Burn Down the Ground (32 page)

OVERBOARD

I
t was the spring of 2002, and I was sound asleep in my apartment when my telephone rang. My digital clock glowed 3:12
A.M
.

“Hello?” I weakly answered, confused and groggy.

“Hi,” said a woman with a thick southern accent and gravelly smoker’s voice. “Issh thisssh Kayme-bree?”

“Yes,” I croaked.

“Hi, you don’t know me but my name is Helen and I’m here with your daddy,” she continued with deliberate formality, unaware I’d spoken to new lady friends calling on behalf of my father dozens of times over the years. Since I didn’t have a TTY, I received these early morning phone calls from various drunken women interpreting for Dad. As was usually the case, I heard his voice in the background.

I could tell Helen was signing something to him to let him know I had answered, because she whispered each word and letter, a common habit for people not skilled in ASL.

“K-A-M-B-R-I O-N telephone.”

Dad grabbed the receiver and cooed into the mouthpiece, “Kipree, luh yooo. Mih yoo, Kipree. Luh yooo.”

His chatter was followed by the muffled sounds of my father and the woman signing and handling the receiver before she finally slurred, “He saysshh he loves and missshhes yew.”

“Okay, tell him I love him, too, but it’s three in the morning and I have to go to work in a few hours.”

More whispers as Helen relayed my words to my father. “It’s only ’bout two o’clock here. He forgot you’re in New York City.”

It was true. I was in New York City. Alone.

When a seventeen-year-old gets married nobody expects it to last, but Rob and I gave it a decent try. After our courthouse ceremony, we continued living with Mom in her apartment to save money while I finished high school. When my senior prom
rolled around, I begged Rob to go with me and let me use some of our savings to buy a gown. I’d been nominated for “Most Talented” senior, after all, and I had to be there to accept the trophy if I won. Needing everything from a microwave and dishes to toothpaste and toilet paper, we had no business spending money on a prom.

“Please?” I pleaded. “Prom’s only a few days away. I have to get a dress now before they’re all gone!”

After everything I had been through, Rob didn’t have the heart to tell me we couldn’t afford to go. He drove me from boutique to boutique in search of the perfect gown. When I finally found the one I simply couldn’t live without, Rob balked. At almost four hundred dollars, the purple sequin dress, more suited for a drag queen than a prom queen, was more than one month’s rent on the apartment we were going to lease. I grew indignant at his hesitation. Most of our meager savings came from the money I’d collected as congratulations on my upcoming graduation. Technically, it was my money, and the dress was so glitzy, I knew I’d outshine my peers.

I offered a compromise. “I’ll sell it at a consignment shop and get most of the money back.”

“Okay, but you promise me you will sell it.”

I squealed with joy and threw my arms around his neck. “I promise, I promise, I promise. Thank you!”

Our money blown for the dress, Rob wore his dress blues instead of a tuxedo. We didn’t quite match but Mom assured me that a grown man in uniform would look better than any teenage boy in a rent-a-tux. At twenty-three years old, he was far more mature than any of the other girls’ dates.

That purple explosion of satin, taffeta, and sequins hangs in
my bedroom closet to this day. It rests in peace next to my high school letterman jacket and dozens of cocktail dresses I’ve amassed over the years.

Shortly after the prom, I graduated from high school forty-sixth out of nearly seven hundred students. The ceremony was held in the same convention center where I had seen Ozzy Osbourne, AC/DC, and Metallica. This time I was the one onstage as Mom and Rob sat in the stands with Mom’s parents, who had driven my brother to Fort Worth for the occasion.

David was unnaturally subdued, almost comatose. Where was the rabid dog I had come to know as my brother? I didn’t know what they were doing at the Jesus detox camp but I preferred him this way. Dad wasn’t there. In fact, he didn’t know about the ceremony because I didn’t send him an invitation. I predicted that David would be a handful enough. As I glided across the stage to receive my diploma, I was announced, “Kambri Dee Crews, summa cum laude.”

“Summa!” David bellowed from the stands. “Summa girl!”

He was prouder than any father would have been. I smiled at my brother’s joy before I sulked to myself.
Summa, pfft. What’s that gonna get me?

After Rob was honorably discharged from the navy in March 1991, we relocated to his hometown of Akron, Ohio. Since the Internet wasn’t around, my taking his last name and moving cross-country served as a homespun Witness Protection Program. Like the time we moved from Boars Head to Fort Worth, I
had another shot at reinventing myself. This time I aimed for normalcy with Rob and his close-knit family.

No longer a dashing sailor in crisp navy whites, Rob took a job cleaning carpets. As I predicted, my diploma with highest honors was worthless for landing anything other than menial jobs, so I found part-time work as a bank teller. I told my co-workers, all middle-aged women with children, that I was a year older than I really was so they wouldn’t figure out I was married before the legal age of consent. That would prompt unwanted questions.

While my friends were attending college and pursuing their dreams, I was a cashier at a bank. The best I could hope for was a full-time assignment as a real teller instead of working the drive-through. Every waking moment was spent regretting what could have been. I dwelled on an elaborate fantasy life I dreamed up for my high school classmates. They must be in dorms, performing in university theater productions, rushing sororities, and going to frat parties. While they were living the American dream, I was dealing with senior citizens who smelled of mothballs and didn’t trust those newfangled whatchamacallits. “ATM machines,” I’d grumble. “They’re as dependable as I am.”

In all the years on Boars Head, Mom and Dad had prided themselves on not taking handouts when money was tight. They had taught me to endure and I suffered in silence, berating myself over my lost potential. My start-up life was adequate but far short of my dream. I didn’t know where to seek out help. The only scholarship organization I’d ever heard of was the United Negro College Fund and I didn’t qualify.

While Rob scoured the classifieds looking for a more stable, better-paying job, he came across an ad for “The Academy of
Court Reporting and Paralegal Studies.” I had never shown any interest in the law, but it sounded interesting and, more important, it offered a program that I could complete in less than two years. The name was clumsy, but it was an accredited school. The academy offered night classes, cut out the superfluous required electives that add to tuition cost, and used practicing attorneys to serve as teachers. As an added bonus, the bank reimbursed me for selective books and courses depending on my grades. The goal of making straight A’s finally had cash incentive, so I buried my nose in my studies.

Rob began driving an eighteen-wheeler and while the pay was better and the work steady, it meant he was rarely home. I juggled work, classes, and homework while taking care of our one-bedroom rental home in Rob’s absence. Days blurred together, punctuated only by holidays, which were spent with Rob’s family, since mine had splintered. The grueling two-year-long schedule was like counting grains of sand on a beach. It was overwhelming and tedious, but I finished, graduating with an associate’s degree as a paralegal. It was no Ivy League diploma, but it meant I no longer had to skip the education section in employment applications, which had always felt like a twist of the knife.

My love of theater hadn’t faded; it had merely taken a backseat to my adult responsibilities. The next week, certificate in hand and school loans abated for six months, I scoured the
Akron Beacon Journal
for audition notices. A listing for Weathervane Playhouse’s production of
Noises Off!
caught my eye and reignited my dream of working in showbiz. I was used to spending every waking hour studying so I poured that effort into preparing for the tryout. It paid off when I was cast in the role of the young
ingénue Brooke Ashton, who ran around in lingerie for the entirety of the play.

One taste of the stage was all it took. I was hooked. I quit smoking again (and for the final time), was cast in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, volunteered backstage for
Annie
, and even won an acting award for my portrayal in
Noises Off!
After years of being chained to work and school with no time for socializing, I was immersed in a new circle of friends who shared my love of the arts. My independence, coupled with Rob’s long absences from home, spelled the end of our lackluster six-year marriage. We rarely saw each other and when we did, we had nothing to say. We were roommates, plain and simple, and misery oozed from my every pore.

Rob had rescued me. He had been a life preserver when my family’s ship was sinking and he had taken me in as a refugee. I owed him my life. I couldn’t leave him. Feeling trapped, I brooded and nitpicked until Rob finally grew fed up with my complaining and asked the question I had been waiting for: “Do you think we should get a divorce?”

An audible sigh of relief escaped me. “Yes.”

After six years together, I left him the house and everything in it. I hadn’t wanted any of that stuff anyway. I wanted a clean slate. I had childhood dreams to reclaim.

Since my graduation from high school, Mom, Dad, David, and I had become independent satellites orbiting around the black hole that had once been our familial universe. With each of us living in a different state—me in Ohio, Mom in Texas, David in
Indiana, and Dad in Oklahoma—our paths rarely crossed one another’s. Each person did the exact same thing I did, in his own unique way: built a new life far away from what had been “home.” As we had done on Boars Head, where we had scorched the earth, we were waiting to see what grew.

I was disappointed when Mom remarried soon after her divorce from Dad—one year after I was betrothed to Rob at the courthouse. I felt let down. I had hoped that my marrying Rob and leaving home would have freed her up to finally take care of herself. But Mom was really happy to have someone new in her life. She met her new husband while out dancing with friends three months after her divorce from my father was final. He didn’t smoke or do drugs and rarely drank, which made him a keeper in her eyes.

Together they bought a large three-bedroom, two-story home in the southwestern suburbs of Fort Worth. It was bigger and nicer than any home we had dreamed of back in Montgomery. She also distanced herself from the Deaf community, possibly out of embarrassment or to avoid running into Dad. Besides, her new husband didn’t know ASL, so my mother would have to serve as his personal interpreter when they attended social events at the Deaf club rather than relax and enjoy time with friends. Instead Mom preferred spending her free time on adventurous road trips with her husband in a travel trailer. Over the years they would explore forty-eight of the fifty United States. She also spent most holidays visiting with his family, who all lived much closer than our own. But what was “our own” family anymore, really?

Since rehabilitating himself, David had replaced his drug habit with a feverish addiction to Jesus Christ. He proselytized to anyone and became a counselor at Teen Challenge, the facility that helped him get clean. Eventually he settled in Indiana and his preaching tapered to a modest level where I wasn’t afraid to sneeze in his presence, lest I be barraged with a slew of scriptures.

Defeating his addictions is something he is proud of. He even spoke at churches testifying about what God’s mercy had done for him. Now he had earned his GED, was attending college, and worked with troubled boys who were like he had once been as a youth.

He hadn’t witnessed the violent end of our parents’ marriage. He couldn’t understand why I was reluctant to write or visit Dad. “He misses you,” David told me time and time again. “Why won’t you talk to him?”