the drive sits a tiny car, a 1972 Datsun painted green, the precise colour of split pea soup.
My father has landed a job as a plumber at the local Air Force base—a position he is almost guaranteed never to lose. Military bases are full of sinks and toilets and drains. In his excitement on the way home, he saw the car and bought it with the money we had left.
“It looks like a peanut, Daddy.”
Dad claps his hands, “That’s it! That’s what we’ll call it, my baby’s peanut mobile.”
My mother simmers at the door as Dad snaps me into the bucket seat. We take off around the block, my hand clinging to the armrest, my head barely high enough to see out the window. My father smiles down to me and I scrunch my shoulders and smile back. The car zips down the road like a Tylenol capsule on wheels, bounding inches above the pavement; racing along with all the punch of a rip cord toy car.
I’m curled in my father’s lap for Saturday morning cartoons when he gives me the signal to follow. He silently trips the latch on the screen and pushes me out the door.
“Sandy,” he leans back over the threshold, “Me and Julie’s going out in the peanut mobile.”
I can hear her No! from the kitchen but we’re already gone; my father exaggerating a tiptoe in fast motion across the pavement while I plaster my hand over my mouth to keep from giggling out loud. He squeals out the drive.
“Just like the Keystone Cops!” he shouts.
“Yeah!”
There is a feeling of exhilaration to be with my father, to escape from the house and have it be just us. Forever bonded; me and my dad. We don’t even have to talk. We drive out of our middle class suburb and through tidy neighborhood streets with Monopoly houses and green lawns, the jitter of sprinklers rapid firing across wet grass. We drive into foreign streets with dirt lots by the buildings, where neon signs light Martini glasses with a bikini-clad girl dipping over the side in an illusion of bright lights. Tall, lithe dogs shoot across the road without looking; their big, boney skulls slung low on the prowl.
Dad is taking me for the first time to his favourite Chinese restaurant.
The parking lot is empty. He opens the front door and a brilliant slice of light cuts into the dark. The carpet is sticky under the soles of my white sandals. There are no other people and not even tables set. He lifts me to the black high back of a barstool that is one in a row lining a long bar.
“Be right back, Daddy’s gotta go potty.”
My father slips through a set of swinging red shutters that hinge in a naked doorway at the end of the bar. Hushed whispers float from behind the shutters and I see a pair of woman’s legs rise from sitting under the frame. Minutes tick by with only the occasional rustle—the clamour of a falling pan, a single thud against a wall, another wave of frenzied whispers—that lets me know my father is still back there.
A long mirror runs behind the bar. If I kneel on the stool, my head crests into reflection and my face emerges in the dim light. Over the door behind me, I can see in the mirror a red exit marquee, and to the left a barely lit bathroom sign emitting the low sick buzz of electricity.
The bell on the door tinkles, a wedge of light slashes across the carpet.
Where is my dad?
A man stands just inside the door, adjusting to the dark.
I watch him in the glass, frozen in place.
He squints his eyes and slowly makes out my face in the mirror. He bolts to the men’s room just as my father swings the red lacquered doors open.
“Daddy!”
A woman follows, dressed in pink satin.
“Hi, Baby. Can you say, Sawatdee Cup? That means ‘Hello, how are you’ in Taiwanese.”
The girl smiles and slips behind the bar. Her long black hair runs cool down her back. My dad gives the doorknob of my knee a honk honk. He orders us wonton soup and egg rolls with duck sauce.
Behind the bar, our waitress turns to give us our drinks. I glare at her.
She smiles.
My father winks.
He is jovial, relaxed, blowing on my wonton soup to cool it, giving me feathery tickles under my chin, making up for leaving his baby in a way only a dad can do. And in the flicker of a moment, the space between us closes and it’s once again a Saturday with just me and my dad.
That first summer in Phoenix was so hot you couldn’t touch your bare feet to the sidewalk past morning light. Our reasons for moving close to Grandma Madge were fading as Mom bickered with her over everything from whether a red bell pepper was called a “mango” to the boxes of floor-length dresses Grandma Madge kept in a big box marked “Church Bizarre”. She dragged them out from the spare bedroom and held them up against me. Floor-length frocks made of heavy velvet and scratchy gold lamé; high collars, dowdy sleeves, zippered backs. These were not the dresses on their way to the church bazaar, they were in fact rejects coming from it.
“Thanks Madge, that’s great, why don’t you just keep them for Julie until she’s big enough?”
“What a good idea, how old do you think she’ll need to be?”
“Twenty, Madge. Twenty.”
And Grandma Madge counts on her fingers, pondering aloud where she will store them for fifteen years.
In the beginning my grandmother would take me for day trips to fish at the lake but every car ride home ended in a fender bender with her behind the wheel. Privileges were reeled in to the local Encino Park where she could pedal me around the lake in the Swan boats. But even then Grandma Madge never missed a chance for ministry on the fly and she’d sweep right past the water in one of her to-the-ankle long-sleeved dresses looking for a gang of homeless youths, me in tow.
When she spotted a kid high as a kite with a bloody nose, she made a bee-line for him. The kid looked around, trapped. With nothing else to lose, he closed his eyes as Grandma Madge fished a Bible from her purse. Caught in the rapture of spirit, she began to weep; one woman in prayer, her bony hand bound to the wrist of the bleeding boy. And the Swan boats floated by as the kid sneezed and splattered blood on me from his broken nose while Grandma Madge tried to convert him to Christianity. It was soon decided that only my mother’s presence could assure my safety.
I have only one photo from these rare outings with Mom as chaperone. The three of us are leaving the mall, my grandmother with a purse as big as a bowling ball bag looped over the crook of her arm. We have walked out into the parking lot’s bright sun and Mom has whacked me on the head with her fist. As I stand heaving in a pastel jumper with knobbly knees and long blond hair, she roots through her purse for the camera and passes it to Grandma Madge. And there we are, a snapshot captured in time, me wiping away a tear and my mother’s arm around my shoulder, veneered smile sealed upon her face.
To her credit, I always remember Mom having a soft spot for animals and back then she’d take me to the slaughterhouses on the outskirts of Phoenix, where we’d buy up the little colts whose mothers had already had their throats slit. The babies would skit around the corral with wide-eyed fright, snorting through their nostrils, afraid to even let their hooves touch the ground. The feeling that hung in the air was sheer terror. I understood that instinctively, despite being so young, and the smell of death seeped through the car windows as we drove in the dusty lane leading back to the slaughter pens. Mom said that most horses here were stolen from farms and given to slaughter because of the foreigner’s love of horse meat, and that was the first time that I knew that we were different. Because my God, Mom would say, who could ever eat a horse’s meat?
My father pants like a puppy, hangs his tongue out. The bike wobbles and spits down the sidewalk, my training wheels freshly shucked. He runs alongside, hanging onto the back of the bike seat.
“You’re doing it baby, Go, Go, pump the pedals.”