Looking for Love

I’ve been searching for love as long as I can remember. I haven’t exactly looked in all the wrong places, but God knows I’ve looked in some peculiar ones. Damn peculiar.

Speaking of which, you couldn’t find a place much more peculiar than XXX, Missouri, the town where I grew up. We moved there in 1961 when I was 7 years old. Landing in the Ozark Mountains after living in southern California was a lot like landing on the moon, except that was the year President Kennedy announced we were racing the Russians to the moon. No one was racing anyone to XXX, Missouri.

* * *


We’d never seen anything even remotely like it in our whole lives. There they were—the neighbor girls, I mean—naked behind a big lilac bush beside their house. Two teenaged girls buck naked in the yard. In broad daylight. Through the foggy living room window and the pouring rain, my sister and I caught glimpses of bare boobs and butts and everything else. “Mom would kill us dead if we did that,” I whispered.

Debbie nodded and replied, with all the accumulated wisdom of her eight-and-a-half years, “Deader than doornails.”

Debbie wiped the window with one of the dishtowels we were supposed to be folding. When she finished, we stood on our tiptoes and craned our necks to get a better look. Behind us, Mom walked into the living room, carrying more clean laundry. We were too absorbed to notice until she dropped the plastic basket on the hardwood floor.

Both of us jumped like we’d been shot for the nosy little peeping Toms we were. My head smashed into Debbie’s nose; she squealed and smacked me. I was just getting cranked up when Mom grabbed my arm and stepped between us.

“You know better than that,” she said.

“What about her?

“I’m not talking to her, I’m talking to you.”

Of course you are. Debbie always gets away with everything. Tears filled my eyes at the horrible injustice of it all.

I might have been the teeniest, tiniest bit melodramatic back then, but being the middle kid wasn’t easy. Debbie was special because she was the oldest. Jeff was special because he was the baby and the only boy. But me? I was just plain old me. Plain, straight brown hair. Plain brown eyes. Nothing special at all. I'd long since decided that when I grew up I’d have two kids or four kids, but not three. Never three. No one would be stuck in the middle in my family.

“What are you two doing?” Mom asked.

We tried to look innocent. “Watching the rain,” Debbie said.

Mom looked out the window. Her eyes got big and we knew she’d seen them, too.

“Good grief,” she said. “They’re out there washing their hair.”

We ducked under Mom’s arms to look again, and sure enough, two soapy heads were clearly visible through the leaves near the top of the bushes.

“And they’re na-ked!” Mom said, her breath coming out in a rush.

We looked at each other in wonder. What’s she going to do to them?

Mom wasn’t exactly mean, but she definitely had ways of letting us know when we’d crossed the line. She didn’t hesitate to let us have it with the business end of a fly swatter or with a belt. Never with the buckle, though. Only the leather. Once in a great while she made us cut a switch out of a tree and then she spanked us with it. But not usually. Usually, she just yelled.

To our everlasting surprise, Mom didn’t do anything to those girls. She didn’t even go out and yell at them. Instead, she handed each of us a laundry basket and made us go to our room to fold the towels and washcloths. “I’ll put up the ironing board,” she said. “You can iron Daddy’s handkerchiefs when you’re done with those towels.”

Later, I thought I heard Mom crying in her bedroom. It bothered me when Mom cried. Grown-ups weren’t supposed to cry.

That night, when she thought we were asleep, Mom told Daddy what we’d seen. “Out there in broad daylight, Chuck,” she said. “Completely naked.”

“Their house doesn’t have running water, Honey,” he said. “They’re trying to keep clean.”

Mom knew all about not having running water. Our grandma’s house in Iowa, the house where Mom grew up, didn’t have running water either. When we visited Grandma and Grandpa, we took baths the same way they did, the same way Mom took baths when she lived there. We went out in the yard and pushed the long, silver pump handle up and down to fill buckets with water. Then we carried the water into the house, heated it on the stove, and poured it into a small metal tub. We didn’t stand naked behind a lilac bush in the rain, for goodness sake.

“What kind of place is this, Chuck?” Mom was crying again. “What kind of place did you drag us to?”

If Daddy answered, we didn’t hear him.