Grace and Grit by Lilly Ledbetter Read Free Book Online

When the preacher had said that the marriage would come first, he’d meant Charles would, and there’d be a price to pay if I didn’t submit.
    I had only been in Washington one day when I called Charles at GE on the pay phone to check in. A coworker answered and told me Charles was on his way to the hospital in an ambulance; no one knew what had happened. I thought that maybe he’d had a heart attack, so I took the next train home.
    At the time, Charles was running tubes in the furnace room, where it’s so hot you’re supposed to take salt tablets to keep from becoming dehydrated. Charles hadn’t taken them that day, nor had he drunk enough water. But he wouldn’t admit he’d gotten dehydrated on purpose. I knew in my gut that he’d done so in order to get me to come home early.
    It took a long time for me to get over his stunt, and I wished a thousand times I hadn’t come home. I had always known that there’s one thing I hated more than anything else: being told that I couldn’t do something. Now I knew what was second on my list: being tricked and manipulated. In our first few months of marriage, Charles had crossed both lines.
    N OT LONG after that, we argued over the hospital bill that we had to spend what was left of my trip money to pay. Night after night, while he read his Bible, I pretended to sleep, not wanting to talk or kiss him good night. I was stiff with anger. I felt as if my heart had closed.
    One night, after about a week of this, I pulled the covers over my head extra hard and asked roughly when he was going to turn the light out.
    He sighed. That irritated me even more. Finally, I heard him put his Bible on his bedside table, where he always left it. The room became quiet. We lay in silence, the only sound the cicadas’ crescendo outside our window. I thought about my uncle who’d told everyone we’d be separated in a year. I could feel sadness creeping in, softening me. I didn’t know how this was ever going to be resolved, but I was tired of being mad.
    Charles pulled the covers from my face and leaned into me. I didn’t push him away. We found each other again in the dark.
    “I don’t want you to be upset anymore. I don’t want to lose my best friend,” he whispered later.
    Before we fell asleep, we promised we’d always talk through our troubles whenever we disagreed. Throughout our marriage, this pact served us well. After that night, no matter how angry we got with each other, one of us would back down and end the argument by reminding the other that we were best friends.
    I began to realize that no one’s marriage is perfect; you just make the best marriage possible. My senior trip wasn’t the first or last time Charles got into his religious mode, thinking he was lord and master and forgetting that I was a real person. But I knew Charles loved me like no one else.
    T OWARD THE end of my senior year, I interviewed at General Electric, where Charles worked. The Monday after graduation Charles and I drove to his friend’s house, where we carpooled with him and some other guys sixteen miles into the small town of Oxford. I clocked in at GE, thinking the sooner I started working, the sooner we’d be able to put a little more distance between us and the life I so wanted to leave behind. I was going to be like Aunt Robbie, who like many women during World War II had been hired in at Goodyear while the men were fighting the war.
    As one of the younger women at GE, I tended to keep to myself. The older, more experienced women worked the upper end ofthe conveyor belt. Down at my end of the line, we put the finishing touches on the tubes made for televisions and radios. All the women dressed in white uniforms, so we could spot any debris that might corrupt the tubes.
    Operating the foot pedal, I welded together two threadlike filaments. With hundreds of tubes coming down the line, no one had time to talk. You could only go to the restroom during a break. At first, I felt like that