by Dean Kuipers
I couldn’t be around when Mom and Dad were fighting, but I didn’t think the tensions in our apartment were worse than anyone else’s. We were living with several hundred young couples, lots of them with kids, and people were fighting like hell everywhere. They were sneaking around like crazy, too. We lived there from 1970 to 1972, from when I was six to when I was eight, and the gang of kids I ran with heard everything. We might not have known exactly what was going on, but the stakes were high for us—we were the kids—so we’d relate the fights to one another like they were TV shows. During the summers, people would put big fans in the windows and you’d hear people hissing and fighting and slapping, but in distorted, hacked-up voices that came through the fan. My friend Tracy and I had a whole routine worked out made of dialogue we heard through other people’s windows. It didn’t matter that we didn’t know what half the words meant; we’d sit on the stairs outside and say them back and forth to each other:
“Oh, what? You’re with that slut now?” I’d start.
“Shut up, bitch,” Tracy said.
“Get away from me. I’ll kick that dick and then see how you do.”
That was our favorite: “I’ll kick that dick.” Down in the thickets along Stadium Drive we’d found that we could lift the manhole cover off a culvert and see Arcadia Creek gushing underground there, and we’d get down in there and if anyone threatened to put the manhole cover back on over our heads we’d bark out: “I’ll kick that dick!” Our friend Bobby was younger and he had a tic that made him repeat everything you said under his breath, and he’d follow along behind us, whispering, “I’ll kick that dick. I’ll kick that dick.”
As far as I knew, all the apartments in the complex were identical inside, and all the families in them were pretty much identical, too, other than skin color or the stuff they had on the walls. I could walk into any apartment in the complex—they were rarely locked—and I knew exactly which cupboard the water glasses would be in or where they’d keep a cookie jar or toilet paper. Everybody kept their cheap silverware in exactly the same drawer and everybody was poor and everyone had Tang and bologna and white bread. One time I was going to visit Tracy and I absentmindedly walked into the wrong apartment and a man in a white tank top was fighting with a lady just wearing her bra and a slip, and they were in each other’s faces. The man was seated at the table with food in front of him, but she was standing over him, and he was pointing at her with his butter knife. He looked at me and said, “Who the hell are you? Get the fuck out!” The lady barked, “He’s just a kid!” as I backed out the door.
We were just kids. But we were paying attention.
Joe lived in a bassinette in Mom and Dad’s room for a while and then moved into the second bedroom with me and Brett. Joe was a beautiful, towheaded kid, with blonde curls like a cherub from an old painting, and moms would stop Nancy to remark on how gorgeous he was. It was a little crowded in our room, with bunk beds and a crib, and I stayed outside as much as I could.
Dad wasn’t around on the weekends to take us to the good places on the map, but Nancy tried to do it. We had friends one building over named Dave and Joy Meagher, and they had kids our ages; Dave was a skinny vet with sideburns and a mustache who had a chopped Harley and rode with some kind of motorcycle club. He was going to college on the GI Bill, exactly like Dad. One time after Dave had evidently graduated and Mom and Dad were really hating each other, Dave and Joy invited Mom to take us kids to their place in Milford, over near Pontiac. Dad wasn’t invited, or couldn’t go. I was probably eight. They had a house and a trailer and a big pond for swimming. We stayed in the trailer, and in the evening, some of Dave and Joy’s other friends showed up. I was standing out on the dock with Dave, and one of his buddies came out there and took off his prosthetic leg and dove into the shallow water. And there was his leg, lying on the dock. I knew that some men lost their legs in Vietnam, but I thought we had left that in Seattle. I didn’t realize that this loss had crept in everywhere, had stolen from homes right there in our part of Michigan. Dave and my dad had two good legs, and I was so glad. But I thought some other loss or madness had found my dad. No house was strong enough to keep it out.
I would ride the old Cheater Slick a mile up over Howard Street Hill, pedaling furiously past the State Hospital, and down to the YMCA on Maple Street. I took judo classes there and skipped swimming by hiding in the snack room and then taught myself to swim during the free swim that followed. I was mostly there on my own. The Y was a mix of every type of people, which is probably that organization’s greatest legacy—women, men, blacks, Latinos, Jews, Asian kids, people in wheelchairs, more guys with fake legs, everybody was there. To me, that was the world.
Race mattered, though, and there was unease in married housing. I don’t recall the circumstances, but one day a group of black boys threw me down and took off with my bike. Tall concrete walls separated upper and lower terraces, and they chucked the bike over a wall and then smashed it with big rocks, knocking the spokes out, bending the rims and the sprocket.
I ran back to the apartment and reported this to Mom through wailing and tears, and she marched right over there and yelled at those kids to get away from the bike and told me, “Go get it. It’s your bike.” I walked through them and picked it up, and she and I pushed it back to the apartment together.
The kids who had wrecked the bike came right along after us, though, jeering and swearing. They called us “white trash” and started to enjoy themselves more and more. It was a long walk and they came swarming right up after us onto the landing of our second-floor apartment, yelling and carrying on, and both Mom and I started to get scared. Doors were opening to other apartments across the way and people were peering out. Finally, Mom turned to face the boys as I hid halfway in the door of the apartment, wondering how in the world I was going to get a new bike, since we didn’t have any money, and how I was going to live with a new gang of enemies. Mom scolded them for wrecking my bike, and one of the kids yelled out, “Lady, my mama come over here and put you in the hospital!” and another followed up and yelled, “White bitch!”
Mom smashed him across the face. It wasn’t a “Look here, kid” kind of mom-tap, it was a full windup slap that turned his head halfway around.
She leaned in on him and said, “Don’t ever say that to anyone again.”
Everyone was quiet then. The boys stood there, openmouthed, looking at me, looking at her, absolutely stunned to see this white lady staring them down. Then they all took off running like they were scared to death.
I didn’t know what to do. I was proud of my mom for sticking up for me, but I was also horrified that she had just started a race war.
Later that night, the police turned up and got Mom out of bed and took a statement from her. The mother of the kid who was slapped wanted to press charges. The police made it clear that that lady didn’t know the kids had wrecked my bike, or the words they’d said. But when Dad got home, he basically took that lady’s side. He didn’t want any trouble, so he threw Mom under the bus. We saw how it was, then: if anyone ever threatened us, Dad would betray us. The truth must have come out about the bike, however, because that other lady dropped the whole thing.
I stayed away from that crew for the rest of the time we lived there. But a couple of years later I was playing Little League baseball and realized one of the kids on the other team was the guy my mom slapped. He was a good ballplayer, and after the game when the teams shook hands he smiled a huge smile at me as we shook and chucked me on the shoulder. I played against him a number of times down the line, and it was always that way. We were fine.
Six
Muskrat Island
Dad graduated from Western Michigan University, and he decided things could be different with Mom and him, so he bought a white, aluminum-sided, three-bedroom ranch home out in Texas Corners just southwest of Kalamazoo, a short block away from the summer-warm waters of Crooked Lake. The lake was ringed with houses and there were kids in almost e
very one, and surrounding the lake in every direction was farm country. We had a twenty-acre forest of red oak and slippery elm and sassafras out the back door and sprawling vineyards and cherry orchards and asparagus fields and undeveloped land across the street to the south and to the east. I didn’t have to commune with the lunatics anymore to be in the woods.
Dad was working construction for Jerry Stifler and he was hardly ever home, but one day he brought us a dazzling black-and-white English setter puppy. I named her Brandy, probably because of that song by Looking Glass, as I listened obsessively to WLS-Chicago on the AM radio. That dog became one of the best bird dogs of our lives, a gentle genius. Mom and Dad still fought, but I stopped paying much attention because they’d basically installed me in paradise. I could fish for bass and panfish in Crooked Lake and pick leeches off my feet and swing from the wild grapevines like Tarzan and I didn’t need Dad around.
Stopped paying much attention, that is, until September 1975. Mom and Dad had been out with friends on a Saturday night, and all day Sunday Mom was in a state, like she had grabbed on to an electrical wire. She moved slowly and five-year-old Joe wouldn’t leave her side. Finally, in the afternoon, someone came to stay with us and Dad told us he was taking her to Borgess Hospital. She would stay there for three weeks, having what was then called a “nervous breakdown.”
I didn’t know some of this until much later, but the couple they’d visited on that Saturday night had finally shattered Mom’s incredible state of denial. Earlier in the summer, she and Dad had visited these same friends and Mom had walked into the kitchen to find Dad making out with the woman, whom we know but shall remain nameless. True to Mom’s tragic style, they remained friends, and when they went to see them again in September, the woman grabbed Dad and said she was taking him for a ride in her new convertible Volkswagen. Mom sat there in the house with that woman’s husband, both of them knowing full well what was going on, making small talk for an hour.
“I just don’t need this,” she said to Dad when they came back from their ride. All four of them were standing right there. No crack across the face. No tears. She had finally decided she was done with him.
Vern’s wife, Sally, allegedly took us up to the hospital to see Mom once, but none of us remember it. Maybe Mom dreamed it. Sally was a nurse and had tried her hardest to smooth things for Bruce. For years, she had called Mom and told her, “Try to find it in your heart to forgive him,” and recommended that she take a hot bath. All of us remember her taking a lot of hot baths, and Brett and Joe used to climb right in there with her.
But Mom had left Dad in the house with us, and he didn’t know whether to shit or throw up. He was pissed at Mom for going to the hospital and disrupting his life. He walked around the house, barking, “Fuck! FUCK!” He didn’t know what to do. When he wasn’t swearing he seemed distant and quiet, like he knew whatever was happening was his fault. We just kept searching his perfectly shaved face for clues as our faith slipped away morning after morning. He cooked what he would cook if we were camping: boiled hot dogs and canned baked beans and boxes of doughnuts. He bought hot, handmade pizza from the Crooked Lake Market, which we craved and rarely got. He didn’t know how to do the laundry or how to make lunches for school or do our homework, and after a day or two Joe asked if he could have something other than toast for breakfast and the look in Bruce’s eye told us he was going to get mean if that kept up.
We were sitting around the dark-brown Formica table in our little kitchen, with the harvest-cornucopia-themed wallpaper with fruits spilling out of baskets in brown, yellow, and orange, and Joe kept on asking. Mom always made waffles. Why couldn’t we have waffles and syrup? And when was she coming back?
“Pretty soon,” said Dad, standing at the counter leaning on his fists with his shoulders up around his ears, staring straight down into himself.
“WHEN?!!” screamed Joe, bursting into tears.
We didn’t try to hush Joe because we had the same question, and we didn’t care if he hit us or smashed something because our mom was in the hospital and he was in on it.
“She’s taking a rest,” he said, but he told us no more. The next day or soon after he went back on the road selling steel for American Buildings and aunts and neighbors came to stay with us. I was eleven and Brett was six, so I learned how to make pancakes by reading the Bisquick box and cooked breakfast until Mom got home. I never did learn how to make waffles, though.
I was worried our mother would never come back or, if she did, come back as someone crazy. I imagined that she had gone to a place like the State Hospital, where people had to be locked up because they were insane. I knew that there had been trouble in other people’s houses up and down the block, and that some of them went to Parents Without Partners or had big church interventions when ministers showed up at the door, but suddenly that became real. That became our house. The home we lived in broke open and wildness rushed in like floodwater; I didn’t know what would come riding in on that, but I feared it would be strangers and madness and loneliness. There was a difference between parents fighting and real, permanent trouble. A couple of the kids I had known on the block had left when parents split up and never came back, sometimes even separating brothers and sisters.
Little things Dad had done took on new meaning. I knew he could be a mean son of a bitch, and I wondered if that’s just how he was with Mom all the time. A few months before Mom disappeared, all five of us had been driving in his Electra 225; I was dwarfed by the giant front seat and Mom was in back with Brett and Joe and all of us were screaming happy to be with Dad; then he looked in the rearview mirror and gave her the finger and smiled. She looked away. Mom just didn’t know how to respond to a bad man. I thought maybe they were playing, just teasing each other, but after she went to the psych ward I knew it wasn’t a game. He was telling her he could do whatever he wanted, and his boys would still love him.
But that wasn’t true and he didn’t know. It’s hard to hate your dad but that little fire can become a conflagration. When Mom was gone we suddenly knew she could die or go nuts, and Brett and I, at least, began to turn against him, and we had no intention of turning back.
One day in October she was standing in the kitchen again, a pale and thin version of our mother, wearing clothes that looked like a tent on her. She had done some group therapy in the psych wing, and talked to a few doctors, but mostly what she’d done in there was read a paperback copy of The Paper Chase and not be anywhere near Dad. When he came to get her, he hoped she’d come home and take care of us so he could be seen as an upstanding guy and get back to chasing women, but she told him, “I want you to get the hell out of my life.”
She had spent so much of her life deflecting attention away from herself, and she knew she could change that in a heartbeat if she wanted. Mom was the most beautiful mother among all our friends’ parents, and we knew that the dads noticed her. We saw it happen all the time, and in less guarded moments or after a few beers they would even say things to us like, “Your mother is a nice-looking lady.” But she pushed that attention away. She would sit in the bleachers at my baseball games and radiate a mild disinterest toward the men who stared at her tight jeans and see-through blouses. She got a job as the bookkeeper and assistant manager at Osco Drug, and she focused on starting a career and raising three boys on her own. Dad behaved like it was kind of a joke and that it would end soon, but Nancy had actually put him out in the street. He moved out, and he acted like he didn’t know what the plan was anymore.
After he’d been gone a couple of weeks, Dad took me out to Bilbo’s Pizza, a J. R. R. Tolkien–themed place on Western’s campus, and he had a beer. It was such a rare event I took it as a sign. He was a guy who would open a bottle of $1.99 wine for guests and keep it in the refrigerator for two years and then throw it away.
“Your mother wants me to stay out of the house,” he said, treating me differently, treating me as if, unlike during her stay in the hospital, I needed to know what
was going on.
“Are you getting a divorce?” I said, hoping he would say yes. I felt sorry for him and I wanted to crack off the end of his beer bottle and stick it in his face. I had seen that on TV.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Your mom wants that, I think.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he lied.
“You fight all the time,” I said.
“And I guess she just needs a break from that,” he nodded.
He drank his beer.
“Can I still get a shotgun for my birthday?” I said.
He looked at me and nodded. “You’re probably going to need it,” he said.
“I definitely need it,” I said.
When the lakes iced over that winter, Dad and I started our muskrat trap line, and I bought handgrip strengtheners and one of those chest exercisers with three springs on it so I could get strong enough to set my traps. I got books on trapping and on fur-bearing animals from my school, Mattawan, and from the Kalamazoo Public Library. Mom was big on reading, and when we lived in married housing she used to take us to the libraries at WMU and to the public library’s Central Branch on Rose Street, and the Bookmobile would come out to Texas Corners. In one of these books I read the Anishinaabe creation story, in which muskrat is the hero. The Anishinaabe include the Ojibway (Chippewa), Ottawa, and Potawatomi people who occupied western Michigan when white people first arrived.
According to the story I read, sometime after the Great Spirit (Kitche Manitou) created the world, the humans started fighting with one another and the Great Spirit punished them with a huge flood. The only person left, Nanaboozhoo, gathered the surviving animals together and declared that he was going to create dry land by diving to the bottom of the flood and getting some dirt. But he couldn’t hold his breath long enough to reach bottom. All the other creatures tried—the beaver, the grebe or helldiver, the otter, and others—and they all failed. The muskrat said he would try, and the other animals mocked him. They said he wasn’t a good-enough swimmer. But down he went and he stayed under so long that he drowned. And when his body floated up, in his little paw was a bit of dirt. The other animals cheered: muskrat had sacrificed his life so that others could live. The turtle told Nanaboozhoo to put that dirt on his strong back, and thus Turtle Island was formed, which we know as North America.