Blue Plate Special (9 page)

At night, we sat around big driftwood bonfires, eating charred hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks, singing songs around the campfire and stargazing. My sisters and mother and I slept in our big green and orange canvas cabin tent with our sleeping bags all in a row with the window flaps rolled and tied up to let the ocean air in through the screen mesh windows.

The beach was quiet and dark except sounds of the waves and the intermittent headlights and putt-putt-putts of beach buggies going by. I was always anxious about being crushed under those big rubber wheels in my sleep, and I did my best to whip my little sisters into a frenzy of fear so that I wouldn’t be alone in it. In the mornings, miraculously still alive, we emerged from the tent’s zippered door, already in our bathing suits, into sunlight and wind, hungry for space-food sticks.

One day, my mother’s friend Claire, who was young and pretty, announced that she and her boyfriend, Keith, were going to take a walk down the beach. Everyone but me apparently grasped the significance of this.

“Can I come?” I asked instantly. It sounded like the most fun thing in the world. I’d been playing on the beach all day and was getting a little bored. Claire and Keith were so cool. It would be an adventure to take a walk with them.

They looked at each other. “We’re going to take off our clothes,” Claire said.

“Let them go,” I’m sure my mother must have told me if she’d overheard this.

“Please?” I said. “I don’t care if you take off your clothes. That’s okay.”

They didn’t say no, so the three of us walked for a glorious mile or so along the hot, breezy beach. I couldn’t believe my luck. I felt it was my duty to entertain them in return for letting me come, so I kept up a stream of information about myself—books I liked to read, gossip about people at my school. I offered the best shells I found to Claire. I ran ahead of them and back again to show them how fast I could go. I interrogated them: Where did they grow up? What were they like when they were little?

They were so nice. They listened to me and answered my questions and praised my sprinting. Eventually, we stopped walking and picked a spot on the sand as our base of operations for the afternoon. When they got naked and went out swimming together, I stayed on the beach for a while and guarded their clothes from nonexistent thieves and looked away, down the beach, to give them privacy. I dug in the sand with a big abalone shell and watched seagulls land and take off in the waves. I peeked—just once—and saw their heads close together, far out in the water, bobbing up and down.

On the walk back to camp, I was quiet and shy, having finally realized, too late, that they had really wanted to be by themselves. I couldn’t figure out how to apologize to them for foisting myself into their private afternoon without making it more awkward than it already was, so I didn’t say anything, but inwardly I was seething with embarrassment and regret.

When it was time to drive back to Tempe, our mother let the caravan drive on without us, and we spent the day in town. We walked around the streets, peering into open doorways (our mother was as shamelessly nosy as we were), spellbound by the seemingly romantic way they lived there, with hammocks
and crucifixes and TVs in their front rooms, and by the exotic, delicious cooking smells emanating from their kitchens.

Afterward, we got to have lunch at the hotel, just us. And finally, our mother told us that we could choose one thing, anything we wanted, from the curio shop. We were all instantly in an agony of indecision, sure that if we chose the wrong thing, we would regret it forever. I had never heard the word “curio” before, but suddenly it struck me as the most glamorous, fantastic word in the world, and I couldn’t stop using it as I walked around the little shop, inspecting all the curios. I fell in love with a round little turquoise ring, but then I saw a mermaid made of shells glued together, painted beautiful colors. I could only have one; I wanted both desperately. I chose the ring and yearned for the mermaid all the way to the A&W in Ajo, Arizona, where I drowned my sorrows in a root beer.

In June of that year, two months before I turned ten, my sisters and I all went to Oakland to spend the summer with our father on Regent Street. Also in the house, along with the usual commune members, were our father’s current girlfriend and her two sons, Elijah, who was my age, and Jesse, who was between Susan’s and Emily’s ages.

The five of us kids formed a wild, ragtag little crew, unsupervised for the most part and left to our own devices all day while the grown-ups did whatever they did. Elijah and Susan and I discovered that we could travel all over the neighborhood on rooftops, leaping from one pitched roof to the next, swinging on branches, until we were across the block. We played hide and go seek in an empty schoolyard. We hung out with the other kids on the street, including a girl who could swallow little glass bottles and burp them back up.

Once or twice, my father erupted at Emily the way he used to blow up at our mother. Apparently, Emily, of the three of us, was the only one who triggered his blind-rage mechanism. I remember him dragging her by the arm to his bedroom as punishment for her refusal to obey him. He threw her onto his bed and then around the room, scarily, violently. He didn’t hit her, but he didn’t have to—we were all properly terrified.

One day, Elijah decided we were going to rob the house next door. The people who lived there were gone all day, and he knew they left the back door unlocked. He and I would sneak in and take whatever loot we could find, and Susan would stand guard. The code word was “rattlesnake.” We went through their back door the next afternoon and up the stairs to their bedroom. My heart was, of course, staccato, hotly beating. We took two twenty-dollar bills and some costume jewelry from a bureau top.

“Rattlesnake!” Susan yelled at the top of her lungs.

We tumbled out the back door and sauntered down the driveway as if we’d just been taking the air.

There stood my father. He had just come home from work. We managed to act normal, then we hid the costume jewelry under the side-entrance stairs of his house and crouched together in the tiny hidey-hole for a whole afternoon, eating dog biscuits we’d found—a fitting snack for hardened criminals.

The next day, Elijah and Susan and I went to the local Safeway via rooftops. We approached the lady behind the customer service desk with the two stolen twenty-dollar bills and asked her to break them for us. She peered at the three out-of-breath, wild-eyed, rat-haired hippie kids over her half-moon bifocals on a chain around her neck and asked where we’d gotten the money. We told her with insistent fake honesty that it had been our Christmas present. When she rightly surmised that something was amiss, since it was now July, and demanded our parents’ phone number, we ran out.

We decided to put the money on my father’s bureau top.

“Where did this money come from?” he asked us all when he found it.

We all pretended we had no idea, and my father, who was always mild mannered when he wasn’t beating someone up, let it go.

W
hen we got back to Tempe, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. I felt it in the pit of my stomach. During the months that followed, my inchoate fear took the concrete form of a terror of punishment for breaking into the house next door. Whenever the phone rang at night after I was in bed, I lay awake, staring into the dim light of the room with wide eyes, sure it was the cops calling to arrest me.

I finally confessed the crime to my mother and asked if she thought I’d go to jail for it. She assured me the cops weren’t going to find me, but my fear didn’t go away.

In fact, it intensified. One night, my mother was awakened by a tapping on her bedroom window. Terrified, she looked out to see my friend Beverly Begay standing under the swamp cooler with all her siblings. They asked if they could come in and stay with us because their own mother had gotten drunk and kicked them out and told them never to come back. They looked even more terrified than my mother was.

Although she badly wanted to invite them in for the night, my mother realized they might never leave if she did. So she talked them through the steps of breaking into their house without their mother knowing and slipping into their beds. Since they had no telephone to call the police, she told them all to stand up straight and tall and assert themselves to their mother in a loud voice if they had to. Then she told them to come back to her window if it didn’t work out. It did. Beverly was at school, as always, the next day.

Soon after that, a strange man came to the door and threatened my mother, pointing a gun at her. He was the father of a shy, scared, troubled little girl who’d come over to play at our house only once, one of Susan’s classmates. He was sure my mother was hiding her. Somehow she convinced him that his
daughter wasn’t in our house and got him to back down and go away.

Despite these incidents, though, things seemed to be okay on the surface. When Halloween came, I made my costume out of a cardboard box: I drew a screen on it with squiggly static lines, made antennae out of coat hangers, and wore it on my head with little eye holes, dressed all in black so I looked (I hoped) like a TV on a stand. As usual, the enormous bags of candy we lugged home were confiscated by our mother and doled out to us so slowly they would last till Christmas, and would have lasted even longer if she hadn’t ransacked the stash at night while she was studying.

Then one November night, after we kids were all in bed, my father called and told my mother he was in Tempe and would be stopping by soon to take us with him for the weekend.

“The girls are already asleep,” she told him. “You can’t show up out of the blue like this. They all have things to do tomorrow.”

“I’m coming over,” he said. “Get them ready, I’m taking them.”

My mother woke us up and drove us to our friends Mike and Jayne’s house, where we all spent the night. We went home the next morning and resumed our lives. Before lunch, our father arrived. The front door was open, but the screen door was still locked. He yanked it open and leaped at my mother and beat her more savagely than he had ever beaten her before, yanking her hair out and punching her breasts. Susan and Emily hit his legs and tried to defend her while I hovered in the doorway to the kitchen, paralyzed with shock and fear.

“Dial zero, Laurie,” my mother said to me, gasping a little. “Tell them to send the cops.”

I reached up to unhook the receiver from the wall phone, dialed one long, slow zero, and said I know not what to the
operator when she answered. I must have given her the correct information, because minutes later, a cop car arrived in a blaze of sirens. The cops, our saviors now instead of the pigs, came into the house, pulled my father off my mother, and led him away in handcuffs. We all stood in the driveway together and watched him get shoved into the back of the squad car, watched it drive away.

Then we all went back inside. My mother sat at the table, crying, pulling out hunks of her own hair while the three of us comforted her, patting and hugging her, telling her we loved her. The next day, her breasts were completely black and blue. Over the next week or two, the bruises faded. Her hair grew back.

My mother had declined to press charges, so my father was probably released soon after the cops took him away. We received no further child-support checks from him. He disappeared from our lives.

For months afterward, I kept my father’s expired driver’s license under my pillow; he had given it to me the summer before. The photo showed an old hippie with a long salt-and-pepper ponytail and shaggy beard, his eyes wild, probably from drugs. He bore little resemblance to the father I’d blindly adored as a small kid.

We had a lot of cats growing up, but I only ever cared about one of them, a handsome, good-natured little tabby called Toby who slept on the pillow by my head and whom I loved to cuddle and play with. He disappeared shortly after my father did. A neighbor found him in his air conditioner, dead. We guessed that he’d gotten stuck and died of thirst. How the neighbor didn’t hear him mewing before he died, I could not imagine. It was a blow.