Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt

Author:Judy Blunt [Blunt, Judy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Women, Social Science, Sociology, Rural, History, United States, State & Local, West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY), Women ranchers, Ranch life
ISBN: 9781101973585
Google: doO7CwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01CWZH81E
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2016-04-20T05:00:00+00:00

The Reckoning

My sophomore year, the twins started high school too, and my parents faced the logistical nightmare of boarding four lads in Malta. One problem was solved when Grandma Pansy moved from her old homestead to town and purchased a small house near downtown. We were welcome to live with her. However, she was in her eighties at the time, and could not be expected to cook and look after us all, or to bear the expense of this, so Mom moved to town and took a job to offset the cost of running this second household. Dad joined the ranks of lonely bachelors during the week, learning to fend for himself. The rest of us shared Grandma's house, my sister, mother and I jammed into a spare bedroom with one double bed and a cot, assorted boy cousins and brothers crammed dormitory-style into the cement basement, all of us living out of suitcases and battling for the single bathroom.

Work remained the focus of my town life as long as I lived there, and by my second year I had molded an exterior that could slip through the halls of Malta High without a ripple. My hair finally grew long, my belly flat, my jeans tight, and eventually I saved enough money from my job to replace the thick glasses I hated with contact lenses. A few months after my dating debut, I replaced Dennis with Alice's brother Marty, a quiet, nervous senior on his way to the Army. We met on my first and last double date arranged by Lois, just the four of us and a backseat full of beer. A couple of hours into our drive, I added a new dimension by throwing up all over the car—a hardtop with no rear doors and tiny little triangle-shaped windows. I am spared much of the memory of that rapid drive home.

I stopped by his locker the next day to apologize and offer to wash his car, and he was shy and forgiving. For more than a year I would wear his class ring like a shield, writing letters on airmail tissue first to Germany, then to Vietnam. It was a time of healing, a withdrawal from the playing fields made respectable, even honorable, by hometown rules of war. Good women remained faithful to their soldier men. When that began to pall, I discovered that men in their early twenties treated me with all the respect due my tender years. I joked that the initials of my name, J.B., stood for "jail bait." If my mother, now close at hand, took an extraordinarily dim view of my hanging around with older guys, it followed that after a year of total independence, I took an equally dim view of her interference. And the battle was on.

One young man in particular bore the brunt of my teen rebellion, and that was Guy, a good-looking charmer of twenty-two with a fast car and a bachelor lifestyle. I was far more the kid

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