A Big Little Life

I had made. I considered racing home to call her and ask for an official date evaluation, but decided I would appear too needy.
    The following day, Sunday, was interminable, as if the rotation of the Earth slowed dramatically. Monday morning, at school, I was lying in wait at Gerda’s locker when she appeared in the hall outside her homeroom. I half expected a polite hello and a claim of amnesia regarding the events of Saturday evening. Instead, she professed to have laughed so much during our five hours together that her tummy muscles hurt the next morning.
    I always assumed girls found dating me to be painful, but this was good pain. We continued to date. And laugh together.
    I asked her to marry me, and she did.
    Shortly after college, and after our wedding, I went to work in a federal anti-poverty initiative for seven months, long enough to discover that such programs enriched those administering them but otherwise created morepoverty. And the low pay extended my penury for over half a year.
    Although Gerda was a bookkeeper with accounting skills and had worked in a bank for a few years, she couldn’t find such employment in the tiny Appalachian town, Saxton, where I taught disadvantaged kids. She took a piecework job in a shoe factory, and boarded a company bus at four o’clock each weekday morning for a forty-five-minute trip over the mountains to the manufacturing plant.
    We were married with a few hundred dollars, a used car, and our clothes. Of the few houses for rent in Saxton, one had full indoor plumbing. Having moved up from an outhouse lifestyle a decade before, I was loath to return. Rent was sixty-five dollars per month, more than we could afford, but we scrimped on other things to pay it.
    The house had neither a refrigerator nor a stove. We bought a used fridge and an electric hot plate. Without an oven, with a hot plate instead of a cooktop, Gerda prepared wonderful meals and could even bake anything we desired, except pies, because the filling would burn at the bottom and remained uncooked at the top.
    Financially, that was an iffy year for us, and we worked long hours. But we were happy because we were together.
    From Saxton, we moved to the Harrisburg area, and I taught high-school English for eighteen months before Gerda made me an offer that changed our lives. Writing in my spare time, I had sold a few short storiesand two paperback novels. “You want to be a full-time writer,” she said. “So quit teaching. I’ll support us for five years. If you can’t make it in five years, you never will make it.”
    I sometimes claim that I tried to bargain her up to seven years, but she was a tough negotiator.
    All these years later, I am humbled by her faith in me and the love that inspired her offer. Considering our situation at the time—shaky finances, limited prospects, more rejections than acceptances from publishers—her trust seems extraordinary. Although I hope that over the years I have become a man who would make such an offer to her if my talent was for math and hers was for words, I am humbled because I was not that good a man in those days.
    Growing up in poverty, with psychological and physical violence, always embarrassed by my father’s escapades, I became by my twenties a man who needed approval almost as a child needs it. I needed too desperately to prove myself, and as a consequence I made numerous bad decisions in business. I was too eager to trust the untrustworthy, to believe patently false promises, to take bad advice if it came from someone who seemed to be knowledgable—and especially if they manipulated me with praise. Always an excellent judge of character, Gerda knew in every instance where I was going wrong, and she tried gently to steer me away from the current cliff, but I took too many years to realize that the only approval that really mattered—in addition to God’s—was hers. Throughout my adult life, Gerda has been a light to lead me.
    When some members of both our families and other acquaintances learned that I now wrote fiction full-time while Gerda brought home the bacon as well as the eggs and potatoes that went with it, they took this development as proof that I was a good-for-nothing like my father. They pitied Gerda—and from time to time needled me.
    For Gerda and for me, for so many reasons, failure was not a possibility we could accept. At the end of the five years, she quit her job so that we could work together. She managed our finances,