Riding Standing Up

by Sparrow Spaulding

  On top of being perfect Kristen was also beautiful, with long, bleach-blonde hair, and a darker complexion that reminded me of Malibu Barbie. Her teeth were so white I think they glowed in the dark. She smiled a lot so I always got to admire them. Mine were still growing in and had a giant space in between them but hers didn’t. She had the teeth of a twenty-five-year-old Crest model.

  Kristen had a boyfriend named Justin Shaw. He had the same bleach blond hair and darker complexion. They easily could have passed for brother and sister. Justin also had little alligators on his shirts. He never talked to me except to say, “Here comes gorilla arms” when I approached the playground at recess. There was no hiding my Italian heritage with those arms. Funny I had never really noticed how hairy they were until Justin pointed them out to myself and everyone in the fifth grade. I was elated when he moved away later that year. Not only did the teasing stop but it was kind of nice to see everyone’s favorite couple broken up.

  To be fair Mom didn’t have a lot of time to tend to three unruly children. She and Frank had separated, and he moved out of the house. She said his drinking just got to be too much, and he was no longer able to work. At first I was bummed because we had tried so hard to get him to stop. All those trips to the VA hospital where he agreed to go for treatment were in vain. Mom always drove with Frank in the front and us kids in the backseat.

  “Bye Daddy! Please stop drinking!” we yelled out of the car window as he shuffled into the hospital carrying a crumpled paper bag I assumed had a change of clothes in it. This happened countless times and each time we were convinced it would be the last. Unfortunately he only stayed long enough to dry out and would show up back at the house after a few days, like an unwanted dog that finds its way home after being dropped off at a farm miles away. Mom always seemed surprised, but then he would tell her he hitch-hiked back because he didn’t want to put her out. The reality was he didn’t want her to fight him about leaving. He stayed sober a total of three days or so before he was back to beer for breakfast.

  Frank wasn’t the type of person who was going to sit in a circle and tell strangers his problems. What would he say? That he saw kids get blown to bits in Vietnam? That his platoon was annihilated, he saw his good friends get their faces blown off, and that he was walking around with shrapnel in his chest? It wasn’t his style. Mom told me that he was so disgusted with the war he threw his medals in the trash and she had to dig them out. Two bronze stars and a purple heart. He said they meant nothing to him and he wanted no vestige of his time there. But he couldn’t forget, at least not without a beer in each boot. So she finally had to ask him to leave.

  As sad as it sounds things weren’t that much different after Frank left. He had become fairly unreliable due to his drinking, so we saw him more as a fixture than a dad. He was passing out drunk more and more, and we couldn’t wake him up. He would lie on the couch and you could scream in his ear and punch him hard yet nothing worked. He was out. Several times I thought he was dead because his face was gray and it seemed like he wasn’t breathing. But in time I quit worrying and graduated to drawing on his face with a Sharpie, giving him makeovers with Mom’s Mary Kay and once I opened his eyelid and studied the human eyeball for a good twenty minutes. I discovered eyes are very spongy and slimy.

  There was no fighting or bitterness when he left, just goodbyes. He had a few tears as he hugged each of us. When it was my turn he hugged me tight and I nestled my face in his long hair. He smelled like beer and cigarettes. I was sad for a moment but as soon as he left I convinced myself it was for the best. I decided I needed a dad who could pay the electric bill.

  One downside for Mom when Frank left was that it was harder for her to get Mikey and me to behave. Mikey was always getting into trouble in the neighborhood. When our neighbors went out of town he took a garden hose and stuck it in the window of their bedroom and turned on the faucet full force. When the Brown’s returned they had one flooded house on their hands. Not long after he lit a fire in an open lot across the street. Luckily the neighbors put it out before it got too out of hand. Somehow he always got away with that kind of thing.

  I never vandalized other people’s property but shortly after Frank left I decided to take up smoking. Up to this point I was so mad at Mom for smoking that I often took her cigarettes out of the pack, broke them in half, and put them back in the pack so when she went to take one out she found them all broken and unsmokable.

  “Sparrow!” she yelled. “Leave my cigarettes alone!” Then she painstakingly tried to put them back together with Scotch tape.

  One day I happened to notice Mom all stressed out go over to the kitchen table, pick up her cigarettes, and take one out of the pack. She was smoking Merits at the time and the pack was white with a yellow emblem. I had watched Mom smoke a million times before but this time was different. I noticed how Mom’s face totally relaxed after taking just one drag. She exhaled and looked so peaceful—she was even smiling a little. I wondered why I hadn’t tried this smoking thing again earlier. It sure seemed like the answer to everyone’s problems. All four of my parents smoked. (I was forced to smoke once when I was five but that was different and I was a baby back then.)

  I decided I needed to see what all the fuss was about. When Mom left the kitchen I took a cigarette out of the pack and grabbed the book of matches on the table. I slipped into the bathroom and locked the door. I gently opened the window all the way to help with the smell. I put the cigarette in my mouth just like Mom did and plucked a match out. I had watched my parents use matches lots of times so I felt like a pro. I struck the match and it lit on the first try. I brought it to the end of the cigarette and took a deep breath in just like Mom did. I even closed my eyes to try to get the same effect.

  I wasn’t prepared for what happened next. I began coughing uncontrollably and couldn’t stop. I remembered that happening the first time I smoked but I thought it was because I was only five and just not ready. At nearly ten I l felt like I should have been able to handle it. But I was wrong. Once I stopped coughing I decided to take another puff and figured out how to smoke without actually inhaling. I felt so grown up, so free. I puffed and puffed and even looked in the mirror as I was sucking in. I watched the end of the cigarette glow really brightly, then get dimmer as I stopped puffing. I even felt like a grownup flicking the ashes into the sink. I was curious to know how people knew exactly when it was time to flick the ashes. I wanted to do it just right, so I experimented.

  Mom caught on. I think she heard me coughing and I’m sure she smelled the smoke. She banged on the bathroom door. “Sparrow! What are you doing in there? Are you smoking? Come out of there right now!”

  I completely ignored her. I wasn’t afraid of her at all, plus I was in smoke heaven in that tiny little bathroom. By this point I had also started digging into Mom’s Mary Kay collection and was contemplating giving myself a makeover. Mom always had the coolest makeup, and she painted her face every day with thick, black eyeliner and gobs of mascara and almost always a nude lip. Since I was now a smoker like Mom, I thought I should also look the part. But Mom wouldn’t stop beating on the door. She killed my Merit high and I let her in after holding my cigarette under the running faucet to put it out. She tried to yell at me but I walked away. I had found a new readily accessible toy that I didn’t have to beg my real dad or Jesus for. I was happy.

  It didn’t take Mom long after Frank left to start dating. Who could blame her? With her looks I’m sure she was asked out quite a bit. She would get a babysitter on occasion and then sometimes invite her dates in for coffee when she got home. I remember two guys in particular: Ralph and another man named Frank. Ralph was an attractive artist who lived in a chalet on a nearby lake. His hair was prematurely gray and he had piercing blue eyes. Mom seemed smitten. She brought me over to his house once and he had several small plants in his loft growing under heat lamps.

  “Nice tomato plants” Mom said to Ralph, in a teasing manner.

  �
��Those are pot plants, Mom.”

  “They are not, Sparrow!” I knew they were because I recognized the smell. Dad and his second wife Samantha smoked pot regularly at night, at least when I was there visiting which was every summer and school holidays. They locked themselves in their bedroom and smoked while watching Johnny Carson. They laughed hysterically and I heard everything since my room was right next to theirs. My older stepsisters were the ones who told me what it was. Sometimes we knocked on their door if we needed something but once they were high they would never answer. We were on our own.

  Mom and Ralph didn’t last long. I’m not sure why. He did seem a little overwhelmed by the fact that Mom had three “active” children. Maybe he just couldn’t deal, especially since he didn’t have any kids of his own. She quickly moved on to her next love interest, Frank number two. He was tall with short, dark hair and a thick, untrimmed mustache. I only remember him coming over a couple of times.

  The first time Mom had him over for dinner she put us kids to bed early. There was no way I was missing out on her date, so I crept down the hall when they were in the kitchen making coffee and wedged myself between the couch and the wall. I was tiny and could easily fit if I lay with my back against the wall, like a human piece of paper. It was tight but I didn’t care. By age ten I didn’t have faith in Mom’s ability to choose a man, and if this guy was going to be the new daddy I wanted to know all about him. They made their way into the living room and were making small talk when Frank said, “Joan, I have something to tell you.”

  “Yes?” Mom replied as she sipped her coffee.

  “Joan, I have herpes.” Mom spit out her coffee and I imagined it spraying all over.

  “Oh, my. Well, thank you for telling me,” she said.

  “Uh…I haven’t had an outbreak in a really long time, but I thought you should know.”

  I had no idea what herpes was but I kind of knew what an outbreak was and I knew it was bad. Once there was an outbreak of chicken pox at school and half my class was missing for a week. What the hell is herpes? I couldn’t wait to find out. We had a few encyclopedias Mom got with some green stamps from the IGA food store but I couldn’t recall at that moment if we had H. Mom had stopped getting encyclopedias because we needed a new suitcase, so we didn’t have the entire set.

  Mom and lover boy talked for a long time. I fell fast asleep. I woke up in the middle of the night and at first was a little scared, not knowing where I was. Then I remembered I was still wedged behind the sofa. I worked my way out and tiptoed into my sister’s room. Sometimes if I woke in the middle of the night I got scared and would drag either my brother or sister down the hall to sleep in my bed with me. Rarely, I would climb in bed with one of them. They had bunk beds and shared a room that always smelled funny because our cat Marsha would leave giant, foamy loads of diarrhea under the bottom bunk. The whole ensemble was too heavy for any of us to lift once Frank had left so no one could get to the piles to clean them up. I always kept the door to my room closed because I hated the smell of poop and I didn’t want animals in there.

  The next morning Mom was in a pretty good mood, but she looked strange. She had a red ring around her mouth and the skin around her lips was dry and cracked. I asked what was wrong with her face.

  “Frank and I did some kissing last night and my lips got chapped.”

  I had seen people kiss before but I had never seen that. I even had a make out session with my sometimes boyfriend George once but I ended up punching him in the face because he tried to stick his tongue down my throat and that was the most disgusting thing I could think of other than eating worms.

  “That’s how people kiss,” he insisted.

  “Not this girl.”

  Mom looked like she had been making out with a St. Bernard all evening.

  Chapter 10

  Part of Mom and Dad’s agreement was that Mikey and I spent summers with Dad. I dreaded going to Dad’s because for one thing it was boring. He lived in a new place every year so it was nearly impossible to make friends. And he lived in the Deep South, which meant the summers were sweltering. My little body was used to the much colder New England climate so playing outside in Alabama heat was unbearable.

  Dad’s new wife Samantha was nice enough but she was a true southern belle who kept a perfect house and who wanted us to be perfect at all times. Sometimes she worked but mostly she stayed at home and was in charge of us during the day. She said it was unacceptable to be in the house all day so she would kick us outside and lock the door. We could either walk to the local pool, which we did a lot, or we could play in the yard, which really meant find some shade and count the hours.

  Sometimes she let me stay inside if I played the piano, which I learned to love. Samantha and Dad had a piano because her two daughters took lessons. Carla and Pamela were three and five years older than me, respectively. Despite the lessons neither girl loved playing. I asked for lessons too but Dad said he wasn’t going to waste the money since I was only there for the summer. Undeterred I studied their books, asked them certain questions that puzzled me such as what 2/4 was or what pp meant, and just taught myself. I learned a skill and I kept myself from melting in the Alabama heat—a win-win.

  My stepsisters were nice for the most part, except that they were the reason I smoked cigarettes for the first time. I coughed and hacked forever and thought I was going to die and then it got even worse because somehow Dad found out and put cigarettes on my plate for dinner that night and told me if I wanted to smoke I had to eat them too. I cried, devastated, and luckily he was just making a point so I didn’t have to eat them after all. But it was enough to scare me away from smoking again, at least for a few more years.

  The other reason I dreaded going to Dad’s was because he missed his true calling as a surgeon. If you had any kind of ailment Dad wanted to operate on you with his pocket knife. Dad wasn’t the kind to hug or console you if you had gotten hurt—he looked for ways to cut you open. The first time I found out about Dad’s missed calling was when I showed him a wart on my thumb. It was right on the cuticle and no surprise I had gotten one because Charlie McLaughlin had a giant one on his index finger and rubbed it on my thumb one day in class, telling me that I would now have one too. He was right.

  I innocently showed my wart to Dad because I needed it gone. I thought perhaps he would take me to the local pharmacy to get some medicine called Compound W. I had seen several commercials about that stuff and it looked like it worked miracles on peoples’ unsightly finger fungus. Dad had other ideas. “Hold still,” he murmured as he held my thumb with one hand and eased his pocket knife out of his pants with the other. Before I could blink he had gouged my little thumb with the blade and sliced the wart clean off. There was a huge hole left and blood gushed out of it. “Go get a paper towel,” Dad said as he turned to go back to the television, wiping his knife on his pants before closing it up and putting it back in his pocket. I stood there, stunned. I didn’t even have time to whimper, let alone cry out. I went and grabbed the paper towel and held it on my thumb for a long time. It kept bleeding and when I asked for a Band-Aid Dad’s response was, “You’re fine.” He wasn’t about to get out of his Barcalounger again for something so silly.

  Dad performed another outpatient surgery on me one time when I had a stye on my eyelid. It was swollen and painful and I had no plans of calling any attention to it; however, Dad couldn’t help but notice it.

  “Come here, let me look at that,” he ordered one night after dinner. I was reticent but not quite so fearful this time. After all, I was pretty sure Dad wasn’t going to gouge my eye out with his pocket knife so I was relatively safe, I thought.

  “Stay here,” he told me as he disappeared into the living room. I had no idea what Dad was doing but my heart raced when I saw what he had in his hands when he returned—a gargantuan set of tweezers. Dad kept a grooming kit in the end-table drawer next to his favorite chair so he could pick his feet while he was watching golf or th
e races on TV. Dad was prone to ingrown toenails and he insisted that he needed to dig them out regularly instead of spending money to have the doctor take care of it. I had seen Dad go to town digging trenches on the sides of his big toes with those tweezers. What in the world was he going to do to me?

  “Hold still,” Dad said as he tilted my head back and studied my eye. “I know how to handle this. Don’t move.” Dad held my eye open with his thumb and index finger and grabbed more than a few of my eyelashes with the tweezers. This time I couldn’t have blinked if I wanted to before he yanked with the brute force of a determined Viking. Once again I was too shocked to utter a sound; however I can assure you that experience hurt a thousand times more than the attack on my wart. This time it was my eyelid that was gushing blood and I didn’t quite know what to do about it, but I instinctively forwent the paper towel and booked it to the bathroom where I locked myself in and grabbed a washcloth, wetting it before I held it up to my eye. I told myself the man was nuts and I must never let him come at me with metal appliances ever again.

  I did not fit in with my southern family. They told me nonstop that I talked funny and called me Yankee on a daily basis, as if being a New Englander was a sin. They hated how I said soda instead of coke and they had to ask what sneakers were because they had only ever heard them referred to as tennis shoes. I despised fried okra and yearned for my Devil Dogs and cream cheese and jelly sandwiches. My stepmother Samantha cooked a traditional southern meal every night. Sometimes it was good. I loved her barbecued chicken, lima beans and mashed potatoes. I learned to appreciate her black eyed peas and corn casserole. I just couldn’t deal with the salmon croquettes. Salmon in a can is perhaps the worst idea of the twentieth century. She mashed the salmon into patties with bread crumbs and huge chunks of onion and fried them up. They stank up the house for days on end and the smell made my stomach turn.