Hush Up

I used to cover the Hanover County Planning Commission for the Mechanicsville Local. The poor Planning Commission had to approve all the proposals from everyone who wanted to build something new, and listen to the complaints from everyone who had already built what they wanted in the county and didn't want anything else added.

The Nimbys -- Not in My Backyards -- were as united as any political party. Their platform was Stay Away From Me. They usually showed up at the public hearings with the Utopians, those who believed in a world according to their own rules and tastes that protected their God-given "quality of life."

The Nimbys and Utopians shared the same basic argument, no matter what the proposal was. Nobody wanted anything in their neighborhood. Everyone had a quality of life they wanted to preserve, an existence that was like living on the moon: no noise, nothing, for miles around them.

At one hearing, a neighborhood was up in arms about a new store in an existing shopping center that wanted to have gas pumps in its parking lot. It would destroy their quality of life, they said. One man told the Planning Commission that he could already "hear" the Home Depot, which was across the road from the proposed gas pumps, both about a mile from his house.

After the hearing, I drove to the Home Depot to hear what it was saying. What message was it sending out, and how did you hear it? I didn't hear anything coming out of the Home Depot, and I was parked across the street. How could he hear something from a mile away, a mile that crossed dozens of other houses with televisions, music, barking dogs and lawn mower noises?

I tried to write sympathetically about these residents whose quality of life was soon to be destroyed by gas pumps, but then I remembered I lived two doors down from a 7-Eleven with six gas pumps. Two doors! Six pumps! I had forgotten about that because I never heard them, and they were open 24 hours a day.

It made me reflect on what was spoiling my quality of life in bucolic Mechanicsville, what noise did I hear if not the gas pumps?

It was the birds, the damn birds in the woods around my house. They woke up before I did and tweeted with much enthusiasm, waking me up. They disrupted my quality of life.

The second thing I heard was cars. I was always amazed at how many people had to be at work at 5 a.m. because when I woke up at 4:30 a.m. (damn birds! Shuttup!), I heard traffic whizzing by at a steady pace. I blamed it on the early shift at the hospital, which was across the street from the nontalking 7-Eleven gas pumps. The hospital shifts were disrupting my quality of life!

The third thing I heard was NASCAR. I lived close enough to Richmond International Raceway to know when there was a race in progress. All day long, it was rrrr, rrrr, rrrr. But if the television was on and the air conditioner was humming -- which made the pots on my stove vibrate -- I didn't hear race cars. I had to stand outside and listen. Rrrrrr, rrrrrrr, rrrrr. It disrupted the quality of my standing outside and listening life!!

And the last disruption was the train. Decades ago, my suburb was a little town far enough away from Richmond -- if you traveled by Model T or horse -- to have its own train depot. The site of the station was just blocks from my house, and although the train didn't stop there anymore, it still came through the neighborhood several times a day. All the windows in my house rattled when it did, and the engineer blew a horn to let folks know he was coming through, get off the tracks! The train rattled along right beside a newly built, upscale neighborhood of $300,000-plus homes and was much louder than gas pumps, but the train was there first. The people came later with their 4-bedroom McMansions, four to an acre, 2.5 baths, whirlpool tubs, entertainment rooms over the two-car garage, and interest-only mortgages that would soon be underwater when the housing market collapsed.

The Utopians, and even the Nimbys, considered the train, as well as gunshots and buzz saws "country noises," while Home Depot and gas pumps were "city noises." There's a difference, you see.

Ugly Girl Thinking

I decided that the night we'd go to the State Fair would be the same night my husband knew the guys in the band that was playing, as if he needed an extra incentive to go out with his wife. I still think like an ugly girl, like I am not enough and I need to offer something else in order to deserve a man’s time.

After an hour or so on the midway, and after he stopped three times to talk to friends he encountered, he went backstage to wish the band a good show. With any luck, he’ll come back out and we can go home. The sun had set and it was getting cold. But the bandleader told him, “We’ll call you up to do a song.” So now he was out front waiting for the call-up, which came an hour into the show. With any luck, he’ll take his bow, come down and we can go home. But he stayed on stage, playing guitar, for the last hour of the show. So I wandered around behind the stage and across the field, and around the rodeo, and across the field again, alone. Even married, I can’t get a date.

For awhile I sat on a bench, staring at the ferris wheel lights and realized I had set myself up. I did it to myself. I could have just as easily picked a night when he didn’t know the band playing. Then I would have had his full attention, and we would have left when I was ready. But, I think like an ugly girl and give up control, even when I have it.

Then, the lights of the ferris wheel dislodged an unpleasant memory. When I was 15, my mother gave me permission to go to the North Carolina State Fair, which was a two-hour bus ride away in Raleigh. A boy I had been dating irregularly for four months lived there and he was meeting me at the bus station. He was 18. He was not someone I had fallen in love with. He was just a boy. He had asked me out. I went because at 15, any date is good. Why my mother allowed me to go will remain one of my life’s mysteries.

We went to the fair, and we left with an hour free before my bus back home. He invited me to wait it out at his place, a single room he rented at a boarding house. I foolishly went. He wanted to make out. I had made out with a boy or two before and managed to stop things before they got out of control. This time I could not. Let me say this: it is possible for it to happen and you don’t realize it and don’t really feel anything unusual. It is possible for it to happen without you removing your underwear. I wasn’t even sure if something had happened, but I had a bad feeling, and when I got home, it was confirmed. There was the telltale blood stain of a broken hymen.

I was 15. He was 18. This was technically statutory rape, and since I had not agreed to it, it was arguably genuine rape. But teenage girls don’t think that way. I never told anyone. I just stepped sadly into adulthood. I wrote some mournful poetry about not being ready for this in a notebook I have to this day, despite numerous moves and housecleanings. A notebook I have never shown anyone, a notebook I need to destroy before someone settling my estate finds it. (I keep thinking I may turn out to be Emily Dickerson. But, seriously: posthumous fame – what good is that?)

Two serious problems developed. The first was: every date with this boy after that became a struggle. I had done it once, why not again? The toothpaste was out of the tube. And usually I lost. I could only win if the geography of where we were made it impossible, or if my father was following our car on the date, which he sometimes did. I had to listen to all the ridiculous teenage boy lies like being in pain if he didn’t get relief, and using a condom was like taking a shower with a raincoat on. I did not have enough self-respect to say no and risk losing him.

I wasn’t getting anything out of it. Teenage sex is awkward, uncomfortable, and full of guilt, embarrassment and fear of pregnancy and parental wrath. I wasn't even sure I wanted him as a boyfriend anymore. But I thought like an ugly girl, that this might be my only chance to have one. After all, it took me all the way to 15 to land him! The first one to call back for a second date! What if that never happens again? It didn’t occur to me that I might do better than him when I was 18, or 22, or 30, and I should keep my options open.

And the second problem was: despite it being the swinging ‘60s and the summer of love and all that, I had been raised in my mother’s morality and the Baptist Church and truly believed that you get to do it with one guy and that was it...if you were a nice girl, if you wanted to go to Heaven. No matter what. You made your bed, now lie in it. (A decade later when I brought my second husband home to meet my parents, my mother greeted me at the door with, “So now you’re a whore.” True story.)

So there it is. A trip to a state fair put in motion a situation I could not see my way out of. Fortunately or unfortunately, just weeks after the deflowering, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam, so the struggle to not have sex before I was ready or wanted to was conducted only twice a year when he was on leave. When he got out of the army, we went to colleges in different states. Our relationship was in its fourth year when we finally lived in the same town, saw each other frequently, and realized we didn’t like each other at all and never had. He was, from beginning to end, a terrible boyfriend in every way.

But by then it was too late. I was pregnant at 19. He went on to live the life he had planned. My plans went completely off the rails. Our pathetic shotgun marriage didn’t even last a year, and even as I was going out the door, having finally caught him with another woman, he convinced me to co-sign a loan for him. Like an ugly girl, I did.

It was not possible to fully enjoy the college experience when I was limited to night classes and had to rush home to the baby. The career I planned required a lot of time to get started, working nights and weekends, being available to cover a story in some distant place at a moment’s notice, moving from town to town to advance your career. It was going to be very difficult to do as a single mother.

And I couldn’t muster the determination. I kept hoping I had enough talent to make it happen in limited circumstances under multiple handicaps. I did not. I watched women with far less talent and desire move ahead just because they could move without strings attached.

And I continued to think like an ugly girl and give up, give in, and sell myself short. I accepted terrible dead end jobs and stayed in them. I married another person I should have left after a few months, and stayed put for years. Thinking like an ugly girl is a hard habit to break. I need to stop going to fairs.

My Cloverleaf Mall and Peaches Story

As soon as we entered Cloverleaf Mall, I’d let my toddler run loose. Sears and Penneys, the anchor big department stores on either end, would eventually pick up my toddler and start broadcasting over the PA that they had a “little girl” who had become separated from his parents, or “Scott has become separated from his parents, please come pick him up.” My son was neither a little girl or named Scott. Because of his curly hair, sometimes they just assumed he was a girl, and if they asked, he would tell them his name was Scott, which he preferred to Jeff. I have no idea why. (When he became an adult, he changed his name legally, but not to Scott.)

In any case, I knew it was him so I would leisurely go collect him. I was never reprimanded or arrested. They cheerfully handed him over. Becoming separated from your parents in the mall was not uncommon then and the announcements over the PA were routine. Things have changed very much.

There was a Ruby Tuesdays and a Piccadilly Cafeteria at the entrance to the mall, and a two-screen movie theater on the right side of the intersection. There was even a dentist. I went there once for a toothache. They charged me to have every tooth in my head x-rayed by this robotic machine that circled my jaw, flashing my head with radiation, then the dentist found a popcorn skin lodged between my teeth.

I spent many hours in Cloverleaf Mall. The Sears there was a home away from home. At one time, they even sold Apple computers. This was between the reigns of Steve Jobs I and Steve Jobs II, when such blasphemy was allowed.

My second husband knew nothing about cars, so the Sears auto shop in front of Sears regularly charged us to replace our struts. We knew nothing about struts or why they needed to be replaced so often, but we always agreed. Now, I always call my third husband, he goes “what the hell? Put them on the phone,” talks to the auto guys, and the next thing I know, they’ve changed their mind about what I need. No more waving muffin tins and pizza pans at me and telling me my animatron defibulator is malfunctioning and my car is unsafe to drive until I get it fixed.

My third husband spent many more hours in Cloverleaf Mall because even though he lived deep in Chesterfield County, down a long and winding country road that was near nothing but Lake Chesdin, he regularly hung out in Cloverleaf Mall. Just to hang. To sit there and walk around. Just to see who else was sitting there or walking around. It was a Fast Times at Ridgemont High sort of thing.

Chesterfield Towne Center was Chesterfield Mall back then, and derisively called Chesterfield Morgue because nothing was going on down there. But between the loitering teens, urban decay creeping up Midlothian (it eventually murdered the Red Lobster and Steak and Ale on the other side of the overpass years after it killed off the original version of Target/Walmart, a store called Carousel across from WWBT that was half department store, half grocery store), Cloverleaf was in the line of rot. I don’t even remember what was across the street now except for the Best Products, Friendly’s and Peaches. Peaches always had that overpowering incense smell. And at one time, you had one of their crates. You know you did. Maybe you still do. I still have a Peaches cassette crate, full of tapes. I need to throw them out.

Here’s my bonus Peaches story. I worked for them one day. I’m not sure if I was never put on the schedule for a second day or I quit, but one day was enough. You couldn’t bring your purse into the store and leave it in the employee lounge. You had to leave it out in your car during your shift. Any personal items you absolutely had to have with you, you were required to bring them into the store in a see-through plastic bag. At the end of the shift, we all gathered at the door where the shift manager inspected our plastic bags for contraband, activated the security alarm, and we all scurried out at the same time. No one could leave earlier than anyone else.

But even that wasn’t so much the problem as my eyesight. My job was to stay out on the floor and keep checking that the records and CDs and cassettes were all in the right places. I needed my reading glasses to do that. But if a customer asked me where something was, and I looked across the store to find the sign, I couldn’t see it. I needed my distance glasses for that. And I immediately figured out that the behind the counter, check-out jobs went to the favored few who had been there for ages, so moving up at Peaches was going to take much longer than I had time for. My shift manager was very nice, actually cute in a way, and gave me a four-track Ricky Nelson CD (he had an office full of samples) at the end of my shift as a present. I still have it. It has “Hello Mary Lou” and “Travelin’ Man” on it. But I was done with Peaches. I never got paid for that day. Peaches, you owe me money.