Valentine

This section begins with a rape and closes with the birth of a baby. In these three women—Gloria Ramírez, Mary Rose Whitehead, and Corrine Shepard—the novel introduces three case studies, three different women (one a teenager, one a young married mother, and the other a widow) whose life narratives all share a similar pattern. These women are in distress, imperiled by their relationship with a destructive male. Each is controlled, emotionally violated, made to feel helpless and dependent on a malevolent and insensitive man; and none finds strength sufficient to withstand the assault. They’ve surrendered.

In the closing chapter, Victor, Gloria’s world-weary but wise uncle, himself a Vietnam veteran, will tell his niece that her story, which begins the novel, is a war story and that she has lived to tell it. The same will apply to the three women introduced in these chapters: Gloria’s physical assault, as horrific as it is, metaphorically suggests the relationships that trap and emotionally, if not physically, abuse both Mary Rose and Corrine. Mary Rose, a 20-something wife just beginning to perceive the trap that her marriage is, has an insensitive husband who believes that a husband has dictatorial rights. Corrine, who is past 60, is retired and is now left to pick up the pieces of her life after her husband’s suicide.

A refreshing innocence radiates from the rebellious character of 14-year-old Gloria Ramírez. Like most adolescent teenagers, she’s a rebel without a clue. She loves to torment her mother by singing along loudly to a song on the radio, Patti Smith’s angry “Gloria,” which includes the lyrics she knows will agonize her conservative Christian mother. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” (6). She’s a typical teenager, angry for no reason, flip without logic, and ironic without perception. She relishes the independence of her night at Sonic, far from her mother’s control. She smokes. She sips Jim Beam and Dr. Pepper. She teases the kid driving the pickup truck, unaware of the implications of her sexuality. She climbs into the young man’s pickup truck because she’s bored: “Nothing to lose, everything to gain” (7).

The story of the Valentine’s Day pickup, however, comes only after we understand the results of such typical Happy Days-infused drive-in shenanigans. We meet Gloria Ramírez just hours after she has been sexually assaulted by the guy she met at Sonic. Her boredom and frustrations have led her to this: fearing for her life should her assailant come out of his alcohol-soaked sleep. Her body feels shattered like a puzzle tossed into the wind, and she inventories her body parts as if they’re scattered all around her. This is her moment of Lead, an Emily Dickinson reference Mary Rose recalls in her chapter—a moment remembered only if survived. Gloria’s walk across three miles of open Texas desert, which includes picking her way through a barbed-wire fence, becomes the novel’s first assertion of the woman’s determination not to surrender but to return from the war with a story to tell.

Mary Rose Whitehead reveals a similar pattern. She’s emotionally trapped by her marriage; an unexpected pregnancy at 17 abruptly curtailed whatever promising life she might have had. Although Robert takes care of his wife and child—in a splendidly appointed ranch house—Mary Rose, a stay-at-home mother, now heavily pregnant with their second child, is keenly aware of her captivity, aware of her limited options, aware of how many decisions she now leaves up to her husband. She’s uncertain why she helps the battered girl who appears on her doorstep, but her armed confrontation with the man-child she assumes attacked the girl puts her and her own child at risk reveals—like Gloria’s heroic trek across the open desert—that the male-defined cultural world of West Texas hasn’t sufficiently destroyed her independence, her heart, and her guts. She’s unafraid of Dale Strickland: “He is standing less than ten feet from me now. If there’s a bullet in the chamber, I won’t miss from here” (24). What makes the showdown even more courageous is that Mary Rose is unsure whether her Winchester is loaded. When the police finally arrive and she watches the sheriff’s men handcuff Dale (“still as a frightened jackrabbit” [27]), Mary Rose collapses, passes out cold in front of the two girls; she’s not yet strong enough to assert the integrity of her own purpose.

Corrine’s efforts to complete the puzzle left behind by her husband after his staged suicide suggest her life narrative. Her life had direction, purpose, and meaning; only in the days after Potter’s suicide does she realize how much of that order came from her role as wife. She isn’t ready to shuck that role because she is uncertain who she is apart from her married identity. To cushion that reality, she self-medicates with liquor—not because she has alcoholism but because she’s in process. Like Glory stumbling through the desert, like Mary Rose clutching what may or may not be a loaded rifle, she’s sorting through the implications of asserting her identity, her independence. By her recollection, her marriage wasn’t volatile or violent; it was quiet, uncomplicated by passion. It was a routine she settled into. Now she’s uncertain where to go, what to be. Although she has long lived without the company of the women in Odessa (whom she finds dull and shallow), she’s drawn to Mary Rose when the woman moves in. Just when a booze-soaked Corrine heads over to introduce herself, Mary Rose goes into labor, suggesting that in this friendship stirs the beginnings of new life for both Mary Rose and Corrine.