Freckled

by T W Neal

  The food is as I suspected: sugar, meat, and artificial-free. I crave sugar the first few days but come to appreciate the sweetness of beet salad and the fluffiness of couscous, though I’m never going to be a fan of lentils. We’re still eating them with every meal at home because The End of the World didn’t happen, and they were getting moldy.

  Yoga class is taxing, even for someone my age. We hold the poses until muscles are trembling, and I do my first headstands and splits. It feels good to master my body, along with a measure of control over my mind and emotions.

  On our last day at camp, we tour Paramahansa Yogananda’s opulent former living quarters. I’m startled by the luxury and feel a little betrayed, as if finding out my favorite TV evangelist drove a Rolls—which Yogananda did, too.

  At the end of the tour, we form a line and head toward an altar that holds a pair of leather shoes set on orange velvet draping. “The prana of the Master is concentrated in his shoes,” our teacher tells us. “We kiss them to partake in his energy.”

  I shuffle forward with the rest of the kids, trying to tell myself I believe this—but I don’t. Shoes don’t have energy. They have foot odor, and germs, and kissing anyone’s shoes feels like slavery, not freedom.

  I finally get to the shoes.

  I really look at them. They’re leather slippers, arranged on an orange cloth with a few other mementoes: a lock of dark brown hair, a watch and pin, a fresh, plump marigold.

  I won’t kiss anybody’s shoes. It’s just not my nature. I’m too stubborn, stiff-necked, and proud, the Guru would say.

  I guess I need a few more turns on the wheel of karma.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Losses Hurt

  Me, Anita, and Huni the Horse

  Age: 12, The Estate, Hanalei, Kauai, 1977

  I want to go visit Keiki at his new family’s house in Moloa`a. The family had said I could, and in spite of having a leased horse and Nicole’s Huni to ride, I miss my fuzzy little palomino rascal-buddy. “Can we stop by their house on our way home from town next time we go?” I ask Mom one day.

  “Toby.” Mom gets serious, switching plump Anita to her other hip. “I didn’t know how to tell you this, but…Keiki died.”

  My face feels frozen, my eyes open too wide. “What?”

  “You know how he loves coconut.” Keiki’s favorite treat was a whole coconut, smacked in half with a pickaxe. He’d put his little muzzle into the open coconut half and chew it out with his big yellow teeth. “The dad broke open a coconut for him, and he ate a piece of the shell. He choked to death.”

  The horrible picture my overactive imagination creates makes me recoil. I want to vomit, can actually taste it in the back of my throat. Mom reaches out to hug me, her hazel eyes fogging, but I can’t stand to be touched. I’m gasping with pain, hyperventilating.

  I run to my room and grab my pillow, blanket, journal, and current library book, a four-inch-thick promise of mental escape called Dune, by Frank Herbert. I scramble through the fence and run across the rough, tussocky pasture barefoot, all the way to my tree fort. Up the hidden handholds I go, awkward with my burdens. Up on my platform in the swishing branches of the big ironwood tree, I make a nest and cry for my lost pony, face in the pillow and blanket over my head.

  I feel like I’m crying for everything I’ve ever lost and never had.

  I’m crying for the end of my childhood, for all the silly, lovable, naughty ponies in the world who have to die someday—because we all do. Everything good always ends.

  I cry until I’m hollowed out, great gouts of tears and snot soaking my pillow, my throat raw with howls of grief.

  I’ve never been a pretty crier when I really let go, and the best place for emotional storms is out in nature. I’m just another small wounded animal, briefly here, suffering, and soon forgotten. Nature can handle my storms, even if other people say I’m too intense, that I feel too much. Nature can take it all, even when I worry that my feelings are so strong that they’ll break me, and I’ll go crazy like Mom did.

  When I’m done crying, I sit up, close my eyes, and get into the lotus position. The chatter of mynahs, the funny beeping call of the Hawaiian coots in the turtle pond nearby, the wind in the branches of the ironwood tree, shushing, swishing—all these sounds soothe me. Flakes of sunlight fall though the branches onto me, and the breeze dries the tears off my hot face. Calm and emptiness fill me, and that’s a relief. I’ll stay out here all night, and fast without food to honor Keiki and all he meant to me.

  I open Dune and escape into a world of intrigue and giant sandworms.

  But like that other time I ran away grieving for a lost pet, mosquitoes and my empty stomach eventually drive me back to the house. Skulking into my room after dark, foraging for a snack in the rusty refrigerator, I’m ashamed of my weakness.

  Keiki deserves at least a full day of fasting to honor what he meant to me, but I can’t master my body or my emotions. Eating cold brown rice with a spoon from the leftover pot as I stand in the light emitted by the refrigerator, I worry that, along with ugliness, I’m seeded with crazy.

  Mom and Pop decide to celebrate their anniversary by taking a three-day hike along the Na Pali Coast to Kalalau, leaving me in charge of the house and my sisters. They’ve been fighting lately, angry whispered rumblings in their bedroom. Pop’s still hating his job as the groundskeeper. Mom’s still working up at the Big House, cleaning and watching the girls when Gaylord and Carol go out. They’re both feeling frazzled and overworked in spite of morning surfing.

  Mom tells me more than I want to know, as usual. “We haven’t had any really good sex since Anita was born, and we really need to reconnect.” She’s also worried about Pop’s drinking because I see her counting the beer bottles in the recycling box by the back steps. “You’re such a good babysitter, I’m sure it will be fine. We’ll have some people poking their heads in to check on you girls.”

  The three of us kids stand on the porch and wave goodbye as they drive off in the Rambler.

  The adults looking in on us consist of a hippie chick friend of Mom’s named Twig, a skinny high-strung woman who makes us nervous. Anita cries just looking at her. Surfer friends, Tom and Cheri Hamilton, who currently live in their van, are really nice—Tom has a rumbly voice that’s reassuring and I’ve never seen him anything but mellow, and Cheri is a strong, tall woman with long, ripply blonde hair and a practical manner. Both sets of friends drive up the first day, come into the house and see that we’re alive and have food in the fridge, and leave, saying, “Call us if you need anything.”

  Anita has a bout of diarrhea and fusses for hours at bedtime. She gets sicker and runs a fever. Halfway through the night I remember I’m still just a kid, but I don’t feel like one, walking her and heating her bottle of expressed breast milk, dunking and swishing her slime-coated cloth diaper in the toilet, and worrying that we’ll run out of clean diapers and have to call someone for a ride to the Laundromat to wash the hideous contents of the ammonia-reeking pail.

  I’m so exhausted from not sleeping and being stressed out that I think of calling Tom and Cheri, but they don’t have a phone; maybe they’ll stop by, maybe they won’t. Twig has one, but I can’t imagine how she’d be helpful. So, I assign Bonny and me shifts carrying and entertaining fussy Anita.

  Anita’s heavy as she rests her hot head on my shoulder. Her plume of white-blonde hair tickles my nose as she wriggles uncomfortably in my arms, and I know I don’t feel right to her. I’m too small. My shoulder is hard and bony, my chest flat, my arms stringy around her solid plumpness. Her green eyes are sunk in pouches of red from crying, and her little pink cowrie mouth is turned down.

  My imagination, always so powerful, is my enemy. Every time I set her down in her crib, I imagine she’s dead when I come back to check on her. I can see everything about it: her ashy, limp body lying there. How I try to do CPR and accidentally crush her ribs, like the health nurse at school told me can happen. I can feel the rubbery
touch of her dead lips as I try to blow life into her. The pain I felt when Keiki died would be nothing compared to the grief of losing Anita, and everyone would blame me for letting her die.

  I’m terrified, and yet calling 911 is out of the question unless Anita is in a coma or something. The ambulance will come, and it will cost a fortune, and The Man will be alerted. They might even put all three of us in a foster home for being left alone without a parent.

  I try everything to soothe Anita: a bath, which she usually loves but now shrieks at, taking her for a walk in her stroller, even dosing her with baby aspirin which finally gets her to sleep. That break means Bonny and I have time to wash and scrub the disgusting diapers in the kitchen sink, wringing them out by hand and hanging them out to dry on the clothesline outside, where sunshine and palm trees mock me.

  I’m never having kids. It’s just too scary when they get sick.

  Anita is feeling better by the time Mom and Pop get back late the next day. Their faces are lit with “reconnecting,” which I imagine consists of skinny-dipping and having sex while dropping acid or eating some of Doug’s honey-soaked magic mushrooms. Anita’s already reaching for Mom with her chubby hands as I hand her over. “We survived. Please don’t ever do that again.”

  “Yeah,” Bonny says. She has her hands on her hips. “Toby was so bossy! She is not the mom!” Her voice accuses Mom of leaving us too, and I’m glad of the support even though I’m the bad guy. Pop ignores us all and goes into the house.

  “It’s a mess in here,” he grumbles from inside. “Smells gross.” I tremble with rage, thinking of the mountain of diapers I washed, of the sleepless nights, of my fear and responsibility.

  “Didn’t Tom and Cheri and Twig help you?” Mom looks glossy and tan, smiling and happy. She’s not taking us seriously. She thinks it was okay to leave us, and I can tell by the gleam in her eye that she’s already planning her next escape.

  “No. There wasn’t anything they could do. Anita was really sick.”

  Mom doesn’t care how we feel.

  I know something new: for Mom and Pop, we kids don’t really exist as people with needs that matter. Other parents sacrifice to give their children education, lessons, opportunities. But not our parents. We’re there for them, not the other way around.

  I wonder why it took me so long to notice this.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Cup Incident

  Age: 11-12, The Estate, Hanalei, Kauai, 1977

  The afterglow of Mom and Pop’s Na Pali Coast hiking adventure doesn’t last long. Pop grumbles constantly about his twenty hours a week. He sits in his room after work every afternoon, playing guitar, sipping Primo beer, and smoking pakalolo. His angry depression is a black cloud that I can almost see and definitely feel. We all give him a wide berth and try to stay quiet because his temper explodes at random intervals into yelling, stomping, and door slamming.

  I join Mom in monitoring the beer bottles by the back door. He starts drinking at noon now. Mom tries to keep everything calm. She’s worried because he’s literally drinking our food budget away. I feel bad for her because the three of us kids are never quiet enough, and he snarls and stomps around the house before he leaves for the eternal mowing.

  Our world gets even smaller. Trips to town are fewer and fewer, and even trips to Hanalei. Adults stopping me and asking, “Why aren’t you in school?” has made me feel like there’s something wrong with what we’re doing, and Mom and Pop don’t want to draw attention to the fact that Bon and I aren’t attending. Between the bullying attack at hula and homeschooling causing comments, I stop roaming town on my bike.

  Homeschooling gets sketchier. Mom just hands me the Teacher Guide and says, “Follow the assignments.” We stop mailing our tests and bigger assignments to Calvert for grading. “Too expensive. We don’t need those extras,” Mom says.

  We have a very lean Christmas, with a tiny Norfolk pine in a bucket as a tree, and handmade ornaments. Gigi’s longed-for boxes don’t get to us in time to open, and presents under the tree are a plastic Pokey for me and a Gumby for Bonny, with walnuts and store-bought oranges in our stockings.

  “Christmas is so commercial, anyway,” Mom says, fixing corn bread for breakfast as a treat. “It should be about love.”

  I feel ashamed of my disappointment, and I can tell Bonny feels the same by our guilty glances at each other.

  Doug, our mushroom-selling neighbor, gives us our nicest presents: a horse care book, new hoof pick and hoof ointment for me, and a good quality pocketknife for Bonny. We are thrilled with these.

  We’re invited over to the Big House on Christmas afternoon for cookies and to play. Bonny and I goggle over the massive Norfolk pine our dad cut down and installed in the vast living room of the Big House for the family, dressed with colored lights and glass balls. We eat gingerbread cookies and watch the girls ride their shiny new Big Wheels all around the giant porches of the Big House, and wait for our turn to ride when they get tired of them.

  Standing there, picking the Red Hot eye off a gingerbread man Carol Wilcox baked, I realize we’re poor. Really poor, and we’re servants. It’s not a good feeling. It makes me want to hide from the world even more. Because we aren’t really poor—we’re here this way because Mom and Pop have chosen this life on Kauai. They could have had the “normal” life Gigi and Grandpa Jim tried to give them. But we’re here so they can live in Hanalei and surf every day, without thinking about how it feels to be standing in a doorway on Christmas Day, looking at plenty.

  Anger blooms in my heart. I do my yoga breathing and try to be present in the now, like Yogananda says. But all I feel is jealous of the abundance in front of me that I can’t have, and shame because I don’t want to feel that way. I want to be proud and throw the gingerbread man in the trash, but I am too hungry for the sugar and sweet of it. Shame and anger tie my stomach in a knot and I sneak off, climbing into my tree fort with the cookie and my book, where I escape into a reread of the Lord of the Rings.

  Books are my escape and comfort, a world I can disappear into whenever I want, where battles are epic and enemies are clear.

  My twelfth birthday’s in January, and as a birthday present, Aunty Jan, my mom’s youngest sister from her first family of four, pays for me to come visit her in Honolulu. She’s a single woman working for a big Oahu corporation, and she wears business suits and her hair is in a severe blunt cut, even in Hawaii. We’ve had a special connection since I was five, when Mom and Pop left me with her for a week when they took baby Bonny on a camping trip.

  Aunty Jan meets me in the open-air Interisland Terminal at the Honolulu Airport with its wafts of plumeria flowers and jet fuel. I’m so excited I’m almost hopping as she leads me to her little Honda Civic at the Honolulu Airport. Her zippy little car is the end-all of groovy.

  “You look like you could use a treat.” Aunty Jan has a female version of Grandpa Garth’s booming voice that makes me smile and a big laugh that tickles the air. She doesn’t agree with a lot of Mom’s health food opinions. She takes me to famous Napoleon’s Bakery, and we eat sugary treats and I drink my first cup of coffee, liberally laced with cream. I’m so hyper after that we take on Ala Moana Shopping Center, one of the biggest malls in the whole United States now that it’s 1976. The floors and floors of stores, from ritzy Liberty House at the top to the Chinese Market at the bottom, are completely overwhelming.

  Aunty Jan takes me to the Honolulu Zoo, exotic and smelly under the spreading banyans, the nearby Aquarium, and to the University of Hawaii Manoa. We drive over the breathtaking switchbacks of the Pali Highway to see Kaneohe again, and on the way back we stop at the top of Pali at a lookout, and lean into wind that’s so strong it holds us up.

  It’s a magical weekend, and I come home to Hanalei heady with the discovery of a wide world of wonders just an island away.

  Mom picks me up at Lihue Airport in the Rambler with Bonny.

  “Did you have fun?” Bonny’s face is bright, and I g
ive her thick blonde braid a tug.

  “I bought you presents,” I say by way of answer. Bonding over the three days we were left with Anita brought us close, and I feel guilty for having done something fun she didn’t get to share. Besides, Ala Moana Shopping Center is just too mind-blowing to put into words.

  Mom’s worry shows in folded-together lips and a frown that won’t go away. “You girls need to be quiet when we get home. Pop’s cutting back on his drinking, and he’s grumpy.”

  I subside into silence, feeling the newly expanded world I’d just glimpsed contracting around me again. At home, I take Bonny into my room and open my backpack to show her the presents Aunty Jan and I bought her. Mom takes Anita, who’s fussy again, outside for a walk.

  Pop barely greeted me upon our return from the airport, but now he comes to the door. He’s still wearing sweaty work clothes and the black mood is dense around him.

  “Bonny, you need to do the dishes.”

  “Just a minute.” Bonny’s back is to the door so she doesn’t see his thunderous expression. She’s opening a wrapped gift from Aunty Jan.

  “You better hurry,” I whisper as he disappears. She speeds up unwrapping the gift, but she’s distracted by the new Barbie she’s uncovering and trying to open the box.

  Pop’s at the door again. “I told you to do the dishes!” he roars.

  He reaches in with one long, tanned, muscular arm and grabs hold of Bonny’s braid. He gives a savage yank that hauls her right through the door and into the hall. Her hands come up to try and take the weight off her hair, grabbing onto his hand.