Betty Raye did not know it but there was a perfectly good reason she felt so different from the rest of the Oatmans and the Varners. She was different. In fact, she was not even remotely related to them. They were strangers. But nobody knew it. Even Minnie Oatman believed she had given birth to her seventeen years ago, but she had not. The real truth about the matter was stranger than fiction.
In the last month of her pregnancy, Minnie and Ferris and the boys were living in Sand Mountain with Ferris’s mother and daddy and when it was time for the baby to be born they all piled in the car and drove down to Birmingham and checked her into the Hillman Hospital. On November 9, 1931, three babies were born not more than thirty minutes apart. A little boy named Jesse Bates, a little girl named Carolina Lee Sizemore, and Betty Raye Oatman all saw the light of day on the same night. It was unusually busy on the fourth floor and it didn’t help matters much that the entire Oatman and Varner clans all descended on the maternity ward like an invading army, including Floyd and his dummy Chester. Ferris Oatman’s brother Le Roy was still singing with the gospel group at the time and he called a bunch of his hillbilly musician friends in Birmingham who sang on the Country Boy Eddie radio show and invited them to the hospital for a party. And so, combined with the normal everyday chaos of a big-city maternity ward, there was now a hillbilly band playing in the waiting room, the two Oatman boys and all their cousins running and yelling up and down the hall. Besides this commotion, plus being excited at seeing real live hillbilly stars such as Country Boy Eddie and his sidekick Butter Bean in person, was it any wonder that nurse Ethylene Buck was all atwitter that night? She had been nervous to begin with, as this was only her second week working in the maternity ward. And to make matters worse, she had just been handed three babies at once and she had to weigh and clean up and get them ready to go and see their mothers. Not only that—now there was a man standing at the window with a dummy shooting his eyebrows up and down at her, saying “Whoo, whoo, whoo.” Chester banged his wooden head against the window, trying to get her attention. Which, unfortunately, he did. Nurse Buck became so flustered that she put the Sizemores’ baby’s name bracelet on the Oatman baby and the Oatmans’ baby name bracelet on the Sizemore baby.
When Mrs. Kathrine Sizemore, the lovely young blond wife of a prominent Montgomery attorney, was handed her baby, she was surprised to see that her hair was so dark. Just as Minnie had been surprised that her baby had such light hair. She had immediately remarked to Ferris, “She’s a pale little thing, ain’t she. And just look at them tiny little ears!”
If anyone had known about the error Nurse Buck had committed that night, it certainly would have explained why, eighteen years later, a plump large-boned girl with coal black hair and short arms was desperately trying to stuff herself into a white evening gown to prepare for her debut at the Montgomery Country Club. Of course her parents adored her but secretly they wondered why, when her mother had been so tall and slim and graceful, each time Carolina practiced her debutante curtsy to the floor she always fell over on her side in a lump. Just as the Oatmans wondered why Betty Raye had been unable to carry a tune. But what has been done cannot be undone. Fate is fate, and while Carolina was getting ready to be presented to Montgomery society as one of the city’s leading debutantes, Betty Raye, who should have been there, was miles away applying for a job as a vegetable girl at the Three Little Pigs cafeteria.
Betty Raye had wanted to get a job after graduation but she was not equipped to do anything that required intimate dealings with the public or being outgoing in any way. The job at the cafeteria seemed just right for her. All she had to do was stand there and dish out portions of whatever vegetable the customers pointed to. She did not have to talk a lot, so she was very happy she got the job. Now her world consisted of offering beans, okra, creamed corn, black-eyed peas, or whatever was on the menu that day and going home. Not knowing she might have been a debutante, she was perfectly content being a vegetable girl. And who knows—she might even work her way up to the desserts someday.
Anna Lee stayed in Chicago that summer to do her student nursing and after the valentine fiasco Bobby gave up on girls forever. When he was not at the swimming pool he spent most of his time reading Zane Grey cowboy novels, which Betty Raye brought home from the library for him. He was so caught up in reading about the romance of the Old West that by June he had finished them all, from The Riders of the Purple Sage to The Thundering Herd, and he took great comfort that most real cowboys did not even have girlfriends.
The Lady Bowlers
WHEN THE CAR full of women pulled up in front of the house and tooted the horn, Dorothy called out, “Sweetie, your bowling team is here.” In a few seconds Betty Raye came out dressed and ready to go and said good-bye to all as she ran down the stairs. Everybody was out on the porch eating ice cream, including Monroe, and Bobby waved at the car and said, “Good luck tonight.”
“Thank you,” they said and drove away.
As they turned the corner Doc stood up and walked over and tapped his pipe on the side of the house. “I’m glad they asked her to join. She needs to get out once in a while.”
Jimmy nodded. “Yeah. I think it’s been good for her.”
Dorothy got up to take her bowl back in the kitchen and agreed. “I do too. I just hated seeing her sit at home every night, a young girl like that.”
“I just wish some nice boy in town would ask her out,” Mother Smith said, “somebody her own age.”
Jimmy grunted. “There’s nobody around here worth going out with, if you ask me.”
Monroe, sporting a new crew cut, his red hair shooting out of his head like wires, said, “I’d take her out . . . if she’d pay for everything,” and thought it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said, punching Bobby in the ribs.
Bobby punched him back. “She wouldn’t go out with you, you cootie head.”
Jimmy said to Doc, “See what I mean?”
He did not say so, but Jimmy often thought that if he had been younger and had not lost his leg, things would be a lot different. He wondered why the boys who had fallen all over Anna Lee, who would not give most of them the time of day, never paid the least bit of attention to Betty Raye. He was pretty well disgusted with the whole lot of them. When Jimmy had slipped the valentine under her door, he had said to himself, If the local Romeos are so dumb that they cannot see what a fine girl she is, then, by God, he would see to it that the day would not go by without her knowing there was at least one person in town who thought the world of her. Not while he was around at least.
Jimmy was also right about one thing: The bowling team had been good for Betty Raye. A few months before, when Ada and Bess Goodnight had come marching into the house to lobby for her to join the Elmwood Springs ladies bowling team, Dorothy and Mother Smith had encouraged her. And despite her initial reluctance, Bess and Ada could be very persuasive. Ada, the larger of the two, had once worked in the WASP recruiting office and knew just what to say. In the end Betty Raye could not say no. According to Ada it would have been, at the least, unpatriotic, un-American, and letting down the entire female sex if she did not join.