes have our problems,” I explained. “But you know? No matter how much we may argue, there’s one thing she has never said to me: ‘You’re only my stepfather.’ And Marianne has told me, ‘She’d better not ever say that.’”
Bob said nothing, but he beamed.
*
The day before Bob’s funeral, Marianne, Mildred and I were eating lunch at the only restaurant Mil liked, the Del Rancho, or as she termed it, “the Day-all Rain-cho,” (you have to say it out loud to get the full Oklahoma flavor) and I was thinking out loud about the change in Bob over the years. He did, as it turned out, have a soft underbelly; he just didn’t expose it very often. He was usually so cold and caustic that Mildred had once visited an attorney with the idea of divorcing him.
“He was just such a different person in his later years,” I mused. “Rick’s boys just loved him to death and I could tell that he felt the same way about them. He was great with Kristi and he was the one who started calling to California every couple of weeks instead of you. He actually ended up being a really nice guy.
“Strange. I wish I knew what did it.”
“I’m sure he saw what a close, loving family we were and it rubbed off on him,” Mildred said, in all seriousness.
Marianne and I rolled our eyes in unison. I made a pantomime gesture of sticking my finger down my throat. Gag me. Marianne tried her best to kick me under the table for this, but I knew the silent exchange had gone unnoticed by Mildred. She was not the subject of the conversation, so it held no interest for her.
**
Over dinner at Rick’s house that funeral week, Rhette began asking about our relationships with Mildred and Bob. She had only just met me, but had known Mildred and Bob since her daughter’s wedding to Rick. I assume the opportunity had never before arisen for her to ask these questions. Funerals do that to people.
“I have to say she was always there for me,” Rick said. “She came to every one of my high school football games. She…encouraged me in sports…encouraged my education and pretty much supported me, no matter what I did.”
“That’s so special,” Rhette said with the tenderness in her voice that only a mother can muster. “I’m so glad you could have such a good relationship with her. Steve? How about you? Did she support you that way, too?”
In barely a second or two, a person can have an entire discourse with himself, in mental shorthand. It does, of course, go more quickly after a couple of glasses of wine.
– Uh, oh. This is not the time to get into this.
– Why don’t you just tell them the truth?
– Because Mil is around the bend and her husband just died and Rick worships her and nobody really wants my view, or maybe they think they do, but they won’t after they hear it.
– So are you going to lie and say, Yes, she was always supportive?… I thought not. Are you going to say No, and really believe the subject will be dropped at that? Or are you going to answer the question?
I took a breath and chose Door Number Three.
“When I was in high school, I was very active in the speech and drama department,” I began slowly. “We were always going out of town for tournaments and we always needed parents to drive and chaperone. I asked her over and over if she would come along on one of the trips, because it was the same parents always doing the work, and I wanted to be able to contribute something.
“She always said she couldn’t take off work because that would eat into her vacation time. This was from a lady who got four weeks’ paid vacation every year and was able to carry over another 30 days from year to year.
“She couldn’t spare much more than pocket change when I was in college because she said she had to make double house payments and put another five hundred away every month for retirement. And she had to be careful not to use any of Bob’s money for me.
“Every September, I had to scrounge the Salvation Army and the thrift stores for used furniture to furnish my apartment for that school year. With money I had earned, by the way. Every June, I had to give it away because she wouldn’t even store it for me. It was…inconvenient for her.
“And the only time she ever visited me at school was when she wanted a free place to park because she had tickets to a football game.”
I misinterpreted the silence.
“Sorry,” I grinned, trying to change the tone I had brought to the conversation. “I’m sure that was a lot more information than you wanted.”
“No, dear,” Rhette said. “I’m sorry.”