Excerpt
The Tell: Oprah's Book Club
1. FreeI want to tell you about the things that I remember. The things I have always remembered, things I remember still. The way it felt as a little girl when I’d get on my banana-seat bike, faded pastel pink with tassels on the handlebars, and ride through the streets of Amarillo with the breeze on my face. The sound of the cicadas chirping in the summertime. The way a change in the wind on the cattle yards outside of town, caked with manure, could leave you running for cover. Or a surprise on the cherry tree in our front yard: a loveliness of ladybugs swarming along its bark. I would stand there with a jar, collecting them excitedly. They would crawl up the glass, and I’d watch for a while, naming them. Then I’d set them free.
Free—that was what my childhood in the Texas Panhandle felt like to me. Free like the wide-open spaces, where you could see for miles. Free to stay out until dark, trusting that nothing bad would happen. Free to do cartwheels through the park. Free to roam the neighborhood in search of friends who wanted to ride their bikes to the convenience store for a Coke and a candy bar.
My family owned that convenience store, and several others in town. They were called Toot’n Totum, and there were locations all over Amarillo. The closest to our house was the store on Wimberly. My friends and I would ride there, then use our kickstands to park our bikes next to the building, up against its red-and-white brick siding, leaving the bikes unlocked.
I can hear it now in my memory: the swish of the door opening and the jingling bell announcing the arrival of a customer. I can feel the blast of air—flat and cold—hitting my face as I walked inside, a reprieve from the dry heat. I can see the hot dogs that had been turning too long in the hot dog machine, which probably needed to be thrown out; my dad didn’t like when they were overcooked, which they often were. In the front aisle, there was candy, and lots of it, with a colorful array of gum: I liked the bright, shiny yellow of Juicy Fruit and the synthetic watermelon tang of Hubba Bubba. Chewing gum was discouraged in my family, so much so that my grandmother Novie didn’t allow it, considering it an offense as bad as smoking. Once, at a restaurant, my father pointed out a pretty woman smoking a cigarette. “See that woman over there?” he said. “Do you think she’s beautiful?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” my dad said. “She’ll be wrinkly soon, because she smokes.” This was a clever way of keeping me and my siblings away from cigarettes, by appealing to our vanity. Tattoos and motorcycles were similarly verboten, but you couldn’t get either of those at the Toot’n Totum.
My favorite snack, the choicest of all options, was a bag of Funyuns. Or I’d mix up a Slush Puppie, pulling the handle to dispense the frozen ice; the store had a machine where you pumped the syrup yourself, and I would use all the flavors, one after another, so that the slush turned my teeth black. Sometimes I would go into the store with my father, usually to pick up a case of Capri Suns when my mom volunteered to bring the drinks to a soccer tournament or community fundraiser. We would walk to the back, into the walk-in freezer where the drinks were stored, past the racks of Hostess Twinkies, Mrs. Baird’s white bread, and Planters peanuts. My dad had a sweet tooth: He would usually pick up a pack of M&M’s, alternating between classic milk chocolate and peanut; it was always a surprise that I would find stashed, half melted, in the center console of his Suburban. The clerk, in a bright-green apron with pockets, would ring us up, smiling under fluorescent strip lights. When I looked down at my pink jelly sandals, I’d see the gleam of the white linoleum floors, always spotless. Everything was perfect.
Toot’n Totum wasn’t the only store in town. Sometimes I would ride my bike to Joan Altman’s, a gift shop in a strip mall not far from my house, where there was candy in the shape of red and black berries. I would study them, trying to decide which color I liked better, even though they tasted the same; or did they? I could never tell. Joan had gray hair and a demeanor that could turn on a dime; depending on the day, she would be either delighted to see us or cranky about having her store invaded by a pack of unchaperoned children. My mother went to Joan’s to purchase monogrammed gifts. In the South, anything that could be personalized would be—towels and Dopp kits and coasters and mugs, and anything we might need for summer camp. One Christmas I got a turquoise Jon Hart barrel bag with my name stitched on a tan rawhide patch; I can see it in my memory, on the shelf of the closet of my childhood bedroom. The bag was a symbol of possibility—the places I might go, the new people I might meet there. They would know my name because it said it on my bag.
There were two worlds. There was the one outside, where I could be wild, always in a swimsuit, my hair bleached from the summer sun and dry umber dirt under my fingernails. I was as rugged and free as the longhorns that, according to folklore, still roamed Palo Duro Canyon. Then there was the world inside, a world of things, which was ruled by order, exemplified by the stores my family owned. The aisles and shelves were organized, each product perfectly lined up. Space was maximized in the interest of efficiency. Surfaces were tidy. Things were put away where they belonged. Everything was bright, colorful, and ready for purchase.
That order was a form of safety. Life, I thought, would be better if everything could be presented like the items in that store, packaged or frozen. I believed that the things that we sold at my family’s stores were good because we sold them. And what we sold—what was good—was convenience. This—convenience—was very important. The best things in life weren’t free. They were shrink-wrapped.
When I was little, I loved entertaining my friends at the store, treating them to feasts of Reese’s Pieces, Cool Ranch Doritos, and lemon Gatorade, which I could put on the family account. Eventually, my father had a talk with me. “Amy,” he said, “can we talk about the monthly tab?”
“The tab?” I asked.
“From the store on Wimberly,” he said. “What do you think happens when you write down what you’ve bought on that little piece of paper?” I had never thought about it—it seemed more like magic. “I have to pay for all of it,” my dad said. It was the first time I understood that everything has a cost.
The family business was only about as old as my father; his parents had opened their first store in Amarillo around the time he was born. At the first location, customers would drive up and honk their horns, and then a clerk would ferry their order out to the car. The store was named for the toot of the car’s horn and the toting out of the goods.
Five years after my grandparents started the business, my father’s father, whom everyone called Lefty, fell from a ladder while cleaning the gutters. They weren’t sure if he’d died of a blood clot or a heart attack; either way, he was gone. My grandmother Novie was widowed with two small children, my father only four years old. But over the next two decades, she expanded the business such that there were nearly thirty locations, a big presence in a small town, by the time I was a little girl. I was the oldest of my parents’ children, followed by my brother Jeff, one year my junior. Three years later, my sister, Lizzie, was born, then my youngest brother, Andrew.
Novie’s house was as orderly as her stores. The four of us grandkids bounded like a pack of wolves through her beautiful home in search of dinner rolls or Andes mints. Novie arranged every little decorative object just so. You could feel the tension when we ran through her living room, as if the adults were just waiting for us to topple a potted plant or piece of antique silver. Her house even smelled important somehow, like orange and clove.
Novie had a beloved decorator, a man named Tom, who was frequently at her side, bringing her objects from around the world, like a silver turtle that made a buzzing sound when you pressed down on its tail; she also had a housekeeper who cooked and cleaned. It was novel to me that Novie, a woman, had help with domestic tasks; it meant her hours were free to run her business. It made her life more convenient.
Eventually, Novie found a new partner, Harley, a taciturn man who helped her expand the business; Harley was the only grandfather I ever knew. But no one ever said, “This is your step-grandfather, as your real grandfather is no longer alive.” It wasn’t until I saw a photo of a young man in a football uniform, standing proudly with his hands on his hips, and I asked who it was, that I understood that this was my paternal grandfather, Lefty, who had been a star athlete before his death.
I began to see that there were things, adult things related to matters of intimacy, that people just didn’t talk about. Nobody said that Tom was gay, although it was obvious that he was different from other men I knew, nor did they comment on the fact that Harley and Novie slept in separate bedrooms, as we once discovered when we were playing hide-and-seek in her house. My mother assured us that babies were delivered by stork.
