My Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Sissy Spacek, Maryanne Vollers Page A

called Mother. “Gin, Clifford Zack wants to give Sissy a little ring.” They measured my finger, and before long he gave me a beautiful sterling silver ring with his initials engraved on it. CC. I wore it to school the next day, happily showing it off to everybody.
    A few weeks later a new girl moved to town, about four houses down from me. She was really cute, and mature. In fact, she already had breasts. All the boys, including Cliff, started buzzing around her like bees. I was a tomboy and couldn’t compete, but I was still surprised when Cliff asked for his ring back. I reluctantly handed it over. I was devastated when he gave it to her! It was humiliating, because everybody knew that ring was for me. My first broken heart didn’t last long though, and neither did Cliff’s romance with the new girl. I suspect she only wanted the ring in the first place, so she soon got bored and broke up with him. But the ring that had been made especially for me was too small for her and got stuck on her finger. Her father had to get out the tin snips to cut it off. Clifford got the ring back sure enough, in two pieces. Me, I would have sliced my finger off before I clipped that ring.
    I went on my first real date when I was thirteen, while my parents were away on a road trip with some friends. It was their first vacation without us kids. Ed was about eighteen and home from college, so he was keeping an eye on Robbie and me for a few weeks that summer. Mother and Daddy were visiting Washington, DC, and Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. In those days, long-distance calls were expensive, and when our parents phoned home to check in with us, the conversations were generally loud and fast.
    When they called one evening, Ed and Robbie got on the line, and after the hellos, Mother said, “Okay, let us talk to Sissy!”
    “Um, she’s not here,” said Ed.
    “Well where is she?”
    “Oh, she’s on a date.”
    “She’s what!? She’s never been on a date before! Who let her go on a date?”
    “It’s okay,” said Ed. It was a harmless date, he explained. The boy’s mother had picked me up and we’d gone to the movies together. “We held a family council and decided it was time she was allowed to go out with boys.”
    When we were little kids, the big place to go was Mrs. Huckabee’s Sno-Kone stand. It was just a little wooden shed, the size of a guardhouse, set up off the oil road in front of where she lived. It was only big enough to fit Mrs. Huckabee, a cooler of ice, and a Sno-Kone machine attached by a long extension cord to her house. She did a good business on hot school days. When I was in first and second grade, I stopped at Mrs. Huckabee’s Sno-Kone stand almost every day on my way to the Wood County courthouse to see my mom and dad. If I had a nickel for a Sno-Kone, the walk downtown seemed much shorter and a whole lot cooler.
    There was also a drive-in called the Dairy Bar where you could buy a hamburger, French fries, and a Coke for 26 cents. Then, when I was a young teenager, a Dairy Queen opened on South Main Street, and suddenly the entertainment possibilities in Quitman doubled. We could now get into a car with our dates and slowly cruise between the two drive-ins until we got tired of it and went home. There were dances during the school year, but in summer it was either the drive-ins or Shell Camp a few miles outside of town. That was where the oil company built a pavilion for the community to throw big parties. It was where I had my first kiss, in sixth grade, playing spin the bottle then walking around the building with whomever the bottle had landed on.
    My second kiss was on Halloween when I was thirteen. I was dressed up as a flapper; my date, Barry, was a pirate. Barry was the boy who took me to the movies for my first real date. He rode all over town on his turquoise motor scooter. Even though I wasn’t allowed to ride on it, I couldn’t resist sitting on it in the driveway. Barry and his