Writer in the Forest

Chapter 5
I managed to keep my stomach on the bumpy road to the Lower Lena Lake trailhead. I’m in a group today, but walking alone except for the developmentally disabled boy who keeps going off the path and then jumps out to scare me. I pondered whether I’d be able to make him understand it wreaks havoc with the vegetation and the runoff when you make shortcuts. Stay on the stupid path. I dragged on my stocking cap and wondered if we’d get fogged out.

My thoughts on this misty day keep wandering back to about a year after my parent’s divorce when my mother brought home a Navy man named Bob. What is worth remembering about this time in our life? Their courtship consisted of a ride to Hood Canal in his ’58 Cadillac and nightly drinks at the Officer’s Club. He was lanky and balding and looked at me with a leer. On Saturdays while she worked, she’d let Bob sleep on the sofa while I was home alone so he wouldn’t have to nap on the ship.

Within weeks they were married in a Navy chapel, a ceremony that did not include Billy and me. Bob went home on his ship, and the three of us set out on a Trailways bus to meet Bob in Long Beach, California. It was 1961. My mother was moving us into a house she’d never seen with a man she hardly knew because, true to her nature, she was in love with love and full of faith.

Bob’s house was a small, peeling ramshackle affair packed full of his and his deceased wife’s personal possessions.

Me and old Bob

I rummaged through cupboards and drawers, finding sheet music, a primitive hair dryer, and a giant Chinese-style jewelry box full of the woman’s jewelry.

A run-down, nearly empty convenience store stood a block away. “Here’s a note. Go buy me some cigarettes.” I’d take off down the alley dodging the pack of dogs that belonged to the gypsies who camped on mattresses on the sides of the alleyway.

“C’mon Katie.” I dragged my best friend down the alley. Her father was in the diamond business and her mother was a socialite. They lived on the 15^th floor of a beachfront hotel where Katie had her own suite, her own telephone, and a maid. On a big adventure she was, seeing how the other half lived. The gypsies paid no attention to me on my regular trips to the store, but stood along the alley surveying Katie. What were they looking at? The following week, the fifth grade class performed a square dance in the auditorium at the annual school program. Katie’s mom approached us and made it clear Katie would not be allowed at our poor white trash house again.

Meanwhile, there was no honeymoon period for Bob and Mom. Where was he all the time? They took the fights into the backyard under the windows of the apartment house next door. He’d swing at her and she’d swipe at him with the same broom she used to fight the cockroaches.

Shut up. Somehow my thoughts became words Bob could hear. I clutched the bathroom doorknob and felt the sting of the razor strap on my back while I considered going to the pastor of the Lutheran church Bob belonged to and asking for help, but who would believe me? Once, I rode my bike to the church to say, “My mom’s not acting like herself and her husband is a creep,” but it was Bob’s church afterall. No one would believe me. Luckily, Bob stayed on the ship most of the time or was out to sea. We were hungry again and Mom went to the Chaplain for help.

I parked myself against a big rock and leaned on my walking stick for a moment to give my back a rest. I’ll write this in my journal and then I’ll  blow my memories into a balloon, which will float up so high it will pop. The memory of Bob will burst out and blow away to the four corners, anywhere but on me.This last part of the hike was a lot of work. I hung in there and the giant rock on the edge of the lake came into view. A few hikers from my group were perched on the rock, eating and gazing at the quiet scene. The only person running around was the kid who miraculously found the lake by going off on an animal path. All roads lead to Rome, I guess.  Could you really get lost in the Olympics, or would you just end up on another path – not the one you chose but a good one all the same?

As he yelled and threw rocks at the birds, I got a flash of myself in those California days when Mom walked me to the old Carnegie Library every week on her day off.

“Stop throwing rocks at the pigeons,” Mom said.

“I’m not going to hurt them, Mom; I just like to watch them fly up.”  I skipped to the children’s library in the center of the park, where make-believe really came true and the best librarian in the world always greeted me like a fairy godchild. I loved the library lady with the gold-toothed smile and chopsticks poking out of her coiled up hair. She remembered my name and aimed her golden grin at me as if she’d been waiting all week, just for me.

One day on my way home from school I discovered a beautiful Catholic church two blocks from our house. I started going in nearly every day. It was quiet and safe, and everything was just as it seemed. The Jesus and angel statues and the other visitors were quiet, the way I liked it. It was ok if I lit candles. I’d have to head for home before 5 pm and watch the proceedings without comment or if Bob were there and I mouthed off, he’d get the razor strap out. I took my time getting home, skirting lizards and garden snakes on the hot sidewalk. But worse than that, every morning when I made my bed I had to shake cockroaches out from my blankets.

“Billy, can you hear the roaches?” I whispered to my brother in the dark. When it cooled down at night, you could hear the cockroaches tick-tick-ticking their way en mass up the window, trying to get in where it was warm. And in they marched, through cracks in the window screens and into the house where they scurried across the hardwood floors and into the kitchen cupboards. Billy ignored me. I pulled the covers up and tucked them around my chin to keep the bugs out.

But in the morning, what I got was roaches in my blankets and ants all over my birthday cake.

Soon, Mom would be between husbands again. Lack of spousal support, cheating, and a rumor of Bob liking other sailors was too much for my Mom. One night she pulled me onto her bed where she talked to me like a grownup, telling me Billy and I gave her life worth. Many years later my childhood memories of Mom, her fierce love, and how she depended on me helped me hold on tight as she began to float away, out of my reach.

I propped my pack behind me and tried to get comfortable on the enormous cold rock. I pressed my hand against my back and shifted around, wondering if anyone else on the rock felt the storm coming. Of course they did.  Financial problems, divorces, sick relatives, job problems. That’s why we’re here. I pulled out my journal and wrote. When the tension in my back eased, the tears that were just under the surface dried up, unable to fall in the face of such serenity. The fog floated higher and became a cloud, and the fresh air calmed my brain. I closed my eyes and floated away until it was time to go.

I’d emerged from the fog to find the lake, quiet and unspoiled as the day it was discovered. Visited by how many generations of hikers with their solitary thoughts. And I felt hugely satisfied that despite the fog I’d unearthed some ordinary moments worth keeping, such as they were.

As I entered the path I turned for a last look, wondering if I’d come this way again. How many more years will I be taking care of my mother? How bad will it get? So I said goodbye to Lena just in case, and thought the view looking back was as beautiful as always and all the pain was worth it.

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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.

~~~~~~

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.

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