weekends, I enlisted Terry’s help to strip, sand, stain, and paint. Like an artist contemplating a blank canvas, I pored over paint samples.
“What do you think of this yellow for the kitchen? Do you think it’s too bright?” I asked as I flicked ashes into a glass green ashtray.
“You’re better at that than I am. Whatever you decide is okay with me.”
“Can’t you simply give me a clue?”
He couldn’t.
And he didn’t.
During those first weeks, ladders, paint cans, and brushes littered the rooms. The apartment reeked of fresh paint and turpentine. The large rooms with high ceilings accommodated bright colors: royal blue, sunshine yellow, and new spring green. However, the deep purple enamel paint in a tiny half-bath was an unwise choice, which I never remedied. I stenciled white clouds over the baby blue ceiling in Matt’s bedroom as lovingly as Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. Matt and I arranged his Matchbox cars, Fisher Price toys, blocks, puzzles, and his many Caldecott picture books on the shelves that filled one entire bedroom wall. Bright red beanbag chairs waited in front of a bay window for someone to sit in them.
Terry surprised Matt with a set of Dallas Cowboys sheets.
“Going to make a Cowboys fan out of that boy,” Terry told me. (Matt, who eventually did become an avid Cowboys fan, unearthed those faded sheets when he packed up to leave for college.) While I read him bedtime stories and stroked his hair, Matt and his stuffed Snoopy cuddled with the Cowboys and drifted into that untroubled slumber of childhood.
After each room in the apartment glistened with fresh paint, we tackled more challenging tasks like hanging window shades. Brandishing his newly acquired power tools, Terry drilled holes to hang prints, posters, and plants.
Hanging a lamp, the kind that swung from a thick gold chain, was a two-person job. Terry climbed a ladder and drilled two holes in the ceiling: one in a corner of the room and another about three feet in front of it. With two hooks secured, we wrestled with the lamp’s metal chain, which refused to climb the wall. After several tries, it looped in a graceful arc to support the lamp below. Terry climbed down the ladder.
“It’s too low; someone’s going to knock into it,” I said.
“Not to worry. We’re both short. Besides I don’t want to fool with the damn thing again.”
“Sorry, it won’t do. We have to hang it higher.”
“Let’s take a break.” He opened the fridge, downed a cold Budweiser, grabbed another and then climbed back up the ladder. Once again we tussled with the chain and positioned the lamp. It was still too low. But I let it go.
Our decorating continued at a fast pace. Shiny philodendron and thick asparagus ferns cascaded from macramé planters fastened to the ceiling with gold-colored hooks. We rolled olive green and gold shag carpets onto hardwood floors in our living and dining rooms. (How I managed to vacuum those carpets with the consistency of crab grass is a mystery.) A string of multicolored glass beads hung in the open kitchen doorway to add a Middle Eastern touch. Several then-ubiquitous prints and posters graced the walls: Robert Indiana’s “Love” lithograph, the Casablanca movie poster of Bogie in a trench coat with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Terry purchased bricks and boards from a lumberyard and assembled bookshelves for our collection of hardcover and paperback books, including textbooks from college.
We floated calmly through those halcyon days of impromptu parties, potlucks, fondue feasts, food and babysitting co-ops, consciousness-raising groups, and new friends and acquaintances. Charleston is a cozy city with about three degrees of separation. Folks are friendly and newcomers welcomed. We socialized with other new faculty members from the college. I joined NOW (the National Organization for Women) and befriended fellow feminists, several of whom have remained close friends. Terry introduced me to his Texas buddies who’d migrated to the lush West Virginia hills because land was cheap. They teased me about my New York accent but welcomed me to their fold. “She’s not so bad for a Yankee.”
Because our apartment was large and centrally located in town, friends and their young children congregated there. When families arrived, the kids raced to Matt’s bedroom on the third floor, where they built forts with cardboard boxes, sheets, and pillow cases, raced Matchbox cars, and constructed elaborate towers from Lincoln Logs and Legos. They’d surface for juice and snacks or to tattle on one another.
The adults smoked cigarettes, and drank beer and gallons of cheap Gallo red. A few stepped into the hallway to smoke a joint. As we munched on cheese, crackers, and potato chips, we shared stories about our lives before moving to “The Mountain State,” compared notes on our kids, worried about the sorry state of local schools, puzzled over hillbilly neighbors with their funny accents and rustic ways, and chortled about corrupt politicians in Southern West Virginia. And Terry reviewed the latest movies.
A walking encyclopedia of film trivia, Terry relished nothing more than catching old black-and-white flicks on late night TV. Although he practiced law, Hollywood was in his heart. Too shy for acting, he could have become a screenwriter or director. In my younger years, I’d harbored similar dreams.
But like Terry, I’d chosen a safe, secure profession—in my case, teaching—over my dream of becoming a writer. Words have always been my strong suit. My Aunt Vivian recalls how at the tender age of eighteen-months, I could recite nursery rhymes word-for-word. Although reading wasn’t featured in my childhood home, I discovered the local library early on. “That Frances, always with her nose in a book,” my father would say. My mother, a first-generation Italian-American who grew up poor, couldn’t understand. “Where do you get those ideas, Frances? A writer? How are you going to earn a living as a writer? Become a teacher like your cousin Barbara. She earns a good living and has summers off.”
Both Terry and I had our noses in many books. With Matt in tow, we often visited the county library, which was located a block away from Terry’s office. During that time, I consumed nonfiction: spirituality, Eastern religions, polemics by feminists like Gloria Steinem, and inspiration by authors like Leo Buscaglia. As a kid, I had been drawn to the lives of the saints and mystics like St. Teresa of Avila, who founded the “barefoot” Carmelites. I marveled at her unstinting faith, her devotion, and her sacrifice. I still do. Back then, I had to redefine myself as a divorced, single parent, living with a significant other without the benefit of marriage. I turned to books to learn how to navigate in those uncharted waters.
While I sought enlightenment, Terry escaped, with spy novels and detective stories. A big fan of Louis L’Amour, he introduced me to that author, as well as to Dashiell Hammet and Frank Herbert. Books on cinema and old Hollywood film stars littered our living room.
One day Terry arrived home carrying a coffee-table biography of Charlie Chaplin illustrated with photos of his famous persona “The Tramp.” As he sat at the kitchen table nursing a scotch and flipping through the pages, Terry asked: “Have you seen many of Chaplin’s films?”
“Probably, but I don’t remember much about them.”
He looked at me as if I’d sprouted antlers.
“Say it ain’t so, Frannie.”
I shrugged. “What can I say? I don’t remember.”
“Come on, you’re joshing me, aren’t you?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because
