Welding. No. Sales. No. Corrections officer. No, not at four foot ten. Then she found a quick six-month paralegal training program. It turned out to be a for-profit gimmick, but it’s how she met Don.
5
“HE LOOKS LIKE TROUBLE,” they said. Despite what my aunts told her, my mother married Don. My whole world was uprooted almost overnight. There I was packing my bags, saying goodbye to friends, nine years old and crushed. In actuality, I was saying goodbye to a part of myself that wouldn’t return for years. My first crush Christie was also moving, but she was going a bit farther, up to Canada. I don’t know if it made me feel better or worse that she too was going somewhere. She was one of those few people in this world when I looked into her eyes I felt comfortable like I’d known her a long, long time. I’ll never forget the sadness in her eyes as she stood on the sidewalk as my mother’s car pulled away for the last time.
When we moved to the new town I was devastated. I missed my friends and the quiet lake neighborhood. After I moved, the whole class wrote to me at my new address and wished me good luck. I wrote back and then a few close friends wrote back one last time. There was no Internet— Who knows how I might have kept in touch and how that communication might have comforted me or maybe even made it worse. But that was it. I planned to visit them, but that never happened. You learn to move on and forget. People I had grown up with through the lower grades would go on to middle and high school and become adults I would never know. People, like my first crush, Christie in Canada, gone. While I was only nine when we left, I wondered about her and what might have evolved out of our friendship and cute childhood crush. I wondered about others. Where are they now? Who are they now? But after a month, I realized that world was gone forever. Now I would say hello to a host of new problems.
The new apartment did not allow pets, so I had to give up my beloved cat, Max. No looking for a different apartment. This was it, even if it didn’t allow Jack’s pet. You would think they could at least let me keep Max as they were about to move me miles away to a new town to live with some strange man I barely knew. Making me sacrifice my pet was not the right foot to start out on. They took him away one day while I was out at my grandmother’s house. I came home and that was it.
$$$
Don tried. He really did in an odd way. In the beginning, he tried to buy me with tubs of Carvel vanilla ice cream. It surely was the way to an eight-year-old kid’s heart, but it stopped there. No connection— no spending time— just superficial weather talk. Even the ice cream stopped once the wedding plans were sealed.
One night six months into their relationship, they sat me down in a pizza place in some strange town we were visiting. They told me the news that they would be married in the winter, we’d be moving to the town in which we were eating pizza, and I would have a new brother in the spring. This was a fork in the road for me and I accepted it. What other choice did I have?
Don tried to be a family man. He brought us to Disney World and played the role. He went to work from nine to five and wore a suit; he tried to be a man. He was just twenty-three when he met my mother. He had just graduated from college a year before and met my mom in paralegal school. He aspired to be a lawyer someday but then life happened. He met my mother and had a baby and later bought a house. His responsibilities forced him to invest energy in his part-time car detailing business, which suddenly started to expand with lucrative car dealership accounts in the late 80s. I think sometimes this deviation from his plans ate away at him later on. He went from wanting to be a lawyer to someone who cleaned others’ cars.
He provided a small but comfortable apartment home with a washer and dryer, something my mother really wanted. No more stinking laundry mats in the middle of the night or on Sunday afternoons. But there was a cost. Her relationship with me was stretched and grew more tumultuous with time as she was pulled away with new baby responsibilities, and she continued to work nights as a waitress.
In the early days, Don would be home at night while my brother and I slept. This was his time to be alone and he liked to blast rock n’ roll, a trait I surely would have respected later on, though it wasn’t exactly healthy for a sleeping school age child and an infant. One night my ten-year-old head awoke to the booming music of The Hooters “All You Zombies” and in my dazed half sleep I screamed like an old man for the racket to stop. It stopped and just like that I had effectively silenced Don’s night music forever. I don’t know why I reacted that way because I loved music. For years my mother listened to records during the day and exposed me to great music by Elton John, The Rolling Stones, and others. I loved music. Maybe I was rattled by the loud music at night or maybe it had more to do with my resentment and competition with a man who took my old life away from me.
I think he felt guilty for some time after, but later became rebellious and in an odd manner took on the persona of a kid himself. I was the adult telling him to turn his music down. Something changed in Don around this time. It was as if the silencing of his music one night stunted his adulthood and regressed him straight back into his teenage years. He was just twenty-four years old in a world I couldn’t imagine being able to handle at that age.
To begin with, he was a different kind of guy— more interested in politics than sports. His voice was softer and his skin seemed years younger. His floppy light brown hair and scrawny legs didn’t help his unfatherly appearance. People easily mistook him as my older brother. I guess he tried to do what he could for his image. One way of compensating for his look was driving brand new cars. His choice was a Cadillac— an old fogey kind of show-off car, but nevertheless luxurious. Every other year he upgraded and traded in the car for a new one with a different color. Some guys do that with girlfriends, but he only had one ex-girlfriend we knew of. She even came around once to visit. My mother threw her out and told her to never come back. Mom told me the woman was trying to win him back for some reason, even though she had been the one who supposedly dumped him. She said the lady had been abusive.
Cars were his passion. So it made sense that he made money doing something with cars. He was always polishing his own cars and wiping off smudges. It was a whole project every time we used his car. Afterward, he’d go through the seats adjusting seatbelt straps so they were straight, dusting off the seats with a rag, and checking the carpets for dirt. He would park his Cadillac across the street to keep it away from the neighbor’s cars. One year he had a white one, one year he had a black one, and then one year he had a maroon one.
One day the first of a string of vandalism events took place. They flattened the tires on the passenger side, which faced the shrubs. On a peek out my bedroom window I thought I had seen some motion around his car, and then later I saw some kids running away, but I naively ignored it and continued with the school project I was working on. The next time it was scratches, then a busted mirror, then a stolen hood ornament, then a bent antenna. You just didn’t park a car like that in our neighborhood, but he kept at it. The Cadillacs were vandalized over and over by street punks with nothing better to do than randomly destroy other people’s property— something I never took part in my punkish years. Flat tires, spray paint, key scratches, none of that was fun. I didn’t care to destroy someone else’s property. My philosophy was don’t bother anyone; after all, I didn’t want to be bothered myself. Don finally gave up the Cadillacs for a real investment as he called it, a Bentley. But now he would really have to keep an eye out for the punks.
6
UNLIKE THE GENTLENESS of my old friends in the old town, it seemed like the kids in the new town were rash and rough. Take the worst kid in my old town and put him on steroids and multiply him by two. The teachers weren’t so gentle either. Everything was crazier. The new school held air raid drills where a loud siren would go off and we were led out to the hallway and instructed to tuck our heads inside our knees facedown against the wall where apparently we would die more peacefully. Had my old school really ill prepared me for the nuclear attack in the final years of the Cold War by not conducting any of these drills? The new school seemed so
