“Texas Woman”

Over the years, many muses have inspired my art. The oldest as well as the bossiest muse I ever encountered was Estelle Manning. When I first met her in 1974, Mrs. Manning was eighty-seven years old, and I was twenty-seven.

For an old lady, I guess she got along all right. She could toddle around in her house, but she couldn’t navigate sidewalks outside without help. And she couldn’t see very well—not to read, to write, or to watch television. Mostly she listened to the radio. Her only regular visitor was a lady from a nearby church. Shortly after I met her in 1974, I began visiting her once a week and doing her weekly grocery shopping. I suppose I wanted to be the hero and rescue a damsel in distress. I’d seen plenty of movies in which the hero battles a villain and saves the damsel. But no villain challenged me, and Mrs. Manning, although in need of help, was tyrannical, manipulative, and rock-headed—the bossiest woman I’d ever met. There was no satisfying her. Every week I’d bring her groceries, and she’d examine them.

“Look at this cabbage. It’s too ripe. Didn’t your mother ever school you how to shop? And look at this meat—you got to tell the butcher, ‘Trim that fat.’ You got cheated. And look at this jar of instant coffee. What you think I am, a muscleman in the circus? Now I got to spend all afternoon spooning coffee from this big jar into little jars.”

This was our weekly ritual. I’d bring her groceries, and she’d examine my purchases, berating my incompetence. Finally, she’d forgive me and fix lunch.

Lunch with Mrs. Manning always consisted of a cup of instant coffee, a salad, and a can of soup. I’d tell her I wanted my soup boiling hot, really steaming. Why? Because the first time she fixed soup for me, I spotted a roach swimming laps around the chicken and the noodles. Now I’m not a finicky eater, but if bugs get in my soup, I want them boiled.

Hundreds of roaches infested Mrs. Manning’s kitchen. She was almost blind, so if she dropped crumbs, she couldn’t see to clean up. Luckily for her, she couldn’t see the roaches either.

When I’d sit down for lunch, I’d rap the handle of my spoon on the table. That would scare the roaches hiding under her toaster, so they’d back off and wouldn’t charge my food. Every sixty seconds or so, I’d rap my spoon on the tabletop again to keep the roaches at bay. But once, a scout snuck around my defenses and leaped into my salad.

Mrs. Manning’s salad always consisted of a lettuce leaf, topped with a hard -boiled egg sliced in half with a dollop of mayonnaise on each half. The roach had leaped into the mayonnaise. When I saw him, he reminded me of an extra in an adventure movie who gets stuck in the quicksand. The more he squirmed, the deeper he sank.

I waited till Mrs. Manning walked over to the kitchen counter and turned her back. Then I scooped up the mayonnaise along with the roach with my paper napkin, wadded it up, and later threw it away. No point letting Mrs. Manning know how many roaches were in her kitchen. She couldn’t do anything about them. And I was also concerned for my personal safety.

One time when Mrs. Manning was standing at her kitchen counter, a roach ran across the back of her hand. She felt under her cabinet, pulled out a can of roach spray, and sprayed the entire counter and all the dishes on it. I suggested she should probably wash all those dishes very carefully. Later, when I got the chance, I slipped that can of roach spray into my briefcase and threw it away. I can tolerate bugs in my food, but I draw the line at poison.

When I sat down to eat lunch, Mrs. Manning would join me. But she didn’t eat. She just had a beer. Every week, I’d bring her a six-pack with her groceries. I’ll say this, an old lady can get a lot of mileage out of one beer. Before she downed half the can, she’d get to feeling real happy and start telling me stories.

After I’d listened to her stories for a year or so, I realized that if I selected her best stories, edited them, and snapped a few photos of her, maybe I could sell an article to the Houston Chronicle. But Mrs. Manning wouldn’t cooperate. “No, no. Too old, too ugly,” she’d always tell me. She would never pose for a picture.

Estelle Manning, 1917 (age 30)

But she did let me copy one photo. It was taken in 1917 when she was about thirty years old, working as a nurse-aide at St. Joseph’s Hospital caring for soldiers returning from World War I. Unfortunately, most of her other photos had burned in a house-fire sometime in the nineteen-twenties. Then after she passed forty, Mrs. Manning didn’t pose for many pictures.

One other photo had survived the fire. It was a black-and-white, 8x10 portrait of Mrs. Manning in her wedding dress taken in 1903 when she was a sixteen-year-old bride.

JACK: This wedding photo and the nurse photo are all I need to illustrate an article for the Chronicle.

MANNING: You want to put my wedding picture in the newspaper?

JACK: Sure. People will love it. And I’ll split the profits with you.

MANNING: No! Absolutely, positively no.

JACK: Why not?”

MANNING: Lots of people use public restrooms nowadays.

JACK: What’s that got to do with your wedding picture?

MANNING: If you’d shut up and listen, maybe you’d learn something.

JACK: All right, all right. I won’t speak another word. Tell me.

MANNING: Lots of people use public restrooms nowadays. Me, I never liked them.

Too smelly. If I had to use one, I was in and out. But some people, men especially, don’t mind the smell. They sit there reading a newspaper, reading a magazine. Then, when they finish their business, they reach over and what do you know—no toilet paper! Public restrooms run out of toilet paper all the time. So what do men do? Wad up the newspaper, that’s what they do. I tell you, that wedding picture’s one of the few sacred things I got left. I was a pure-dee virgin when that picture was taken. And I swear on the Bible, nobody but nobody is gonna wipe their butt with my wedding picture.

What could I say to that? Later, when I thought about it, I realized that when Mrs. Manning was a girl, indoor plumbing probably wasn’t all that common. She’d been born in 1887 after all. And what did they use for toilet paper in an outhouse? Pages from a Sears Catalog or pages from a newspaper.

I wonder what ever happened to that wedding picture?

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Back in 1969, Mrs. Manning had promised to give her house to the Salvation Army after she died. In return, the Salvation Army agreed to help maintain the house and do the yard work. Fair enough.

Then, in 1979, ten years after she made this deal, five years after I’d begun doing her grocery shopping, Mrs. Manning discovered that the deed to her property was missing. And what did she conclude? That I had stolen it.

I phoned the social worker at the Salvation Army, and she said not to worry. Mrs. Manning’s deed was in their file cabinet. So I told Mrs. Manning, “Your deed’s in the file cabinet at the Salvation Army.”

“If they got it, then you stole it and gave it to them!” she said.

Why would I do that?

What probably happened was this. When making the deal with Mrs. Manning, the Salvation Army had sent a lawyer to do the paperwork. Since the lawyer was working pro bono for a charitable organization, he most likely wanted to set up a legal agreement and be on his way. I remember Mrs. Manning had once mentioned that a lawyer had come to visit her.

I bet she was rock-headed as usual and refused to sign anything. So the lawyer got impatient and gathered up all the papers, her deed along with them. What did she know? She couldn’t see. Then he went back to his office, forged her signature, stuffed the papers in the Salvation Army file cabinet, and that was that. From his point of view, everything worked out fine. It was ten years before she discovered her deed was missing.

But when she did find out, she began to obsess. And what did she obsess about?

That I had stolen that deed. She got madder and madder. Finally she threatened to shoot me.

That’s right, Mrs. Manning had a gun. Purchased in 1936, it had never been fired, never been cleaned. It probably wouldn’t have worked in 1979. But maybe it would. Maybe the old lady would get mad enough to pull the trigger. Not wanting to take any chances, I phoned the social worker at the Salvation Army and told her, “I’m retiring from grocery shopping. You do it.”

A week later, the social worker phoned me and said, “Did you know that old lady was planning to shoot you?”

“I know she was planning to shoot me,” I said. “That’s why you’re doing her grocery shopping.”

A few months after the social worker started doing the shopping, Mrs. Manning tripped over a pile of old newspapers, fell, and broke her hip. She got sent to a hospital, and then to a nursing home. These events took several months, and I thought maybe the old lady would have mellowed with time. So I went to visit her in the nursing home.

As soon as I walked into her room, Mrs. Manning said, “I forgive you for stealing my deed. Now get me out of here.”

“I’ll help you get out as soon as you can walk,” I told her.

“I’ll let you live rent-free in my garage apartment, just get me out of here.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “You have to cooperate with the physical therapy nurses. As soon as you can walk, I’ll help you get home.”

This was not what she wanted to hear because, of course, Mrs. Manning was not cooperating with the physical therapy nurses.

“You goddam, low-life, thieving son-of-a-bitch,” she shouted and threw her water pitcher at me.

I left. I tried to visit two other times, but as soon as I walked in the room, she started cussing me out. So I stopped coming.

About a year later, Mrs. Manning died in the nursing home. Until the end, that old lady was like a Greek goddess, tyrannical, manipulative, and rock-headed—the bossiest woman I ever knew. However, unlike a Greek goddess, she wasn’t immortal.

Postscript

Loss of independence was probably the root of Mrs. Manning’s irrational fantasies and her threat to shoot me. To return to her house from the nursing home after breaking her hip, she would have had to fully cooperate with the nurses and learn to walk, and with the right attitude, she might have left the nursing home. When my mother suffered a stroke at age 87, she fully cooperated with the therapists and returned home after three months. Mother needed help shopping and could no longer drive a car, but she could cook and keep her house tidy and continued to live independently.

I don’t know how difficult it is for a ninety-year-old woman to walk after breaking her hip, but she would have had to cooperate with doctors and therapists. Mrs. Manning was too rock-headed for that. With independence gone, frail and powerless, all she could do was wait for death.

Some lines of Dylan Thomas always remind me of her:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rave, rave, against the dying of the light.

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Besides reflecting the personality of Estelle Manning, my painting “Texas Woman” is about the inadequacy of heroism. Comic books, along with the myth of the Wild West promulgated by television in the 1950s, indoctrinated me and all the other aspiring heroes of my generation. I loved T.V. Westerns and admired the Cowboy Hero, the rugged loner who depends on no one and needs no one. In those melodramas, women were sometimes rescued by heroes, sometimes allowed to help out, but almost always they were characters of secondary importance. After all, how can a hero battle savages and rustlers if a woman interrupts with requests to fetch some groceries or paint the bedroom?

Sketching preliminary drawings for “Texas Woman” began after I saw the 1950 cover of Thrilling Comics. Always searching for inspiration for a painting, the cowgirl rescuing a hero caught my eye. What if the hero were less muscular? What if the heroine had lassoed the helpless jerk and was hauling him off to the calaboose?

Even after I reached adulthood, the Cowboy hero rescuing a distressed damsel lingered in the recesses of my unconscious mind. So when I met Mrs. Manning, a bit elderly for a damsel but obviously distressed and in need of assistance, I jumped at the chance to play the hero. However, the stubborn old lady didn’t want rescue. She wanted power, youth, and mobility—and all I had to offer was help with grocery shopping which Mrs. Manning would rather have done herself. Working as a social worker with the Texas Department of Human Resources, I had set her up with a “provider”—a home assistance aide to work eight hours every week and help with shopping, cleaning, and cooking. But a few days later Mrs. Manning phoned me at my office.

MANNING: I need groceries. I thought you were supposed to help with that. All my life I pay taxes, and now what do I get?

JACK: But I hired Mrs. Henderson to shop for you. And to help you with cleaning.

MANNING: That lazy old thing! She couldn’t shop right and her cleaning was slap-dash. So I

fired her.

JACK: You did what! It’ll take me weeks to find a replacement.

MANNING: I need groceries. What good are you if you can’t do a simple task?

Although Mrs. Manning was housebound, she seized what power she could. As a hero coming to the rescue, I proved less than adequate and was easy to manipulate. Once Mrs. Manning had me doing her shopping, she paid for my “good deed” by fixing me lunch and telling me stories. She took charge of her life as much as possible and resisted dependency. In the end, though she couldn’t defeat Death, she went down raging. If I hadn’t leaped for cover, she might have taken me with her.

“Texas Woman,” though not a physical portrait of Estelle Manning, depicts her spirit. Blasting that bottle to smithereens and lassoing the hero fits her personality perfectly. When trapped in a nursing home, she wanted me to get her out. When I refused, she cursed and threw her water pitcher at me. I failed to rescue the distressed damsel and fell short as a hero.

As a child, I regularly watched T.V.’s Lone Ranger, the masked man who galloped on a white stallion shouting “Hi Yo, Silver” while the “William Tell Overture” thundered in the background. The Masked Man brought law and order to the West with only the help of his stallion, his silver bullets and his Indian pal, Tonto. When you’ve got a mask, a white horse, and a pal, what more does a guy need?

Of course, lacking the mask, horse, and pal, I needed everything.

“Texas Woman” (acrylic painting)