The Airstream

 

We rented a beautiful little Airstream trailer in Fairmont Trailer Court right outside of Manhattan, Kansas, the home of Kansas State University. Most of the people there were also in the army, but a few, including some army wives were going to school.

Money was a concern now. My husband brought home $450 in cash from the army every month. We bought a little lock box and put our money in there. We divided our money into envelopes with $60 for groceries, $92.50 for rent, $33.61 for our car payment, $40 for recreation and entertainment, and money for things like gas and doing laundry, etc. in other envelopes, we were careful to always put $20 into a joint savings account. I still remember these things because it was really the first time I had ever thought about paying my own bills and what things cost.

I had lots of time on my hands here and this is where I began to do a lot of the things I still do. We bought a second hand Dressmaker sewing machine and a friend taught me to sew. After that I made most of my dresses for a long time. It was easy in the early seventies. A yard of material made a darling little mini-dress. I used leftover fancy jars that syrup, or other food came in to make paper mache art projects. Our landlords let us bring our little dog, Ninna, out to live with us and there were dozens of things to do together. For one thing our landlord had a big boat and he invited us out on the lake. One day when we were out there a big inboard motor boat filled with teenagers flipped up in the air and turned over! I'll never forget seeing those kids leaping like frogs into the water. One night a week we joined the long line to Pizza Hut where anyone could get a medium pizza and a coke for one dollar. Sometimes when he had to work overnight he would bring home Spudnuts, the best donuts ever!

We were proud of our little trailer and bought an angora shag goat rug to put under our Danish table topped with glass, our only personal furnishings. Our friends were mostly the men he had been in Vietnam with and those people became our surrogate family. All of us were young, far from home, and eager to establish relationships with each other. When the army kept us from going home on a holiday we spent it together. All of us lived in furnished trailers of one sort of another, had one car and learned to lean on each other in times of need.

Other couples we met were a veterinary student, his wife and their baby, Will. She was a telephone operator and on the rare occasions they could go home we filled in for them at the Veterinary school insemination labs where we swept the floors around the gigantic bulls stabled there. In return he would trim Ninna if she needed it. 

This was the year I had to go to an army dentist and discovered my wisdom teeth had grown in pushing down and to the front,  All of my teeth were being crowded and deformed by those teeth and needed to come out. It was a horrendous process leaving me with dry sockets both times and in so much pain I thought I would die. Then, when it was all over, they said I had an unerrupted tooth above my canine tooth that needed to come out. That time the dental surgeon actually hammered a rubber triangle into my mouth with his mallet, springing my jaw. I went home looking like the bride of Frankenstein with three long black sutures hanging down from my top gum and a plastic plate in my mouth. None of this was especially painful, but my jaw was so damaged from being sprung that I couldn't open it. By the time I had recovered from this I weighed 102 pounds, which is not much for a five foot seven woman.

We bought a five foot Christmas tree that year from a place called Paradise and since money was tight we bought a cheap pink feathered angel at the dime store for the top. We called her our Floozy Angel. I made cookies to hang and we sewed long chains of popcorn and cranberries to decorate it. I was going to decorate styrofoam balls with sequins, but that turned out to be more expensive than buying some small red glass ornaments. We soon discovered that one of the downfalls to decorating a tree with food was the company that followed. At night, while we were watching our tiny little black and white television a little gray mouse would come out, climb up in the tree and munch on cookies and popcorn. He was cute, but he was a mouse and my husband put out Decon much to my distress.

That year for Christmas I asked for a strawberry cookie jar and got a mushroom one. I don't remember what I got him, but we were happy.

When my parents came out to visit I proudly served them stuffed duck and pudding ala messe. Imagine their faces as I undid the safety pins I'd closed that duck up with! It tasted great though the stuffing was so dry you could blow it away with a breath. The pudding, which was supposed to be a chocolate cake from a recipe I got from his mother's church cookbook never turned into a cake, but scooped over ice cream it was delicious!

I had three other visitors from Illinois that year. One night we were having an argument when I looked out the window and saw two people I did not recognize coming up our driveway. "I suppose you invited somebody over and forgot to tell me!" I exclaimed indignantly. He glanced out the window. "That's your sister!! He was right! It was my sister, who had always been a petite size 5, and her new husband. Evidently being married improved her appetite immensely. And another week, when he had to spend the week out in the field,I drove home by myself and brought back my eighty year old Great Aunt Lela! On the ride back she asked if we could turn the air conditioner in the car back on and I had to tell her that it hadn't been the ac she felt. It was simply the vent under our dash. She wanted me to teach her how to drive that week, but we had a stick shift and I didn't think eighty was a good age to take up driving, so instead she taught me to crochet granny squares, which I quickly forgot after she left. Still it was fun having her there.

We were always trying to think of ways to save money and one of those was by not sending his fatigues to the dry cleaners. I washed them at home and hung them on the trailer court clotheslines. After they were dry they had to be starched and ironed. Starching was quite a process. I dissolved the starch in a green wash tub and soaked the clean uniform in it, then re-dried it, sprinkled it with water and put it in the refrigerator. Finally I ironed it the rest of the way dry in order to get the proper creases and stiffness required. 

We also thought I could cut his hair when his unit bought a barber's chair and set of clippers. Of course we couldn't use the chair, but he brought the clippers home and insisted I try. "Just hold the hair in a comb and run the clippers over it." He said. I did. I scooped up a big thatch of hair, ran the clippers over the underside of the comb, which knocked them out of my hand and promptly left him looking like a tonsured monk! Fortunately only the really tall guys in his unit could see this.

I decided I should get a job, so I applied for positions near Camp Funston where he was stationed during the day. I got a job pumping gas and rode to the post with him early in the morning then parked at the gas station until my job started at ten. When he got off after work around 4:30, he waited until 6:00 when I was done. It was not a bad job. There were five us working there and we rotated between working in the cooler, selling beer and pop and pumping gas. I learned to use a cash register, but somehow no matter whether I worked the pumps or the cooler I tended to come up with too much money! My boss thought maybe people were tipping me. I didn't, but we will never know. Of course men were always trying to give women a hard time, so if they asked us to fill it up and we did, then they said they'd only asked for two dollars worth, we just had them pull inside and someone would siphon out all the extra plus enough to start the siphon. Once a man insisted that his Volkswagen beetle radiator needed water and no matter what I said to him, he insisted, calling me names and being a general ass. I finally just opened up his trunk and put the hose in. As the water began to pour over his engine he immediately recanted. I was not prepared for working on my first army payday. The lines for gas never stopped and it was 120 degrees out. I was so sunburned that the part in between my braids could not be touched for days. Those were good days, but hard.

Eventually we decided it was too hard. Then I applied for a job in Manhatthan. I would drive him to work when he couldn't get a ride and then I would go into work. I was a Bumper Bunny at a local gas station. It was all women except for our boss and we wore white cowboy hats, short white shorts, red tight shirts and washed windows with squirt guns. The money was great, but the job turned out not to be. I had men grab at me and paw me and one guy even cut me with his ring. I still have the scar. That was when I quit.

My husband thought of himself as a swinger. He loved the movie, Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice, and since we were always having get togethers for fondue, or Bridge, or something, he wanted to have a party that was risque. The only problem was that I didn't and neither did our friends. He thought this was simply because we didn't get it, so he invited them to a Pajama Party. Everyone wore pajamas, but they all put a humorous touch on it and that party was all laughing and playing party games like passing the spoon on a string through your clothes, or passing the orange using your chin or your body. It did get a bit rowdy but that was because he was drinking and mixing drinks and towards the end he was mixing liquor with liquor instead of coke or seven up, We all survived. Both physically and as friends.

The only sad thing that happened that year was when my husband kept signing up to work nights. He would have his best friend come keep me company. We would go out to dinner, or dance, or simply sit and talk and we got way too close to each other. Finally it was too complicated, awkward and painful so we had to break off.  They stayed friends, but I don't think he ever realized how close we had come to destroying everything..

When his time in the army was finally coming to a close he began job hunting in Illinois. We thought Bloomington might be a nice place to live since it was midway between our two parents and we were close to both of them. His mother was now a widow who shared a hundred year old family duplex with her sister and my siblings were still all living close to home.