A Today Kind of Marriage

We called ourselves the Austin Mafia. Nearly all of us had gone down to the University of Texas and come back to Dallas to take up our lives, some of them ruinous and some successful. But Jack and Peggy and Lee and Hancel and Rich and Anne and I had always stayed together, hanging out at night and going to drive-ins and loaning each other money. We were all sort of shiftless, younger than our years, incapable of more than two consecutive serious thoughts. Marriage and babies? They were almost inconceivable, to none of us more so than Jack and Peggy. Jack was a brilliant, passionate goofball who put "boy scientist" on his IRS forms and made a meager but satisfying living repairing calculators, doodling with computers and playing drums for a band called the Shitty Beatles. He was a jokester, a private stand-up comic for our gang, a 27-year-old going on 15. The idea of some baby's calling him Daddy would make your sides split with laughter--or your palms sweat with anxiety.

We were at a burger place called Hunky's and (continued on page 146) Marriage (continued from page 89)

Jack was eating a hot dog when he dripping chili and onions, and he put it down, swallowed the bite bulging his cheeks and said, "Peggy and I are eloping to Hot Springs tomorrow night. She's pregnant, and we're gonna have our honeymoon at Graceland."

Everyone laughed but Peggy. Some of us had been friends as far back as grade school; now we were in our late 20s, grabbing dinner together and listening to another one of Jack's colossal jokes. But he soon convinced us it was no joke--for once in his life, Jack wasn't kidding.

"It's true," Peggy said. "We really are." We looked into her solemn, almost wistful face and realized that Jack and Peggy--the least likely candidates of us all--were going to be the first to bite the dust and set up housekeeping.

We weren't so surprised about Peggy. She was a quiet hipster who taught fifthgrade English at a private school and who had, more than any of us, settled into a nice life for herself. If we all got together to eat dinner or watch Hill Street Blues, we'd usually end up at Peggy's. If we really needed someone to talk to, Peggy would wake up in the dark and answer our phone calls. She hadn't always been happy: That had come with Jack. For a couple of years, she'd lived with a Polish-American novelist/dishwasher in the East, where she'd gone to get her master's. But she missed Dallas and the gang, and her boyfriend seemed to us, on the one occasion we met him, to be the gloomy cause of a pall that had fallen over her for a long time. When Peggy moved back to Texas in 1983, she and Jack began hanging out together, and they finally faced us one night with the astonishing, embarrassing admission that they were going steady. Jack's high-jinks brought Peggy to life; she became straight man and yukster to his constant stream of goofy observations and roadhouse antics.

They were fun to watch: They were both so alike and so different from everyone else. They liked drive-in movies, antique clothes, Busch beer and the National Enquirer. They loved baseball and everything in pop culture; Peggy had a master's degree in it, which put a cool curve in the short stories she wrote and in the way she taught her fifth graders.

They did have some differences--Peggy's family was fairly wealthy (she wore Neiman-Marcus underwear beneath her Salvation Army clothes), while Jack cared little about money, career, ambition. And now here they were, noisily sucking the last drops of milk shake from their cups, with a one-way ticket to Preg City.

We all wished them good luck. "Luck? We don't need luck!" Jack said expansively. "We have the whole world in the palm of our hands!" He held up his palms, pretended to fumble the planet on the restaurant's linoleum floor and went, "Oops!"

The happy couple returns

The Monday after their weekend elopement, Jack and Peggy screeched up my driveway in Jack's '66 Tempest. They looked like they'd just done something illegal and were going to let me in on it.

"I had my finger up her butt crack the whole dang time," Jack said, closing the car door. Peggy got out on the other side, swinging the Newlywed Gift Pak they'd gotten at the courthouse three days before, protesting this account of their wedding.

"Not up it," she said. "I had a dress on. It was on my butt."

"I was goosin' her, was what I was doing. The whole dang time."

Peggy rolled her eyes. "I almost missed my cue to say 'I do.' I was too busy swatting his hand away."

They'd driven straight to Hot Springs Friday and gone to the courthouse, in one of those sleepy Southern squares where World War One veterans sit on benches watching the traffic. Inside, their first sight was a holding cell full of prisoners. ("We figured that was a good sign," Jack said.)

Peggy held up the Newlywed Gift Pak. "Look at all this neat stuff," she said. "Tide, Massengill disposable douche, Scope mouthwash, Midol...."

"Yeah," Jack said. "I picked up the Midol and waved it around in the courthouse and went, 'Hey, honey--no excuses tonight!' "

Peggy rolled her eyes, which she did with amazing regularity. "It was like 95 degrees that day--we'd just driven all the way there, we were hot and sweaty and our faces were all red."

I winced. "Sounds romantic."

They went to a justice of the peace, who spent most of the brief ceremony talking about himself. "And he slipped some Jesus stuff in the vows, which we really didn't want in there, but what could we do?"

"I paid the J.P. twenty bucks, too," Jack said, "which means with the marriage license, Peggy still owes me a total of twenty bucks. Actually, you don't have to pay the J.P. anything, but he was looking at me with ten-dollar signs in each eye. I wanted to rabbit-punch him a few times."

This all left me a bit pained--my picture of weddings is a little more idealized. I think of weddings like they are in Thirties movies, or like the one between Prince Charles and Lady Diana back in '81, when the whole gang got together at five a.m. to watch it. We scattered black-and-white portable TVs all around my place and munched on wedding cookies and cheap champagne while the royal couple kissed outside Buckingham Palace. This Hot Springs wedding just seemed to be missing something.

"Did y'all kiss then?" I asked. "You know, like you're supposed to?"

"Sure," Jack said. "The J.P. smiled and said, 'You can go ahead and score now, Mr. Turlington--you're married! You can get some of the sweet stuff!' "

Peggy rolled her eyes.

The rest of their wedding weekend went along those same lines--they motored to Little Rock for their wedding night and called their parents from a "cheap, clean hotel room with free HBO."

"Yeah, my mom started bawlin'," Jack said.

"My mother wasn't there," Peggy said, "and my father didn't believe it. He just started laughing and hung up." The next morning, they went to Memphis, so they could always say they'd honeymooned at Graceland. They barely had time to drop 50 bills at Elvis gift shops and catch a few dog races in West Memphis before it was time to head back to Dallas. On the way back, they had their first argument: Since Peggy was keeping her last name, what would the baby's last name be? Peggy, who has no brothers to carry on the family name, voted for Norvell. Jack insisted on Turlington, traditional this one time. They finally came up with a way to settle the issue when they got home--they would decide who got to name the baby by playing chicken with their cars.

"Well, how does it feel?" I wanted to know. "To be married, for life?"

Peggy shrugged. "I have to admit, it felt a little shocking to wake up in Little Rock, Arkansas, married."

"I guess it was like ... real, real beautiful," Jack said, affecting an angelic glow. "Here we were, married in Little Rock, married as shit, and I woke up, the little lady still asleep, so cute and precious, all curled up and snorin' like a sawmill, and I thought ... Yeah. Yeah. This is it. This is perfect".

They drove off to break the news to Jack's roommate, the lead singer of the Shitty Beatles. The group had just released a single, though it had never had a gig, and Jack was afraid that John would take the news hard. And they still had to convince Mr. and Mrs. Norvell that they'd actually done it. I watched Jack's Tempest sail around the corner at the end of the block, with Jack and Peggy inside, heading off together, married as shit.

Finding a love Nest.

"Well, what do you think?" Jack pulled an ottoman from the bed of his old pickup and gestured back toward the house. It was something, all right--two stories tall, 60 years old, with a long, open porch and French windows all across the top. Just a block down Swiss Avenue, in the historical district, houses like this had been fixed up into mansions years before and went for $1,000,000 apiece. But a lot went downhill in a block: Here the sidewalks were cracked, half-naked children ran around squealing in Spanish, and a crumbling apartment house across the street advertised rooms for rent by the week.

"Dream home, huh?" Jack said. "Dream home!" We clomped up the wooden steps and went inside, where Peggy and a few friends were touring the high-ceilinged, oddly painted rooms. There was a lot of work to be done, but the house was enormous, and it had possibilities. They'd decided to rent it, with an option to buy in a year or two if things worked out.

I asked Jack how Peggy was doing--she looked tired.

"It's morning sickness," he said. "She's in E.N.S.--the Early, Nasty Stages. Hey, look at this." He picked up a crumpled sheet of paper, smoothed it out. "Peg and I were talking about baby names, and she asked me to write down ten names, in order of preference."

His list went like this:

Jack had had a thing about the name Dale ever since he saw a commercial in the Sixties in which a teenager goosed his girlfriend's mom by mistake at the bottom of a pool and came up sputtering, "I'm sorry ... I thought you were Dale!" He had magazine subscriptions sent to him in that name, and it was his dog Sam's nickname. So it was natural that he name his kid Dale--it kept the joke going. But there were people who would see this list as a danger signal. This was no joke to Peggy--she could no longer smoke, she never so much as sipped a beer and she was looking more and more ragged out every day. Some of us in the gang, now that we'd had time to fully realize that Jack and Peggy were actually married and expecting, were wondering if they would be OK. Jack, who could be deadly serious about things like politics (he subscribed to the Anti-Klan Newsletter), seemed to be dealing with married life on a comic level. Sooner or later, it was bound to hit him--he would wake up and realize where he was.

"Did you hear about Sam?" Jack asked me, sitting on a just-moved-in couch and rubbing down his old mutt's shoulders. "We heard that sometimes dogs can get jealous of newborns, and you can deflate the situation by getting a doll, carrying it around the house, kissing it and showing it to Sam, giving him some attention, too, to sort of break him in. So we did that, and then we went out to a movie. When we got home, the doll was scattered in a million pieces all over the house, and Sam was in the corner, growling and foaming at the mouth, with the doll head hanging out of his jaws. And we went, "Uh-oh....' "

Later on, our friend Rich came over and the three of us drove in Jack's pickup to Sears, took the escalator to major appliances and walked up to a Kenmore. The house didn't have a refrigerator, so Jack and Peggy had bought this one, on sale. We helped get it loaded in the truck, and Rich and I stood gripping its sides as Jack careened back toward Swiss Avenue. We had a great time, just like in the old days of a month before, cutting up like high school kids. Buying a refrigerator at Sears ... suddenly, the whole thing seemed so ridiculously bourgeois it was absurd, and we were goofing off all through East Dallas, as if it were really just a great big joke.

Jack gets a Curfew

Mr. and Mrs. Norvell seemed to adjust fairly well to the idea of Peggy as a suddenly married, expectant mother. None of their four daughters had ever been very predictable, anyway: They'd been in punk bands, designed wild clothes, cracked up cars, gotten into various levels of heartache and trouble, and one of them had even married a forest ranger. Yes, the Norvells could handle this all right. A month after the wedding, they gave a reception for the newlyweds, sending out engraved invitations and preparing a feast at their mansionlike North Dallas home for an odd mix of guests (teachers from Peggy's school, old family friends, some of the old rowdy crowd from Austin, the rest of the Shitty Beatles). Everything went smoothly, though Jack bridled when Mrs. Norvell insisted that he and Peggy pick out a china pattern and get it registered at Crate & Barrel. ("It's stupid," Jack said, before caving in. "If people can't think of a present, they can just give us stacks and stacks of cash!") At the party, only a few people brought dishes; Jack and Peggy's favorite gift by far was a five-foot-long plastic airplane that had hung on the wall outside the Jet-Away Lounge on Cedar Springs, until the place was being torn down just as Rich happened by. Now Jack was running his hands back and forth over the jet's shiny gray surface, his vision blurred by joy, as a dozen discarded blenders and toasters lay strewn at his feet. "This," he said reverently, "is going over the mantel."

As the night progressed, the quiet crowd stayed in the house, munching veggies and listening to Mr. Norvell's big-band albums, while the rest of us bopped in the huge yard out back, downing long-necks and catching up on stuff with the Austin kids. Things got sort of hazy after two or so, and I wasn't really aware of things until Rich called me the next day with incredible news.

"You won't believe this," he said. "Last night, Peggy gave Jack a curfew."

"No!"

"Yep. He got in real late, and she was real mad, and so he has a curfew now."

"What is it?"

Rich didn't know. Whoa, boy. This was too much. This was great. I tracked down Jack to get the scoop.

"Well, you know, I hadn't seen a lot of those guys from Austin in a long time," Jack said, "and Peggy got tired pretty early, around two, and said she wanted to go home, and I told her to go ahead, that I'd be home before too late."

"When did you get home?"

"Uh ... five thirty. And, boy, was I in the doghouse. Peggy was thinking, Oh, no, shades of things to come. And I thought, Hmmm ... this isn't really atypical behavior for me ... what have we done?"

After a moment of seriousness, Jack was laying on the sarcasm. "Oh, God, what have I got myself into? A woman who doesn't like to party at all--she only stays out till, like, two, two thirty a.m., that's it. She gets tired and can't even knock off a twelve-pack; she stops after eight or nine beers! What a wimp! What have I done to myself? A gilded cage is a cage all the same!"

Jack's curfew was a joke, too--it was officially set at 4:30 a.m.--but at least it was a goal, something to shoot for. Two weeks went by and I heard nothing else about that night, until one day I had lunch with Peggy, alone with her for what I realized was becoming a very rare time. Peggy had gotten over her morning sickness and looked pretty chipper. "I'm feeling great," she said. But when I made a joke about Jack and his curfew, she didn't laugh.

"That's not really how it happened," she said, after staring at her plate a long time. "It wasn't that I was mad at him; I was more hurt than mad. I really wanted him to go home with me from the reception. I wasn't feeling too well, and I get real sleepy these days--I can't stay up all night like I used to. But he wanted to go out with his friends--which is fine, I can understand that, he never gets to see them anymore--so I went home. I watched part of an old movie on the VCR, then I went to bed, but I couldn't go to sleep. I started crying at four and kept it up till he got home at five thirty. I'd cry for a while, stop, then start crying again. When Jack came home, my face was all swelled up, the tears were starting to sting, and I think he was really shocked. He felt real bad, and he put his arms around me and said something like, 'Once we get all settled in, things will be all right again,' and I felt better, but then I thought, Bullshit! and started crying again. I didn't say anything about him needing to act like a father, because I thought he was uncomfortable with that.... I just said, 'You can't do this to me!' " She took a breath, looked around our table. "Then he said something like, 'Yeah, I ought start becoming more responsible,' or 'I'm a family man now.' He's never said anything like that before, and I think he really meant it."

Peggy and I talked about things the rest of us had all discussed but had been afraid to bring up with her--what kind of father Jack would make, whether he'd be able to take it seriously.

"Sometimes I'm scared," she said. "I was scared that night. You know that movie, St. Elmo's Fire, where Rob Lowe plays a kid who's a terrible father? I was afraid either I was gonna have to deal with something like that or else I'd strap him down so badly that we would both be miserable. But so far, that hasn't happened-- he's begun to accept it all gracefully."

"Do you ever talk about the baby?"

"Not really ... it's... it's not exactly a taboo subject, but neither of us quite believes it yet, I think. I mean, until lately, I felt so sick, and I guess I thought, How could I be happily pregnant and have this wonderful creature inside, and feel so sick? I don't think either of us has really faced it yet"--almost imperceptibly, her hands dropped toward her stomach--"we just don't think of it as real."

Babies at the Baseball Game

A wet diaper has a certain inescapable smell, even when it's in the back seat of a '66 Tempest hurtling along Interstate 30 with all the windows down. Sitting in the back of Jack's car, I knew the baby beside me had loaded his pants, but obviously Jack hadn't noticed--he had one elbow out his window, his palm slapping the hood to the beat of a Ventures tape, and beside him, Peggy was adjusting a cool six-pack of Busch in her lap, probably thinking about how much she'd like one. We--Jack and Peggy and I--had made a date to go see the Texas Rangers drop another game at Arlington Stadium, and at the last minute, Peggy decided to bring her nephew along, to see what taking care of a baby in public was like. It would be sort of like a dry run.

"Will is wet!" I yelled into the wind.

Jack jerked his head around. "Gosh dang it, Will!" he said. "Quit acting like a baby!"

Will played with his tennis shoes in his car seat and chewed a wad of gum, perfectly content. He wasn't quite two and rarely understood anything Uncle Jack said. Sometimes, Jack would explain complicated algorithmic theorems, then stop midway through, feigning impatience, and say, "Why... why ... you're not even paying attention!."

"He'll be OK till we get to the game," Peggy said, reaching back to check Will's diaper. "What's that on your shoe, Will? Gum?" She pointed to a tiny dot of green on the heel. "Gum? Gum?"Misunder-standing, Will pulled the gum from his mouth and spread it out on his shoe.

"Will, act your age!" Jack yelled.

Actually, Jack seemed happy to have Will around on the rare occasions when Peggy's sister brought him up from Pasadena. He treated him as a toylike, miniature man, pointing out busty women on the street, offering him cigars, suggesting improvements for his car seat ("When we drive him in the pickup, we can make him a little pickup baby seat, with an itty-bitty gunrack").

We slowed down behind a mile of cars, which made no sense. Only a handful of people ever went out to see the Rangers get shelled. "Maybe there's a special promotion tonight," Jack said. "Maybe it's Saab Turbo night." Peggy asked the folks in the next car and found out that everyone else was going to Six Flags Over Texas, right next door to the ball park, to see the New Edition in concert.

"Watch this," Jack said when we'd stopped completely for a moment. He reached over the seat, tenderly touched Will's little chest. "Hey--what's that on your shirt?" Will looked down, and Jack flipped his fingers up to catch his nose. "Haaaa! Gotcha! Betcha he falls for that for the next five years."

It wasn't Saab Turbo night. Jack assured the ticket tearer that he'd read all about it in The Dallas Morning News, but no dice. Just when it looked like Jack was going to give up, his face brightened. "Oh, now I remember," he told the guy. "This is Krugerrand night."

We went way up in the cheap seats in time to see the bottom of the second. Peggy spotted Cal Ripken of the Orioles popping his glove near second base. "Ooo, Cal Ripken!" she said. "If I don't go home with you guys tonight, I'll be with him."

We guys--including Will--couldn't let that pass. We began looking around for dames. Jack tried to teach Will to say, "Hi, girls!" and by the fourth inning, he would go, "Hi, girsh!" if either of us even nudged him.

"Now I remember what tonight is," Jack said as six cute teenagers made their way up our section. "It's Nude Teen Night! Will--when they come by, say, 'Hi, girls, drop'em!'"

Will popped a bite of hot dog into his mustard-coated mouth and squealed, "Hi, girsh, doppim!"Jack patted him on the back, glowing, as proud of his young nephew as if the kid had just discovered a cure for cancer.

"Hey," Jack said in the middle of the fifth, "this is already the fifth inning, and I've only had, what, fifteen beers? C'mon, will, let's go get us some brews." As he led Will down the aisle, he leaned down and said, "Remember, if you get lost, you're in Plaza Box Level seating, section 414, row G, seats 11 through 14. Got that?"

At the concession stand, Jack ordered a Texas-size Budweiser for Will, a pretzel for himself. The ladies behind the counter made a big fuss over Will, and Jack ate it up, proud as a poppa. "Yeah, he's a really good kid," Jack told them, picking up Will and nudging his chin with his finger tips. "Now, if he could just do something about that horrible, horrible drinking problem."

Deep in the eighth, Peggy was sitting next to me, dying for a beer and a binocular view of Cal Ripken's buns as he went into his batting stance. She looked beautiful these days--her complexion had that clear, beatific radiance pregnant women sometimes get. She was always in a good, tranquil mood, too. She looked next to her, where Will was dozing off in Jack's arms. "He loves Jack," she whispered to me.

On the way home from a rare Ranger victory--about the only one we saw all year--Will got restless and cranky, started bawling. Jack pulled a pen from his pocket and said, "Will! Hey, hey, Will! Look at this!" It was one of those action pens, with a picture of Graceland at the top. "Look, Will, what's that hiding behind that bush? That bush right there?" He tipped the pen over. "Why ... why ... it's the king of rock'n' roll!" The rest of the way home, he sang Are You Lonesome Tonight? until Will was asleep in his car seat, exhausted from another eventful night out with Uncle Jack.

Dressing down the shitty beatles

In a big booth at Campisi's Egyptain, an Italian pizza place, the gang was eating Thursday night out. Jack and Peggy had been married nearly three months and something remarkable had happened-- Peggy was starting to look pregnant. I mean, there it was, right there. You couldn't miss it. Before, it had always seemed so abstract, something to be concerned about, to fret over. But as Peggy's belly began ballooning like a soccer ball, it all suddenly seemed so simple.

Our waitress raced over, tugging at her apron. "Who had the Lite beer?"

"Yo!" Jack said. "Tastes less." Jack and Peggy were wearing matching plaid Bermuda shorts--both Jack's. ("They fall down around my hips, but they're starting to fit better," Peggy said.) Peggy had been to the doctor that day, but she could hardly describe it, because Jack kept butting in. He'd gone, too.

"Yeah, we listened to the little guy's heartbeat," he said. He pointed at his wife's stomach, and we all looked. "It sounded like electronic music. We were waiting a long time, so I decided to be indiscreet. I said, 'Doc, as long as we're waiting, I've got a butt problem.'"

Everybody groaned and threw garlic toast at him. This was becoming his 1000th Reagan-operation joke.

"I said, 'Maybe you could check it out ... I may have a polyp or something. I'm pretty sure I have a really huge butt polyp.'"

The waitress saved us by coming with our orders. Jack and Peggy were splitting a plate of linguine; money was getting pretty tight for them. The rent and bills on the big house were higher than they had thought they'd be, and besides, they'd been making baby purchases. Just that day, they had bought a baby car seat at Storkland, and earlier in the week, Jack had bought a crib at a garage sale. They weren't rich, but they looked happier than I'd seen them in months.

"Hey, have y' all heard me and Peggy's latest get-rich-quick scheme?" Jack said, wolfing down a last forkful of pasta. "A nude teen petting zoo! It can't miss! Work a few extra weekends a month! We'll do testimonials: Hate your boss? Tired of forty-hour weeks? Be your own boss! Open a nude teen petting zoo! I earned $400,000 my first weekend, tax-free!"

As we walked outside into a glittering blue twilight, Peggy pointed at three enormously fat women waddling down Mockingbird Lane. "That's what I'm gonna look like," she sighed.

Jack snorted. "What do you mean, gonna?" But then he put his arm around her and patted her back. They were going off to a Shitty Beatles rehearsal--Jack's band had its first real gig ever that weekend, at the wedding of a friend of a friend in Wimberley, Texas. Peggy was going along, which had the makings of trouble-- it was no secret that Dennis and John, two AAA salesmen who were the other Shitty Beatles, thought this marriage business was a bunch of baloney, an aggravating inconvenience to the future of the band. If Jack wanted to leave a practice before midnight, they'd say stuff like, "You mean you let your wife tell you what to do?"

Later on, from Peggy, I heard what happened that Thursday night. Something about the visit to the doctor--listening to the baby's heartbeat, hearing and seeing tangible reasons for sacrifices he'd made for months--had really seemed to get to Jack. Just the way he walked with Peggy the rest of the day, putting his hand on her elbow, acting protective, seemed to suggest a change in him. Then, during a business discussion with the band, Jack did something he'd never done before, at least as far as Peggy knew. Dennis and John wanted to invest all their $300 fee for the gig back into the band. "No hotel rooms," said Dennis. "We'll just sleep on people's floors and save the money."

Peggy was in the bathroom when she heard Jack do it--he stuck up for her and the baby. "But Peggy can't do that!" he yelled. "She's pregnant!"

Peggy left in mid-practice; she had to be up at 6:30 for school. When Jack got home, about midnight, she was already half-asleep. He walked right up to the bed, stretched out beside her and reached out gingerly to touch her belly. His breath was sweet in the air, from a few cans of Old Milwaukee, and Peggy lay awake, watching as Jack slid down and put his ear against her stomach, trying to hear that tiny heartbeat again. It was a moment, the most romantic seconds of their lives. Then Jack shook his head and looked up at her.

"Peggy," he said sadly, as if what he was about to say caused him to feel all the sorrows of the earth, "you don't really want to name him Dale, do you?"

Peggy gathered him up in her arms, tousled his dark mop of hair. "Yes, I do," she said. "Just as long as we can give him other names, too."

They went to sleep that way, with Sam chewing a Frisbee at the foot of the bed, with firecrackers popping in the alley out back, with sirens in the distance and their whole lives ahead of them. They went to sleep, lulling each other toward Storkland, snoring like sawmills. They had no idea what was going to happen to them, any more than the rest of us did, but they were almost absolutely sure that when it did, they would be there together.