Freckled

by T W Neal

  She’s always seemed more like an aunt than a grandma, her attention on her new family and her affection toward us, indifferent. Tall at five eleven, Stella Fenenga Natale has light blue eyes under ruddy, untrimmed brows and a prow of a nose, making her striking rather than beautiful. Her strawberry blonde hair, once the exact shade as that of her youngest daughter Nancy and myself, is ribboned with white through a thick braid hanging down the back of her embroidered turquoise smock. Mexican amulets tangle in a mass across her breast, and she’s wearing linen pants and sturdy leather sandals.

  Outspoken, educated at Berkeley, liberal, and fluent in three languages, Maga couldn’t be more different than my Chanel-clad grandma, Gigi—yet I recognize a similarity in their steely wills.

  Maga and Egidio seem to have had as little time to prepare for us as we have had to pack because when we get to their three-bedroom ranch house in the foothills of Santa Barbara, we’re not sure where to put our stuff or where we should sleep. There’s an awkward period of milling around while Patricia closes her door, the Bee Gees thumping, and Nancy shows me her Barbie collection and Breyer horses.

  The house is stuffed to the windowsills with the antiques Maga sells at her little shop, Yesterday, downtown, and we move some of the clutter aside to unfold the couch in the living room for Mom, Bonny and Anita. I sleep on a pallet in Nancy’s room.

  My first order of business the next day is to make a “fort” where I can withdraw to be by myself. I set up my hideout in the canyon under the deck. Using an old carpet remnant, I create a little bedroom for myself amid musty dead grass and old beer cans, slots of brilliant California sunlight streaking my humble domain through the boards of the deck. I move all of my favorite things out there: the few plastic Breyer horses I brought, my journal, and my art supplies.

  I miss my animals more than anything. Naomi went back to her real owners, and Pop is still trying to find a home for Sarah.

  “Watch out for snakes and black widows under there,” Patricia says. She’s a sophisticated fourteen and looks the most like Egidio: tall with a high forehead, square jaw, and flowing mane of chocolate-brown hair. She has a poster of Parker Stevenson from the Hardy Boys on her wall and spends a lot of time in the bathroom with a curling iron.

  Nancy looks like a younger version of Maga: long-legged, blue-eyed, with a thick riot of strawberry blonde hair and the same proud nose.

  Our hair color bonds us, and it’s a good thing. I need a friend in this place. Only a year older than I am, Nancy’s much more of a teenager than me, but she lets me lie on her bed and listen to the radio. We love the Weekly Countdown Top Forty and watching MASH.

  We arrive just before Spring Break when no school is in session, so Bonny and I lie around in the living room, glutting ourselves with Nancy and Patricia on food and TV. My half-aunts feel a whole lot like cousins I’m just getting to know.

  Mom is too broke to buy expensive health food, and too distracted by trying to find a place to live and some way to support us, to keep Bonny and me from ravaging Maga’s fridge. We eat and eat. The free bananas, coconut, and papayas we ate so much of from the Estate’s trees are nonexistent, as are the abundant Swiss chard, won bok, lettuce, and Chinese pea pods from Mom’s huge garden. Instead, there’s a plethora of junk food in the house that we binge on without restraint. Cookies, ice cream, gallon jugs of whole milk, whole boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese, and packages of hot dogs and frozen French fries are all inhaled. We lie around eating and watching reruns of I Dream of Jeannie and Gilligan’s Island as we revel in having television for the first time.

  Pretty soon, I can’t fit into any of the clothes I brought—not that they were right for the Mainland anyway—and I have to wedge my plump thighs into Nancy’s too-long hand-me-downs. I’m chubby for the first time in my life, and my body, sprouting breasts and tummy rolls simultaneously, feels as foreign to me as everything else.

  I have hardly been doing my homeschool curriculum in the last six months since Mom and Pop stopped paying attention, and I haven’t actually been attending school in over a year. Maga insists that we to go to school, so Bonny is enrolled in Cold Spring Elementary in fourth grade, and I get on the bus with my two aunts and head off to Santa Barbara Junior High where I’m in seventh, Nancy in eighth and Patricia in ninth.

  I climb aboard the echoing yellow bus where it picks us up, down the steep hill of Westmont Road, and around a couple of bends in Sycamore Canyon Road. It smells of rubber, foot odor, and the Cheetos some ninth graders are eating. Social distribution seems to be by grade from front to back, and Patricia and Nancy suddenly pretend they don’t know me and walk to the back of the bus, sitting down with their friends.

  I scan for an empty seat with someone who doesn’t look scary, and slide in to sit next to a pudgy girl with dark hair hanging over her face, arranged to hide a pair of glasses that look like my last pair from Welfare. She has a book open on her lap, and my heart gives a leap of hope—maybe she needs a friend. “Hi.”

  She looks up long enough to see that I’m in as bad a shape as she is looks-wise. Her eyes are brown and intelligent. “Hi.”

  “What’s that you’re reading?”

  “The Black Stallion Returns.”

  “Oh, I love that one.” I bounce a little with enthusiasm. “What do you think of the Red? I don’t like him as much as The Black, even though I know I’m supposed to.”

  We spend the drive to school discussing Black Stallion arcana. My new friend’s name is Laurie, and she lives a few blocks away on Sycamore Canyon Road. I’m hugely relieved. I only need one friend to survive, but I need at least one, and my faithful Tita is far away now.

  Nancy reappears beside me as the bus disgorges us in front of a building the size of a city block with that California stucco-and-red-tile look. “Mom said to take you to the office to pick up your schedule.” She’s talking about her mom, not mine. My mom disappeared that morning with Bonny and Anita to get Bonny registered at nearby Cold Spring Elementary.

  Nancy leads me down echoing halls bustling with people, many of them brown, but not the brown I’m used to. At the office, they print out my schedule. Nancy leads me at a run to my first class.

  “See you at lunch?” I ask.

  The scrunch of her nose tells me that Nancy, while feeling sorry for me, has her own well-established world. “We have separate lunch times. Sorry.”

  I turn reluctantly and step into the Algebra class.

  School is something I’ve always been good at, so even though I’m completely intimidated, I’m excited too. I set my Santa Barbara Junior High Condors student folder, schedule, and map down on an empty desk and go boldly up to the front of the room to ask for a book.

  The teacher, an older Hispanic man with mutton-chop whiskers, hands me a book so battered it’s held together with duct tape. Inside, double rows of students’ names are followed by the year. The row of names goes back to well before I was born—but I guess algebra doesn’t change much.

  I ask for a few sheets of paper and a pencil, and return to my desk. I write my name in the book below the others: Toby Wilson, 1977.

  Writing my name feels like making a statement: I am here, now.

  The last time I did any math at all was in fifth grade, so I’m worse than way behind. I labor through the class, moving up to sit close to the front so my glasses work well enough to see the board, diligently copying everything, hoping to learn by osmosis.

  I don’t care how I look to others. I know I won’t be popular. I just want to get back to learning, catch up, and get A’s again—and as a bonus, not have anyone call me Haole Crap.

  With that priority, I make quick progress catching up academically but spend miserable days sitting alone in the cafeteria with my homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread.

  On my way to my usual spot in the corner of the caf with the loners and losers, I pass the Chicana girls at their table. These exotic creatures are totally different from the Hawaiian, Japanese, mix
ed, and haole girl cliques I’m marginally familiar with. The girls’ lips are glossy, their eyelids flash jewel-like color, and they wear bright, tight, low-cut clothing. They seem to despise me on sight as I skulk about in my thrift-store jeans, untrimmed hair askew and latest pair of Welfare glasses hiding my rabbity eyes. I never go into the bathrooms because they gather there like a flock of brilliant parakeets, smoking cigarettes and chattering mockingly in Spanish, freezing my bladder too much to pee. “Stay away from them,” Nancy warns me. “They can really mess you up.”

  As I pass one day, balancing an open library book I’m reading on top of my humble lunch bag, I accidentally knock into one of the Chicana girls with my elbow. The chocolate cafeteria shake she’s holding splashes down her breasts and onto her white Ditto jeans in a spectacular spill. Chiefess among the Chicanas; the girl is gorgeous—a fall of perfect black curls touches her tiny waist, and big gold hoop earrings brush the shoulders of her low-cut top. That we are even in the same species is hard to believe.

  She jumps up and shrieks. “Madre de Dios! Fucking gringa puta!”

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” I stammer, backing away, the library book clutched to my chest.

  “Stupid cow! I’m going to kill you!” She yells more in Spanish that I’m happy not to understand. “Get her!” She yells to her minions, and five Chicanas surge up from the table to do her bidding.

  I drop the book and my pitiful bag lunch and make a dash for the cafeteria door. The girls, hampered by getting up from the table and stack-heeled strappy shoes, scramble after me, screaming like harpies. I punch through the doors, fleeing past an open-mouthed teacher, and run down the hall full tilt in my old Adidas.

  I may be chubby now, but I’ve always been fast on my feet. I hurtle down the long, echoing hallway and am already banging out into the quad through the double doors by the time the girls, still screaming terrible things, make it out of the caf. Once in the quad, I look around for somewhere to hide, but there’s nowhere in the expanse of asphalt peppered by knots of kids, everyone turning to look at my noisy exit in disdain. I bolt for a lone pine tree on top of a little grassy knoll, a spot not occupied by a clique. Worst-case scenario, I can climb the tree—that method’s worked for me before. Reaching the tree, I hunker down and peek back around it.

  The girls spill out into the quad, looking around, stabbing long colored fingernails into the air as they swear vengeance in Spanish. None of the groups of haoles and blacks scattered over the area turn me in, thank God, and finally the Chicanas retreat back to their turf.

  A pudgy girl in a hoodie is sitting alone on the other side of the knoll. She pushes the hoodie back to reveal a familiar face. “Toby. What are you doing up here?”

  It’s Laurie, the girl from the bus, and I drop down beside her. We still ride together, but then part ways and don’t share any classes. This is the first time I’ve seen her during the school day. “Oh, thank God it’s you. Do you want to meet me here at lunch from now on? I can’t ever go in the caf again.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes, made tiny by the thickness of her glasses, blink happily at me and her acne-riddled skin flushes. “What happened?”

  I tell her my tale of woe, and she shares half her lunch with me since mine’s abandoned with the book in the cafeteria.

  The knoll is a spot none of the popular kids like due to a long uphill trek and the tree’s poky, slippery needles. Safe from prying eyes, Laurie and I hide out there, reading paperbacks and playing with a pair of plastic horses she smuggles in her backpack.

  Laurie doesn’t live far from Maga’s, so I start getting off the bus at her house to hang out after school. Each day we trek up the steep driveway to her square modern home, dig the key out from under the mat, and let ourselves in.

  The house smells like cigarettes, and the ceiling is sprayed with white sparkle-flecked drywall. A lot of mirrored tile with gold veins in it and beige shag carpet dominate the rest of the place, except for Laurie’s room, which is pink and decorated for a much younger child. Laurie’s mom and stepdad both work, so we make ourselves white bread bologna sandwiches and settle in to wrangle her herd of Breyer horses and play Parcheesi.

  I leave for Maga’s as soon as her stepfather arrives. He’s a bearlike suit-clad man with a gunshot voice who lights a cig and pours a huge Scotch the minute he gets home, yelling things like, “So, you two chubsters eat our whole fridge yet?”

  His loudness and mean comments make me cringe, and I feel so bad for Laurie, who’s scared of him. My dad was mean too, but in a different way, and I think it might have been easier because sometimes he was nice.

  Pop is “bottoming out,” Mom calls it, in the new vocabulary she’s picking up going to a group for spouses of alcoholics. He was supposed to keep our scene going at the Estate; instead, he’s quit working and is drinking and surfing all day, living in the Rambler and a tent at night. He gave my beloved goat Sarah to a family who tied her out in their backyard—where she was attacked by their dog and killed within a week.

  I don’t cry over Sarah like I did over Keiki. In fact, I can’t even think about what happened to her—my mind just flits over it. It’s simply too awful for me to take in. I don’t have room for big emotions, for missing our life on Kauai. I’m too busy trying to get through each day.

  Someday, I’ll have a wonderful family of my own, a house that I own and never have to keep moving from, and a great big yard and garden and room for all the goats and horses and beautiful things I could ever want. I’m smart. I can get all that if I work hard. I just have to keep doing good in school, and get myself to college, and then get a good job. I won’t live like this when I grow up—no. Not ever again.

  These are the words I write in my journal in my little cave under the deck. This is my manifesto.

  Mom sits us down in the living room on the couch where she, Bonny, and Anita are still sleeping each night. “I’m not getting back together with Pop,” Mom says. “Not until and unless he gets his shit together.”

  Churning, guilty-bad feelings make my tummy hurt when I hear this. “We should have stayed. Taken care of him.”

  “No, Toby. That’s co-dependent thinking. It’s not your job to take care of your dad—he’s supposed to take care of you.” Mom has patches of red in her cheeks; she’s really enthused about this twelve-step program, and this kind of talk is totally new. “You saying that just confirms how much you need to go to the group for children of alcoholics.”

  I don’t want to go, of course. It’s hard to wrap my head around learning that Pop is an alcoholic—his drinking and smoking was so much a part of our lives, just there like gravity. Now it’s supposed to be something we object to and need to understand? And what about Mom’s drinking and smoking and taking drugs? Really, I just wish we could go back to happier times. Wish I could get a time machine and go back to that summer with the Josephson boys on top of the trees . . .

  Unexpectedly, Nancy is interested in finding out what the teen group is about, and that makes my excruciating embarrassment a little easier to bear. The four of us, leaving Anita home with Maga, Egidio, and Patricia, borrow the Vista Cruiser and drive to a run-down church whose basement hosts the meetings.

  Mom leads us into the building, and it feels as foreign and nerve-wracking as when we visited the various cults on Kauai. I’ve already bitten my nails down to bleeding nubs so there’s not much I can do with my hands as Mom points me, Bonny, and Nancy at the door of our meeting and heads off for her own.

  The room smells as if the dirt from all the feet of everyone who ever attended the church above has sifted down through the floorboards and embedded itself in the nap of the burnt-orange carpet we sit on in a cross-legged circle. I huddle in Nancy’s shadow as the adult leader leads us in a chanting prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  Kids around our age sit cross-legged, folded in on themselves, or sprawled
confidently. Expressions range from wary to blank to bored, and there are other girls with chewed nails hiding behind bangs. My weirdness definitely blends in, and I begin to relax. We go around the circle, encouraged to “share our experience, strength, and hope” with each other.

  I’m surprised at how forthcoming the girl next to me is, describing a home where she has to wake up a passed-out mom and cook and clean for her siblings after school. A boy with a dad who used to beat him tells us some of the lies he’s used to explain his injuries, and I find myself fingering the L-shaped scar on my forehead.

  There are other kids with scars here, some much worse than mine—and John, the handsome blond boy I’ve been crushing on in gym class is also at the meeting, though he refuses to talk about home. At the end, he says “hi,” to me.

  Sold. I’m going to those meetings every week.

  After going to a few more of her own meetings, Mom tells us that she’s realized she’s an alcoholic and drug abuser too, but that she’s a “periodic,” not a daily user like Pop.

  This isn’t the revelation she thinks it will be. Mom has always seemed to need something— be it a drink, a toke, or the surf—to deal with life. Her moods and appetites are too big for her to contain or manage. Now, without the curbing effects of substances, she is volatile but clear-eyed and energetic. The sober Mom I’m getting to know in Santa Barbara is a different woman than the one from Kauai.

  Struggling to find work without any childcare for Anita during the day, Mom tells Bonny and me that she asked for financial help from Gigi and Grandpa Jim. “Jim told me, ‘welfare is for people in your situation,’ she says, white-faced with rage. “They offered to help us ‘get on our feet’ if I went back to your dad.” Clearly, my grandparents aren’t in favor of our parents’ breakup. Cash and checks that Gigi gives to Bonny and me in cards and letters, are Returned to Sender by Mom.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Moving and Motorcycle Guys