Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong

by Sophie Hudson

  (Even if I wasn’t wearing any sort of protective headgear when I rode my bike ACROSS THE HIGHWAY.)

  (AT THE AGE OF ELEVEN.)

  (And fist bump to your parental courage, Mama and Daddy—you daredevil rascals, you.)

  The Clarks lived in a charming Cape Cod–style house that basically looked like something out of a storybook. The white clapboard siding always stood out against the backdrop of trees behind the house, and the shutters were the perfect shade of magnolia-leaf green. In the midseventies, Kimberly’s daddy decided that he was going to start a rose garden, so to the left of the driveway—beside the garage that looked more like a carriage house—there were at least twenty rosebushes. They’d start blooming in the spring and last through the early part of fall; it’s almost impossible to think about their house without picturing that explosion of pink and yellow and coral blooms.

  As an adult, I’m all too aware that roses can’t grow like that—nothing can—unless there’s some mighty fertile soil.

  I honestly can’t remember a time when the Clarks weren’t a part of our extended family. When Kim’s mother, Evelyn, was about twenty years old, she became friends with my mama, Ouida, and my mama’s sister, Choxie. Evelyn and Choxie were actually roommates when they were single and working for a local bank; they rented the top floor in a house not too far from Myrtlewood’s main park, and I can only imagine how sassy and stylish they must have been. In my mind they must have been just like Doris Day in That Touch of Mink or Pillow Talk: lots of pencil skirts, cropped jackets, modest heels, fur stoles, and pillbox hats. I picture them clocking out at the bank and going on a double date to one of Myrtlewood’s better restaurants—a place where they’d order chopped steak and a baked potato, maybe some green beans in a bundle on the side—before they enjoyed lemon icebox pie and coffee for dessert.

  (I have no idea why these completely pretend details are so important to me.)

  (Apparently I am a person who needs a lot of concrete information. Even if I have to make it up.)

  Mama and Daddy were already married when Evelyn and Choxie were rooming together; eventually Evelyn married Bill, and Choxie married Joe. The marriages only strengthened everybody’s connections. Mama and Evelyn had their first children—both girls—within a year of each other, and well over a decade later, they both delivered what were considered “late in life” babies. That’s when Kim and I arrived on the scene. I was born in October, and Kim was born the following March; Mama and Evelyn no doubt spent the next twelve to eighteen months commiserating about how exhausting it was to add another baby to the mix when you’re almost forty.

  Kim and I like to think that we kept ’em young.

  They would probably beg to differ.

  By the time Kim and I were old enough to ride our bikes to each other’s houses, we were more like sisters than friends. Our families took trips together, shared meals together, and celebrated holidays together. Evelyn and Bill were the only two adults I got to call by their first names—no “Mr.” or “Mrs.” required—and their house was almost as familiar to me as my own. I knew that their milk would always be in a glass bottle instead of a paper carton since Evelyn believed it tasted better that way. I knew that Bill kept his collection of Kenny Rogers and Dottie West country music albums inside a console in their dining room. I knew that Evelyn’s tuna salad was way better than Mama’s because Evelyn didn’t put chopped celery or apples in hers. I knew that Bill would always play baseball with us if we begged him long enough—and I knew that after the game Evelyn would serve us iced tea so sweet that it might qualify as syrup. I knew that they kept the Planters peanuts and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in the kitchen cabinets to the left of the stove, just below the spot where Bill kept his cartons of Benson & Hedges 100s and Evelyn kept her cartons of Virginia Slims Lights.

  (By the way, I just looked up a picture of an old Virginia Slims ad so that I could make sure I had the brand right.)

  (The ad features a woman who is wearing tennis clothes—and holding a lit cigarette.)

  (Apparently the early eighties were a time when physical exercise and cigarette smoking were not considered contradictory activities.)

  (Game, set, match—and smoke, y’all.)

  Evelyn and Bill were both hysterical—quick witted, fun loving, and easygoing. They loved to laugh with Kim and me, and from a young age, I noticed that even my parents laughed more when the Clarks were around. Their house was the site of all manner of celebrations—birthdays, New Year’s Eves, Friday night dinners—and I guess that sort of leads us to the next thing I knew about their house, though at the time it was not nearly as significant to me as the location of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: at the Clarks’ there was always a jug of Paul Masson Chablis in the refrigerator (and I don’t mean bottle—I mean JUG)—along with six or twelve Old Milwaukee beers. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal, really; it was just part and parcel of being at their house.

  Sure, Evelyn and Bill drank more than my parents did, but that wasn’t necessarily saying much. Mama has always contended that she’s allergic to alcohol (I know. You just have to take her word for it and move on.), and while Daddy enjoys an occasional glass of wine, he has always been way too self-disciplined to habitually indulge in anything. In fact, Daddy’s commitment to sensible, upright living prompted Bill to give him a nickname that has stuck for more than fifty years: “The Reverend.”

  Bill’s high regard for nicknames was a source of endless entertainment to all of us. If he loved you, he refused to call you by your given name, which is why Kim was Kimber or KC (and the Sunshine Band), her sister Margaret was Mae, my sister was Suza, Mama was Sugah (not sugar—SUGAH), Choxie was Choxah—I could write a list so long that you’d need a scroll to contain it. Even the Clarks’ cat, Pizitz, had a nickname: LePew.

  And just in case you’re wondering, my nickname was Soap. For a while, at least. Because when my friends christened me with the nickname “Sofa” in high school, Bill followed suit with his own name for me.

  He always liked to be on track with the trends.

  I never really analyzed why I loved being at the Clarks’ house so much—I didn’t have a big need to escape life at my own house—but I imagine that part of it was that Bill’s outgoing personality guaranteed there was always something extra fun going on. Plus, since Evelyn and Bill were like second parents, they treated me like one of their own. Bill couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket but would serenade Kim and me with the song of our choosing whenever we asked. Evelyn let us play in her makeup and dress up in her clothes, and if Kim and I got a wild hair at ten o’clock at night and decided to bake brownies or cookies, Evelyn would stay up with us, rocking in her chair by the kitchen fireplace while she read her latest Harlequin Romance and simultaneously put the hurt on a pack of those aforementioned Virginia Slims Lights. Evelyn and Bill both loved Password, Sorry!, and gin rummy, and the four of us spent countless nights playing games on the floor in their den.

  I wasn’t related to them. Not even a little bit.

  But they were family.

  And it occurs to me that God has a mysterious way of giving us homes in places where we don’t necessarily have an official return address.

  It’s funny, because when you’re a kid, you don’t really have an awareness of other people’s brokenness. I guess it’s because you don’t really have an understanding of your own. And from the time we were six until we were about ten, I’d say that Kim and I had a pretty carefree go of things. We considered a sleepover a total success if we got to slide down her stairs a bunch of times and play sisters for several hours.

  (My pretend name was Holly.)

  (I worked in a pretend clothing store.)

  (My pretend boyfriend’s name was Scott.)

  (As in Baio.)

  We also liked to play Bill’s favorite country albums and pretend like we were competing in pageants as we belted out the most dramatic songs we could find. Evelyn’s heaviest glass candlesticks were our m
icrophones, and there were several country hits in our repertoire: “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” and “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind),” to name a few.

  You should know that the subtext of those songs was completely lost on us. Plus, it never really occurred to us that no one had ever been crowned Miss Mississippi after singing a song about adultery during the talent competition.

  But somewhere in between the time when I started riding my bike to the Clarks’ house and the time when I started driving, something changed. The best way I know to explain it is that there were glimpses of brokenness I hadn’t noticed before, even if I wasn’t exactly sure how to label it. Maybe part of the reason was because Kim and I were getting older and were a little more aware of what our expectations were in terms of “normal” behavior from our parents, but there was no question that Bill’s drinking had escalated—and there wasn’t much about it that seemed “social” anymore.

  In the summers I spent most Mondays with Kim; it was Bill’s day off, and since the Clarks had more cable channels than we did (plus Atari!), Kim and I tended to gravitate to her house instead of mine. Most of those Mondays have blurred together as sort of a collective happy memory, but there’s one that was a watershed moment for both of us, I think.

  One Monday when Kim and I were twelve, Bill asked us if we’d ride with him to the store—in his sah-weet green Camaro, no less. I thought that I’d seen him drinking earlier in the day—I wasn’t completely sure—but I figured it was safe to get in the car with him (keep in mind: I was twelve; plus, Kim and I always loved riding around in that Camaro). But about a half a mile from their house, I realized that something was wrong. And no matter how many jokes he cracked, no matter how loud he turned up the radio so we could sing along, no matter how fun and carefree I tried to pretend like the car ride was, there was no denying that he was drunk. Not tipsy. Not buzzed. Drunk.

  It was the first time his drinking had ever made me feel scared.

  And sometimes, when I think about Kim and me in the backseat of that car, trying our best to find something to laugh about as we swerved back and forth along the road, my heart hurts a little bit. When he was sober, Bill would have never dreamed of doing anything to put us in danger; he looked after us and tended to us and loved us like crazy. Kim was his beloved, brilliant baby girl, and it was his great joy to dote on her. He thought she was the absolute best at everything she tried, whether it was ballet, piano, flute, or tap dancing; no daddy could love a daughter more. In fact, one time when Kim accidentally pinned Evelyn between her car and the garage door (it’s a long story), Bill was so worried about Kim’s emotional state after the accident that he bought her a purse. Evelyn used to laugh and say that if Kim had actually succeeded in injuring her, there’s no question that Bill would have bought her a new piece of luggage.

  But that’s what stinks about the parts of us that are broken and hurting. We try our best to keep all the pieces and shards gathered and contained, and we trick ourselves into thinking that they’re not affecting other people. Eventually, though, our need to feed what is broken starts to overpower everything else, and those hurting places make us careless and reckless. Before we know it—and sometimes after it’s too late—we look around and see that the people we love the most have been wounded in the collateral damage.

  And listen. I certainly don’t mean to imply that my own family was so full of awesomeness that I had to go visit somewhere to see some dysfunction at work. Heavens, no. But the thing about your own family’s dysfunction is that typically you’re so immersed in it that you don’t always see it for what it is. When you’re with someone else’s family, though, you haven’t spent a lifetime conditioning yourself to look past the unhealthier stuff.

  (That last paragraph sounds like I have somehow confused myself with Dr. Phil.)

  (I do apologize.)

  (All those psychology classes that I took in college just ROSE UP AND DEMANDED TO SPEAK.)

  Now. As a bit of a history lesson for the young people, I will point out that before there was any such thing as a cell phone, people had to call each other on a telephone that was connected to all the other phones in the house. What this meant was that your privacy extended only as far as your parents allowed it, and also, your parents did not care one iota about your privacy. They could pick up the phone at any second and (1) listen in on your conversations, (2) tell you to get off the phone, or (3) some combination of 1 and 2.

  Maybe that’s why one particular phone call from Kim stands out so much in my memory. I was a sophomore in high school, and she was a freshman, and one Wednesday night she called and asked if I could come over right away. At the time the driving age was fifteen in Mississippi, and please know that now that I am an adult, I share in your early driving-age horror. Anyway, I was standing in the kitchen when she called, and as I started to respond to her story, the tone of my voice got my mama’s attention. Mama stopped cleaning up the kitchen, and as I tried to create some privacy by stretching the phone cord into the dining room (Here’s another fun fact, kids: phones had cords. And the only people who had phones in their cars were detectives on TV shows.), Mama followed me step for step. Her maternal radar was pinging like crazy—and for mighty good reason.

  It took Kim all of about fourteen seconds to break the news: Bill had gone to rehab.

  Keep in mind that back then the whole idea of rehab (or “treatment,” as some people called it) was mysterious and vague—something that seemed reserved for rock stars or characters on ABC Afterschool Specials. I don’t think I’d ever known anyone in real life who had gone away to deal with an addiction.

  But that night on the phone, Kim told me how a series of events had convinced Bill that he couldn’t get better on his own. Bill finally realized that he was desperate for some intervention. Evelyn had driven him to Jackson late that afternoon, and since she wouldn’t be home until very late that night, Kim called to see if I could spend the night so she wouldn’t be by herself while she waited for her mama.

  Of course my parents said yes—they didn’t want Kim to be alone and understood why she wanted to be at her own house—so I hopped in my burnt sienna 1978 Chevrolet Impala (jealous much?) and drove those three miles that I’d traveled hundreds of times before.

  Everything was the same.

  Everything was different.

  If the Afterschool Specials had prepared me for anything, it was that my time at Kim’s house that night was going to be filled with all manner of earnest conversation. Kim had never been much of a crier, so I didn’t really anticipate that there would be tears, but I imagined that she’d need some encouragement. I felt certain that I would need to comfort her with some very deep thoughts—perhaps even a brief reading from the Psalms.

  Oh, I was going to Be There for Her. Yes, I was.

  But once I walked into Kim’s house and we worked through a few initially awkward moments of “So, how about that rehab business?” it became crystal clear that there was one very valuable lesson that the Afterschool Specials hadn’t taught me: when a loved one finally acknowledges a struggle and bravely asks for help, it feels like relief more than anything else. It feels like hope. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be uncertainty and difficulty in the process, but, oh have mercy, there is the most glorious reality in the wake of it all: it is forward progress.

  Kim and I didn’t say that out loud, of course. We were fourteen and fifteen years old, for heaven’s sake. What we said out loud was more along the lines of this:

  “So, are you, like, okay? Because we can, like, go to, like, Wendy’s, and get, like, a Frosty if you’re not.”

  “Like, I think I’m fine? Because I’m, like, sad, but, like, in a good way, you know?”

  Feel free to memorize our conversation so that you can call it to mind when you’re in a situation where you need to offer someone a little encouragement.

  We e
nded up not going to Wendy’s after all. I had a poetry portfolio due in English the next day, so I really needed to manufacture some Deep Thoughts and then put them to paper in the form of loosely connected sentence fragments. Kim couldn’t get the Prince song “4 the Tears in Your Eyes” out of her head (it was 1985, y’all) (Prince was epic), and eventually we started making up motions to the lyrics.

  Long ago, there was a man

  Change stone to bread with the touch of his hand

  Made the blind see and the dumb understand

  He died for the tears in your eyes.

  I mean, it wasn’t a John Wesley hymn or anything, but now that I think about it, it sure did put the focus where focus was due.

  Everything was different.

  Everything was the same.

  Two months later, Bill came home.

  There are a lot of details about his recovery that I’ve never known. I don’t know why he started drinking. I don’t know when he realized that he had a problem. I don’t know why it got worse when it did. I don’t know what ultimately convinced him that he needed to stop.

  But I know enough about my own brokenness to understand that sometimes you just get to the end of your dadgum self. Those parts of our hearts and lives that try to live in perpetual exile—well, eventually it’s almost like they long to be reconciled. They want to be whole.