Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (10 page)

The next morning I learned my father's heart had stopped the
night before and no one was there to hear the ruckus he made, no
wires attached to him to alert anybody. His heart just stopped with
hardly anyone noticing. For months afterward my freshman-year college roommates made much creepy ado about the stupid skull I'd
earlier drawn on my calendar on that very day. John, in particular,
thought there was some otherworldly reason for the image I'd foreshadowed on the day of my father's death. "She knew," I could hear
him whisper to my other roommates. "She saw the sign of death."

I remember thinking it would be great if that were true, if there
really was a wire that connected us to a reason for things, even if
it's just a reason for why we search for a reason when there is none.
"Really, she knew," I could hear them whisper. In response I simply
lay in bed, bereft, letting these people believe they found a reason for
something, letting them continue to talk uncorrected.

WHEN I WAS FIVE, MY BIGGEST TALENT WAS SHOPLIFTING at the local
Thrifty drugstore. At first I just stole candy. Charleston Chews were
my favorite, but their long shape made them hard to heist, so I developed the masterful trick of stuffing things into a rolled-up beach
towel. It worked great until I got greedy and graduated from Charleston Chews to Slinkies, then to kites and then onto entire sets ofTonka
trucks. By the time I tried to leave, my beach towel was so stuffed it
looked like I was trying to transport a corpse in a rolled-up area rug.
I got busted, of course.

"Where's your mother?" the store manager asked me.

"She's at work," I said.

"Then where's your father?" he demanded.

"He's at home asleep," I said, and even though it was three in the
afternoon, I probably wasn't lying. My dad napped a lot during his
bouts of unemployment, probably due to the increased voracity in his
beer consumption at these times, which is one of the reasons I was so
deft at escaping the house in order to shoplift at the Thrifty store. My
two sisters were probably, at that moment, trespassing onto the property of the small motel across the street from our house so they could
swim in the pool, and my older brother was engaged in who knows
what horn-dog activities common among post-adolescents. The last
place any of us could be found was at the forefront of someone's mind,
it probably seemed.

"Well," the store manager exclaimed, looking at me with an
odd judgmental sympathy, "if your father wasn't worthless, he'd be
ashamed of you," he said as he ushered me to leave. When I got home
I was relieved to see that my father was not waiting on the other side
of the door like I'd worried he'd be, all freshly informed of my thieving, slapping his belt against his palm, growling. Instead he was-I
swear this is true-baking a cake.

This was another way he spent his time during his bouts of unemployment, and I loved his cakes. They were amazing feats. He used to
let me pick out the kind I wanted by pointing to the pictures on the
mix boxes ("The brown cake with the beige frosting, and stacked up,
not flat!"), and I was always amazed that they came out looking relatively similar to their advertised images. I didn't know not to be proud
of my father until that day I got caught shoplifting by the Thrifty
store manager, and I didn't know my father's pride in me could be
so important that the thought of losing it would make me quake for
days after I got caught, not sure which I feared more, that the Thrifty
manager might track me down and tell my father to admonish me for
what I'd done, or track my father down and admonish him for what
he'd allowed me to become.

As the days wore on, my mother continued to go to work and
my father continued to bake his cakes and take his naps and deal with
his circumstances as best he could, and my siblings and I continued to
wander so freely and so far from home that sometimes I'm surprised
we survived, seeing as how kids are considered downright endangered
these days unless they're raised under surveillance like lab mice.

But we did survive, and became business owners, executives, and
parents ourselves. I stopped shoplifting that day I got caught, because
say what you will about my unemployed dad, the fact is he had made
his pride in his children matter more to me than my klepto ways,
no matter that my own pride in him noticeably waned after hearing
him called worthless by a drugstore clerk. Today, though, I am more
attuned to the fact that parenting is as painful as it is almost impossible. People are rife with insecurities and inner demons, and sometimes
it's all they can do to protect their kids from their own crumbling
opinion of themselves. To raise a child, let alone four like my dad did,
amid this inner and outer turmoil is, quite literally, an amazing feat.
I used to wonder if, had he lived, my father might be proud of me
today, seeing as how our parenting styles turned out to be so contrary.
Lately though, I spend less time wondering how proud he'd be of me
and more time amazed at how proud I am of him.

MY MOTHER DIED BEFORE SHE EVER went completely crazy, but she
was relatively crazy and also incredibly strong-willed-which explains
why I'm never completely alarmed when I hear screaming coming
from next door. It turns out my neighbor, Dolly, is not at all accustomed to being attacked by her mother. In fact she's very put off by
the whole experience.

"I tell you I have had the worst couple of days," said Dolly. "She
thinks the house is full of strange babies, and yesterday I caught her
trying to escape down the street with the dog in her arms."

Dolly's a good neighbor and hardly ever imposes on me, considering she lives with a person in the throes of dementia. If I were in
her situation, I'd probably be a lot more intrusive on the surrounding households. And for an eighty-five-year-old woman suffering
advanced Alzheimer's, Dot is still pretty deft at keeping the craziness
within the walls of their home-or Dolly is good at secluding it there.
Only a few times have I ever had to usher Dot's barefoot, nightgownclad butt out of the street and back to her doorstep.

Take that time I caught Dot in the middle of the road collecting
industrial material that had fallen off the back of a truck. That did
not seem crazy to me at all, except that it was 60 degrees and Dot was
wearing one of those '50s-era, Lucille Ball-type ruffle-neck negligees.
But it's not like it was the first time someone rushed out of the house
in their pajamas to deal with a dire situation. I remember a man did
just that once when I was seven and I'd found our dog Bonnie stuck butt-to-butt with some mutt up the street. I bawled sorrowfully in my
ineffectual attempts to pull them apart until a man in pajama bottoms, obviously roused from sleep, took it upon himself to save me by
throwing a bucket of cold water on the dogs, which caused Bonnie to
pop free and commence gestating the seven puppies she'd have a few
months later. I did not think that man was crazy at all, just a Good
Samaritan.

So that's what I thought about Dot when I saw her in the street
that time, collecting hose valves and coiled piping that had fallen off
the truck. To me it all looked easily dodge-able until the person who
lost it would discover it was gone and retrace their route to retrieve it.
But Dot insisted on clearing the road that instant. I led her out of the
street and finished moving the debris to the side of the road myself,
with her pointing out where I missed a spot, even though I didn't miss
any spots. I didn't think she was crazier than me, just more thorough.
Crazy, after all, is relative.

Dolly admitted her mother to a treatment facility the other day,
the screaming and histrionics having reached a point that was intolerable for her, especially after Dot took to insisting Dolly was a dangerous stranger who'd kidnapped her (long-dead) husband and real
daughter, hence all the attempts at escape lately. I'd just seen Dot out
and about, and she didn't look like she was plotting an escape. She
looked comfortable, tottering around in her pajamas. I can't wait to
get old, I thought at the time, so I can wear whatever the goddamn hell
I want and dance a jig in a rain shower if I feel like it.

Though I have always known Dot to be cantankerous, it's only
been a year since we met, and according to Dolly, all this screaming
and viciousness is not Dot's normal self. So I can only imagine what
it's like for Dolly, constantly dodging attacks from this little old lady
living in her house, who happens to be her mother, accusing her of
kidnapping her younger self. How hard it must be, I think, to hear
your mother wail for the child that you were, to look at you as though
you are a stranger, as though we don't all miss our younger selves
enough as it is.

My own independent mother used to tell me all kinds of things
about myself I didn't believe. She used to marvel at how strong I was,
and I thought she didn't know me, because most of the time I felt
more helpless than a hermit crab without a shell. I used to look in
the mirror and wonder if she was confusing me with herself. I used to
think she was a little nutty for seeing herself in me like she did, but
again, crazy is relative. The late novelist Sheila Ballantyne once said,
"You can always trust the information given to you by people who are
crazy, because they have an access to truth not available through regular channels." So maybe Dolly did kidnap her younger self-don't we
all eventually? -and maybe my mother was onto something as well.
Because lately, I swear this is true, when I look in the mirror these
days, I sometimes see her strength looking right back at me.

I'M DYING TO SHOW MILLY THE KEY CHAIN for our new (or newly
purchased old) trailer. It has a tiny Formica beer mug attached to it. I
remember that my own dad never used to lock the doors of his trailers
and motor homes, which probably explains the ease with which his
last one was towed away when the repo people finally found it. My
dad discovered the trailer missing after his daily beer-belting marathon at the local tavern, and he was only half as pissed as I thought
he'd be. In fact, he was more mad the night I broke the seemingly less
valuable Stan Laurel half of the Laurel and Hardy plaster statue set he
gave my mother on her fortieth birthday (that night my mother had
to fling herself in front of me because my father had his kicking foot
all drawn back and poised to land on my ass).