by Tracy Ross
You’ve heard about the camel, and that tiny straw that crushed its back? That last sentence was my straw. I stood up and pressed my body against the door, waiting for my mom to finish talking.
“I’m so sorry, Tracy,” she pleaded. “I promise, I’ll never say anything like that again. You know I love you and would never do anything to hurt you. I just got overexcited. Now open the door, please, and let me in.”
When it seemed like she was through begging my forgiveness, I unfastened the deadbolt I’d installed after my dad left and opened the door of my bedroom. Mom stood in the hallway, in front of the linen closet. She opened her arms, offering a make-up hug. I lifted my arms too, but when I got close enough to wrap them around her, I shoved her into the linen closet.
Looking up at me with wild, injured eyes, she said, “So is this it? Is this what I can expect now that I’m the evil mother?”
“Yes, Mom,” I answered. “It’s exactly what you can expect.”
Mom got me. I got her back. But it was the shock of what happened to Dad that threatened us all. Among the stipulations of my homecoming was that Dad couldn’t come within five hundred feet of me. If Claudia—or one of the cops assigned to keep an eye on us—drove by and saw his Jeep parked in the driveway, he’d be in serious trouble.
Apparently it didn’t matter.
One Saturday morning in late November, the Jeep pulled into the driveway. Mom was dusting the furniture, and I was perched in my dad’s leather swivel chair watching American Bandstand. Dad walked through the front door as if he still lived with us; he went straight to the kitchen and hoisted himself onto the counter. Mom hurried to him. I hung back, nervous.
Dad and I hadn’t talked since the time I’d called him from the abused girls’ shelter. Not really talk, like we used to before the abuse. He’d called us nightly over the past month, and when he did, Mom made me say things to him. She’d raise her eyebrows and point into the receiver. I’d concede but keep it brief—“Hi, Dad. How ya doin’? See ya later”—because the pain in Dad’s voice scared me. I knew he hated living with his brother, and my mom had told me that the sex-offender meetings the court required him to attend were filled with thugs who did things like rape babies. I could see why she was proud of him for going, but I wasn’t about to be the one to congratulate him.
Mom saw the Colt .357 handgun the second Dad pulled it out of his waistband. And the second she saw it, she started screaming. Then I saw the gun, too, and froze where I was standing. I started to shake, and my chest wall cramped over my heart. My heart hammered: Would he fire? At us? Himself? Across my mind flashed a common headline: “Man shoots family, then self.”
My mom started walking in circles, pulling on her earlobe. “Don?” she said. “What is that? Is that a gun? You have a gun, Don. Why do you have a gun?”
But Dad just sat there with his legs dangling over the counter. The glance he threw me made me want to throw up. I’d known a girl whose parents tried to kill her in a fit of insanity. They’d been drunk and had hacked at each other with kitchen knives during a fight. The girl ran to our house, and my dad let her sit on the couch under an electric blanket while he called the police. Now my dad could be her dad, but unlike her, I had nowhere to run for help. I watched my dad and wondered if he was going to kill me. I figured he must have been contemplating it, because in hell, like in Newfoundland, incest was probably considered normal. Behind me, a small moan started in my mom’s throat. It grew until she was screaming.
Her hollering made Dad stand up. He put the gun in his back pocket and started for the front door. Mom sprinted after him, reaching for his shirt. She couldn’t swim, ride a bike, or ski except for cross-country, but she clung to his light blue Izod like one of the Wicked Witch of the West’s flying monkeys.
I still don’t understand how my dad reached his arm around his body and grabbed her, casting her off of him like a tick that hadn’t yet burrowed into his skin. It didn’t seem like an arm should have been able to bend that far backward. But she hit the floor and crumpled. I watched the commotion from the spot I’d wedged myself into between the piano bench and the wall.
My dad took one last look at us before he continued walking. He was still smiling … and still crying. He was about to step through the door, when he turned around and spoke in a voice that sounded like his vocal chords were coated in butter. “What other choice do I have?” he said. “People are going to find out what happened. Then what? What’s left?” My mom must have been in shock, because when I looked at her, she was poking her tongue between her cracked red lips. She pulled at the collar of her sweatshirt, as if she couldn’t get enough air.
Years later my mom would tell me that, after my dad drove off “to kill himself,” she almost copied him. She thought she could no longer live with such a pitch-black feeling. While I sat in the living room waiting for someone to save me, she went to her walk-in closet, dug under a shirt rack, and located a different gun. This one was a Smith & Wesson Chief 38 Special that my dad had given her for protection. She cocked the gun and bit the barrel. But just as she was about to pull the trigger, a voice inside her spoke up. Doris. Think of Chris and Tracy, it said. What will they do if you take the easy way out?
Bandstand was still playing when she emerged swollen-eyed, rumply-clothed, and tearstained from her bedroom. I pushed myself around in my dad’s swivel chair while she picked up the phone and dialed a number. I figured she was calling the police, to alert them that my dad was on a suicide mission. But she wasn’t. She phoned my uncle, who told her, Doris, you’re overreacting. Donnie took the jeep into the South Hills this morning. But he’s back now, and he’s in his room napping.
11
Where There’s Love, There’s a BMW with Heated Seats
Can I smoke another cigarette? It’s almost time to board.”
“Don’t smoke, Trace. You know it’s bad for your health.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little late to start preaching, Dad? Children learn by example.”
Mom, Dad, Chris, and I sat in blue plastic bucket chairs in the dingy one-runway terminal at the Twin Falls County Airport. Outside, even the air seemed brittle. February in Twin Falls is grey and cold or cold and grey, with no other combination. That must be why the official Groundhog Day groundhog doesn’t live there: the sun is too weak to create a shadow.
In a little while an American Airlines twin prop would skid onto the tarmac, belching a trim, pinch-mouthed stewardess from the belly of the plane. Smiling and waving like a prettier version of our own Miss Idaho, she’d summon me and the half-dozen other passengers lounging around the candy dispenser onboard. Fingering the lighter I stole from Chris’s glovebox, I’d hurry across the tarmac, trying not to look back at my family.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” said my dad. “We’re not asking you to leave.”
Except that they were—Dad, Mom, Claudia, and the Health and Welfare Department, everyone who claimed to have my best interest in mind. In early January—after our big fight, the suicide threat, and several other minor infractions that led my extended family to believe I was within inches of running off and joining the circus—Mom went to Claudia and told her I’d become too difficult for her to control. This was partly true: after the suicide stint, I stopped listening to either of my parents, believing that neither was sane enough to give me orders. The less I listened, the more terrified Mom became, until we were having colossal, blowout fights on a near-nightly basis. We bickered about everything from whether or not I could go to the Dairy Queen after a football game to why I borrowed my mom’s favorite sweater without asking. I’d end up screaming that I’d rather live in hell than have her for a mother. Afraid of the twitching in my arms that made me want to grab her and throw her out a window, I’d tear outside and sprint down Parkway Drive. All I wanted was space, and a few puffs of a cigarette to stop my blood from searing my arteries, but instead of letting me kick the curbs until my toes broke, Mom would chase after me, shout
ing, “TRACY! COME BACK! DON’T LEAVE ME, PLEASE!”
Seeing her like that—keening and wild-eyed, like a character out of a Greek tragedy—had the opposite effect on me from the one I believed she was going for. Her hysteria drained my compassion and filled me with disgust, making me vow to become emotionless.
Claudia did a cursory search for foster homes in the greater Twin Falls area. And apparently no one wanted me. Even Joy refused to take me back to her beige ranch house, like all the other ranch houses, on Indian Trail. Her name, along with my mom’s, my mom’s attorney’s, Claudia’s, and the Twin Falls county prosecutor’s, all appear on the document filed by the Twin Falls county magistrate on January 27, 1986. It’s four pages long and states that the “present residential placement, as well as the placement options presently available to the Health and Welfare Department, do not appear to be consistent with the best interests and emotional well-being of the child. An alternate placement, with the child’s relative in Oregon, has come to the Guardian Ad Litem’s attention, and the Guardian Ad Litem is of the belief that it should be presented to the court.”
Nobody asked what I wanted. If they had, I would have told them that Reed and I were going to California. We’d find a beach where we could sleep under the stars. We’d surf and swim and eat scallops cooked like marshmallows over an open fire. If things worked out between us, maybe one day we’d have babies. The whole family would take up skateboarding, which we would do on the boardwalk where they filmed Three’s Company.
But nobody wanted my opinion. The court decided I should move to Tigard, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, to live with my dad’s sister, Lori, and her accountant husband, Nick. In exchange for helping Lori care for my infant cousins, I could camp out in the family’s guest room, go to a school where nobody knew me, and give up my spot on the Robert Stuart cheerleading squad. Bitchin’.
Out on the runway, the plane skidded to a stop and a ladder ejected from within. It was time to go. Dad put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me like he used to when I’d beat myself bloody riding my bike as a kid. I’d come home with gravel in my kneecaps, bawling about not being able to pop a wheelie over the curb, and he’d tilt his head and puff out his lip, reflecting my expression back to me. Sad face got me again. I let him hug me, but jutted my butt out so our vital organs wouldn’t touch.
Then it was Chris’s turn to say good-bye. He stood before me in a pair of dark-blue shrink-to-fit Levi’s and a navy blue Ralph Lauren shirt. He didn’t smile or wink at me like he had before that summer. We’d talked only once since I’d run away, and that was during Christmas vacation when he got drunk at a party and drove me to the very airport we stood in now, watching crop dusters dive like swallows over the wheat fields. Parked in the gravel at one end of the runway, he’d blazed Bacardi-fueled anger at me, saying, “I don’t know what happened and I don’t want to. I love you and Dad the same. Can’t we just make this go away?”
And now it was going away because I was going away. Dad would move back in with Mom, and Chris would return to the University of Idaho. Four months from now, my parents would drive to Oregon, pick me up, and take me home. We’d all resume the lives we had before Dad started fantasizing about wrestling me in the shower. I said good-bye, leaving a chapped-lip kiss on my mom’s tear-streaked face, then followed the other passengers across the tarmac and onto the plane.
Less than forty-eight hours later, I stood at the bus stop in front of my aunt and uncle’s house, awaiting my inaugural ride to Whit-ford Middle School. Dark clouds clotted the sky. Half a dozen kids milled around me, joking and trying to shove one another into gutters swollen with rainwater. I froze my face into an expression of friendliness and tried my best to avoid eye contact.
That morning I’d sugar-watered my hair into a great wave that crested one eye and swooshed down across the other, and I had smeared my lids with metallic gold and green shadows. From my dad’s army duffel I pulled an oversize purple silk shirt and an enormous yellow sweater, layering them over black, ribbed leggings. On my feet: a pair of soft-soled jazz shoes that I’d spray painted metallic gold.
Lori’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline when I showed up at the breakfast table dressed like Annie Lennox. “That’s what you’re wearing on your first day at a new school?” she asked when I sat down next to her at the table. Her blue eyes clicked. She was getting ready to do volunteer work and was dressed in a grey sweater and pleated khaki trousers. Nick had already vanished, on his long commute to Portland, ten miles away, where he worked.
“I think so,” I answered. “Why? Does it look stupid?”
“No, not stupid,” she said, smoothing the edge of her place mat. “It’s just a little … noisy, don’t you think?”
I didn’t, and wore the outfit in spite of her poor opinion.
I went outside and stood in front of the house with the other kids at the bus stop. The longer I stood there, the more I wished I hadn’t worn the gold jazz shoes. The kids around me splashed through rain puddles in K-Swiss sneakers, Guess jeans, and Polo oxfords. Next to them I looked like a thrift-store version of Punky Brewster.
I stepped onto the bus anyway and made my way to the back. I found an empty seat and scootched across it to the middle. I dug into my pack for the dog-eared copy of Romeo and Juliet Lori had lent me for freshman Shakespeare. But my hand landed on a hard, plastic bubble.
I pulled it out, and saw that Nick or Lori had slipped me a Valentine’s Day present without my noticing: a heart-shaped container filled with red-and-white heart-shaped candies. Below them I found another heart-shaped box, this one full of miniature chocolates. Putting both of these on the seat beside me, I kept digging and found a pair of pink-and-white ankle socks with more hearts embroidered around the cuffs. Beneath all of this was a card that had the words, “Dear Tracy, Love exists if you believe it” scrawled across it in Nick’s high-powered ink.
My heart lurched. I stared out the window at the rain pelting the greenest earth I’d ever seen. I hadn’t felt love—for love’s sake, with nothing attached to it or weighing it down—for many, many months. I pulled my valentines onto my lap before the bus could hit a pothole and knock them onto the floor.
If I’d have thought someone was watching me, I would have shoved them deep into the bowels of my backpack and kept them there until I could look at them again, in the privacy of my own bedroom. But because I was the new kid, and sad, with pain etched into the creases of my forehead, I lined them on top of my backpack and gave them—and myself—an awkward, secret hug.
I made friends at Whitford Middle School the way the Nazis made enemies: by wearing a swastika over my heart. I was standing on the basketball court, trying not to sweat through my running shorts, when a voice a few feet away from me said, “Hey, bitch, what’s up with that shirt?”
I looked up from the spot on the free-throw line I’d been examining to a girl with hair so red it was purple. She was glaring a hole though my Sex Pistols shirt. I noticed with a sizzle of self-vindication that her hair was also long on one side and short on the other, just like mine. She stood apart from the other girls, who were lined up against a cinder-block wall waiting to be picked for volleyball.
I honestly had no idea what she was talking about. Beads of sweat, generated by hormones and anxiety, popped onto my forehead. I checked my posture and slouched over.
“I made it. It’s punk rock. Don’t you like it?”
“No I don’t like it,” said the girl, stepping closer. I wondered if she was going to shove me. “And if you keep it on, you’re gonna get your ass kicked. There’s a lot of Jewish kids in this school. Some of their grandparents even went to Auschwitz. They’re not gonna like it if they see some Nazi lover walking around. What are you? A member of the Aryan Nations or something?”
Aryan Nations. Aryan Nations. I wracked my brain, trying to remember where I’d heard that term before. Oh no. Chris had told me about them when he came home for Christmas from college. His school was in Moscow
: Idaho headquarters for the neo-Nazi skinhead organization, which was responsible for murdering anyone who wasn’t white and which, I’d heard, cavorted with the Idaho chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Now that the real meaning of my swastika was being revealed to me, I wanted to sprint out of the gym and burn it. But with the purple-haired girl breathing stale smoke breath into my face, I decided it was smarter to feign ignorance.
“Aryan Nations?” I said. “No way. Never heard of them.”
“Well …” said the purple-haired girl. “You’re lucky, cuz I’m gonna take pity on you. But only because you seem so innocent and stupid. My name’s Mary. Go tell Mrs. What’s-Her-Face that you got your period and you need me to take you to the locker room. I keep an extra T-shirt stashed there. It probably reeks, but whatever. Anything’s better than that thing.”
And that’s how God, or the Holy Spirit, or some other benevolent deity took pity on me for the first time in teenage memory. Because from that day forward Mary treated me as a friend. She and her parents lived in a big, beautiful house with lots of windows that let in the sun. Mary’s mom believed that kids should make their own decisions about things like smoking, so she let Mary torch up whenever she wanted. When we met for lunch, Mary would feed me cigarettes and let me listen to New Wave bands on her Walkman. That’s how I became addicted to nicotine and first heard Flesh for Lulu, the Smiths, and the Jesus and Mary Chain.
I doubt Nick and Lori would have liked Mary, who, for reasons I still don’t understand, was allowed to hang out in seedy bars in Portland’s Burnside district. My aunt and uncle, on the other hand, kept their conservative chains shackled tightly around my ankles. My territory when I lived with them consisted of school, track practice, home, and church. I joined them for service at their Methodist church on Sundays, but while theirs was the god of affluence and corporate conservatism, my god reigned over the world of music and imagination. Its disciples were my friends at Whitford, who turned me on to David Bowie, the Romantics, and Yaz. After my Shakespeare class read Romeo and Juliet, we went on a field trip to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, where I saw people who’d committed themselves to the arts. For the first time in months, I got out my journals and started writing poetry and short stories again.