I put my dirty money in my flowered jewelry box with the plastic ballerina, who twirled in front of a diamond-shaped mirror and collapsed flat when I closed the lid.
The extra money helped Mom relax about the future. She wouldn’t go without as long as he didn’t trade in that pickup.
In the beginning of that summer a tornado came through around five o’clock in the morning, waking everyone up and sending us hurrying to the basement. On the way down, I stopped in the hallway and called Granda. It took her a while to get to the phone because I was waking her out of a deep sleep and her bad hip always slowed her down.
“This had better be good,” she said when she picked up the phone, breathing hard.
“Granda, there’s a tornado warning. You need to get over here and get in the basement,” I urged.
“Honey, there’s not a tornado strong enough to blow my fat ass out of this trailer. Don’t worry about your granda.”
“Please come over,” I pleaded.
“You get yourself in the basement. I’ll be just fine. Now go on, honey, I don’t want you talking on the phone when there’s lightning around. It could come through the phone and kill both of us.” I reluctantly hung up, grabbed Buddy by the collar, and headed to the basement.
The storm blew in quickly and was so violent that all eight of the Whitmores (who had no basement of their own) came running over in their pajamas to join us in our basement. If it was too dangerous for Dad to grab his movie camera and speed away, it was the real deal. The entire town could blow away.
I sat on the filthy cement floor in my nightgown, with Buddy situated between my knees. I held on to her brown leather collar with both hands. Our neighbor’s dog, Buttons, ran away during a storm and was never seen again. I imagined that crazy-eyed black-and white mutt tumbling and swirling around inside a giant black tornado and landing somewhere in Pennsylvania.
The idea of Buddy being lost and wandering the countryside looking for us was the saddest, most heart-wrenching scenario I could imagine. I held on tight.
The worst of the storm blew through with a sudden dip in temperature, and the pressure dropped so fast, my ears popped. Sheets of rain pelted the windows, and hail pinged off the roof and the top of our car. I was so keyed up, I had diarrhea, but I couldn’t leave the basement to go to the toilet.
Dad was running up and down the basement stairs, reporting the blow-by-blow with a transistor radio pressed against his ear. First he was standing at the top of the stairs looking out the back door.
Then he hurried back down and said, “There’s a tornado southwest of Elk Grove. A house was hit.” He raced back up.
Soon he’d holler back down, “They think it’s heading this way.”
I wished he’d shut the hell up. His commentary was making a tense situation a hundred times worse. I was petrified, worried, and freezing all at the same time. I hugged Buddy and quietly sang the prayer from church:
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Amen.
I didn’t want to meet the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost that day, so I praised them and hoped for a reprieve.
When the lights went out, my terror level shot up and I braced for the big hit. I pictured the wooden ceiling above us splintering into tiny toothpicks and all of us being sucked up into the furious tornado that Dad had reported was just outside of Galesburg. Mom turned on the one flashlight we had and threw blankets over our heads. Buddy was sweating from the end of her tongue, saliva dripping onto my leg.
The wind became stronger, and suddenly we felt a thud that bounced me about three inches off the floor. My heart was racing and Buddy was whining and struggling to get away. I held her tighter.
“Something fell,” Martha said.
“Something’s definitely down,” Dad confirmed, bolting back up the basement steps.
I looked up and saw the house still over our heads, so that was good.
“Two houses destroyed in Elk Grove,” Dad yelled down the stairs. “But they’re not saying anything about what happened here.” We weren’t going to see the sun come up, I was sure of it. We’d be dead, buried under debris that would include our shitty oven that never worked and all of Mom’s fancy furniture.
Five or ten minutes later the wind died down and, miraculously, the rain stopped.
“Looks like it’s headed over to Harrisburg,” Dad reported, setting down the radio. All I knew about Harrisburg was that I’d seen an enormous billboard that read JESUS IS LORD OVER HARRISBURG right outside of town. If that were true, they’d probably be okay.
We climbed up the basement stairs. Buddy was jumpy but had settled down enough that I could let go of her.
Dad ran outside to see what had fallen. I was dreading the moment when I’d discover what the wind had destroyed.
The sun was just coming up and the clouds were creating a spectacular sunrise, complete with thick rays of light shooting up in the east. Through the sunrise, I saw the back of the storm, black angry clouds swirling toward Harrisburg.
The backyard was littered with leaves and branches. But when we walked around to the side of the house, we saw our maple tree, one hundred feet tall and fifteen feet around, lying on its side. It gave me gooseflesh to see its heavy, wet branches crunched onto the highway and its scraggly long roots sticking seven feet up in the air. Nothing that big should be on its side.
The Whitmores and the Griswolds were looking at the damage and saying, “You were lucky, Glen. If that tree had fallen the other way, it would have crushed the house.”
That caught my attention. Smashed to smithereens was not the way I wanted to go. I loved trees, but I looked at the remaining two maples with absolute dread.
That night I heard Dad say, “I’m gonna take those other two trees down tomorrow while we have the city out there hauling away all those branches.”
“You aren’t touching those trees. We’ll have no shade at all,” Mom said.
“Would you rather have them come down on the house?” he asked.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Mom answered.
“You’ll think ‘dramatic’ when they do come down and we’re hauling dead kids outta here,” he said.
“You aren’t touching those trees,” Mom said. I heard a door slam.
I didn’t like my father, but I trusted him when it came to disasters. After all, he was an expert.
The first night after the tree fell, I stayed up as long as I could, straining to hear creaking that would indicate the trees were falling, giving me time to get the girls up and out of the house. From that night on I imagined those two trees hovering like death’s hand, ready to swoop us up in the night; scoop us up while we were sleeping, only to be deposited on Max Cooper’s embalming table.
In the fall I was turning eleven and starting sixth grade and, most important, JoAnn, Becky, and I were going to get our own rooms. Dad hired a contractor, Mr. Thorton, to turn the attic into three bedrooms.
It was just in time because I had finally, and for no reason I could explain, quit wetting the bed. One morning I woke up dry and was never wet again. I’d pictured that day arriving with a marching band or an expensive gift from Sears, but it snuck in like any other day. I was finally liberated from the moldy pee bed.
Mr. Thorton worked up there all summer, and when he was done, I was surprised to see the ceilings were triangular-shaped, just like the roof.
In an uncharacteristic move, Mom allowed each of us to pick out furniture, colors, and carpets for our own rooms.
JoAnn chose black walls and psychedelic black-and-white swirly curtains. The curtains and her door were always closed. Becky chose light yellow with Mom’s help and guidance. I went against Mom’s advice, ordering pink shag carpet and outrageous wallpaper covered in bright orange and pink flowers. I also wanted my new twin bed built into the wall.
The ceilings were so low that building a bed into the wall was a mistake, but we did it anyway. If I woke suddenly—and I often did—I banged my forehead when I sat up.
All three of us girls spent hours in the luxury and privacy of our own rooms. I could finally have friends stay overnight.
Toward the end of that summer, Mom wanted to go on a vacation. I didn’t know why she was pushing it, since Dad had just paid for the new upstairs. Besides, he hated vacations, which is why we didn’t take them. According to Dad, vacations were silly: a waste of time, and too expensive.
JoAnn had left on a European trip with her beloved French teacher, Mrs. Cleary, and her French class to have a wonderfully cultured time. She wouldn’t be joining us.
Jamie would stay home so he wouldn’t miss track practice. Mom told him to watch the house, but I doubted there’d be much watching between the smoking and drinking he had begun enjoying.
On Saturday, Dad, Mom, Becky, and I took off around seven in the morning in our old green station wagon and made it to a Holiday Inn near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that night. Our vacation would be driving Mom all around the Smoky Mountains.
Mom was passionate about the Smokies. She’d spent years making the annual trek to Tennessee with Martha Whitmore, where they crept along mountain back roads oohing and aahing at the same breathtaking yet oddly monotonous scenery.
Mom was excited and wanted to ride along with her head sticking out the passenger window and her hair blowing—sniffing in the mountain air and admiring the rolling, forested panorama. It was beautiful. But I was eleven and I didn’t care about riding up and down curvy roads searching for waterfalls. I was carsick most of the time, which made the trip excruciating. From their blank looks, it seemed Dad and Becky didn’t care about mountains either, but there we were, zooming along Highway 641 straight through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Mom was mad because Dad was driving like a maniac. When she stuck her head out the passenger window to admire a favorite mountain pass, there was so much wind from the speed of the car, she couldn’t even open her eyes. She looked like Buddy hanging out the window on her way to Dr. Dobbs’s office for her shots.
Mom turned to Dad, her hair sticking up on one side. “I don’t suppose you could slow down.”
“Why?” he asked.
“So I can see the mountains.” Her teeth were clenched. Dad was driving between sixty and seventy miles an hour, while the speed limit was posted at forty. He smiled.
“I can see fine,” he said, not slowing down. Tears rolled down Mom’s cheeks.
I couldn’t remember ever seeing Mom cry or Dad so happy.
Becky and I were in the backseat bored out of our minds and trying not to piss anyone off. If we had to pee or eat, we still wouldn’t say anything. We wished we were invisible. Only we weren’t—we were trapped in the car between the hatred my parents felt for each other, and probably for us. We couldn’t do anything but ride it out.
Problem was, it was hard to ride it out when your ride just turned off the highway and directly into oncoming traffic.
In the next instant a small Honda plowed into my door, throwing all of us to the right and showering us with glass. The impact was so loud, I couldn’t hear anything afterward.
Dad jumped out and ran to the lady in the Honda, not bothering to look back to see if Becky and I were okay. I was right when I decided in fourth grade that Dad wouldn’t love me at my death scene. It was actually worse: He wouldn’t even notice.
Mom leaned over the front seat, grabbing us to check for injuries. Luckily, Becky had been reading Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder and had had the book in front of her face. The glass hadn’t cut her, but there were tiny bits of it covering her hair. Oddly enough, she sparkled.
At the exact moment of impact, I had leaned forward to tell Mom I’d seen a Holiday Inn sign, so I wasn’t injured by my door, which was now a jagged V crunched into the spot where I’d been sitting. I’d missed being killed by inches, but Dad was still busy checking on the other driver.
We looked outside and saw him squatting beside the open door of the smashed Honda, talking to the attractive young redhead sitting dazed in the driver’s seat, the front of her car still fused with my door. She had a large purplish bump on her forehead, but I didn’t see any blood. When we climbed out of the station wagon, we saw that the entire right side of it was demolished and the windows on my side were blown out.
The next morning Dad insisted we drive the car back to Ohio.
We looked at him in disbelief, but when he climbed into the driver’s seat, we climbed in too, wiping broken glass off the seats with Becky’s yellow sweatshirt and laying a beach towel on the glass-strewn floor. Dad wanted to get home to cook steaks for the Rotary Club the next night. Mom’s dream vacation, and I could have predicted this, was a catastrophe.
We clanked and clattered along at considerably less speed. Mom finally saw her beloved mountains, and there wasn’t any glass to obscure her view. The wind blew our hair, and my door was shoved in so far that I was forced to sit right next to Becky, which pissed her off because every once in a while I’d accidentally touch her with my arm or leg. “Don’t touch me,” she’d growl.
We assumed the worst had already happened, and I was relieved in some weird way that the accident had actually occurred. It was a physical manifestation of what had already been going on inside the car. The outside now matched the inside—damaged beyond repair.
We drove without stopping until dusk. Dad picked a different route to get home, one that avoided the highway so we wouldn’t be pulled over for driving an unsafe vehicle. Problem was, he didn’t know where we were. He’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and our crippled car was suddenly headed straight up a steep mountain road.
Becky broke the silence. “Where are we going?”
“A shortcut,” Dad said with a grin.
Our back wheels were spinning, trying to get traction on the gravel, so Dad gunned it and we fishtailed up that road. As we swerved to and fro, I could hear pieces of shattered glass rolling back and forth in the frame of my smashed door.
Becky and I clutched the bottom of our seat. It was getting dark and we were starving, but Dad kept flooring the car up that twisty dirt road. Any dumb-ass could see there wasn’t anything up there, but we didn’t say a word, especially when all it would have taken to shut us up for good was a turn of the steering wheel.
It was getting even darker on that mountain, where there were no streetlights or stores, but I could still make out the crappiest houses I’d ever seen in my life. I’d never seen such poverty—shacks with faded laundry strewn out in all directions, and startled faces coming to peer out of cracked windows that were covered in thick dust from the gravel road, just to see who was crazy enough to be driving up there. These houses scared me as much as Dad’s driving. He was humming Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” even though we were still in Tennessee.
More than halfway up, Dad happily announced, “We’re almost out of gas. We’ll have to coast down.”
This sent me into an inappropriate laughing fit. I wasn’t allowed to get angry, and I couldn’t cry, so I laughed—a lot. Becky wanted to murder me and kept hissing, “Shut up,” but I couldn’t.
Minutes later, when we came to the top of the mountain, Dad killed the motor, threw the car in neutral, and let us roll down the other side.
He refused to hit the brakes as we accelerated around corners so steep that when I looked out my glassless window, I was peering straight down into an abyss. The steeper the road, the faster we went.
I stopped laughing.
Later, the three of us agreed that Dad had probably wanted us dead that night—he’d had the perfect opportunity—and yet, we made it down the mountain. I’d never hated anyone more than I hated Dad, and I swore I would scare him to death someday. I would scare him so badly, he would never recover.
Part III
It’s My Turn
C
hapter Twelve
Dad had pulled some horrendous stunts, but when he fucked with Mom’s love of the Great Smoky Mountains, he’d gone too far.
After rattling home in that demolished station wagon without so much as a stroll through Cades Cove to show for it, Mom plotted her escape.
She secretly decided to establish a career for herself and finally divorce the bastard.
When she was twenty, Mom skipped college to marry Dad. She later told us kids, “I would have died if I hadn’t married Glen Peterson,” which made her even more confusing to me. But now her decision to give up college left her with a marriage in shambles and no road out.
Mom’s father had begged her to wait on marriage and think of her education first. But Grandpa Riley, as I’d known him, didn’t hold much sway, since he’d abandoned Granda, Mom, and Dale for his young secretary some twenty-six years earlier.
Mom married Dad.
Grandpa Riley offered to pay for college if she ever wanted to go, and now, at thirty-eight years old, she was taking him up on it.
When Dad found out Mom was going back to school, he screeched, “By God, I’m not paying for it,” thinking that would be the end of it. He knew she didn’t have money of her own.
“My dad’s paying for it,” she said. “It won’t cost you a dime.”
“I doubt that,” he said, trying to think of another roadblock to throw in front of her.
“I don’t care what you think; I’m going.”
“The hell you are,” Dad said. I was creeping down from upstairs in case Mom needed help. It sounded like Dad wasn’t going to get his way, and that’s when he usually started throwing things. I sat on the bottom step.
“Our entire marriage, you’ve done exactly what you wanted to do,” Mom told him. “Now it’s my turn, and you can’t stop me.”
Right on cue, Dad ripped the closet door off its hinges, and threw it at their cherry wood bedroom set, leaving a permanent scar sliced across the wood.
Mom walked down the hall, snatched her keys off the counter, and said to Dad, “Tear the whole place down. You don’t hold any power over me. Not anymore.”
Driving With Dead People Page 10