Her: A Memoir (7 page)

We weren’t allowed to talk at dinner unless asked a question, and we weren’t allowed to speak a word on car rides. Our voices distracted Mike from driving. If we made a peep at dinner or on a drive, he’d shake his finger and say, “Children shouldn’t speak unless spoken to.”

On one of the rare mornings when Mike wasn’t home, as we ate our breakfast, Mom asked Cara and me, “So what do you think of him?”

“He’s pretty okay,” Cara said.

My eyes said, I hate everything. Mike included.

*   *   *

We listen to the “Stray Cat Strut” with Dad on his weekends. We eat chocolate for breakfast and watch Dad play with his food. He spits out mashed potatoes, making a worm on his plate. He takes two peas and makes eyes for the potato worm. We laugh. The worm is watching us. Dad tells us how fun it is to be with him.

Dad dials Mom on the telephone

“Tell her how much you love me,” he says.

“Mom, I love Dad.” I am wearing his white undershirt.

“Tell her how much better it is here.”

“Mom—”

“Tell her.”

“Mom, it’s good here. See you on Sunday.” I hang up fast.

Mom says Dad will take us away from her. Dad says he will put cement shoes on Mom and throw her in the lake. Dad says if we say a word, he’ll burn us all while we sleep.

*   *   *

Until we were five, we were at Dad’s every other weekend; he liked it when we played games outdoors, so it looked from the outside like he was a perfect father. He cared what the neighbors thought even though he said they couldn’t be trusted. Look at the ground, he’d say. Don’t look the lady across the street in the eyes; she might think you want something.

When he and Mom divorced, he kept all of our video games and everything else that was fun. The joysticks for our game console sat on his floor. The wires got tangled. I liked to play the game where I got to be a frog and jump across the highway, on the tops of car roofs. One wrong move and you’d get splatted; game over. All of our toys, storybooks, and most of our clothes were at Dad’s house. He’d kept Mom’s baby pictures and her entire wardrobe; he’d taken her clothes from her closet and tossed them into a big heap in the basement, next to the washer and dryer. Some of her things he left out on the curb in the rain, for the garbage collectors to pick up.

We drove to Mom’s with the radio turned up loud. Dad flipped the station off when we pulled into Mom’s driveway. “Tell me what I want to hear, girls,” Dad said. “Remember what I told you about your mother.”

Every weekend we said the same thing before we got out of the car and went inside with our mother. “Mom is a witch. Mom should die. Mom is an evil bitch.”

*   *   *

Dad had a swimming pool. He taught us how to swim by pushing us into his pool, one after the other. He said we’d have to learn how to swim for our upcoming vacation to Florida. The pool was a big, above-the-ground model that Dad put up at the side of his yard. He carried us, a twin on each of his hips, up the stairs of the wooden deck, to the poolside. We stood together and looked down at the deep water.

“Close your eyes, girls,” he said, putting one of each of our hands in each of his. He pulled them up from our sides and asked us to cover our eyes. “Don’t peek.”

He pushed us in.

The air whooshed through our hair and we landed.

We were on our way to Florida.

*   *   *

Dad likes to comb our hair. Our hair is long and brown, hangs to our waists. He starts out softly with a brush, then works his way through until his fingers tickle the tops of our heads.

“Stop it,” I say. Sister is crying. “She doesn’t like that. You’re hurting our heads.”

“You sound just like your mother,” he says, as mean as the meanest kids on the playground. “You look like her, too, with all that hair.”

Dad has an idea.

“Did you know there is a place where it’s summer all year?” he asks. “Don’t tell your Mom. It’s a secret.” I know we will keep his secret. It isn’t a lie if it’s really summer all year someplace.

“It’s hot there,” Dad says. “You’ll need to get your hair cut to stay cool.”

Dad takes us to his barber. I like to watch the barber’s pole, the spinning red and white. Christa and I sit in the chairs. Our eyes spin around with the pole. Men sit and get their haircuts. All of the shop’s seats are full. The men sitting next to us talk about boxing and the new
Rocky
movie.

“It’s just not realistic. But he’s some actor,” one man says. The rest nod, put their hands in their laps. They lose more hair.

The barber gets close to my face and talks loud. “Are you next, pretty girl?” Dad pushes me forward.

“I never saw
Rocky
.” That’s all I could say.

“Such pretty, pretty hair” the barber says. When he’s done cutting, there’s none left.

Sister is next. The barber cuts her hair shorter than he cuts mine. Sister cries harder with each snip of his scissors.

“You look like Dorothy Hamill,” Dad says. “Don’t cry, sweetie. She’s a real sex pot.”

We don’t know Dorothy Hamill but we know Dorothy and her yellow brick road. We know her braids.

Dad buys us balloons shaped like Mickey Mouse heads.

“Don’t tell you mother about the place where it’s summer all of the time.”

“Okay.”

“Say it.”

*   *   *

We said what we were supposed to.

But instead of dropping us off and driving away, like he usually did, Dad walked us to Mom’s front porch. Mom answered the door and Dad stood back. He hid.

Mom was quiet for a minute, then her eyes grew huge. “Oh my God, my girls.” Mom covered her mouth with one of her hands. “Ladies?” She scooped us up and slammed the door. We heard Dad laughing on the other side. Our balloons flew away.

She ran her fingers through our short hair. “It will grow back, honey. I promise,” she said to neither of us. Mom paced the kitchen. I remember having the feeling that this wasn’t like the time Cara cut the hair on my Barbie doll. Mom told her then that she’d have to apologize and save up her allowance and buy me a new doll. “Barbie’s hair is permanent,” Mom said. “It never changes.”

“We look like Dorothy Hamill, Mom,” Cara said.

Dad said he has a surprise. I tried to tell Mom. “We are going to a place where it is never winter.”

*   *   *

I’m not sure what Mom would have done had she not married our father; I’ve asked her many times and she always says the same thing. “I love you girls, and once you were born I stopped wanting for myself.”

“You couldn’t have given up on yourself by twenty-three,” I tell her, certain.

But she might have.

It seems to me that the difficult thing in life is to find what stirs you and move toward it. Mom put us first but also put us in the way of whatever moved her and, so, avoided the anxiety of the unknown, the fear of failure, the pain of opening up her heart and feeling her losses. Her selflessness was also her selfishness. But Mom told us that we were smart, funny, beautiful. “Capable young women,” she called us, pushing us onward and out, fighting her desire to keep us home, though there was no question that should hard times come, home was the place to return to.

*   *   *

We are in the car to Florida: the drive to the summer place is long. We keep asking, “Are we there yet?” Dad says we are as close to there as we’ll ever be.

We sing to the radio and drink orange juice.

When we get to the place where it is always summer, the sign says,
WELCOME TO FLORIDA
.

It’s hot. I wonder how far away from home we are.

Dad says we can’t call Mom and that we are the luckiest girls alive because tomorrow we are going to see Mickey Mouse. “That’s right, girlies, Mr. Mouse himself.”

“I miss Mom,” I say.

Dad ignores me like he does when I repeat a bad word.

We check into a hotel and Sister and I get to share a bed. We fall right to sleep. Dad watches us and smokes a cigarette. He keeps the phone off the hook in the hotel room.

Disney World is better than on television. We eat cotton candy and ride Space Mountain. We go to the Hall of Presidents. We watch fireworks and eat dinner in Cinderella’s castle. We stop thinking about Mom.

One day Dad packs our bags and says we can’t go back to see Mickey. He mumbled something about the police and Mom. I remember Mom. I feel sorry that I forgot her.

We drive home.

WELCOME TO NEW YORK,
a sign says. It’s warm here, too. It was June when we left and now it’s July.

There is a truck in Mom’s driveway and men are putting our things in it. Mom kisses us and hugs us hard. Mike comes out of the house. He has a fresh crew cut.

“Honey.” Mom is looking at both of us. “We got married. Mike is your dad now. We are moving far away.”

We look at our old dad in his car and wave at him. We are too young to know we won’t see him again.

*   *   *

While we were away in Florida Mom had married Mike, in a small ceremony in her sister’s backyard. In the photographs, Mom wears a white spaghetti strap sundress with tiny pink and purple flowers. She was tanned and tiny, had a modest bouquet; Mike smashed wedding cake in her face; she smashed it in his.

“My mom had a way with men,” I liked to say, years later, raising a single eyebrow. “She ran as fast as she could toward the most obvious jackass in the room and then she married him in a hurry.”

In place of a honeymoon beach vacation, Mom wrapped our dishes up in newspaper, gave our cat Randy to a new home, loaded the U-Haul cargo trailer, and prepared for a new life at Camp Lejeune. She waited for our father to bring us back from our trip, and when he did she packed us into the car, our belongings in tow; we sped down the highway, the furniture and dishes and toys bouncing about. She took us out of state and away from Dad. She sat in the front passenger seat with her feet up against the dashboard. What life would her girls lead if she didn’t take them away?

Dad had thought we were moving in with our aunt to save money. He came for his scheduled visit with us the following week, our sixth birthday. When I was in my twenties and briefly in touch with him, he told me about this day, the worst of his life. He’d planned our celebration by buying us each our own ice cream cake and a cluster of festive helium balloons. He’d covered his dining room table with gifts wrapped in shiny pink paper, topped with bows. For weeks he’d left the gifts and party favors just as he’d arranged them, unable to bring himself to clean up after the party that was never to be and the relationship with us he’d never have.

But in the car to North Carolina Mom was doing something I hadn’t seen in years; she was smiling.

Chapter 6

Mom said the trip
to Camp Lejeune would take sixteen hours. We stayed quiet in the backseat. Mike stared out the windshield at the road and said we were making good time.

The route was all road and stars, turn signals and crickets. Before long the toll collectors’ accents changed. Southern summers are too hot for travel in a compact car. The leather interior clung to our thighs. I tried to stretch my legs. Mike turned to the backseat. “You’re getting too close to me,” he scolded. My knee poked him through the seat, that’s how far he’d pushed it back.

I tried to stay far away and small. When we stopped for breaks, we switched sides. Cara got the seat behind Mike. Being stuck behind him was like going to jail, but not for long. Mom said he had the bladder of a five-year-old and she was right. We’d learn to hold it: there was never enough time to make it to the bathroom and back if I wanted the seat behind Mom. The rule was to alternate, but neither of us was beyond stealing for legroom.

“We are a military family,” Mike said like he was telling a bedtime story. “What that means is we don’t talk much about ourselves. Everything we do is for the whole family. We are not individuals anymore. We are a four-part machine and I want it well oiled.”

Our birthday was soon. I thought six might be a lucky number. I thought of Grandpa singing, “When I was seventeen, it was a very good year,” and whistling the tune. Maybe for him seventeen was a good year. There was a war he told us that he fought in. It must have happened to him after seventeen. He said he had a very good year when we were born, but he didn’t sing about it.

“Do you think we will both get very good years?” I asked Cara quietly.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said.

“You know, Grandpa and his song about being seventeen and having a very good year?”

“It’s just a song.” Cara stared out the window like she was looking for someone.

“But it could be true, couldn’t it?” My mind started to race. “And what if we have to share one good year like we share a birthday cake?”

“You miss home?” she finally said to the window, but she wouldn’t look at me. “I do,” she said without letting me answer. “But don’t tell.”

Mike said we would have to move a lot for the Corps. “That means you will have to leave behind your schools and all the friends you meet just like we marines leave our families.”

Mom looked upset. “Enough, honey,” she whispered. “They have been through enough today.”

She looked over her shoulder at us in the backseat. “Girls,” her voice dropped very low. “One thing you need to know is that wherever we are living is an extra special secret. Don’t tell Grandpa. You will be able to see him sometimes but you can never tell him where your home is. Grandma can know and everyone else in the family can know, but not Grandpa, okay?”

“Isn’t that lying?” I tried to pull my leg off the seat but the vinyl held on like a Band-Aid.