Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

I HAD NEVER WANTEDsomeone to take care of me, but I found that I liked being married. After so many years on my own, I was sharing my life for the first time, and it made the hard moments easier and the good moments better.

Ted always encouraged people to think big, to dream big, and when he found out that my great ambition had always been not just to finish high school but to go on to college, he told me I might even want to think of getting a Ph.D. When I told him of my dream to fly a plane, he said he could see me becoming a barnstorming stunt pilot. Ted was full of plenty of schemes for himself, too-how he was going to manufacture his own line of vacuum cleaners, build radio antennas out in the prairie, start a telephone company.

We decided we’d put off having kids and squirrel away money while I finished night school. When the future came into better focus, we’d be ready for it.

Ted was away a lot, but that was fine with me because I was busy with work and night school. To save money, we ate a lot of saltines and pickles, and reused tea bags four times. Busy as we were, the years passed quickly. When I was twenty-six, I finally got my high school diploma. I began looking for a better job but was still working as a maid when, one summer morning, crossing the street while carrying an armload of groceries for the family whose house I kept, a white roadster with wirespoked wheels came tearing around the corner. The driver slammed on the brakes when he saw me, but it was too late. The grille upended me, and I went rolling across the hood, scattering the apples, buns, and tins that I’d been carrying.

I instinctively went soft as I tumbled off the hood and onto the street. I lay there for a moment, stunned, as people rushed over. The driver jumped out. He was a young man with slicked-back hair and two-tone shoes.

Slick started insisting to everyone that I had stepped out into traffic without looking, which was a darned lie. Then he knelt down and asked if I was okay. The accident looked worse than it was, and lying there, I could tell I had no serious injuries, only bruised bones and some nasty scrapes on my arms and knees.

“I’m fine,” I said.

But Slick was a city boy, not used to seeing women take hard spills, then get up and walk away. He kept asking me how many fingers he was holding up and what day of the week it was.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I used to break horses. One thing I know how to do is take a fall.”

Slick insisted on taking me to the hospital and paying for the examination. I told the nurse at the emergency room I was fine, but she told me I was a little more banged up than I seemed to believe. While filling out her forms, the nurse asked if I was married, and when I said yes, Slick told me I should call my husband.

“He’s a traveling salesman,” I said. “He’s on the road.”

“Then call his office. They’ll know how to get in touch with him.”

While the nurse put mercurochrome on my scrapes and bandaged me up, Slick found the number and gave me a nickel for the pay phone. As much to put his mind at rest as anything else, I made the call.

A man answered. “Sales. This is Charlie.”

“I’m wondering if there’s any way you can help me track down Ted Conover on the road. This is his wife, Lily.”

“Ted ain’t on the road. He just left for lunch. And his wife’s name’s Margaret. Is this some kind of prank?”

I felt like the floor was tilting underneath me. I didn’t know what to say, so I hung up.

SLICK WAS BAFFLED BYthe way I rushed out of the phone booth past him, but I had to get away from him and out of the hospital to clear my head and try to think. I kept fighting panic as I made my way to the lake, where I walked for miles, hoping the still blue water would calm me. It was a sunny summer day, and lake water lapped at the promenade’s stone wall. Had I misheard Charlie or imagined what he’d said? Was there an explanation? Or had I been two-timed? There was only one way to find out.

The Electric Suction sales office was in a five-story cast-iron building near the Loop. When I got to the block, I fished a newspaper from a trash can and took up a position in a lobby across the street. As five o’clock approached, people began pouring out onto the sidewalks, and sure enough, my husband, Ted Conover, joined them, walking out the door of that cast-iron building wearing his favorite hat-the one with the jaunty little feather-tilted at a rakish angle. He’d clearly fibbed about being out of town, but I still didn’t have the full story.

I followed Ted at a safe distance as he made his way through the crowded streets over to the El. He climbed the stairs and so did I. I stood at the far end of the platform with my nose in the newspaper and boarded the train one car behind him. At every stop, I stuck my head out to watch and saw that he got out at Hyde Park. I followed him a few blocks east to a shabby neighborhood with walk-up apartment buildings that had sagging wooden staircases in the back.

Ted went into one of them. I stood outside for a few minutes, but he didn’t appear at any of the windows, so I went into the vestibule. None of the mailboxes had names on them. I waited until some kids came out, then slipped through the open door into the hallway. It was dark and narrow and reeked of boiling cabbage and corned beef.

There were four apartments on each floor, and I stopped at every door, pressing my ear against it, listening for the sound of Ted’s South Boston accent. Finally, on the third floor, I heard it booming out over a couple of other voices.

Without knowing exactly what I was going to do, I knocked. After a couple of seconds, the door opened, and standing in front of me was a woman with a toddler on her hip.

“Are you Ted Conover’s wife, Margaret?” I asked.

“Yes. Who are you?”

I looked at this woman Margaret for a moment. I figured that she was about my age, but she seemed tired, and her hair was going gray before its time. Still, she had a wan, careworn smile, as if life was a struggle but she managed from time to time to find something to laugh about.

Behind her I could hear a couple of boys arguing, then Ted’s voice saying, “Who is it, honey?”

I had an almost overwhelming temptation to push past Margaret and gouge out that lying cheater’s eyes, but something held me back- what it would do to this woman and her kids.

“I’m with the census,” I said. “We just wanted to confirm that a family of four is living here.”

“Five,” she said, “though sometimes it feels more like fifteen.”

I forced myself to smile and said, “That’s all I need to know.”

I WAS ON THEEl going back to the boardinghouse, trying to figure out what in the blue blazes to do now, when I suddenly thought about our joint bank account. I stayed up all night, sick with worry about it, and was waiting in front of the bank when the doors opened. Ted and I had salted away almost two hundred dollars in an interest-bearing savings account, but when I got to the teller, he told me there were only ten dollars left.

I got back to the boardinghouse and sat down on the bed. I was surprised by how calm I felt. But as I packed my pearl-handled revolver in my purse, I noticed my hands were trembling.

I took a bus to the Loop and walked up the stairs of the cast-iron building to Ted’s office. I pushed open the frosted glass door. Inside was a small, dusty room with several old wooden desks. Ted and another man sat at two of them, their feet up, reading newspapers and smoking.

As soon as I saw Ted, I lost every bit of ladylike decorum my mother had tried to instill in me. I became a wild woman, lighting into that two-timing thief, cursing and screaming-”You no-good low-down dirty lying scum-sucking son of a bitch!”-and whaling him with my purse, which, since I had my six-shooter in it, meant I was giving him a pretty good pistol whipping.