Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World

Chapter 10

A Long Way from Home

In Hartley, Iowa, where my family moved when I was fourteen, I was a straight arrow, the head student librarian, and the second smartest girl in my grade, after Karen Watts. It was all As for Vicki Jipson, except in typing, where I got a C. But that didn’t keep me from having a reputation. One night I went with my parents to a dance in Sanborn, a little town nine miles from Hartley. When the dance hall closed at eleven, we went to the restaurant next door, where I promptly passed out. Dad took me outside for some fresh air, and I threw up. The next morning at eight thirty, my grandfather called the house and said, “What the hell is going on over there? I heard Vicki was drunk in Sanborn last night.” The cause turned out to be an abscessed tooth, but there was no beating a bad reputation in a small town like Hartley.

My older brother, meanwhile, was considered one of the smartest kids ever to attend Hartley High School. Everyone called him the Professor. David graduated a year ahead of me and went to college a hundred miles away in Mankato, Minnesota. I figured I’d follow him there. When I mentioned my plans to my guidance counselor, he said, “You don’t need to worry about college. You’re just going to get married, have kids, and let a man take care of you.” What a jerk. But it was 1966. This was rural Iowa. I didn’t get any other advice.

After graduation from high school, I got engaged to the third boy I’d ever dated. We’d been going out for two years, and he adored me. But I needed to get away from the microscope of small-town Iowa; I needed to be out on my own. So I broke off the engagement, which was the hardest thing I’d ever done, and moved to Mankato with my best friend, Sharon.

While David went to college on the other side of town, Sharon and I worked at the Mankato Box Company. Mankato Box packaged products like Jet-Dry, the dishwashing liquid, and Gumby, who was a star at the time. I worked mostly on Punch and Grow, a container of potting soil with seeds attached to the lid. My job was to grab potting soil containers off a conveyor belt, snap on the plastic lid, slide them into a cardboard sleeve, and put them in a box. Sharon and I worked side by side, and we were always singing goofy lyrics about Punch and Grow to the tune of popular songs. We would get the whole line laughing, the Laverne and Shirley of Mankato Box. After three years, I worked my way up to feeding the empty plastic cups into the machine. The job was more isolated, so I didn’t get to sing as much, but at least I didn’t get filthy from all the potting soil.

Sharon and I developed a routine, which happens with line work. We would get off work exactly at five, ride the bus to our apartment for a quick dinner, then hit the dance clubs. We’d stay out, dancing our toes off, until they shut the dance halls down. If I wasn’t dancing, I was usually out with my brother David and his friends. David was more than my brother, he was my best friend, and I can’t count the number of times we stayed up talking about our lives. If I stayed home, which was rare, I’d put on a record and dance, all alone in my bedroom. I just had to dance. I loved to dance.

I met Wally Myron at a dance club, but he wasn’t like the other guys I’d dated. He was very smart and very well-read, which impressed me immediately. And he had personality. Wally was always smiling, and everyone with him was always smiling, too. He was the kind of person who would go down to the corner store for milk and talk to the clerk for two hours. Wally could talk with anyone about anything. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. I say it to this day: Wally was incapable of intentionally hurting anyone.

We dated for a year and a half before getting married in July 1970. I was twenty-two, and I got pregnant right away. It was a tough pregnancy, with sickness morning, noon, and night. Wally spent evenings after work out with his friends, usually riding motorcycles, but he was always home by seven thirty. He wanted a social wife, but he would take a sick wife if that meant a baby on the way.

Sometimes one decision changes your life, and it doesn’t have to be one you make yourself—or even know about. When I went into labor, the doctor decided to speed the process with two massive doses of Pitocin. I found out later he had a party to attend, and he wanted to get this darn procedure over with. I went from three centimeters dilated to crowning in two hours. The shock broke my afterbirth, so they put me back into labor. They didn’t get all the pieces. Six weeks later I hemorrhaged, and they rushed me back to the hospital for emergency surgery.

I had always wanted a daughter named Jodi Marie. I had dreamed about it from a young age. Now I had that daughter, Jodi Marie Myron, and I was dying to spend time with her, to hug her and talk to her and look into her eyes. But the surgery knocked me flat on my back. My hormones went haywire, and I was racked with headaches, insomnia, and cold sweats. Two years and six operations later my health hadn’t improved, so my doctor suggested exploratory surgery. I woke up in the hospital bed to discover he’d taken both ovaries and my uterus. The physical pain was intense, but worse was the knowledge that I couldn’t have any more children. I had expected a peek inside; I wasn’t prepared to be hollowed out. And I wasn’t prepared to enter sudden and severe menopause. I was twenty-four going on sixty, with scarring through my gut, regret in my heart, and a daughter I couldn’t hold. The curtain came down and everything went black.

When I came around a few months later, Wally wasn’t there. Not like he used to be, anyway. That’s when I noticed, suddenly, that everything meant drinking to Wally. If he went fishing, it meant drinking. If he went hunting, it meant drinking. Even motorcycle riding meant drinking. Before long, he wasn’t showing up when he promised. He would be out late and never call. He’d come home drunk, and I’d say, “What are you doing? You have a sick wife and a two-year-old child!”

“We just went fishing,” he’d say. “I had a couple too many. It’s no big deal.”

I’d wake up the next morning, and he’d be gone to work. I’d find a note on the kitchen table. I love you. I don’t want to fight. I’m sorry. Wally could never sleep, and he would stay up all night writing me long letters. The man was smart. He could write beautifully. And every morning, when I saw those letters, I loved him.

The realization that your husband is a problem drinker comes suddenly, but the admission takes a long, long time. Your insides tie themselves in knots, but your heart refuses to understand. You make explanations, then excuses. You dread the ringing of the telephone. Then you dread the silence when it doesn’t ring. Instead of talking, you throw out the beer. You pretend not to notice things, like money. He always comes through, but only when the cupboard is bare. But you’re scared to complain. What are the chances, you think, that it will get worse instead of better?

“I understand,” he says when you mention it. “It’s not a problem. But I’ll quit. For you. I promise.” But neither of you believes it.

Day by day, your world gets smaller. You don’t want to open cabinets for fear of what you’ll find. You don’t want to search the pockets of his pants. You don’t want to go anywhere. Where’s he going to take you that doesn’t involve drinking?

Many mornings I found beer bottles in the oven. Jodi found beer cans in her toy box. Wally was waking up early every morning, and if I dared to look out the window, I could see him sitting in his van drinking warm beer. He didn’t even bother driving around the corner.

When Jodi was three, we went to Hartley for my brother Mike’s wedding. Jodi and I were in the ceremony, so Wally had free time on his hands. He would disappear and not show up until late at night, when everyone was asleep.

“Are you trying to avoid us?” I asked him.

“No, I love your family. You know that.”

The family was sitting around Mom’s kitchen table one night, and as usual Wally was nowhere to be found. We ran out of beer, so Mom went to the cabinet where she was keeping extra beer for all the friends and relatives in town. Most of it was gone.

“What were you thinking, taking Mom’s beer?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“How do you think I feel? How do you think Jodi feels?”

“She doesn’t know.”

“She’s old enough to know. You just don’t know her.”

Afraid to ask. Afraid not to ask. “Are you even working?”

“Of course I am. You see the paychecks, don’t you?”

Wally’s father had given him part ownership of the family construction business, which meant Wally didn’t get a steady paycheck. I couldn’t tell if the company was between projects or if the whole world was crashing down around us.

“It’s not just money, Wally.”

“I know. I’ll spend more time at home.”

“Quit drinking for one week.”

“Why?”

“Wally.”

“Okay, one week. I’ll quit.”

But again, neither of us believed it.

After Mike’s wedding, I finally admitted to myself that Wally had a problem. That he was coming home less and less. That I almost never saw him sober. He wasn’t a mean drunk, but he wasn’t a functioning drunk, either. And yet he ran our lives. He drove our only car. I had to take the bus or ride with a friend to buy groceries. He cashed the paychecks. He paid the bills. Often I was too sick to follow the finances, much less raise a child on my own. I called our house the Blue Coffin because it was painted a hideous shade of blue and shaped like a casket. It started out as a joke—it was actually a fine house in a nice neighborhood—but within two years it felt like the truth. Jodi and I were stuck in that house, being buried alive.

My family came through for me. They never blamed me. They never lectured me. My parents didn’t have money, but they took Jodi in, two weeks at a time, and raised her like their daughter. Whenever life smothered me, they gave me room to breathe.

Then there were my friends. If that delivery room doctor ruined my body, another stranger saved my mind. When Jodi was six months old, a woman knocked on my door. She had a daughter about Jodi’s age in a stroller. She said, “I’m Faith Landwer. My husband has been friends with your husband since high school, so let’s have coffee and get to know each other.”

Thank goodness I agreed.

Faith got me involved in a newcomer’s club that played cards once a month. I met Trudy over our regular game of Five Hundred, then met Barb, Pauli, Rita, and Idelle. Soon we were having coffee together at Trudy’s house a couple days a week. We were all young mothers, and Trudy’s house was the only one big enough to hold us. We would shove the children into her enormous playroom, sit at the kitchen table, and keep one another sane. I confided in them about Wally, and they didn’t blink. Trudy just came around the table and gave me a hug.

What did my friends do for me in those years? What didn’t they do for me? When I needed to run an errand, they drove me. When I was sick, they cared for me. When I needed someone to watch Jodi, they picked her up. I don’t know how many times one of them dropped by with a plate of hot food just when I needed it.

“I just cooked a little extra casserole. Do you want it?”

And yet it wasn’t my family or my friends who saved my life. Not really. My real motivation, my real reason for picking myself up every morning and struggling on, was my daughter, Jodi. She needed me to be her mother, to teach by example. We didn’t have money, but we had each other. When I was confined to my bed, Jodi and I spent hours talking. When I was physically able, we walked in the park with the real third member of our family. Brandy and Jodi looked up to me; they adored me without question or doubt; they gave me unconditional love, which is the secret power of children and dogs. Every night when I put Jodi to bed, I kissed her, and that touch, that skin on my skin, sustained me.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too. Good night.”

A hero of mine, Dr. Charlene Bell, says everyone has a pain thermometer that goes from zero to ten. No one will make a change until they reach ten. Nine won’t do it. At nine, you are still afraid. Only ten will move you, and when you’re there, you’ll know. No one can make that decision for you.

I saw that firsthand with one of my friends. She was pregnant, and her abusive husband was still beating her every day. We decided we had to get her out of there before it was too late, so we talked her into leaving him. We set her up in a trailer with her kids. Her parents came by every day. She had everything she needed. Two weeks later she went back to her husband. I realized then you can’t make people do what you know is right. They have to come to it on their own. A year later my friend left her husband for good. She didn’t need help from any of us.

I learned that lesson for myself, too, because a marriage unwraps slowly. Maybe it’s not the slowness but the consistency that crushes you. Every day is a little bit worse, a little less predictable, until finally you’re doing things you never, ever thought you’d do. I was looking for food in the kitchen one night, and I found a checkbook. It was for a secret banking account Wally had set up for himself. I turned on the grill at two in the morning, ripped out the checks one by one, and burned them. Halfway through I thought, “Sane people don’t live like this.”

But I stayed. I was worn out. I was emotionally drained. My confidence was crippled. I was physically weak from the surgeries. And I was scared. But not scared enough to make a change.

The last year was the worst. It was so bad, I can’t even remember the details. The whole year was black. Wally had stopped coming home before three in the morning, and since we were sleeping in different rooms, I never saw him. He left the house early every morning, but I didn’t know where he went. He had been pushed out of the family business, and our money situation was drifting from bad to unbearable. Mom and Dad sent me what they could. Then they went to the rest of the family and collected several hundred dollars more. When that ran out, Jodi and I had nothing to eat. We lived on oatmeal, nothing but oatmeal, for two weeks. I finally went to Wally’s mother, who I knew blamed me for her son’s condition.

“Don’t do it for me,” I said. “Do it for your granddaughter.” She bought one bag of groceries, set it on the kitchen table, and left.

A few nights later Wally came home. Jodi was asleep. I was in the living room reading One Day at a Time, the bible of Al-Anon, a support group for people affected by alcoholics. I didn’t yell or hit him or anything like that. We both acted as if Wally came home all the time. I hadn’t seen him in a year, and I was surprised how bad he looked. He was thin. He was sickly. He clearly wasn’t eating. I could smell alcohol, and he still had the shakes. He sat down on the other side of the room without a word, this man who used to talk for hours to anyone, and watched me read. Eventually he dozed off, so it surprised me when he said, “What are you smiling about?”

“Nothing,” I told him, but when he asked I knew. I had reached ten. No fireworks. No final injustice. The moment had slipped in as quiet as a stranger coming home.

I went to a lawyer the next day and started divorce proceedings. That’s when I discovered we were six months behind on house payments, six months behind on car payments, and $6,000 in debt. Wally had even taken out a home-improvement loan, but of course no work had been done. The Blue Coffin was falling apart.

Grandma Stephenson—Mom’s mother, who had divorced her own alcoholic husband—gave me the money to save the house. We let the bank repossess the car. It wasn’t worth saving. My dad passed the hat in Hartley and came up with $800 to buy me a 1962 Chevy an old lady didn’t even drive in the rain. I had never driven a car in my life. I took driving lessons for a month and passed my driver’s test. I was twenty-eight years old.

The first place I drove that car was to the welfare office. I had a six-year-old daughter, a high school diploma, a medical history that can only be called a disaster, and a pile of debt. I didn’t have a choice. I told them, “I need help, but I’m only going to take it if you let me go to college.”

Thank goodness, welfare was different in those days. They agreed. I went straight to Mankato State and registered for the upcoming semester. Four years later, in 1981, I graduated summa cum laude, the highest level of honors, with a general studies degree, double majors in psychology and women’s studies, and minors in anthropology and library science. Welfare paid for the whole thing: classes, housing, living expenses. My brothers David and Mike had dropped out without graduating, and so, at the age of thirty-two, I became the first Jipson to earn a diploma from a four-year college. Twelve years later Jodi would become the second.