Coffee With Shirley
I used to have coffee with Shirley Olson when I was in college. I’d get it, and she’d drink it. Shirley was one of the first management teachers at the Else School of Management at Millsaps College. Shirley could be a controversial character among Millsaps's nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one-year-olds. She had a reputation for being something of a vicious bitch. She worked hard to earn that reputation.
I knew Shirley’s daughter. Boys used to whisper about how pretty Shirley was, but they never saw her daughter. She had a gawky, awkward phase, like most kids do, but by the time she was nineteen, she had zoomed past that like a rocket.
Like many Else School professors, Shirley had a consulting business. I had personal relationships with many of her clients, mainly through their children but also through my dad. Shirley was one of the first people to tell me that she didn’t know where I belonged, but it wasn't at a business school in the shadow of my father. I agreed with her, and we discussed it, but I didn’t yet have an escape plan. The idea that I might be good at something else hadn’t resolved itself in my mind.
The students used to talk about her husband, a mysterious six-foot-six-inch special forces marine whom nobody had ever seen but whom she affectionately called “Duke.” Some speculated that he was a myth. No mortal man could live with a woman that mean, but I’d met the guy. He was pretty great, actually.
One day, I tried to speak to Shirley on behalf of another student. That particular hat-in-hand meeting with professors was pretty common for me. My friend was very conscientious about her grades, and excelling was important to her, but Shirley frightened her, and she worried that it was affecting her work.
Shirley was not the kind of person to ever be intimidated by me. She’d known me since before I could shave, and we both knew she was carrying me grades-wise. She wasn’t about to be intimidated by Jim Campbell, even though he was Chairman of the Board at Millsaps. My only hope for success was abject humility and to make a case that my friend was actually pretty brilliant, which she was.
“Let me be honest with you.” She said. That’s how I knew I failed.
Business in general, but more specifically, business in the South, and even more specifically yet, business in Mississippi, was a man’s world. No matter what her grades were, a young, pretty girl had to be better, stronger, and more persistent than her male peers, even when they were inferior and didn’t try as hard.
Shirley admitted to something I already knew. She was considerably rougher on girls, particularly those who showed some capacity for what they were studying. Students who made good grades were often coddled and catered to by their professors. For Shirley, with female students, it was exactly the opposite. Because they were talented, she made them fight harder for their place because—in her opinion, they had to.
I carried this message back to my friend. We sat in her room, and I held her hand while we talked. She graduated a year after me. She won everything but the Founder’s Day Medal and a Rhode’s Scholarship. The first thing she did was get the hell out of Mississippi. She was probably the prettiest girl I ever dated at Millsaps, but she was out of my league, and we were as star-crossed as could be. I hugged her at graduation and wished her well.
I grew up, born in the sixties, an over-privileged white guy at a time, and in a place where if you were anything else, you had to fight like hell to get what you deserved in life. Starting around age thirteen, I quickly became the largest, strongest person in the room, to add insult to injury. Oppression and injustice just never became part of my life experience—but I could see it all around me.
I never cared much for culture war issues. They never impacted my life, and I chased a million other interests with passion. No matter how hard I tried, I could never close my heart. It sat in the very middle of me, like a parabolic telescope, gathering all the emotional energy around it and pushing it into the center of my being.
The problem I always had with the culture war was that it was never a battle among equals, wrestling out their fate based on logic and reason. It was always a matter of a great imbalance in power, making it an issue of injustice, and injustice calls to me like a banshee in the night.
I was ten years old when the US Supreme Court handed down Roe v Wade. Girls were just horrible, and I wanted nothing to do with them. Pregnancy was a grownup issue, and I wanted nothing to do with it either. Five years makes a great difference in perspective when you’re ten.
I lost my virginity when I was way too young in a seldom used room at the Country Club of Jackson to a girl, I learned, had been doing this all Summer. When I told my friend about it, he said, “Did you get her pregnant, you think?”
“Oh, shit.” I thought. I hadn’t considered that. I didn’t know very much about girls, and I didn’t know very much about sex, but I knew that an unplanned pregnancy was curtains for people who hadn’t even gotten their driver’s license yet.
“Do you think she was mature enough?” My friend asked. “Her body, I mean.”
I had no idea how far through puberty a girl had to be to get pregnant, but she sure looked pretty developed to me.
After that, I had no idea when I’d have sex again, if ever, but I became almost psychotic about having condoms nearby and ready. I had them in my wallet, in my car, in my gym bag, and in my dopp kit. I wasn’t going to be the reason anybody got pregnant and had to drop out of school.
In the late seventies, an abortion in Jackson cost between two and three hundred dollars. I know this not because I was out impregnating everybody in Jackson but because for people who couldn’t go to their parents and couldn’t go to whoever got them pregnant, I became the avenue of last chance, and you’d be surprised how many people knew it.
I had all sorts of questions about when life began, what abortion meant, and what pregnancy meant, but the one thing I had answers to was that I would never get pregnant. I might have to get a job after school to pay child support if I got somebody pregnant, but I would never be the one who had to drop out of school and have their parents, their family, and all their friends think about them differently—forever.
I always believed, and I believe now, that if we could ever be in a place where just women, just people who were in the crosshairs, got together and decided what they thought was best about abortion, I would accept whatever they came up with. I don’t think that will ever happen, though. I think it will always be an issue men decide and women struggle to be heard about.
Despite my almost psychotic assistance on safe sex, a friend came to me one day and said, “We’re having a baby.”
After discussing it, she was pretty insistent that at thirty-two, she didn’t know how many more chances she’d have, so she was going to have the baby. She was also pretty insistent that, as much as we cared for each other, we weren’t in love. I agreed. The sex was great, but the conversations were better. We were good friends who sometimes drank too much and ventured beyond lines we shouldn’t have. She was excited about co-parenting, believing I’d be a better dad than she would be a mom. At three months, she told her folks, and I told my mom.
Going into the fifth month, just past the halfway mark, she began to have abdominal pains; then she began to bleed. The baby died.
Knowing that I had lost my child, her grandchild, my mother began to open up to me about her miscarriage and the difficulties she had with my pregnancy. Sometimes, people get annoyed with how much I write about miscarriage. Men, sometimes, just have no interest in it. Aborting a child when you want to be a mom one day is devastating. Losing a child that you very much want to have is worse.
It’s very hard for me to see the world the way women do. It’s mostly impossible. Whether I want it to be or not, my heart is always open to the things other people experience, and I absorb their energy, be it joy or be it pain.
Shirley was right. The world is different for women, and—whatever I want to be true, I haven’t the right nor the capacity to judge. A lot of men don’t feel that way. They believe they have the right to judge whomever they want to. When that happens, I have to decide if I feel strongly enough about the issue to cross swords. Often, I do.
