A Little Bit Wicked (3 page)

If you’re unfamiliar with the joy of Ménière’s (and I hope you are), imagine a floor-warping, ceiling-spinning, brain-churning, think-you’re-gonna-die-and-afraid-you-might-not hangover and multiply that times the aftermath of a power outage at the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. That’s Ménière’s. Saying it’s “an inner ear disturbance that causes vertigo” sounds so
Bless my petticoats, Miss Petunia is having a spell
. This is more than that. This SOB is seriously debilitating at times. So I sleep on an incline (even though hotel housekeeping people look at me as if I were requesting handcuffs and a swing above the bed), I limit sodium and several other factors that bring on episodes, and I take my don’t-fall-over-and-throw-up drugs when I fly or experience a climate change. And I pray. A lot. I’ve tried everything short of the handcuffs and swing in an effort to control it. Bottom line: Ménière’s disease sucks a big fat corncob. Knowing if some biological family member also has it wouldn’t really make a difference. I mean, what are we supposed to say to each other about it?

“Howdy, stranger. Throw up much?”

“Yup. Tough to be us sometimes, huh?”

“Yup. Have a nice day.”

“You, too. Try not to fall over.”

The light haze of curiosity isn’t enough for me to risk disrupting my life or the life of the woman who gave me up for adoption. She made a difficult choice, and I have profound respect for that. In 1968, abortion was still illegal in the United States, but she apparently had
the money (and the flight bennies) to go wherever she needed to go to get it done. She chose to have me instead, and
thank you
does not begin to cover how I feel. But that’s all I’ve ever really wanted to say to her.

There was one strange little incident back in my pageant days. While I was the reigning Miss Oklahoma City University, I was invited to sing at an event honoring then vice president Dan Quayle, who was visiting Tulsa. At this sort of event, I was always accompanied by my handler, Kathleen McCracken, the pageant Rambo who steered me to wherever I was supposed to go and made sure I looked like a beauty queen when I got there. You get to be like sisters with your pageant handler (which makes me an aunt to her daughter, who’s now a Broadway babe). Who else can you trust to let you know if your roots are showing or there’s a scrap of toilet tissue trailing from the hem of your gown?

A huge crowd had turned out to greet the vice president. After I sang, speeches were made, I sang again, and then I was wrangled off to a table to sign autographs. A strange assortment of folks show up to get Miss OCU’s autograph: lots of little girls and I don’t know whom else. Some people in Oklahoma don’t get out much, I guess. I don’t allow myself to wonder if there’s an autographed eight-by-ten glossy of me attached to the head of an inflatable doll in some guy’s basement up in Okfuskee County. I prefer to think we were all caught up in the festive occasion, and people wanted something to remember it by. It’s not like I was famous; the whole autograph thing was probably more thrilling for me than it was for them.

“I’ve been watching your career.”

The voice was choked with emotion. I glanced up to find a small blond woman with luminous green eyes.

“I just wanted to say…I’m so proud of you.”

“Well, thank you so much,” I said with my pageant-perfected smile. “That’s so sweet.”

Oklahomans are proud of their own, but she seemed particularly
overwhelmed. Her eyes welled. She bit her lip and thrust a wrinkled program forward, unable to say anything more. I didn’t find this terribly odd; I’d sung “God Bless the USA,” and a lot of people get choked up about that song. It’s not unusual for one song or another to strike a deeply personal chord, and I’m grateful when people let me know that they were moved. It’s a privilege. I signed her program and thanked her again. As she retreated into the crowd, Kathleen gripped my arm.

“What…”

“Kristi, that woman—she looked exactly like you.”

“What…”

“I think that might have been—I mean—do you think she’s—”

I bolted from behind the table, not to stop the woman, only to catch another glimpse of her, to see if the resemblance was as striking as Kathleen thought. I craned and gandered after her, but like me, she stood head and shoulders shorter than most of the people in the crowd. It was like trying to spot a daffodil in a cornfield. Only a few seconds had passed, but she was already lost in the throng.

I’ll never know for sure, but if that really was the landed flight attendant, that young girl from old money who made the choice to bring me into the world and cared enough for me to give me a good home, I love her all the more for walking away. Perhaps she has a happy family of her own now. (Please, God, let her have a happy family of her own now.) And perhaps she’s chosen not to tell them about her difficult past. I wouldn’t dream of intruding on this woman’s privacy, and naturally I’m uncomfortable with the idea of strangers intruding on mine, but it makes me happy to think that she knows about the blessings that have rained down on this life she knitted. If she was aware of the Miss OCU pageant, she must know about
Wicked, Candide,
and
Pushing Daisies
. She must have watched me collect a Tony and sing at the Oscars. She’s reading this book right now. It’s the loveliest thing she could have said:
I’ve been watching your ca
reer
. There’s no bragging rights attached to that statement, no attempt to reestablish a territory. There’s only gladness in the most unselfish package possible.

Remember the Bible story about wise King Solomon? Two women came to him with one baby, each claiming to be the infant’s mother.

“Bring me a sword,” he said. “Cut the child in two, and give each woman half.”

The first woman instantly cried, “No! Please! Give the baby to my sister.”

Meanwhile, the other chick shrugged. “Go ahead. Neither of us will have him.”

How brilliant was that? The ultimate test of a mother’s love. King Solomon immediately knew that the first woman was the baby’s mother because love is not about doggedly clinging to what belongs to you; it’s about finding it in yourself to let go, even when letting go breaks your heart.

I remember Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow,” the smell of the mosquito-spray trucks that slowly rolled down our street at night, dozing against my mother’s shoulder in church on Sunday morning, playing with my brother, Mark, on this huge grassy mound (at least it seemed huge as we scrambled up and over it) in the yard outside our pleasant ranch-style house in Broken Arrow, a little town just outside Tulsa. I don’t remember this happening, but Mom says she came out one day and found me posing on that mound with a stick in my mouth. Several feet away, Mark had positioned himself with this bullwhip that Dad had made when he was a teenager. In one of those classic “Someone could put an eye out!” shenanigans, Mark was winding up to whip that stick out of my mouth like a lion tamer, and I was standing there with all the faith in the world that he could do it.

That’s how it was, is, and ever shall be with me and my big brother.
I’d follow him to the ends of the earth, and though that isn’t a great example of it, he was always my champion and protector. One summer, we went on a family road trip that sort of Chevy Chased out of control. At one point, poor Dad was struggling to jack up the car to change a flat when a semi roared by and the car came down with a
kafwumph
. Dad started cussing a blue streak—the first time I’d ever heard any such language—and I must have gotten wide-eyed because Mark scootched over and slid his arm around me, telling me it was okay. A while later, we felt the car bouncing up and down and peeked over the seat back to see Dad hurling himself on the trunk, trying to get it closed. Then we just busted out in giggle fits.

When I was in sixth grade, Mark met Betsye. Blond, adorable, and such a terrifically
good
young woman. Anything she did, I wanted to do—cheerleading, summer camp, you name it. We were girlie girls together. If I got clothes for Christmas or my birthday, I laid them all out on my bed and made her come and look through them the second she walked through the door. She made Mark happy and never treated me like the annoying little sis. She became my sister, plain and simple. (For me, family has never been restricted by genetics or paperwork.) When Betsye was in ninth grade and Mark in tenth, he broke up with her briefly, and I was devastated.

“Mark!” I sobbed. “How can you do this to me? You have to get back together.”

In a week or two, she was part of the family again and hasn’t missed a beat since.

I thought Mark was the smartest kid around. He even looked smart with his smart-kid glasses, which didn’t diminish the Greg Brady brand of cool he achieved with his sharp blue eyes, longish hair, and groovy stovepipe cords. In many ways, Mark was a chip off the ol’ block, very much like my dad (who achieved his own brand of cool with one of those
Magnum, P.I
. mustaches), and Dad, in turn, was an apple who didn’t fall far from the tree. His own father had the same
quiet strength. My grandfather Roy Chenoweth was a gatekeeper, too, a salt-of-the-earth Christian and devoted family man, married to his beloved Mildred Alice for seventy years.

Grandpa was humble and hardworking, easygoing as an Oklahoma evening. Grandma, on the other hand, ran a pretty tight ship. She was a Southern Baptist who played canasta with the Methodists and dominoes with the Church of Christers, which kinda says it all. She believed by the Book, but embraced socially liberal ideals.

“I’ll always be a Democrat,” she told me when I was old enough to know what that meant but still young enough to think it made a difference. “Jesus cared for the poor. He was for the people, and I gotta stick with him.”

She thought Jimmy Carter was the greatest man who ever lived, which made my conservative Republican father groan and invoke the name of his patron saint, Ronald Reagan. Needless to say, this made things interesting when everybody got to talking late in the evening, and I learned two things from all that lawn-chair filibustering:

1. It is possible to discuss differences of opinion in a friendly, respectful way.

2. There are good people of every political stripe, all with good reasons for believing the way they do.

I’m a swinger when it comes to voting. Not even interested in a monogamous relationship with one party or another. Following Grandma Chenoweth’s example, I subject everything to the Jesus smell test. He was an issues guy who staunchly refused to dish out or swallow spoon-fed answers. He told people to search the Scriptures and think for themselves, so that’s what I try to do. But following Grandpa Chenoweth’s example, I mostly keep my politics to myself. A good barber must also be a master of diplomacy. Being right was never as important to him as being kind.

Conversation in Grandpa’s shop revolved around the weather, family gatherings, local harvests, high school football scores. (South
ern towns are all about the Friday-night lights.) There was the usual busybody stuff, but no malicious gossip. All the local curmudgeons gathered for morning coffee and a shave. If it was too hot for coffee, they went to the old Coke machine in the back, where you could plug in your money and pull out a bottle of 7UP, Dr Pepper, Orange Crush, Strawberry Crush, or my personal favorite, Grape Crush. Sometimes, Grandpa would let my cousin Kimbo and me sweep the floor in exchange for whatever pocket change he had on him so we could walk up the street and buy candy from Red Bud Grocery or Hobbs Drug, with its genuine heart-shaped soda fountain right out of the 1930s.

I always saved up my allowance to buy my mom and dad a present every summer. Grandma worked up the street in a ladies’ shop, so finding a knickknack or a charm bracelet or tennis-racquet brooch for Mom was always easy, but I never knew what to get for Dad, so Grandpa always fixed me up with a bottle of this particular green hair gel, which he assured me Dad couldn’t do without. Dad was always delighted and thanked me profusely when he opened it, but just before I left for college, I was looking for something in the dark reaches of my parents’ bathroom closet and came upon a dozen bottles of that green hair gel. He’d never used a single squirt. Maybe that was Grandpa’s silent revenge for the Reagan administration, I don’t know, but I love that simply because it was a gift from me, Dad couldn’t bring himself to throw it away.

In a funny way, that green hair gel tells you everything there is to know about how my parents raised me. The choices I’ve made haven’t necessarily been what they hoped for. Sensible? Not always. Utilitarian? Not hardly. But they were delighted with just about anything I presented to them. Ballerina? Give it a whirl. Songbird? Lovely. They saw value in each endeavor, purely because it came from me. Looking back, I’m sure at times they weren’t quite sure what to do with me. My physical appearance and realm of interests were noticeably different from those of everyone else in my family, but I always felt that I fit in
because they have always loved me exactly as I am. They never expected or even asked me to be anything else. That’s the kind of family we are.

It hit Grandpa hard when Grandma died. I was in the middle of shooting a Christmas movie called
Deck the Halls,
and it took some scrambling, but the director, John Whitesell, was kind enough to shuffle the schedule for me to fly down just in time for the funeral. Mark and I stayed with Grandpa afterward, and late that night I found Grandpa standing in Grandma’s closet, drifting his hands over her empty dresses and coats.

“Grandpa? Are you okay?”

He looked at me, his face full of loss. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“You keep on keepin’ on,” I said. Because that’s what Grandma always said.

He told me I should take anything of hers that I wanted, but I wasn’t ready to do that. Long after he left, I sat looking through her things. Her Bible was in a quilted cover with handles, and every margin of every page was written completely full of notes, prayers, and questions. You can tell a lot about a person from the way she interacts with her Bible. Grandma’s Bible was a living thing, a running dialogue between her and God. She knew her Scripture up, down, and sideways, well enough to be comfortable with both her faith and her doubts. When I first started feeling uncertain about some of the teachings I was raised on, I went straight to her.