“Damn it, Jes,” she said, letting go. I spun off across the lawn. “Stop.”
“Catch me,” I said and ran. I could hear Carol right behind me.
She chased me through the Mizes’ backyard, setting their collie, Arrow, barking, through the Barnses’ yard. Mr. Barns spent every evening after work and every weekend perfecting his lawn, which was as flat as a green on a golf course. His damp grass squeaked under our bare feet, and I caught a glimpse of Mr. Barns standing at his bedroom window, his chest naked and hairy. Carol chased me through all the yards and onto the sand hill. The sand warmed my toes as they grabbed hold. I went on all fours, scrambling up the hill, sending waves of sand behind me into Carol’s face.
Then we were on top. I stood and Carol stood beside me, both of us too out of breath to speak. In the moonlight, the sand was so white it looked like snow, like this was not Florida at all. All I could see of the houses below were their white gravel roofs, blending so well in the moonlight with the empty white sand that the houses themselves disappeared. Only the black roads were left, like suddenly we did live in Satellite City. I took Carol’s hand, and this time she didn’t pull away. Without a word, we ran down the slope, waiting until the last instant to push off as hard as we could in a final leap. “Ge-ron-i-mo-oh,” Carol said, yodeling the last syllable. Then we landed, sliding, our feet digging into the sand, sand slipping cool up our pajama legs, our backs.
When we stood up and the sand poured out, something fell out of my pants leg and clinked on the road. “What was that?” she said. I bent down and picked up a piece of a Coke bottle, worn smooth by the sand. I held it out for her to touch. “There was glass in that sand?” she said, like she couldn’t believe it.
“It isn’t going to hurt you,” I said. “Look, the edges are all smooth.”
She wasn’t listening. She kept shaking her head. “You made us run barefoot over broken glass?” I shrugged.
Carol sneezed.
So to me it seemed like Carol’s fault two days later when I came sliding barefoot down the sand hill one last time before dinner, and there was a piece of freshly broken glass, brown glass, from a beer bottle maybe. I felt it cut into my right foot.
I stood up, afraid to look. “Is there blood?” I asked Marly. I held up my foot for her to see.
“There’s blood,” she said. I looked. Red was mixing with the white sand that clung to the bottom of my foot.
“Your mother is going to kill you,” Marly said. She brushed her sandy brown curls out of her face. “You said she told you not to run around barefoot.” I ran to get my sneakers from behind the bush where I had thrown them. They were almost new, still white. I’d had to beg for genuine Keds. I put my left shoe on, tied the laces. Then I threw the right one as far as I could. It turned heel-toe, heel-toe in the air, up over the fence that separated the sand hill from the causeway, and bounced twice on the asphalt shoulder. Marly looked at me like I was crazy.
“The glass went right through my shoe,” I said, practicing my lie. Marly shook her head. She didn’t think much of my chances.
“Your mother is still going to kill you,” she said.
I limped home, leaving small moon-shaped bloodstains on the driveway. I could hear Carol in the garage, taking a load of clothes out of the dryer. I opened the front door as quietly as I could so she wouldn’t hear me.
My mother was in the kitchen, having a drink before dinner. She was wearing a sleeveless top, shorts, and bedroom slippers. The dogs were sleeping under the kitchen table, snoring slightly. I leaned on the table and lifted up my foot. She took a sip of her bourbon. “Well, let’s go to the bathroom and take a look,” she said. I waited for her to ask me how I did it, but she just followed me, her drink in one hand. I limped extravagantly, hoping for sympathy. I heard Carol come in from the garage, start down the hall behind us, but my mother shut the bathroom door, closing Carol out.
I sat on the vanity beside the sink while my mother ran water over my foot. I closed my eyes. “I think you’ll live,” she said. I opened my eyes. The cut was nearly an inch long. The glass had sliced clean through my new hard callouses, the ones I had earned by going barefoot every day for a month. It looked bad, but when I bent closer I could see that the soft skin underneath was only broken at the top of the moon, where I had landed on the glass with my full weight. Already, the cut had almost stopped bleeding. My mother opened the cabinet under the sink and got out the round blue box of Morton’s salt she kept there for gargling away sore throats. “Lift up your foot.” She filled the sink with warm salt water. “Okay, put it back.” I did as she said. The salt stung. She sat on the edge of the tub drinking her bourbon and water and watching me. She didn’t say anything. I looked at myself in the mirror, which was slightly fogged with the steam from the sink. I certainly looked guilty.
“I was barefoot,” I said. She nodded. “I wasn’t wearing my shoes.”
“Obviously not,” she said. She didn’t seem upset. I thought of my nearly new sneaker lying on the side of the highway. Maybe if Marly held the barbed wire apart, I could crawl through the fence and retrieve it. I decided not to tell my mother about my shoe just yet. Then she smiled at me, and I felt a question coming.
“Do you know what milkweed is?” she asked. I shook my head, confused. “It’s a plant with hollow stems like bamboo”—she formed an O with her forefinger and thumb—“or a bunch of soda straws.” She touched a hand to her right knee, and I saw she had a scar there, an old one, a round white lump. “I fell once and a piece of milkweed went in right here,” she said. “I didn’t tell anybody, and it got infected. My knee swelled up as big as a cow’s. That was before antibiotics. I’m lucky I didn’t get blood poisoning and die.” My mother rubbed her finger across the raised scar. “My father carried me everywhere for a month. He wouldn’t let me walk, wouldn’t let my feet so much as touch the floor.”
I didn’t say anything. I just sat there. I was waiting for the point, for this story to become a lesson—that there were dangerous plants, that parents knew best. My mother just shrugged. There wasn’t any point. It was just a story. She was talking to me like we were the same age, like she wasn’t my mother at all. Maybe this was the way she talked to Carol when they played cards, why Carol knew the things she knew.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
My mother took another sip of her bourbon and looked at me, puzzled. “For what?”
“For going barefoot when you told me not to.” My mother still didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. She shook her head. Just then Carol sneezed. She was in the hall, right outside the bathroom door.
Then I understood. My mother hadn’t said anything to Carol about my going barefoot. It was Carol, Carol who worried about my getting hurt, my mother’s being unhappy, my father’s feeling left out.
“You can take your foot out now,” my mother said. “It’s soaked long enough.” I lifted my foot and looked at the cut, the edges now white and soft.
“Carol’s going to kill me,” I said. My mother nodded, as if now we both understood. She handed me a towel, and we sat there a minute more, like we were kids hiding out. Then she opened the bathroom door and let Carol in.
6
When I was growing up, my sister and I used to joke that, for all we knew, our father could be a Russian spy. Sure, he said he’d been born in Idaho and grew up in nearby Spokane, Washington, where he once had a mother and a father and still had two sisters, but we’d never met so much as a cousin. Once, when we still lived in D.C., one of his sisters sent me a pair of gloves for Christmas, gloves too large even for my mother. The card was signed Your Aunt Tad. That didn’t prove a thing, I said to Carol. Anybody could have sent them.
My father had been born in Rathdrum, Idaho, on January 4, 1914. He always told us the place had become a ghost town, but apparently it was merely a near-death experience, because I have been to Rathdrum, and it still exists. His father was a successful businessman. We used to have a picture of him
posed in a general store he owned in nearby Spirit Lake, Idaho. Maybe Carol still has it. She did send me the picture of my father as a baby on his father’s lap. When I was little, this picture used to confuse me since my father is wearing a long, white dress, but my mother explained that was what babies, boy or girl, wore then. In this picture, my grandfather is handsome, obviously blond even in a black-and-white photograph. But I can’t say he looks much like my father or like my sister or me.
The picture my sister didn’t send of my father’s father in his store makes a pair with a picture of my father’s mother teaching school in Idaho, eight barefoot children posed in front of her, four of them with the same last name. Somehow my father’s parents met. Somehow they married and had two daughters and then a son, my father. When he was just a boy, his parents divorced. I don’t know if they were living in Spokane when this happened or if his mother moved there with her children after the divorce. Even as a child, I sensed this was not a subject my father wanted to discuss, though I always wanted to ask why his parents got divorced.
After my father died, I was struck by regret: Why hadn’t I asked? Now I know that whatever he might have told me would have been, at best, only a part of the truth, the part a boy could have known or guessed about. Probably he died still wondering why his parents couldn’t stay together.
The result was that my father was raised by women, his mother and two sisters. In spite of this, he told only one story about his mother. He said that when he was a little boy, his mother dressed him in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits and fussed over his long blond curls, which she would not allow to be cut. One day, he took a pair of scissors and whacked them off himself. Then, he said, she had to take him to the barber shop for a real haircut. In another picture, he is eight or ten, with the short blond hair he earned the hard way with his scissors. Already, he has the beginnings of what he jokingly called his fine Anglo-Saxon nose, though in truth it was the kind of nose that made waiters in Miami bring him matzo balls in his chicken soup. It was his most distinctive feature, the sort of nose that only shows its true nature after adolescence, as my sister soon found out. In this picture, he looks so much like Carol at the same age, they could be the same person.
Maybe that’s why every picture of my father brings out in me a feeling of fierce protectiveness. He has kind eyes, a slight smile, and gazes bravely straight out of the picture as if nothing he can think of scares him. Something in me wants to tell him to duck, to close his eyes, to spare him what is coming. By most objective measurements, he had an easy, even luxurious childhood. Listening to him talk about growing up, it was hard to believe my parents had been born in the same century, let alone the same decade. My mother told stories of watching freight cars full of destitute men roll by, about her mother leaving food on the back steps for them. My father, who went to Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, told stories of taking fencing lessons, of swimming in an indoor pool, of French and Latin classes.
Even his adventures, his perils, were well organized. He was an Eagle Scout, a boy who earned merit badges in archery, knots, fishing, hiking, swimming, and cross-country skiing. When another kid broke his leg on a winter camping trip, my father got a special commendation for hauling him to warmth and safety on a sled built from tree limbs. In his 1932 high school yearbook there are pictures of 187 graduating seniors, smooth-faced young men with their hair parted neatly in the middle, wide-eyed young women whose hair clings to their heads in tight and careful waves.
Underneath each picture is what course the student followed: Scientific, General, Commercial, Home Ec, Manual Arts. My father was in the Classical Course. For students who were going on to college, the yearbook also lists what school they were planning to attend. The most popular choice was the University of Washington, but my father was headed for West Point, a fact almost all the inscriptions mention. Here’s to the future commander; a friend wrote. Another: To the General, long may he wave. And my favorite: Dear Eddie, when you’re shooting craps with the other low lifers in the army, remember your old pal, Art.
My father was supposed to have gone to Stanford, but his father had been hit hard by the stock market crash and the Depression. I still have a folder filled with beautifully engraved, completely useless mining stock certificates. We used to have a trunk full. At some point in my father’s bachelor days, he said, he’d papered a bathroom with them. West Point was not only free, they paid you just to be there. He said he made more his first year as a cadet than a teacher earned at his high school in Spokane.
As far as I can tell, my father left for West Point at eighteen and never went home again. He was an unlikely recruit, at five foot six barely tall enough to be admitted, though he had broad, strong shoulders. He was on the swim team, which he loved, until he got a sinus infection that turned into bronchitis, then pneumonia, which, in those days before sulfa drugs or penicillin, almost killed him. In spite of being from the West, he hated horses and riding, something still mandatory at the academy, where the glory days of mounted cavalry had not entirely faded. The horse he was assigned knew my father wasn’t a good rider and developed a trick of shaking his head violently when my father stood next to him in formation. In four years, the horse broke my father’s nose eight times. It was broken twice more, once while boxing, once in a game of football. His already large nose developed a quite distinctive hump. During a routine checkup a month or so after the tenth break, the academy’s doctor suggested that he could fix my father’s nose, but to do that, he explained, he would have to break it yet again. “Wait a week,” my father told him. “Chances are it’ll be broken by then.” But he never broke his nose again, and so it stayed quite crooked.
In 1936 my father graduated from West Point. He always said that after West Point, war was easy. In his senior picture, the photographer took the liberty of touching up his nose, and in the West Point annual for that year, The Howitzer, it looks straight as any ruler. Under his picture, a joking caption reads: The Northwest grows tall trees, but not so our El Toro. (His nickname was the Bull, for stubbornness or strength or some other, less printable attribute. Carol and I could never get him to say.) The only other picture of my father in The Howitzer was a snapshot taken when the cadets were away learning how to fly. This was in the days of the Army Air Corps, before there was a separate air force, and so flying was part of every cadet’s training. The caption for this picture is Fogged In, and it shows two cadets, still oversize boys, slumped on a sofa sleeping. Behind them, my father is curled in a chair, reading. His head is circled in blue ink, and a note off to the side reads simply Me.
He graduated into a tiny peacetime army. The generals were aging leftovers from the last war, and the junior officers mostly boys my father’s age commanding companies in which many sergeants and enlisted men were old enough to be their fathers or even grandfathers. The only stories he told about life in the army were from those days before World War II. His first command was a company of white matched mules used to pull artillery in the post parades. No matter how he tried to hide them during war games, they were always the first unit captured. Mud, brush, nothing could keep the commander on the other side from picking up his binoculars and saying, “There’s that second lieutenant and his damn white mules. Go get ’em.”
He got posted to the Panama Canal zone in 1938, and here his stories ran to barracks humor, like his tale of having put an iguana down some colonel’s latrine. Naturally, the lizard tried to escape, only to find its way blocked by some naked section of the colonel. In the box of pictures Carol sent, I’m surprised to find a tiny square snapshot of my father I have never seen. He is standing on a hill, above some tent camp cut into the jungle. He is smiling his usual warm smile, looking gently friendly, a little bit amused. He is dressed in wrinkled khakis and looks tanned and blond, the humidity making his short-cropped hair uncharacteristically curly. Next to him stands an older sergeant who, though my father outranks him and is probably his commanding officer, stands a good head taller.
Then came Pearl Harbor. My father was a first lieutenant on leave in New York City when he heard the news. He jumped into a cab in Central Park, but the cabby was so upset when my father told him the news, he hit a tree, sending my father headfirst through the windshield. He was taken unconscious to the nearest hospital. He was dressed in civilian clothes when he was admitted, and waking up four days later, he learned that a world war had started without him. The army, not knowing where he was, had declared him AWOL. He spent the war in the Pacific, where the fighting, I know from movies and history books, proceeded from island to bloody island. He never spoke about it. He got a Bronze Star. He kept it in his sock drawer with his cuff links. He also had a box full of certificates he never bothered to turn in for battle medals.
Sometime before he shipped out for the Pacific, he married for the first time. Her name was Fern, and by the time he came back, he had a two-year-old daughter, my half sister Bobbie. The marriage didn’t last. Once I did get up enough courage to ask my father why, and all he said was that Fern hadn’t liked being alone with Bobbie for the duration. He said, “She thought she’d had a harder time of it than I had.” He shrugged. “Maybe she had.” When I was little and we were still living in D.C., Fern and her new husband sometimes dropped off Bobbie, who was a teenager by then, at our house for visits. They never came inside, just pulled up at the curb long enough to let Bobbie climb out, clutching her Teen Princess overnight case.
From these visits, I drew certain lessons about life, though when I applied them, they didn’t always fit as well as I hoped. We didn’t go to church, so when Christmas rolled around I was always puzzled by all the stories about God, Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus. Joseph was Mary’s husband, but Jesus was the son of God. I decided that, like my father, Mary had gotten a divorce. In my version, God was her first husband, Joseph her second. Jesus lived with his mother and stepfather, but God wasn’t happy with the custody arrangements. No wonder the family had to flee to Egypt. Even I knew that God wasn’t somebody you wanted to make angry.
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