by T W Neal
“Where’s BlackCoat and Argos?” I ask, a bad feeling starting in my chest. It shortens my breath into little pants of terror. Something has happened.
“Argos has another home,” she says. “We gave him away.”
“What?” My voice rises into hysteria. “BlackCoat too?”
I can see why we got rid of the other puppies. I know it was a lot of dogs to feed and a ton of poop to clean up. Fleas hop onto my legs and bite me even now.
“BlackCoat went back to the Camp,” Mom says. She’s smoking a joint, the hand not holding Bonny lifting it to her mouth.
I run to where the dogs sleep in a family under the house and dive into the smelly dirt to look for my puppy. There’s nothing there but an empty handful of silence when once it was full of beloved dogs.
I scream and scream as I come out. I hit the side of the house and grab the dogs’ water bowl and throw it. I yell all the bad words I’ve learned at school. “Stupid crazy bitch cunt whore dirty hippie!” I scream. “Argos was my puppy! MINE! Not yours to give away!”
Bonny puts her fingers in her ears and plasters herself against Mom. I know she’s afraid of me, and I wish Mom were too. I stand right in front of Mom, screaming in her face. I want it to be so loud she has to listen, but she looks through me and beyond me at something I can’t see.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” she says, and takes another drag on the joint. “Too many dogs.”
I’m sick with grief and want to throw up.
My parents can just get rid of anything: a pearl necklace, a beloved puppy. They don’t care about me. They don’t care what I need. What hurts me, haunts me, scares me, tortures me.
“I hate you! I hate you!” I scream and run out into the forest.
I’m crying, and it’s not nice little girl crying. Powerful, terrible feelings take me over and explode out of my body, feelings I’ve always been scared to let out because they’re so strong. The crying is huge and snotty and loud. I hit everything around me, grabbing a tree and banging my head on it, kicking bushes that lash back at me. The pain feels good, soothing the bone-deep grief and fiery burning rage as all the things that are wrong with my world erupt all at once.
I’ll live alone out here, build another fort farther away from the house—a bigger one, where I never have to see Mom and Pop again.
Blinded by tears, stumbling, I look for a spot, somewhere by the stream. But I can’t imagine living out in the forest without the safety and comfort of our dogs.
Argos was my friend.
He loved me and made me feel safe and special no matter what, and he was mine. Mine! My beloved puppy, who cared about me just as much.
I scream over and over again until my voice is hoarse, banging my head on a kukui nut tree in a glade next to Limahuli Stream, and finally hug it tight, the harsh bark rough against my hot, bruised face.
Spangles of light surround me, as if the trees cry drops of sunlight with me, falling like gold coins over the bamboo grass. I slide down to rest, curled up in the roots.
Gradually, I feel the forest all around me absorbing my pain, soothing me.
There are tiny songs and sounds just out of range in the shushing of the wind in the leaves—Mom says she can hear the trees talking. Maybe the sounds are the Menehune, the Hawaiian little people, and fairies, imaginary companions from my books. They feel sad with me because they knew how much I loved my puppy, how happy I was playing out here with him, how his loyal love soothed all my hurts.
I get hungry and forage for stuff to eat: fern tips, guavas, Java plums, flyblown fallen mangoes. By nightfall my stomach is sour from too much fruit. The mosquitoes have sucked off about a pint of blood when I finally return to the house in the dark. Diarrhea cramps my stomach, and I cry some more in the outhouse because the dogs don’t come out to walk with me back to the cottage. Only Awa’s lying on the porch, his big square head resting on his paws. His expressive brown eyes, marked like eyeliner, are sorrowful.
He misses BlackCoat and Argos, too.
I go into the lamplit front room. Mom’s in bed, Bonny’s in bed, and Pop meets me. I know better than to call him bad names, and I’m all cried out and too sick to say anything. His face looks sad but scary and determined, too. He doesn’t comment on my tear-streaked face or scratched, bruised body. He doesn’t ask where I was—he knows, and he doesn’t care. He knew I’d have to come back eventually.
“We’re moving,” he says. “This place isn’t good for your mom.”
Chapter Eleven
The Best Facility
Toby, Mom, and Bonny
Age: 8, La Jolla, California, 1973
My grandparents’ Mediterranean style stucco house across from La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club in California is floored in marble and has white carpet and cream-colored furniture made out of steel tubing. We’re staying in two guest rooms while Mom gets treatment for her “nervous breakdown” at a place my grandma Gigi calls The Best Facility.
Mom goes to therapy at The Best Facility hospital every day, takes her medicine, and sleeps the rest of the time, which was the agreement she made so that she didn’t have to actually live there in the hospital. When I ask Mom about what she does at therapy, she says, “It’s Freudian.”
I have no idea what that is, but it sounds like Friesian, which is a really beautiful kind of black horse with long tasseled legs, one of my favorite breeds from The Big Book of Horses.
I like to imagine Mom goes into the big square building with its tiny windows and, once inside, walks into a stall to groom and then ride her own special Friesian stallion. But I’m pretty sure that’s not what therapy is or Mom would look happier when she came home. Instead, Mom’s eyes are glassy, and all her movements are slow, like she’s stuck in a jar of honey.
No one tells me what’s going on, so I sneak to listen in to Gigi and Grandpa Jim talking about the situation. If Mom doesn’t take her medicine and go to therapy every day, they will “put her away.” And I know that’s not good. “Thank God we got them out of that nigger shack,” she tells Grandpa Jim.
What’s a nigger? It sounds bad. Maybe it’s a bad word like haole crap. I’ve never heard that word before, and it makes me feel yucky that Gigi hates our beloved Forest House.
Maybe it’s the fleas. They really were nasty, but I feel guilty even thinking that because I miss our dogs so much—Pop gave our hero Awa away to a farmer in Kilauea, and now it’s like we were never there in that special place with the lokelani roses in the shadow of Makana Mountain.
Gigi made a big fuss at the state of me and my sister’s hair and clothes when we first got off the plane from Kauai, not to mention Mom’s toad-in-the-headlights stare. I wonder if Gigi knows that I ran around naked and bathed in a stream until recently. I don’t tell her that because she’d get upset. She raises her voice and yells “Jim!” for my Grandpa when she gets upset, and I’m a little scared of Grandpa. Everybody is.
Pop, who had to pack up all our stuff after asking his parents for help and pushing Mom and Bonny and me onto a plane, arrives a few weeks after us. He barely talks, and is gone all day supposedly looking for work, but when he returns in the evening his eyes are brighter, and he smells like booze. He tries to avoid Gigi and Grandpa but sometimes they catch him sneaking in.
Grandpa Jim’s a big man who smells of lime aftershave and always wears clean chinos and soft golf sweaters with little animal logos stitched on the chest. He made millions by owning a factory that makes rubber road cones, and by being one of the first to have his products produced in Japan after World War II. Now, in 1973, he’s doing great. Because he started his business during the Depression, a very bad time according to my grandparents, he can’t understand why Pop is “still floundering” and hasn’t “settled down” to a career.
“You need to get off your duff, son,” he booms. “There’s no free lunch. Get that hippie wife of yours cleaned up and get a real job.”
I hide out with Bonny in our guest room with a book, listeni
ng in so I can be ready for whatever happens, and frowning because I’m confused. Actually, there was free lunch, and we qualified for it.
I don’t understand how everything is fancy here, and obviously Pop’s parents have money, but how poor we were back on Kauai. If I had a choice, I’d pick being rich and having a job over eating nothing but windfall mangoes and rice and beans when the food stamps run out at the end of the month.
Gigi has bright blue eyes and auburn hair teased up and sprayed into a helmet. She wears rows of pearls and fitted Lilly Pulitzer dresses. She smells like the big poufy powder puff she has on her “vanity,” a little table with a marble top where she sits on a satin stool and does her makeup.
I come into her big bedroom and watch her with that curiosity that has already gotten me in trouble—but she likes me visiting. She pats me with the artificial-smelling pouf that I know Mom would hate and brushes my hair with a silver brush. She pets my hair, running its strands through her fingers.
“Like taffy,” she says, her voice as affectionate as it ever gets. She’s been saying this about my hair since I can remember. Maybe I’m not ugly after all, though I’m feeling pretty strange in the clothes she bought me—matching flowered tops with stretchy, scratchy polyester pants, and shoes.
Shoes. All the time, we have to wear shoes. Tennis shoes for tennis lessons, ballet shoes for ballet lessons, and saddle shoes and Mary Janes for school. I am immediately enrolled in all of the above since my grandmother is thrilled to take over my daily schedule.
My hair is neatly cut with a row of bangs in front and a ruler-straight line at my shoulder blades. I’m put in third grade now that I’m eight at La Jolla Elementary school, blocks away from the house. For the first time in my life, I look like all the other kids—but I’m not. I’m different, and I think they can smell the remnants of Dr. Bronner’s and garlic oozing out of my pores.
Though I’m wearing clothes that help me blend, I walk to school, which no one does.
I sit cross-legged on my little plastic chair instead of with my legs down.
I take my shoes off at the doorway of the classroom like we did in Hawaii—wearing shoes inside is rude.
“Put your shoes back on, honey,” my teacher says. “We wear shoes all day here.” Her voice implies I’m from somewhere nasty. Yes, people wear their shoes all day here—ugly, pinchy ones worn with thin little socks with itchy lace on them.
No one is brown here.
Everyone remembers their underwear every day, as well as their shoes.
Jif peanut butter, clear purple jelly, and white bread are considered actual foods.
There are no plumerias, no rubber slippers, no pidgin English with its lilting singsong, no almond cookies, and the ocean is very cold. I don’t hear “haole crap” anymore—but I don’t feel welcome, either.
By the time I’m attending there, I’ve missed so much school that all I can do well is read. I struggle with math and every other subject, but I’m a fast learner, try hard, and I can read at college level, so I catch up quickly.
After my work is done in class, I draw on all my papers. Renderings of princesses, warriors, and horses decorate everything.
“So artistic!” my teacher says, with a tone that says artistic isn’t actually good. “Why don’t you put all your drawings in one place, on their own paper?” She draws sad faces on the worksheets I doodle on, but drawing makes me feel better.
When I’m drawing, I’m in a story—and it’s always somewhere imaginary, glorious, interesting, with quests, dragons, horses, gold, and warrior princesses.
We aren’t like other families. We weren’t like the local families on Kauai, and we aren’t like the families in La Jolla, California.
I’m trying to understand it, but I still don’t.
One day my dad calls school and says that he’s going to pick me up instead of me walking home as usual. I stand on the sidewalk, waiting with the other kids whose parents are right on time in their Mercedes and BMWs.
I’m wearing one of my homemade hippie sundresses with a halter top, in the middle of a California winter. I dressed myself in it that morning because I looked out the window and thought the sunshine just beginning to touch the trees meant it was warm, like sunshine in Hawaii—and my mom made this dress for me back when she cared. I made my own lunch and walked to school this morning, realizing I’d made a mistake in my outfit as soon as I reached the end of the driveway, but out of time to go change or grab a sweater.
And I’ve been shivering all day.
Pop pulls up in front of my well-dressed classmates in our old white van, which we shipped over since we’re here longer than we thought we’d be. The van’s battered and rusty now, and the bright curtains are faded and patched with mold.
Pop’s grown a beard that encircles his head and shoulders like a golden throw rug, and he’s wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and Birkenstocks. The other parents with their shiny cars stare at us as he grabs me in a big, pakalolo-smelling funk of a hug with the jollity that weed and a six-pack bring out in him.
“Let’s spring you from this joint,” he says. “Go down to Windansea for a picnic.”
I pull back, mortified, aware that my bare legs in their Mary Janes are adrift and visible. Other La Jolla dads didn’t come rolling in reeking of pot, swinging their third-grade daughters up, exposing their panties, and driving off in rusty vans with a daisy whirligig on the front.
I slide down to the ground and peg him with the stare he calls Getting into His Head.
“Why don’t you have a job? Why can’t you be like the other dads and wear a suit? Why don’t we have a regular car?” I look up into Pop’s bearded face, my hands on my hips. I’m asking these questions because I really want to know, because Mom and Pop raised me to Question Authority. That used to be something they believed in.
But as Pop’s face changes, going hard and red, I know I made another mistake. These aren’t questions Pop wants to answer from Grandpa Jim, or from anybody—least of all me. His sassy, redheaded daughter who wasn’t a boy and can’t keep her mouth shut.
“Get in the van.” Pop’s green eyes go narrow. I should be scared of him. I really should. “Way in the back. I don’t want to look at you.”
If only this was one of the days we all walked as a family on the beach at La Jolla. Those are our happiest days since we moved here. We start at the Beach and Tennis Club, and we walk all the way to Scripps Pier. Mom and Pop buy a coffee at the stand there, and Bon and I get hot chocolate, and we walk all the way back.
I love that long silver beach with its squeaky sand, sparkling with mica. I do ballet, practicing the steps I’m learning at my lessons, by jeté-ing over mounds of washed-up kelp, keeping an eye out for sand dollars. If the tide’s low, I hunt over the cold, clear tide pools at the end of the beach, finding turban shells and hermit crabs and even an abalone one time. I like to feed bits of kelp to the anemones to watch them close up.
I shouldn’t have asked those questions.
I climb in the side door of the van, and slide it shut with a whoosh and a hard bang—it no longer closes easily. Crawling all the way back onto the bed, which smells musty and lonely, I lie down and look out the back window. I just said what I was wondering, which they used to tell me to do.
Pop drives to my grandparents’ house, and instead of taking me to Windansea for a picnic, he stops the van in the turnaround in front of the house without speaking. After I get out with my little backpack, he drives away.
The double front doors unlock with a key that hides under a fake rock next to the bougainvillea hedge. I tiptoe inside the house where I can’t get anything dirty and all the furniture’s white, and the first thing I do is take off my shoes.
I peek into my parents’ room. Mom is asleep with the bottle of her special medicine called Thorazine on the nightstand.
Mom’s gotten thin. Her tan has gone yellow, and her hair is tangled on the pillow. Looking at her makes that familiar, uncomfortable feelin
g of angry/sad roil in my belly, the feeling I have around her so often now. Bonny is at her preschool, Grandpa Jim is at work, and Gigi’s at her club, so I have no one to talk to.
My Uncle Steve is going to college, and he lives in the guesthouse behind the big one where we are staying. Uncle Steve’s an artist, and he lets me visit him at the studio that’s also his apartment. Downcast, I go to his place, breathing in the delicious smell of linseed oil and paint as I open the glass slider to his place.
Today he’s at his desk working on something, but he lets me dab about with a watercolor set. Steve’s a tall man like Pop and Grandpa Jim, but thinner built than my father and only twenty-two. He has the same green eyes, but his are set at a slant on broad cheekbones, catlike. I love Uncle Steve with an uncomplicated love, not like the mixed feelings my parents stir up in me because he’s so patient and tells me that I’m an artist, too.
Eventually, I hear my grandmother come home.
“Yoo-hoo!” She sings her usual returning cry. “I’m home!”
I scramble up from painting with the watercolors. “Can I come back later, Uncle Steve?”
“Sure, anytime.” Uncle Steve babysits Bonny and me sometimes. Once he let me stay up way too late and watch One Million Years B.C. with Raquel Welch. Raquel’s fur bikini has me eyeing my grandmother’s mink stole—in fact, I sneaked into her closet and played with it one time, but I haven’t dared drape it around myself like Raquel yet.
Bon’s enrolled in an all-day preschool, so I hardly see her until nighttime. Pop will probably bring her home when he returns from Windansea. Once again, I feel a stab of sad/angry. What did I do that was so bad? I just asked him what I really wanted to know.
Back in the main house, I hug my grandmother around her girdled waist, catching her as she’s moving by. “Hi, Gigi.”