It was boring to stay in my room all morning with nothing to do. Sometimes I'd open the door and listen to the television while I sat on the floor. I could hear my brothers laughing, but I didn't dare join them. Without the visuals, cartoons weren't that interesting.
For awhile, I imagined what it would be like to have an older sister to confide in. My sister Carolyn who died would have been old enough to have a life of her own by the time I was ten, but maybe we would have talked if she ever came to visit. If she had grown up, she would have known what it was like to live with an alcoholic in the house because her father had been a drinker. Maybe she could have given me some tips on how to behave. But if she hadn't died, maybe my mother and her first husband would have stayed married and I wouldn't exist. It was too complicated to puzzle out.
Scouting around in the room, I grabbed the few picture books I had. Now, for something to do, I read and reread them. The paper became shiny with use. At school, we learned to read with phonics, which was all right when you had the special books, but didn't do much when you only had regular writing.
Once, when we read out loud at school, I got into an argument with the teacher because she corrected my pronunciation of "island" and insisted I sounded it out correctly as "is-land." She said it was "eye-land," to which I retorted, "If you don't say the 's,' why is it there?
She replied, "That's just the way it is."
To me, that was a most unsatisfactory explanation, one often used by adults.
The next time my mother was off work, I asked her to get me a library card, which she did. She took me to the library a mile down the road in the Sharp Park district of Pacifica. I watched the way she drove both there and back. It wasn't too far, so I figured I could walk there on Saturday mornings instead of being cooped up in my room. The first couple of times, I walked past it and couldn't find it, because the library was up to the left on a side road and not clearly visible from the main street. Pretty soon, I got the hang of it, though, and I would quietly say goodbye to my brothers, sneak out the front door, and take off on my own.
When I walked, I'd say, "Hello," or, "Good Morning," to any girls or women I passed, but if they were boys or men, I mostly stared straight ahead as if I didn't see them. There were three reasons I did this:
One: Men or boys might bother me if I said anything to them.
Two: If I didn't acknowledge them, I was disrespecting them on purpose even if they didn't realize it. This was a ridiculously small way of getting revenge against all males, but it made me feel better.
Three: Sometimes I'd secretly watch a certain kind of man as he walked toward me. A man with blonde, curly hair and blue eyes would get my scrutiny, because he might be my father. I'd seen a few pictures of my father. If he came find me and Jimmy, I wanted to be able to recognize him. The idea we might be walking toward each other on the same street was pretty unlikely, but I thought it might happen. I didn't want him to think he wouldn't be welcome, to me, anyway. And to Jimmy as well.
At the library, there were lots of picture books. If I didn't know the words, I could at least "read" the drawings. They were like static cartoons.
I could spend as much time as I wanted picking out books. By the time I walked back home, Dirk was awake and out of bed, therefore the most dangerous part of the day was over. I could go to my room and read, staying out of his sight.
Trying to decipher the words in the library books made me pay more attention during reading lessons at school. There was a high learning curve and I climbed that mountain gratefully because I knew the new words would make it easier to understand the stories in books. Once I mastered picture books, I went on to Easy Readers, getting the gist of the story while skipping over the words I didn't know. A world of imagination opened up to me. I wasn't by myself in the bedroom anymore, I was in the world of Dick and Jane, the silliness of Dr. Seuss, and books like Caps for Sale (by the deliciously-named author Es-phyr Slo-bod-ki-na) which told the story of the man who found monkeys on his peddler's walk. Were there really place in the world where you could see monkeys in trees? What an idea!
Who knew reading could be so much fun? Once I finished the books, I went back and read them again, looking up the words I didn't know in a children's dictionary so I could understand everything written. Sometime I even read the dictionary, especially the words with pictures next to them. Books became breathing, freedom, flying. And they were mine, at least until time to return them to the library. Then I could pick out other books with different worlds to explore.
Once I got hooked, I read every chance I got, both at home and at school. I craned my head down over the books so often that the back of my neck bones stuck out like knobs. At the library, I discovered some books came in sets. The first set of books I read were fairy tales by Andrew Lang. Each book was named for a different colored fairy. I worked my way through all the colors until l got to the last one, the rainbow. The stories were taken from European fairy tales and had some words that weren't in the dictionary. I puzzled over "goaler" until I decided it had something to do with being in prison. I enjoyed the stories, but there were lots of things that happened like magic, things that weren't affected by reality. Sometimes women prayed for a baby and suddenly they were pregnant. That was especially scary. I also read fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.
Pretty soon, I was reading the classics. Mostly I enjoyed fantasy stories like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz. These were such different worlds to live in, way more interesting than the suburbs. Particularly fascinating to me was The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy and her dog were transported far away from everything and everything they knew. I marveled at how she managed to survive, even thrive, with the help of friends she made along the way. Still, I pondered how did she eat? What did she feed her dog? And I didn't like the ending. Why would she go home when lots of adventures awaited her in Oz? Oz was much more interesting than Kansas.
Jimmy and Billy continued to watch a lot of television. Our worlds diverged they knew all the new cartoons and I knew all the books I read. The boys had something in common they couldn't share with me and they weren't particularly interested in my books.
Once Mom had more seniority, she was able to pick the hours she wanted. She started working swing shift like Dirk. Jimmy and I were in charge of getting ourselves to school in the mornings so she could sleep in. She got up in time to get Billy off to school, since he had to be there later than we did.
Jimmy got the worst of that situation. Mom would say to him, "You're the oldest. You have to be responsible." It wasn't fair, because Jimmy had to be responsible, but our father, whom Mom described as not being able to take the responsibility of having children, had been allowed to skate out of our lives.
We learned to get up on time with alarm clocks. I liked having breakfast with Jimmy. We ate all the Cheerios we wanted. Sometimes we'd augment breakfast with chips or soda. If Mom suspected we'd done that, she didn't say anything. She tried enticing us with "Instant Breakfast," which was supposed to be mixed with milk. It tasted awful.
If both of us overslept, we threw on our clothes, drank a glass of milk, and ran out the door. Somehow we always managed to make it to school on time.
After school, with both adults out of the house, Jimmy and I often stayed up late to watch television. We'd watch Johnny Carson's monologue on The Tonight Show and then go to bed. One night, we saw car headlights turn into the driveway.
"It's him," I yelled. "He must have gotten off work early."
Jimmy scrambled to turn off the TV and we both raced out of the living room. Jimmy ran to his bedroom and slammed the door shut. I heard him shimmy up the ladder of the bunk beds and jump on the top mattress. I stood in the hallway near my bedroom and watched around the corner to see what Dirk would do. He opened the front door, walked over to the television, and rested his hand on top of it for a moment, feeling the warmth, then shook his head in disgust. As he made his way to the kitchen to put away his lunch box, I quietly went into my bedroom, shut the door and got into bed. Later, I held my breath as I heard him pass by in the hallway on the way to the master bedroom.
Because Mom and Dirk had older children, Jimmy never got the praise and attention a first child would normally get. Besides, Jimmy wasn't Dirk's son. Billy got all the attention Dirk had to offer. And, of course, instead of making it easier for him to be responsible, I still resisted when he tried to boss me around.
I often wondered what our lives would have been like if our mother was younger. Often she would sigh and say, "I'm too old for this." She'd already raised a child; she knew what that was like and she was doing it again, this time with three of us and she was in her forties.
After I'd had several months of periods, I didn't get them anymore. I didn't know what was happening. In all the literature I'd gotten, nothing was written about periods stopping unless you were pregnant. I didn't know how I could be pregnant. Again I wondered if Dirk could have done something without me knowing.
I didn't have a period for five months. For five months, I worried. I didn't throw up, like I'd heard women do when they were pregnant. My stomach didn't get bigger, either. But what was happening to me? Jimmy wouldn't know. All that girl stuff was a mystery to him, too. I never thought about asking the nurse at school, mostly because I couldn't find a way to talk to her without it staying private.
Finally, out of the blue, my periods started again. I breathed a sigh of relief. Later, I read that often at the beginning girls would start and then stop having periods for a time. That was normal. I wasn't weird or damaged in some way.
Since we now had a house with a yard, the boys and I started campaigning for a puppy. My mother wasn't keen on the idea, since she had let Johnny have a dog and she had ended up taking care of it. We pointed out there were three of us to care for the animal and we shouldn't be punished for what Johnny hadn't done. The arguments must have worked on her, because my mother took Jimmy to look at beagle puppies and came back with Ginger. She had the classic beagle look, a brown face with a narrow white stripe down her forehead and a black, brown, and white body. Jimmy said the puppy chose him by walking up and licking his hand.
We were thrilled with her. She was a good dog and didn't bark a lot. Once in awhile she would bay at the moon, which we thought was funny. I used to hold her in my lap and stroke her soft ear fur. When she got older, I took her down to the beach at twilight. Once we were on the sand, I let her run free. My favorite time of year was September, when the ocean currents changed and the land was warm, but the water was cold. The sky was so clear I could see the Farralone Islands twenty-five miles offshore. From my vantage point, they looked like little rounded lumps of brown dough. If they had been cartoon islands, the artist would have added palm trees.
As the day faded and the sky darkened, I watched the dog and felt her power as she cleared the beach of birds, the seagulls squawking and taking flight. The air was a delicious mix of salt and warmth and coolness, the seawater caressing the sand and then retreating back into the depths of the ocean.
I jumped and twirled with abandon on the sand, thrilling to the joy of being alive in a world that had sea and sand and so much beauty. I would dance until Venus was bright in the sky. Then the dog and I would walk back up the cliff, tired and happy.
My revels continued until a teenaged girl was raped by a couple of boys on the beach south of us. Mom read about it and forbade me to go with just the dog. I felt sorry for her and angry, too. Didn't she realize I was in more danger of being raped in her house than I was at the beach with my dog? Apparently not.
She said Jimmy could watch me from the cliff (another responsibility for him!), but it wasn't the same. Someone watching, even Jimmy, made me self-conscious. I couldn't be free.
I stopped going to the beach. But at home in my room, I learned I could close my eyes and relive that twilight time when I danced and flew over the sand whenever I wanted. No one could take that away from me.
The old man who lived next door was named Tex. In his heyday, he said he'd worked in vaudeville as a tap dancer and later he led a jazz band. Tex lived with his wife, but we seldom saw her. In fact, we never saw him out of his house or wearing anything but flannel pajamas. Once he realized there were kids living next door and he spied Jimmy and me walking by, he would open the front door call to us, motioning us to come inside.
The house stank of stale cigar smoke mixed with pus from his mangy old cocker spaniel. I felt sorry for the dog, who continually scratched big patches of oozing skin. Tex had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, something I'd never seen before, and he had us listen to plays for children. The plastic reels moved around in a hypnotic way, one side spooling out a ribbon of tape and the other reel wrapping it up in slow circles. When a new character was introduced, he would point at one of us and say that would be our part. We'd giggle at the attention and thought it was great fun. I was entranced with the idea of being on stage. Maybe some talent scout would see me and I would get parts in movies and become famous like Shirley Temple.
This went on for several months. After awhile, I suspected something was wrong. There was never talk of learning lines, getting costumes, or dates for a show. One day my mother came home and said we were not to visit him anymore. Tex had asked her to do an errand for him while she was walking to the bank and somehow the cash she was taking there disappeared. After that, we were told to wave at him when he called to us, but never go in the house again.
Tex and his wife had a small tool shed with a flat roof on their side of the fence off the easement. After I was forbidden to go to the beach, I would climb up and lay there on my back in the afternoons. I was just the right size to cover the asphalt shingles and the sun made it one of the warmer places in the yard. The shingles dug small gravel bits into my shirt, but that didn't matter. It was my hiding place. If the boys called to tell me I was wanted inside, I stayed where I was until they gave up and then I could sneak in when they went to check some other part of the house.
When I was up on the tiny roof, I fantasized. My favorite fantasy was that my father would come and take me and Jimmy away from there. I wanted desperately to leave home, even if it was true that my father couldn't take the responsibility of having children. I concocted various scenarios where he would come and get us and we'd promise to take care of ourselves so our father would be okay for having us. We already got up and out to school on mornings. We could still eat cooked lunches at school and we knew how to take care of ourselves in the evenings, doing our homework on our own and eating sandwiches for dinner. We didn't need much. We wouldn't be any trouble, really.
No matter how many stories I went through, the fact was I had no way of contacting him. He must not have be able to find us, either, or he else he would have come to get us already. Wouldn't he?
Sometimes I dreamt I grew feathers all over and I would stand up, spread my wings, and take off to the sky. I imagined myself a white swan, the most elegant bird I'd seen in books, flying over the breakers that crashed on the shore near the house, soaring over the brown peaks of the Farralone Islands, and out over the calm, deep waters of the ocean. In my fantasy, the wind was never against me, the sky was always blue, and the steam off the sparkling water caused thermals that lifted me higher and higher toward the warmth of the sun.
After months of dreaming, the weather changed and we went into the fog of winter. The top of the tool shed became cold and drippy. I gave up the idea that my father would come and take us away. I would never become a swan, either. Eventually, I was forced to admit the truth: My father wasn't coming for us. Jimmy and I were on our own.
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