Heartland

by Sarah Smarsh

  As we curved along the sides of South Dakota’s small mountains, the highest place I’d ever been, Dad was even quieter than usual, staring past the cliffs in a way that frightened me. I looked over the edge of the road down into the deep ravines and held my breath. I told God that if he would please keep us from falling off the mountain, I would hold my breath until it was painful, over and over until we got home, which I did.

  After we shivered, underdressed, at windy Mount Rushmore, Matt and I waited in the van while Dad gambled at a casino in Rapid City. He said he’d just be a minute, but the sun went down. Stars came out. We shivered again and I stared at the casino door, filled with worry and rage.

  That night we had a hard time finding a room in the touristy area. Finally, we saw a place with the VACANCY sign lit up. Inside, the man at the desk said they had a room.

  “Thank God,” I said with a sigh. “We’re desperate.”

  The price he quoted was too high, Dad said, and the man at the desk wouldn’t budge. When we got back to the van, Dad told me to keep my mouth shut from now on. He couldn’t bargain a lower price if someone knew we were hard up for a room.

  The next day, in some little town in the Badlands, Dad sprang for ice-cream cones. My scoop fell off the cone onto the sidewalk, and I cried at the loss of it and at having wasted Dad’s money. Dad said to stop crying and brought his closed fist down on the top of my head. I fell against the van holding my head. My skull ached.

  Worse than the bump swelling up on my head was the betrayal I felt in my heart. My whole life, Dad had been the parent who was never mean. He had found a way to not put his anger on his children almost every moment of their lives. How could he have done what he did that chilly day in South Dakota?

  The responsibility for our actions is ours and ours alone, I had been taught. But I see now that my dad changed under the pressure of his situation. I would watch his spirit flicker over the years as his economic situation fluctuated.

  Not long after we moved to Wichita, a friendly, nervous woman with big, teased blond hair appeared at Dad’s apartment. I sized her up to determine the nature of their relationship.

  “I found a G-string in Dad’s bed,” I told her, lying.

  “Oh my God, I am so sorry!” she said, covering her mouth.

  Chris had recently been in a bad car wreck that messed up her back. She’d been prescribed painkillers but still had a lot of pain. She took them every day. In fact, she had been addicted to opioids since a Wichita doctor prescribed them for menstrual cramps when she was nineteen.

  I didn’t know it back then, of course. She was highly functional—maintaining an immaculate home, making and crossing off to-do lists, always helping a friend. She laughed a lot and had generous compliments for everyone, including me. Like Mom, she smoked a lot of Marlboros, but hers were reds, not lights. Unlike Mom, she drank a lot of beer on the weekends. She liked that red, too, mixed with Clamato and a shot of vodka.

  Dad and Chris got married at the courthouse in the spring of 1991, when I was ten, and moved into a ranch house on a modest but well-kept street on the west side of Wichita. During the week, Chris operated a children’s daycare service out of the house while Dad worked construction. On weekends, when Matt and I were there, Chris obsessively cleaned and organized the house while Dad fixed door hinges or spread bills across the kitchen table and dialed customer service numbers.

  It was a warm, happy enough place. But Dad and Chris, like the rest of the adults in my family, couldn’t get through a weekend without getting plowed. Usually, it was easy enough to steer clear of their house parties and loud, drunk friends. During a rare trip out of town, though, when they drove Matt and me east into the Ozarks to the tourist town of Branson, Missouri, I couldn’t escape on my bicycle.

  One night during our stay, Chris, drunk next to our motel’s outdoor pool, snuck up behind me while I was fully clothed, looking at the sky and thinking. She pushed me into the pool with a hard shove. Something about the shove didn’t seem playful to me. Out of instinct, I grabbed her head and pulled her in with me.

  I had never been one to hit anybody. I was generally devastated by the thought of hurting someone’s feelings, let alone their bodies. But, when Chris and I came up for air from the glowing water that smelled of chlorine, our summer clothes clinging to our skin, I clubbed her in the face with my fist.

  I climbed out of the pool and took Matt, who was crying, back to the motel room. As go all such stories that are worth telling where I’m from, she never pushed me again.

  Meanwhile, the time Matt and I waited for Dad outside a Rapid City casino turned out to be part of a bigger problem. Dad now had a regular gambling habit. When he was done with his weekend chores and repairs around his and Chris’s house, he drove Matt and me in his work van to the Wichita Greyhound Park between fields on a highway at the northern outskirts of town. Dad would park at the back of the big parking lot, even if there were plenty of open spots near the entrance, so that it would cause less of a scene if the engine didn’t start back up and the van needed to be towed. He would become focused, like Great-Grandma Dorothy did at a bingo parlor—like he needed to pay close attention and pray in order to get what he’d come for.

  He directed me and Matt on how to sneak into the dog track, not only to avoid paying our admission but because children weren’t allowed inside after certain hours. He’d distract the ticket lady while we ran ahead. We needed little instruction, already experienced in sneaking into movie theaters any summer afternoon we pleased. Sometimes he told us to wait in the car while he collected earnings from a recent win, which were always less than recent losses. He’d end up placing a few more bets, and then a few more. Grandma Betty, who often bailed her mother out of gambling-related debt, said it was silly to hand someone your hard-earned money like that. I agreed.

  Matt and I spent hours outside the track racing each other to yellow lines on the black asphalt, or tossing a baseball back and forth over tall pickup trucks with the mitts we kept in the back of Dad’s van among piles of tools and his hard hat marked Key Construction. When we tired of playing, I’d seethe and rant about Dad’s forgetting us, and six-year-old Matt would start to cry.

  As for my own bad habits, I had developed a taste for swiping small items from stores. I was only nine, ten, eleven years old but spent afternoons roaming neighborhoods alone. I walked or skateboarded along Central Avenue, four busy lanes that intersected Dad’s street, past a big drugstore and the discount grocery called Food 4 Less where we shopped, which we liked to call Food 4 Losers. Sometimes I took Matt along. Wearing a black White Sox baseball hat and a Bart Simpson T-shirt from a garage sale, I’d dangle off busy street bridges over stormwater ditches to make Matt shriek and beg me to stop. I often had with me a pocket full of markers for tagging public walls and fences.

  In the eyes of grown-ups, I was a well-behaved, straight-A student at school. I felt so much at stake in my life, in my actions, that even a rebellion—in some young lives an unconscious plea for attention—had to be kept a secret. My bad behavior amounted to taking the things I wanted but couldn’t have.

  They were small things. I was a sports lover who got dolls as birthday gifts. So, at the drugstore, I slid entire cardboard boxes of baseball cards beneath my jacket. In a short time, I amassed hundreds, maybe thousands, of Donruss and Topps cards. Down the road was a small sports memorabilia store that I lurked in for hours, poring over and stealing whatever small item interested me: a Detroit Lions pennant with Wichita hero Barry Sanders, a Michael Jordan sticker, a George Brett commemorative coin. The person behind the counter barely looked up as I walked out the door. If I had a particularly large haul, I would pay for one thing—say, a bundle of plastic card protectors—to alleviate any suspicions, though a small white girl elicited few in an old man’s sports store.

  One night, sleeping on the couch at Dad’s, while Matt and Dad slept in the bedroom, I
was praying as I did every night. It occurred to me that I could not go on talking with God while building a collection of stolen baseball cards. I remembered the time when I was little, before I started school, when I took a gold ring with a purple stone from a display at the mall. Back in Mom’s parked car in the parking lot, I presented it to her as a gift. She was mad, and I felt confused. There was the pretty ring, and I wanted Mom to have it, and now I was in trouble.

  Now I knew full well what I was doing, but the feeling was no less confusing. On Dad’s couch, I promised God that I would stop. I kept on anyway, though.

  At the cusp of adolescence, an angry indignation was swelling inside me. I felt compelled to take, to gather things into my arms and claim them as my own. Stealing was wrong, I’d been taught in church and everywhere else, but I had a feeling that the money system was wrong, too. I didn’t think the world owed me anything, but it also seemed the world wouldn’t give me anything that I didn’t reach out and grab for myself. To do so, though, was both a mark of moral failure and something that could ruin my life, if I got caught.

  Those are the moments, the struggles, the decisions when I relied on you the most—the vague sense that someone else depended on me, and if I couldn’t do right by myself then at least I ought to do right by you.

  The first time I heard my voice ring through an auditorium, the first time I felt seen and heard in a big way, involved a contest about drug abuse.

  In early 1991, when I was in fifth grade, Mom moved in with her longtime boyfriend, a newspaper humor columnist named Bob, on the far east side of Wichita. Matt and I had to change schools, to my dismay. At OK Elementary, I had friends. I had Mr. Cheatham’s fun classroom in the basement. My new school, Minneha, was a harder adjustment. I spent most recesses alone on the playground swing set. Things felt harder at home, too.

  Mom was selling residential real estate, which was a good way to make a living without a college degree. There was enough money to buy necessities now, but she didn’t notice when I outgrew my clothes. One day, I wore pajama pants to my new school, feeling humiliated because they were sheer enough to see my underwear through them. When I needed a training bra, she bought me only one, which meant I had to wear the same one every day. It was made completely out of lace that irritated my skin and was discolored with playground dirt by the time Mom laundered it once a week.

  Bob had a higher income than she did and lived a middle-class life, but to my knowledge she didn’t ask him to foot many bills for us kids. I benefited from my nearness to Bob’s belongings, and he paid the check when we went out to eat. But, in many ways, having a poor mom who dated a middle-class guy was like living next to a pile of things you need but can’t access—which is what it’s like to be poor in America.

  As I’d done before when life got especially difficult, I did two things: talk to you and work hard in school. I managed to find a couple of girls to eat lunch with, but whereas many of my friends at OK Elementary had also eaten school lunches, it seemed all the kids at Minneha Elementary came with cool lunch boxes full of name-brand, prepackaged food. I was suddenly ashamed to get my free lunch, for which Matt and I still qualified through the state since Mom and Bob weren’t married and she filed her taxes separately from his. Most days I didn’t go through the line and instead sat hungry at the cafeteria tables, watching as other children opened sandwich bags and packaged snacks. Teachers somehow didn’t notice. One boy did and took to giving me bits of his lunch out of a plastic box.

  Minneha, a midcentury building with a colder feeling than my last school, had a gifted program, too. The teacher, Ms. Dunn, was a no-nonsense woman who wore a short, curly wig. She had cancer and the treatment made her hair fall out, she explained. One day she took the wig off to show us her scalp. She didn’t care what anybody thought, she said, which sparked my admiration. I threw myself into her assignments for the joy of it and for her approval, which was harder won than Mr. Cheatham’s.

  As the school year wound down, Ms. Dunn announced that it was time to nominate someone for the annual public speaking contest.

  It had to be me, I felt, burning for the chance. It had to be me who stood onstage and had her voice heard. The thought of it being someone else felt all wrong, though I’d never given a speech in my life.

  This year’s theme, Ms. Dunn said, was illegal drugs. As a child of Reagan’s “War on Drugs” era, from a family rife with addiction, I took the matter seriously. I had red ribbons in my bedroom from DARE school assemblies funded by the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Association.

  Ms. Dunn shared the name of the event’s top judge. It was a name I knew: District Attorney Nola Foulston, the shoulder-padded powerhouse at whom I gazed when I went to work with Grandma Betty. This information fanned my ambition into a four-alarm fire.

  I spent the next weekend in the country, at Grandma Teresa’s house. Getting there required passing the country home where my immediate family had lived together in one place not so long ago. Just a couple years prior, the parents of one of my Cheney classmates had bought the place, and it annoyed me to think of her in my old bedroom.

  Grandma Teresa’s house was quieter than ever. Since Grandpa Chic was dead, there was no one smoking while watching the console television in a nubby recliner, making Grandma howl about ashes dropped on the marble carpet. I settled into his old chair to read the latest Reader’s Digest, among the scant reading material in the house besides a set of 1960s encyclopedias. One feature story, it turned out, was about drugs. It was called “The Devil Within.” This struck me as a great phrase, one I understood. I’d watched my family members disappear into their addictions—alcohol, gambling, painkillers, a man’s approval—things that felt to me apart from who they were, like an infection.

  Inspired, I got out a pencil and notebook and wrote an ominous warning of a speech about the hard drugs described in the magazine story and newspaper articles I’d read. Cocaine, heroin, crack—they were harder drugs than the ones I knew up-close, but I applied to them what I believed about every other vice, which was that they might take you over if you give them an inch. With my speech, I laid the responsibility for avoiding drug addiction squarely where I’d been taught it belonged: yourself.

  On a cold, spring morning in 1991, I went over my speech about willpower. I’d been chosen to compete in the contest.

  I put on my best outfit, a forest green cotton skirt and a short-sleeved shirt with green and tan stripes. I’d been in school plays but had never had an auditorium of people stare at me alone on a stage. I had recently lost one of my top incisor teeth and was worried about how I looked. I practiced smiling with my lips shut. My chin was still scarred from a sledding accident at the farm the previous winter, when I got tangled in rope and dragged behind a tractor. I put a pair of dangly earrings in my pierced ears and ran over the memorized speech in my head.

  The auditorium’s foldout metal chairs were filled with families from across the city. Mom, Bob, Dad, Chris, Matt, Grandma Betty, and Grandpa Arnie all showed up, somehow, which made me more nervous than the whole rest of the crowd. They had fought to get off work, which was how I knew this was a big deal.

  The other contestants and I had numbers pinned to our shirts. We sat on chairs at the back of the stage facing the audience and were called to the microphone to give our short speeches, one by one. As the other competitors took turns at the microphone, I paid little attention to their speeches, instead going over mine in my head while I looked at the huge crowd. My body shook.

  “Sarah Smarsh,” the teacher said into the microphone.

  I walked to the center of the stage and heard my own voice, deep and grave for my age, through the speakers. The audience applauded. I smiled on my way back to my seat.

  After all the speeches were done, while D.A. Foulston huddled with a handful of other judges, I found my family in the audience. They were looking at me, their faces shining with nerv
ous smiles, from a row of chairs toward the back. They never felt comfortable sitting in the front anywhere, especially since they might need to sneak out for a smoke.

  Finally, the winners were read.

  “And first place goes to—”

  I prayed that it would be me. It was.

  D.A. Foulston walked onstage to shake my hand. She gave me a certificate and a scientific calculator that, I was told, I’d need next year in middle school. This was a lucky break in a family that would have balked at a $20 school supply. Far more valuable, though, was feeling the whole place clapping for me. I was so happy I forgot about my missing tooth and let a big, unabashed smile cross my face.

  I saw my family cheering in the crowd. I’d written a speech with tidy ideas about right and wrong, but no one knew better than they did that those judgments get complicated when the cards are stacked against you. The probationers I watched stream in and out of Grandma Betty’s office were overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately people of color. The violence men and sometimes women erupted with was usually born of stress and fear, or of their own parents’ violence. Dad’s booze and gambling, Mom and Grandma’s incessant smoking, and Chris’s pills were just as much the result as they were the cause of difficult situations.

  As for me, I never got caught stealing or vandalizing. If that hadn’t been the case, I might have been branded a “bad kid” and seen the trajectory of my life change. Instead, public school teachers had noticed I was smart—the defining intervention of my life.

  Many children from similar places weren’t so fortunate, due to the color of their skin or other disadvantages. But a speech about individual triumph and personal willpower beating out massive societal pressures—not unlike the ones that had me fighting against your would-be existence in my arms—is what had won me first place.