February, the Month of Love
AS IT TURNED OUT, the Three Little Pigs cafeteria not only brought more good food to town, it brought romance as well. The new owners from St. Louis had a daughter who was now in the sixth grade with Bobby. Her Italian father and her Greek mother had produced a dark-eyed, olive-skinned beauty named Claudia Albetta, who soon had all the boys acting silly. In a town that was made up of mostly Swedish and Norwegian and Irish stock she was an exotic creature, as glamorous as Yvonne De Carlo and Dorothy Lamour rolled into one. By February, Bobby was a goner as well. They should have guessed something was up by his recent change in behavior. For one thing, he was using a lot of Wildroot Cream Oil on his hair, and he had put a brand-new shiny dime in his penny loafers.
When Dorothy came home from the grocery store she was surprised to see Bobby still sitting in the kitchen, the table littered with a pack of penny valentines he had bought at the dime store.
“Haven’t you picked one out yet?”
“No,” he said, pushing them around. “These are all too silly. It has to be just right.”
“And, may I ask who this valentine is going to—or is it private?”
“Claudia Albetta,” he told her but added quickly, “It’s not my idea to send some stupid card. Miss Henderson made us all pick a name out of a hat—she wants to make sure everybody in class gets a valentine.”
“Weren’t you lucky to get the name of a girl you like.”
“I didn’t,” Bobby admitted. “I swapped Monroe my Boy Scout knife and an Indian bracelet for it. He kind of likes her, too.”
“Oh, I see.” She sat down beside him. “Well, you have a big selection here.” She looked through the cards and picked up one. “Here is a picture of a kitten with a basket of hearts—that’s a nice one, don’t you think?”
Bobby looked at it again. “I want it to be more serious than that.”
“Ahh . . . I see.” She shuffled through the cards and picked up one with a cupid, looked at it, and put it back down. “No, you don’t want that; what we need is something in the middle, a cross between an adult valentine and a child’s valentine. Not silly . . . but not too mushy.” She chose another card. “Well . . . let’s see, no, you don’t want that either. All right, here’s one. . . . Look, it just has a nice simple heart on it and a nice simple message. You Are My Ideal Valentine . . . Be Mine.”
Bobby took it from her and studied it. “Do you really think this is a good one?”
“Oh yes, very tasteful, understated but to the point.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh yes.”
Bobby seemed pleased and took his pen and wrote across the bottom. Guess Who. His mother looked at what he had signed. “Do you mean to tell me that you have gone through all this agony and you’re not even going to sign your name?”
Bobby was horrified. “I don’t want her to know it’s from me! Besides, we’re not supposed to sign our names.”
“Well, how about giving her a hint, just a little one? That would be O.K., wouldn’t it?”
“What kind of hint?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you could narrow it down for her just a tad.”
“Like what?”
“You could say, From your admirer, the boy with the brown hair.”
“Oh, Mother, that’s stupid.”
“No, it’s not. Think about it. Wouldn’t you hate it if a girl liked you and never let you know? You have to have courage about this. . . . Remember, you have to take a chance on romance.”
“What if she throws up or something?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bobby, I can’t believe with all the noise you make that now suddenly you’ve gone shy and retiring. What’s happened to you?”
Bobby sat and thought about it for a long time. Then, mustering up all his courage, he even went a step beyond, threw caution to the wind, and signed, From the boy in the third row with the brown hair and brown eyes.
The next morning Dorothy told her listeners, “If you are standing up, sit down, because I never thought I’d live to see the day that Bobby Smith actually got up, combed his hair without me having to send him back to his room. Oh, isn’t love grand . . . and I do speak from experience. For years now I have been wanting a Sweetheart Swing in the backyard. I don’t know how many times I have said to Doc, Wouldn’t the spot right under the crab apple tree be just perfect for a little Sweetheart Swing so we could sit out here and look out over the fields and watch the sun go down? If you can believe it, yesterday morning after the show, I looked out in the backyard and there was Glenn and Macky Warren putting up a brand-new Sweetheart Swing. Glenn said, ‘Doc sent us over and said to tell you Happy Valentine’s Day.’ So young people don’t have a monopoly on love.” Mother Smith played a few bars of “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me.” Neighbor Dorothy chuckled. “That’s right, Mother Smith . . . he better not sit under the apple or any tree with anybody else but me . . . or I’ll have to bean him. Are you listening, Doc?”
Bobby fidgeted in his seat all day, waiting for the valentine party to start, when finally Miss Henderson brought out the cookies and handed out all the valentines. When she called Claudia Albetta’s name, Bobby pretended to be looking around the room but he watched her as she sat down and opened the envelope. She then turned around and smiled and gave the sweetest little wave.
Bobby smiled and waved back but she did not see him. She was smiling at the boy who sat three seats behind him, a boy that Bobby forgot had brown hair and brown eyes as well. Rats.
When he came home Dorothy met him at the front door. “Well?” she said.
“I told you it was a stupid idea. Now she likes Eugene Whatley.”
“Oh, dear,” said Dorothy.
When their friend Mr. Charlie Fowler, the poultry inspector, arrived at the house for dinner that night the first thing he asked was how Anna Lee was doing at school.
“Just wonderful,” Dorothy told him, “loving every minute of it, she says.”
“And how is young Robert?”
Dorothy shook her head. “I’m afraid young Robert is having romance problems, compounded by a slight case of mistaken identity.”
Claudia Albetta was not the only one that year to make a similar mistake. When Betty Raye found the unsigned valentine that had been slipped under her door that morning she had seen Bobby in the kitchen the other day and assumed it was from him. Bobby wondered why she had kissed him for no reason. Other than the box of candy from Doc and Dorothy, it was the only valentine she got that year.
Another Graduate
THE TIME BETWEEN February and May seemed to fly by for everyone except Bobby. To him, three months felt like ten years and by the end of the school year he was like a wild animal ready to be let out of his cage. Dorothy did manage to get him into his good suit and a bow tie for Betty Raye’s high school graduation. Dorothy wanted to be sure that everybody made a big fuss over her that day. The entire family was there, including friends like Monroe, who came along to help. They all yelled and applauded loudly when her name was announced and Jimmy even whistled. Dorothy was worried about her not being as popular as some of the other students and since the Oatmans could not be there, Dorothy wanted her to feel like she was not alone and know she had people who cared about her. After the graduation exercises were over, they were all standing around congratulating her when two girls walked up and asked Betty Raye if she was going to the party over at Cascade Plunge. “I don’t think so,” Betty Raye said, and before she’d thought it out Dorothy said, “Oh, Betty Raye, you don’t want to miss your senior party. Why don’t you go—I’ll bet you’d have a lot of fun.”
“Yeah,” said one girl, “you don’t have to have a date. You can go with us if you want to.”
“I’ll take you if you want me to,” Bobby said.
The girls did not wait for an answer. “If you change your mind, call us.” All the way home Dorothy had to bite her tongue to keep from saying anything more b
ut she managed. She had promised Betty Raye that she would never have to do anything she did not want to, but she still hated the idea that Betty Raye was not going tonight. She had not gone to the senior prom, either. One boy had asked her but she’d told him she could not dance, so he’d asked someone else. On prom night she’d stayed home and worked on her scrapbook. She had not seemed to mind but all night Dorothy had felt just terrible about it—and now the girl was missing the big senior party as well.
Later, everybody else was out on the porch and Mother Smith and Dorothy were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee. Dorothy said, “I feel so sorry for her I just don’t know what to do.”
“Why, did she say something about her parents not being here today?”
Dorothy shook her head, “No . . . it’s not that. She never says anything about that. It’s just when I went in her room earlier she was sitting all by herself working on her scrapbook while everybody else is out having fun.”
“Maybe she enjoys working on her scrapbook.”
“Do you know what she puts in it? Pictures of houses that she cuts out of magazines.”
“Houses . . . why houses?”
“Because she says that’s what she wants more than anything else.”
“Movie stars I can understand but houses, that’s a new one. What kind of houses?”
“Just little houses. She must have over a hundred pictures pasted in there.”
“Is that why you feel sorry for her?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s just that I get the feeling she’s always sad about something. Not on the surface but deep down inside of her and I don’t know what it is.” Dorothy looked away and her eyes filled with tears. “But sometimes when I look at her she looks just like a little lost dog, wandering around all alone in the world, and it breaks my heart.”
Mother Smith reached in her pocket and handed her a Kleenex.
“Sorry,” said Dorothy, “I didn’t mean to get so upset.”
“That’s all right, love. You’re just too tenderhearted where that girl is concerned. I think Betty Raye is happy here.”
Dorothy wiped her eyes. “Really?”
“Yes. I think she’s much happier with us than she was with that family of hers.”
“Do you think so?”
“Definitely.”
“Well, maybe I’m wrong,” she said and blew her nose, adding, “I hope so.”
Another Case of Mistaken Identity
DOROTHY HAD NOT been wrong. Betty Raye was sad. And she had felt lost all of her life but she did not know why. She also felt guilty for not being like the rest of the Oatmans and the Varners and for being such a disappointment to them—for not being outgoing and a good singer like the rest of them were. She loved her family but there were times when she felt as if she had just been dropped down from another planet into a group of strangers. There was no good reason why she felt that way, no good reason why she had always felt so different from all the others. But for as long as she could remember, she’d felt set apart.
Betty Raye did not know it but there was a perfectly good reason she felt so different from the rest of the Oatmans and the Varners. She was different. In fact, she was not even remotely related to them. They were strangers. But nobody knew it. Even Minnie Oatman believed she had given birth to her seventeen years ago, but she had not. The real truth about the matter was stranger than fiction.
In the last month of her pregnancy, Minnie and Ferris and the boys were living in Sand Mountain with Ferris’s mother and daddy and when it was time for the baby to be born they all piled in the car and drove down to Birmingham and checked her into the Hillman Hospital. On November 9, 1931, three babies were born not more than thirty minutes apart. A little boy named Jesse Bates, a little girl named Carolina Lee Sizemore, and Betty Raye Oatman all saw the light of day on the same night. It was unusually busy on the fourth floor and it didn’t help matters much that the entire Oatman and Varner clans all descended on the maternity ward like an invading army, including Floyd and his dummy Chester. Ferris Oatman’s brother Le Roy was still singing with the gospel group at the time and he called a bunch of his hillbilly musician friends in Birmingham who sang on the Country Boy Eddie radio show and invited them to the hospital for a party. And so, combined with the normal everyday chaos of a big-city maternity ward, there was now a hillbilly band playing in the waiting room, the two Oatman boys and all their cousins running and yelling up and down the hall. Besides this commotion, plus being excited at seeing real live hillbilly stars such as Country Boy Eddie and his sidekick Butter Bean in person, was it any wonder that nurse Ethylene Buck was all atwitter that night? She had been nervous to begin with, as this was only her second week working in the maternity ward. And to make matters worse, she had just been handed three babies at once and she had to weigh and clean up and get them ready to go and see their mothers. Not only that—now there was a man standing at the window with a dummy shooting his eyebrows up and down at her, saying “Whoo, whoo, whoo.” Chester banged his wooden head against the window, trying to get her attention. Which, unfortunately, he did. Nurse Buck became so flustered that she put the Sizemores’ baby’s name bracelet on the Oatman baby and the Oatmans’ baby name bracelet on the Sizemore baby.
When Mrs. Kathrine Sizemore, the lovely young blond wife of a prominent Montgomery attorney, was handed her baby, she was surprised to see that her hair was so dark. Just as Minnie had been surprised that her baby had such light hair. She had immediately remarked to Ferris, “She’s a pale little thing, ain’t she. And just look at them tiny little ears!”
If anyone had known about the error Nurse Buck had committed that night, it certainly would have explained why, eighteen years later, a plump large-boned girl with coal black hair and short arms was desperately trying to stuff herself into a white evening gown to prepare for her debut at the Montgomery Country Club. Of course her parents adored her but secretly they wondered why, when her mother had been so tall and slim and graceful, each time Carolina practiced her debutante curtsy to the floor she always fell over on her side in a lump. Just as the Oatmans wondered why Betty Raye had been unable to carry a tune. But what has been done cannot be undone. Fate is fate, and while Carolina was getting ready to be presented to Montgomery society as one of the city’s leading debutantes, Betty Raye, who should have been there, was miles away applying for a job as a vegetable girl at the Three Little Pigs cafeteria.
Betty Raye had wanted to get a job after graduation but she was not equipped to do anything that required intimate dealings with the public or being outgoing in any way. The job at the cafeteria seemed just right for her. All she had to do was stand there and dish out portions of whatever vegetable the customers pointed to. She did not have to talk a lot, so she was very happy she got the job. Now her world consisted of offering beans, okra, creamed corn, black-eyed peas, or whatever was on the menu that day and going home. Not knowing she might have been a debutante, she was perfectly content being a vegetable girl. And who knows—she might even work her way up to the desserts someday.
Anna Lee stayed in Chicago that summer to do her student nursing and after the valentine fiasco Bobby gave up on girls forever. When he was not at the swimming pool he spent most of his time reading Zane Grey cowboy novels, which Betty Raye brought home from the library for him. He was so caught up in reading about the romance of the Old West that by June he had finished them all, from The Riders of the Purple Sage to The Thundering Herd, and he took great comfort that most real cowboys did not even have girlfriends.
The Lady Bowlers
WHEN THE CAR full of women pulled up in front of the house and tooted the horn, Dorothy called out, “Sweetie, your bowling team is here.” In a few seconds Betty Raye came out dressed and ready to go and said good-bye to all as she ran down the stairs. Everybody was out on the porch eating ice cream, including Monroe, and Bobby waved at the car and said, “Good luck tonight.”
“Thank you,” they said and drove away.
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As they turned the corner Doc stood up and walked over and tapped his pipe on the side of the house. “I’m glad they asked her to join. She needs to get out once in a while.”
Jimmy nodded. “Yeah. I think it’s been good for her.”
Dorothy got up to take her bowl back in the kitchen and agreed. “I do too. I just hated seeing her sit at home every night, a young girl like that.”
“I just wish some nice boy in town would ask her out,” Mother Smith said, “somebody her own age.”
Jimmy grunted. “There’s nobody around here worth going out with, if you ask me.”
Monroe, sporting a new crew cut, his red hair shooting out of his head like wires, said, “I’d take her out . . . if she’d pay for everything,” and thought it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said, punching Bobby in the ribs.
Bobby punched him back. “She wouldn’t go out with you, you cootie head.”
Jimmy said to Doc, “See what I mean?”
He did not say so, but Jimmy often thought that if he had been younger and had not lost his leg, things would be a lot different. He wondered why the boys who had fallen all over Anna Lee, who would not give most of them the time of day, never paid the least bit of attention to Betty Raye. He was pretty well disgusted with the whole lot of them. When Jimmy had slipped the valentine under her door, he had said to himself, If the local Romeos are so dumb that they cannot see what a fine girl she is, then, by God, he would see to it that the day would not go by without her knowing there was at least one person in town who thought the world of her. Not while he was around at least.
Jimmy was also right about one thing: The bowling team had been good for Betty Raye. A few months before, when Ada and Bess Goodnight had come marching into the house to lobby for her to join the Elmwood Springs ladies bowling team, Dorothy and Mother Smith had encouraged her. And despite her initial reluctance, Bess and Ada could be very persuasive. Ada, the larger of the two, had once worked in the WASP recruiting office and knew just what to say. In the end Betty Raye could not say no. According to Ada it would have been, at the least, unpatriotic, un-American, and letting down the entire female sex if she did not join.