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IN 1939, THE HUGE blockbuster Gone with the Wind had all the girls doe-eyed over Clark Gable. Twenty-two-year-old Tot Hagood, the hairdresser, had even married James Dwayne Whooten (a would-be housepainter), because she thought he looked just like Clark Gable. Her mother said that James Whooten looked as much like Clark Gable as a squirrel looked like an elephant. But Tot could not be deterred. She was in love.
It was a nice wedding, except that Tot’s daddy got drunk and passed out in the vestibule and couldn’t walk her down the aisle, and James got a piece of rice stuck in his ear, so they spent their first night in the hospital. But other than that and a few other ups and downs it had been a pretty good decade.
1940
It seemed to the older generation that the world was speeding up at an alarming rate. The new jitterbug dance the kids were doing was far too frantic to suit them. As old Mrs. Childress said, “I’m afraid to cross the street, with all these teenagers racing around in their hopped-up hot-rod jalopies.”
But in general, people were in a good mood. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was on his way to being elected to an unprecedented third term, and the Depression was finally turning around, and they were beginning to feel hopeful again.
Elmwood Springs had just gotten its own official Greyhound bus stop, with a sign on a pole and everything. A brand-new bowling alley had been built, too. Warrens’ Hardware now had a layaway plan, and by summer, almost every child in town had a pair of roller skates and a new blue-and-white Schwinn bicycle. In June, the Warrens’ ten-year-old son, Macky, had climbed to the top of the water tower and had scared his mother, Ola, half to death. Macky survived the climb with flying colors, only to almost drown a week later over at the swimming pool, when he knocked himself out on the diving board. Luckily, Gene Nordstrom, who was the lifeguard, saw him and reached down and pulled him out of the pool by his hair just in time.
Also, surprisingly enough, that June, the town hairdresser, Tot Hagood Whooten, without any collateral to speak of, was able to get a loan from the bank and open her own beauty shop. Tot didn’t know it, but Ida Knott Jenkins, the banker’s wife, had helped Tot get the loan. Ida was a client of Tot’s, and she didn’t think that having her hair done on the Whootens’ back porch was in keeping with her new social standing. One night, over dinner, she had pointed a celery stick at her husband and said, “Herbert, I don’t care about any bottom line, you men have a barber shop, so there’s no reason in the world that our town shouldn’t have a beauty salon.” Herbert knew he would have to give Tot the loan, or he would never hear the end of it. Whenever Ida pointed celery at him, she meant business.
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TWO WEEKS LATER, IDA Jenkins, her hair in pin curls, was at the beauty shop, sitting under a brand-new hair dryer, engrossed in a magazine article:
Do You Suffer from Perfectionism?
1. Are you a fussbudget?
2. High-strung or nervous?
3. Impatient?
4. Critical of others?
5. Ill at ease among disorder?
6. Worried about future events?
The list went on and on from there. After she had finished reading, Ida hadn’t found one single description that had not applied to her, and she was thrilled. Who would not want to be perfect?
“After all, you don’t walk into a jewelry store and say, ‘I’m looking for an imperfect diamond,’ or go to the eye doctor and say, ‘Oh, I’ll just settle for imperfect vision, thank you,’?” she said. From the time she was a child, she had never understood why anybody wouldn’t try and strive for perfection.
Ida had always been different. At school, when all the kids used to play church, and one would be the preacher, another the preacher’s wife, a deacon, and the choir leader, and some would be the parishioners who had come to the church, Ida said she wanted to be God, because she was the only one who knew how to do it.
Of course, Ida’s strong standards were already taking a toll on her daughter, Norma. That same year, Norma Jenkins had been cast as one of the dancing tulips in Dixie Cahill’s spring dance recital. And on the night of the performance, when she had missed a step, she had run off the stage in tears. As her aunt Elner Shimfissle, who was in the audience that night, said to Gerta, “Poor little Norma—only nine years old and already a nervous wreck.”
Norma had two aunts: Gene’s mother, Gerta, and her aunt Elner. They were as different from Norma’s mother as night and day.
Ida had been the prettiest of the Knott sisters, and the problem was that she knew it. She had been determined from the get-go to marry the banker’s son and move up in the world. And she had. Her sister Elner was just a simple farm lady who still wore old-lady tie-up shoes: black in the winter, white in the summer.
Ida aspired to be a trendsetter, and she read all the fashion magazines. She wanted to dress like the ladies in McCall’s and Glamour. She had made friends with Miss Howard, head buyer in Ladies’ Better Wear at the Morgan Brothers Department Store, who kept her supplied with all the latest fashions.
Norma never thought her mother had ever been very nice to Aunt Elner. Ida would often say, “I just wish she wasn’t so country. She lets chickens walk in and out of her house, Norma!”
Ida was ashamed of her farm background and took it out on poor Elner. Although their parents, Henry and Nancy Knott, had owned a pig farm, Ida would spend the rest of her life pretending it wasn’t so. Norma had never seen a photograph of her grandparents. Ida had hidden them, along with the family Bible that had everyone’s date of birth listed. The little fat German farm woman in an apron and the skinny man in overalls standing in front of a fence with pigs in the background was not the family portrait Ida had in mind. She often complained to Elner about having that photograph out in plain view. “If they couldn’t have dressed up, why did they have to have pigs in the picture? It’s so embarrassing.”
Elner said, “Maybe so, Ida, but those pigs paid for your wedding.” As Elner later told her niece, “Now, Norma, I love Ida…but Lord, she’s bad to put on airs.”
And it was true. Ida’s ideal woman at the time was Eleanor Roosevelt. True, the woman had absolutely no sense of style, her clothes were atrocious, her hair a disgrace. But she had spunk. She was a real go-getter, with agendas of her own, a real no-nonsense person who did not sit around in the background. Much like herself, Ida thought.