Kin, page 20
The trailer was partly furnished and included a VCR that I used to tape a copy of a television version of Alice in Wonderland, one of our favorites because it opened with Alice and her older sister dressed in pretty Victorian-style clothes, lounging in an English country garden beside a pond. As soon as we started watching, we became those characters, and executed our lines and song-and-dance numbers flawlessly. I begged Mom to buy snack cakes and fruit punch, which I poured into tiny bottles I saved. The sister disappeared after the beginning of the show, at which point we both became Alice, pausing the tape to nibble the snack cakes and sip the punch whenever she did, willing ourselves to grow intimidatingly large, or invisibly small. Either would have been an improvement.
My clothes, or lack of them, became an obsession. I laid them out each night before school, trying to work magic with the few pieces I had, adding whatever I could to stretch my wardrobe as far as possible. During the periods when Dad was less religious, I tried to avoid denim skirts, and skirts in general, because they encouraged teasing, so for bottoms I had three options: a pair of flared jeans that I tried desperately to keep pinned and tucked into a taper, a pair of pleated pink pants, and a pair of purple sweats. Occasionally, Aunt Hope came to town with several garbage bags of vogue hand-me-downs, but Mom usually insisted they come to us last or near last, and by the time the bags had passed through all the cousins, they were pretty well flattened. If a cousin spent the night and left something behind, I worked that in, and occasionally I borrowed from Mom’s closet, trying to imitate Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink. Misti didn’t have any more clothes than I did, so I tried to leave hers alone, though she did have one sweater, a stylish hand-me-down from our cousin Autumn, Linda’s eldest daughter, that we fought over at least once a week.
At first Mom mostly helped Dad in his new position. She had never been a career woman, though she was so well respected by everyone who knew her that she would be elected to the city council a decade after we moved to Whitesburg. Still, no matter how much everyone loved her, rising early, getting dressed, and leaving home to spend the day with people who weren’t family exhausted her and left her feeling irritable, anxious, and withdrawn. She left Rite Aid under the cloud of a sexual harassment settlement, when she refused to be referred to by her manager as a pig. She worked as a cashier at a local farm supply store. She nannied a little girl we grew so close to that she began to feel like a member of our family. But always, Mom preferred being home in the peace and quiet with her feet up.
The job she held the longest was a receptionist’s position at the local health clinic, working in the only OB/GYN office for miles around, which meant she was for the most part surrounded by women, but she often came home with horror stories of the husbands and boyfriends who accompanied patients to their checkups, dirty old men with pregnant teenage brides, men who would ask the resident nurse practitioner to add a few stitches to a healing episiotomy to “tighten things up down there.” She liked to tell the practitioner’s reply as if it were a punch line, that if those men had been better endowed, they wouldn’t need extra stitches to help them satisfy their wives, turning the insult on its head. Mom would describe the priceless look of triumph on the women’s drawn, tired faces, before launching into a story about her mother, Mae, who had followed in the footsteps of her own mother and aunts, serving the community as a midwife. I knew Mom wished she could go to nursing school and do the same, but school scared her too much, and working in the OB office was as close as she would come.
Whether she was telling tales about old midwives and premature babies kept in shoeboxes next to coal stoves or her modern job in a modern office, the men in her stories rarely deserved the women they were with, and she usually ended each story by praising Dad. How lucky she felt not to be stuck in a life where, after the tremendous effort of giving birth, of turning yourself inside out, as she described it, your husband was immediately on top of you again, sweating and filthy, with fingernails you could grow a garden under, and long before your stitches had healed.
Dad’s new position kept him busy. He had to fight fires, maintain the fire station and trucks, and keep his staff well trained. In late summer and fall, he also helped coordinate the annual Mountain Heritage Festival, from managing carnies and their equipment to prepping the larger fire trucks for the parade, to safeguarding the proceeds, which filled a zippered bank bag, until they could be deposited. In December he coordinated the appearance of the city’s Santa, who rode one of the fire trucks to nearly every surrounding household with children, delivering brown paper bags stuffed with treats and sometimes even a small gift. Finally, in July, he purchased and executed the city’s fireworks display.
These duties changed our family life in unpredictable ways. They meant, for example, that each year Misti and I had endless rolls of tickets for carnival rides, and that we rode the fire truck through the festival parade, tossing candy to squealing children on the street below. Around Christmastime, when the regular Santa was under the weather, we helped Dad into the Santa suit and joined in the assembly line of fire department volunteers, filling bags with fruit, candy, nuts, and a toy, after which we always had boxes of leftover fruit and nuts to enjoy. We weren’t the kind of family to have kitchen implements, or even much in the way of dishes, for that matter, certainly not a nutcracker, so Misti and I gorged ourselves by smashing the nuts to bits with a hammer. In Seco, we cracked them against the brick woodstove hearth. In Whitesburg, we used the blacktop outside.
The way I felt about Dad changed, too. He spent long hours planning the fireworks show, engineering a safer, better system for discharging the explosives from large PVC pipes that he sunk into the ground for stability, arranging the pipes so there wouldn’t be long empty pauses in the show, because he believed kids in Letcher County were entitled to enjoy a show as extravagant as those in other, bigger cities. Knowing all this, if I heard someone being critical after the show, even casually, I felt protective. I knew that when the crates emblazoned with skulls and crossbones arrived from China, he stored them in his own bedroom, and that he threatened to whip anybody who so much as thought about lighting a match inside the house, which became in July, quite literally, a powder keg.
Even the town’s mayor often sought Dad’s advice, and he was so well respected in his field that eventually he worked for the state department of disaster and emergency services and was even made a Kentucky Colonel, though that recognition wouldn’t come until years after I’d left home. Still, Grandma Betty was so proud of Dad’s accomplishments that she collected every scrap of memorabilia she could get her hands on, and there were many: newspaper action shots of him on a burning roof, countless certificates and plaques, even a photo of him arm in arm with Jeb Bush, grinning like old army buddies.
But the best perk of Dad’s job was season passes to the city’s public pool, mere steps from our new front door and open from late spring to early fall, when Dad used the smaller fire truck, the Mini Pumper, to clean it out. I could hardly believe our luck the first time I approached the pool entrance and the lifeguard recognized Misti and me and waved us in. We swam every day.
If I followed the railroad tracks, Family Dollar was within walking distance, and I was able to use some of my babysitting money to buy my own bottle of baby oil, two thin beach towels, and a pair of sunglasses that Misti and I shared on good days and argued about on bad. I convinced Mom to let me buy a monokini, high-necked but cut out around the navel, almost like a two-piece. The top half of the suit was bubblegum pink, and the bottom was pale mint green.
I loved to spend my babysitting money at the pool concessions and jukebox. Many of the kids were from the projects, and one of the boys, Ralph, had hair like cotton and a crush on me. At least once a day, he played Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me” on the jukebox and followed me around the pool strumming an air guitar and pretending to serenade me. I was constantly scanning the surrounding chain-link fence for Dad, afraid he would catch me flirting with a boy, but I loved the attention.
Rich girls came to the pool in summer, too, though not nearly as often, since many of them had pools of their own and invited each other to slumber parties that turned into home pool parties the next day. I was so far removed from that crowd that I couldn’t imagine being invited to sleep over, staying up late dancing to Cyndi Lauper, and borrowing each other’s pretty clothes. They all seemed to have expansive kitchens, extra rooms, and rich-girl hair, as Misti and I called it. They were the girls whose mothers bought them name-brand vitamins before the doctor said there was a problem.
I made the mistake once and only once of complaining about this to Mom. Some girls were taking dance lessons in Norton, Virginia, about half an hour away, and I wanted to do the same. She tried to explain that we didn’t have the money, that it wouldn’t just be the cost of the lessons, that we’d also have to buy leotards, tights, shoes, and costumes, but I kept at her. We were in the car, and I balled up in the passenger’s seat, feeling sorry for myself and looking out the window. “I just hate that there are all these things I can’t do,” I said. I didn’t care that there were girls, like those in the projects, who could do even fewer things, only that I couldn’t do what I wanted.
Before the words were out of my mouth, Mom smacked my face with the back of her hand so hard it made my eyes water. It was the only time she ever did that, and I knew right away that I didn’t have a leg to stand on, that I was being cruel and spoiled. We sat for a time in the silence of the car. “You literally have a swimming pool in your backyard,” she finally whispered.
I liked to spread our towels on one side of the diving boards, directly across the pool from the kids I thought were rich, close enough that I could listen to their conversations. I ignored Misti for a lot of that summer, tossing quarters into the deep end of the pool where she’d keep busy diving for them. The girls rarely spoke to me except to put me in my place, and the boys mostly ignored me, except for one.
“Hey, Quarter-Size!” he yelled at me across the pool for several days before finally explaining what he meant. “Her nipples are as big as quarters,” he shrugged at another boy, like he was just stating the facts, like it was his job to say it.
“Ugh, she’s gross,” someone said.
“Maybe I should call her Kennedy instead, since they’re actually big as half dollars,” he added.
I felt dirty and flattered. I turned to make sure I could see Misti’s back bobbing in the pool. I knew she loved hiding in the antisocial void of the deep end. I did, too, on slower, overcast days or late in the day when we had the pool to ourselves, but Misti had a gift for disappearing. She kept herself to herself and wore coats even in summer. Even television was a means of disappearing. Nothing could have convinced her to try to fit in, but I couldn’t help myself.
I could feel the boy who called me Quarter-Size watching me as I walked to the concession stand on a whim, where I bought two Bomb Pops. Misti was so happy to get the treat that she put me in a good mood, good enough to dive for quarters with her, and for a time, I forgot how much I hated my new school and missed playing with the Seco neighbor girls, how much I missed being clueless about how I looked.
But then some thunderheads formed over the park and forced us out. The lifeguards circled the pool, warning that if we didn’t get out of the water, we might be struck by lightning. I thought about Aunt Sharon. She’d been trying to pour a concrete porch in the rain, racing to smooth the fast-drying cement with a shovel when a bolt of lightning found her. “Like fire,” she answered, when I asked her for the bazillionth time what it felt like, “like being set on fire.”
Suddenly two hands unhooked the top of my suit and shoved me into the pool. I turned to find it was the boy who’d been teasing me. I’d clutched my suit against my chest the second I felt it come undone, but I still had to paddle to the edge of the pool and ask Misti to rehook the back.
Then I saw Dad, seated on one of the picnic tables beneath a shelter house in the park, like he had always been there, from the first time we’d come to the pool, watching me, and all the blood in my body descended into my legs. He was perfectly still, a gargoyle, or a bull paused in a field, nostrils flaring, ready to charge. Embarrassed, I looked around the pool, but the lifeguard whistle had sounded and everyone had jumped back in, including Misti. They had all moved on. It was like nobody could see Dad but me, a mudslide headed in my direction, eating the face from a mountain. In the middle of the pool crowd, I was alone with him.
He lifted his pointer finger and motioned for me to come to him. I got out of the pool and grabbed my towel, wrapping it around me. I walked over to the chain-link fence, which felt flimsy between us.
“Get to the house,” he whispered.
I raced home. I knew if I took my time it would only make him madder. Mom met me at the door, looked at my face, and whispered, “What did you do?”
Before I could answer, he came through the door behind me and had his belt off in one motion.
“Let her put some clothes on, Short,” Mom said. “At least let me dry her off,” but he grabbed my arm and striped my legs. The belt stung worse than usual on my wet skin. Each hit cut like a razor. Like fire.
I started to feel lightheaded. One end of the belt came loose in his hand and the buckle hit my legs. From a corner of the room I heard Mom say, “Okay, Roy, okay, that’s enough.”
He hit me twice more before flinging the belt in a corner. He left, slamming the door behind him, and Mom and I sat on the floor together for a moment, not saying anything. Outside, I could hear the squeals of the kids playing in the pool, of life going on without me.
I was used to welts, which always sank quickly back into the skin, but this time bruises were forming beneath the buckle scrapes. It was a first, and Mom began to talk about what I’d need to wear to school the next day to cover it up. She had a turtleneck I could borrow. Someone had given it to her, but she hated tight things around her neck, so she’d never worn it and probably never would. It was practically new, she said. She didn’t have to tell me not to tell anyone what had happened. I would have died first.
That year in Bowen’s Mill, I saw Sister Katherine again for the first time in years. She was coming out of one of the dorms and I recognized her immediately. I wanted to run up and hug her, but she had never been that kind of friend. She knew me immediately, too, and started shaking her head at me like she always had, like I was trouble, but smiling at the same time.
“Shawna Benge,” she said. “Now when was the last time I saw you?”
We shook hands like men do. “Grand Marais, I think, Sister.”
“How are you?” she asked. “Doing well in school?”
I nodded. She hadn’t changed. She had been old in Grand Marais and she was still old, but not diminished in the least, with her battleship-gray hair, curled coarsely into a helmet, burly arms still covered in skin tags, and bulging varicose veins. She wore the same clothes she always had, practical and shapeless in various flat shades of blue, accessorized only by her cross necklace and her well-polished orthopedic shoes.
Mom and Misti were with me, and she turned her attention to them, quizzing Mom about Kentucky and our home church arrangements. They talked about how the nearest farm was hours away in Cincinnati, and, like all the farms, it was shrinking every day. They were both grateful for the fellowship offered by conventions.
We said our goodbyes and didn’t cross paths again that week—or ever, that I can remember. After we left, Mom said that Sister Katherine had always reminded her of Aunt Sarah, her father’s sister. I knew Mom was intimidated by Sarah, because we rarely visited her at her very proper home on an old piece of Addington family property in Bottom Fork, about four miles from Seco, and the few times we did, Misti and I waited outside where there was no chance of our damaging a valuable or saying the wrong thing.
“It’s easy to forget,” Mom said, meeting my eyes. I realized I’d been staring at her.
“Forget what?” I asked.
“That her brother died in a plane crash,” Mom said.
I didn’t think much about Sam Fife, except when I heard him screaming on sermon tapes, and even then I thought about him as if he were still alive.
“That man went up in flames on the side of a mountain,” Mom continued. “He was just a stranger to us,” she laughed to herself, “but a sister knows you best. Sometimes better than you want her to.”
I thought about Misti and how true that was, how our life together felt like its own thing, separate and secret, intimate in the extreme. There had never not been an us, at least not that I could remember, and even though my sister’s experience of our family life was very different from mine, she was still always in the vicinity, bearing witness or choosing not to, which is still a kind of bearing witness. I knew Mom felt the same way about her sisters, like she needed to be around them because no one outside the family would ever truly understand her, and not being understood is such a burden, but she also needed periodic breaks from the burden of being known so completely.
We were walking toward the kitchen to get our supper, which smelled delicious, like salty potatoes and cheddar cheese browning under a broiler. People were appearing all around us, gathering in distinctive family groups for the evening meal. It felt like I thought being in a convent would, the sturdy schedule, the blessed absence of glamour. On work details, the only competition was to be the hardest worker, not the prettiest or smartest, and hard work was something I excelled at. Not one girl in Bowen’s Mill was ever unkind to me. Instead, we talked about our favorite things and our futures, and more than once I considered I might end up on one of the farms, married with a bunch of children, my life a clean break from the world outside.
I woke one night to the sounds of a struggle coming from my parents’ bedroom at the other end of the trailer. Mom and Dad slept in a large waterbed that came with the house and that Misti and I played on whenever they were gone, challenging each other to belly flops that smarted just like they did in the pool. Sometimes we gathered ourselves at one side of the bed, pressing all of our weight against the balloon mattress, then racing to the other side, creating a waterbed tidal wave that we tossed ourselves onto, letting it rock us like the waves in the ocean. I never liked sleeping on the waterbed, because no matter how many covers I used, my skin sweated against the plastic sack of the mattress and I woke feeling hot and cold and clammy all at the same time.
