Impetuous Youth Revised

“In America, sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world it’s a fact.” Marlene Dietrich

At 17, she ran away from home with a 22-year-old airman. They drove to Juarez where they searched the back streets, trying to find a quickie Mexican marriage. No one would perform the ceremony so they went to a movie and then checked into a cheap hotel room. The next morning she boarded a Greyhound for California to stay with his parents and he drove back to the airbase.

Within hours he was thrown in the brig. A phone call to his parents and he was released and she was carted off to Juvenile Hall. Raised fundamentalist, she threw herself into Catholicism, spending her nights saying the rosary and imagining herself as victim.

Her days were filled with bad tv, bad food, and boring chores. When she and another girl were assigned to strip the wax off the ancient yellowed tile, they mixed bleach and ammonia to try to get the job done quicker. Whisked off to the infirmary to escape the toxic fumes, they were reassigned the next day to simpler jobs like dusting and washing all the silverware in the kitchen.

A month later, her parents drove to California for the hearing. She told the judge she would run away if they didn’t let her marry. Ready to agree to anything that might get life back to normal, they said ok. The 1100 mile drive home was quiet and not as unpleasant as she’d feared.

The wedding took place in the home of the church pianist. She borrowed her cousin’s white wedding dress and made her own “going away dress” from pink brocade. Family and friends came through with practical gifts, mostly what she would need to set up a kitchen. They spent their first night as a married couple in a motel room on the way to Roswell.

They set up housekeeping in a tiny apartment and she helped him rebuild the engine in his ’57 Ford Fairlane. By Christmas she was having morning sickness, so they bought a trailer house with two bedrooms and moved it out to Air Base Road. She loved her husband and was glad to be married and excited to be having a baby. But, like Marlene, most of the time she really did want to be alone.