Half broke horses: a true-life novel by Jeannette Walls Page A

because I was missing Minnie and I needed someone in my life, but I fell hard for that fellow.
    THE FOLLOWING WEEK, TED took me to dinner at the Palmer House hotel, and after that we started seeing each other regularly, though he was often out of the city for days at a time because his sales territory stretched all the way to Springfield. Ted always liked to be in a crowd, and we went to ball games at Wrigley Field, movies at the Folly Theater, and prizefights at the Chicago Arena. I smoked my first cigarette, drank my first glass of champagne, and played my first game of dice. Ted loved dice.
    Late in the summer, he showed up at the boardinghouse with a bathing suit he’d bought for me at Marshall Field’s, and we took the train down to Gary, where we spent the afternoon swimming in the lake and sunbathing in front of these big sand dunes. I didn’t know how to swim, since I’d never been in anything much deeper than the puddles left by the flash floods, but Ted taught me how.
    “You’ll have to trust me,” he said. “Just relax.”
    And he held me in his arms as I floated on my back. It was true, I could do it. When I relaxed my body, I stopped sinking and rose up toward the surface until my face broke through and the water actually supported me. Floating. I’d never known what it was like.
    About six weeks after I met Ted, he took me back to the fountain with the sea horses, bought me another snow cone, and, as he gave it to me, planted a diamond ring on top. “A piece of ice that I’m hoping will make you melt,” he said.
    We got married in the Catholic church I’d visited when I first came to Chicago. I wore a blue linen dress I borrowed from one of the girls at the boardinghouse. Neither of us could take time off for a honeymoon, but Ted promised me that one day we’d go to the Grand Hotel, this spectacular resort on Mackinac Island at the top of Lake Huron.
    That afternoon we moved into a boardinghouse that took in married couples, and we celebrated in our room with a bottle of bathtub gin. The next day I went back to my job as a maid, and Ted hit the road.
    I didn’t wear my diamond ring to work, keeping it instead in a little silk pouch under our mattress, but I worried about it being stolen. I also worried that Ted had paid more for it than he could afford.
    “Relax and learn to enjoy life a little for a change,” he said.
    “But it’s such an extravagance,” I said.
    “It would have been if I’d paid retail,” he said. “Truth is, it’s got a little heat on it.”
    Ted assured me he hadn’t actually stolen the ring, he just had connections who had connections who knew how to get things through the right channels. In this world, he liked to say, connections were all that mattered.
    I HAD NEVER WANTED someone 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