Writer in the Forest

Chapter 3

We only lived three years in the knotty pine house with the pond, the trails, and the creek. We lost everything to beer and whiskey—our home, the logging company, our way of life, and for some of us, each other. Three-fourths of the family left my father in the middle of the night: one desperate housewife with two suitcases and two kids. Without much ado, my mother left her beloved home and her prized spinet piano, and Billy and I left our toys, our playmates, his Mallard ducks and my cat Twinkle Tinker— who Dad “donated as a mascot” to the Marines at their camp in Seabeck.

Me and Twinkle Tinker

In a moment of sweet revenge, Mom told me he took Twinkle for a ride and dropped her off in the middle of nowhere to fend for herself.

I was eight years old when we ran away. We holed up in the old brick Enetai Inn on the Bremerton waterfront. Suited men, their hats tipped and their shoes shined like black glass, were reading newspapers in the lobby when we dragged ourselves in that night.  The shiny floor screamed, Shoes off, let the slide begin! But eight year-old me just shuffled across the skate rink and settled into our second floor room.

This was our new home? Only for a few days, Mom said, explaining the Salvation Army would pay for our room and food at a diner we’d been to in happier times.

Been to with Dad, I remembered, as I twisted the red vinyl stool from side to side. Squeeeak—-squeeeak. I ordered a tiny one-serving box of Frosted Flakes (squeeeak) and pushed off the other way to look at the empty stools (squeeeak) where Dad and I sat on the day he explained to me what a blue plate special was.

“You should always order that,” he’d said, “and stop that squeaking.”  I squeaked once more for good measure. But I don’t like it. Dad had a solution. “Pour all the pepper you want on it, and it will taste good.” He went on to tell me that during The War pepper was really made from black paper because the United States couldn’t afford to waste its money on real pepper, which grew on trees in foreign countries. I checked out plates all the way down the counter, and there was not a blue one among them and somehow I knew there never had been.

Dad’s empty stool came back into focus. Breakfast was over and we walked back to the inn. We’d left the family Studebaker behind with our lives—a bad choice because it would be a repeat scene over the next year that we’d have to walk to the doctor when we were sick, drag groceries home no matter how heavy they were, and it would take forever for Mom to get home from her new job at the dime store because she had to rely on a bus schedule that had nothing to do with dinner.

Who was going to live in our house with Dad? I cried for three days, stopping when we packed our bags and moved again.

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Our next home was a $40 a month furnished apartment. My mother fretted for slipcovers and I worried about my cat and what would happen to my Cindy dolls. Somehow I had saved Cynthia, my bride doll.

Me and Cynthia

There was nothing to do with no toys, no yard, and no friends. I had to sleep with Mom in a Murphy bed. In those first weeks we sometimes stayed up all night, peeking out of the dusty Venetian blinds to watch Dad drive slowly back and forth, his hunting rifle on the front seat and something on his mind eight year-old me didn’t comprehend. I was not allowed to go with my Dad after the divorce, but once, on a gray day a few months after we’d left him, he trailed behind me in the old green Studebaker as I walked home from school. My mother never knew I got in the car that day.

After I settled on the torn seat with my arms full of books, I looked at Dad, then straight ahead as I picked my moment to tell him, in all earnest, that I wasn’t supposed to get in the car with him because he wasn’t my Dad anymore. I saw grief tear through my father as he stopped the car, his hands gripping the steering wheel and all of his attention, all of his being, focused on his little girl.

“I will always be your Dad,” he said with a voice I can still hear in my head, all ragged and choked with emotion. What does divorce mean, then? I stared at the torn floor mat. A paper bag protruded from under his seat; ashes spilled out the cuff of his unwashed pants, but alcoholic, gray and ruined, he was still my Dad. When I remember that moment, I wish that in spite of everything I could go back and not say the words that broke his heart.