and I’d hold baby Danny by the wrist and flap his hand to the driver as they smiled and drove past. Those Sunday afternoons we all had our hands out the windows as we crawled along the inside lane, waving to the cars that slowed down to admire us as we rolled on. I felt so special in the back of Mr Hoover, with my little brother on my lap, an ingrained sense of pride and ownership of them both.
Mom rarely went because the smell of the interior made her carsick and she had to keep her head on a swivel, she said, to watch out for cars that came up on us too fast. When she was there, by the time we were halfway through the drive, Dad was sulking at the wheel and we’d stopped waving out the window altogether.
Danny had just turned three when Mom made Dad sell Mr Hoover for the move to the country. It seemed as if our descent down the dirt road stripped us of the very thing that made us colourful out in the world. Without the car, we faded from view, Dad behind the wheel of a wide-body station wagon and two bored and bickering kids in the back.
Danny was too small to remember the cool car so he didn’t know what he was missing. But Dad lived so vicariously through my little brother’s Matchbox car collection, expounding big plans for the day he would build us our own classic car, that Danny became as obsessed with the idea of us getting one as I was nostalgic over the loss of the one we’d had.
The outside of our used trailer was dingy white and had interior features Mom referred to as “top of the line.” Doorknobs and bathroom fixtures were cast in gold plastic, some with a marble swirl and little crankout handles jutted from windows far too narrow to let the light of day in, let alone the tang out.
Our mother’s rampant decorating saw us pasting up orange velvet wallpaper and painting accents with gold leaf on everything from the drain stopper to the little plastic clips that held the mirror to the bathroom wall. When the sink faucet she’d spraypainted silver began to fleck, we’d dab at it from a luminescent jar of my brother’s model car paint. Bark art from the Circleville Pumpkin Show displayed a riveting image of Tecumseh’s Last Stand, which was shellacked onto a slab of stained and charred wood and fitted with a toothy mount on the back, suitable for display. Needless to say, the trailer, and all that was in it, was rightfully Mom’s domain. Tan press board was eventually sided up over the aluminium of the exterior and the shutters were drenched in chocolate brown paint.
My mother, wanting to give our trailer some European flair, ordered a plastic cuckoo clock from the back of The Swiss Colony catalogue and hung it next to the hutch that held my father’s blue felt coin collecting books, to which the best years of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters were pressed after being panned from a large clear plastic pretzel barrel that sat wedged in between the couch and the wall. The cuckoo clock chimed on the hour and two plastic birds, one blue, the other yellow, popped out a miniature barn door and circled on a track. The clock’s long chains cascaded down the wall and moulded plastic pine cones dangled at the ends of them, inches above the carpet.
Just like Arizona, time was spent with either Mom or Dad, but rarely both. Even at Christmas, when my father parked in the living room to watch us open presents, Mom scurried through the trailer tending to forgotten tasks. It was as if a hotplate existed just underfoot and began to heat up whenever they landed in the same room together.
Only one photo exists of my father on Burns Road in his boyish state, taken just after we’d moved in. It is a picture of me, Danny, Dad and his two best buddies from the base where he worked. Rolly Polanka and Tommy Templeton were happy, good-natured men, just like my father. Always happy to see us and a joy to be around, they cracked jokes with Dad about gas and crap and never tired once of the same ones. Danny and I laughed just because they did. Excited in their company, we snuck up on the couch and jumped on their heads, rough housing with them for attention.
Life with my father is resurrected as much in memory of our place on Burns Road as it is in the pain found at the end of it. Our one-acre yard was a sea of brilliant lush grass that surrounded the trailer like a moat and I remember riding on a tractor mower in a lime green bikini, leaning into curves around weeping willow saplings, planted to give an air of permanence against the transience of our home. Yellow insulators hung on an electric fence and billowy seeds of milkweed drifted lazily in the summer breeze. A faded canvas halter tied up with baling twine hung just inside the tack shed, next to thick braided reins draped over rusty nails. The call of a lone bobwhite haunted the early summer dusk when I’d pad out in my bare feet and lock the shed doors to keep the raccoons out. A rusty horseshoe dug from the loose earth was haphazardly balanced over the mouth of my father’s garage, a treacherous structure at the edge of the driveway he had cobbled together with twelve-foot-long pieces of rusted sheet metal nail gunned over rough frame.
The garage itself was a dark maze of car parts, milk crates overflowing with a jumble of tools, hand saws and claw hammers dangling from hooks overhead. And back in the dimmest, eeriest corner, in a place no child or budding teenage girl would ever willingly wander, lurked my father’s long metal workbench. The solo fluorescent light that lit his cave buzzed like a fly zapper from where it hung by a dog chain from the low ceiling to shine a five-foot radius on the concrete floor. But even on the brightest of summer days, there were parts of this creepy edifice that remained pitch black.
Our hollow held the kind of raw beauty a band of wild hill children might—shy and innocent, but you could never quite trust them. You weren’t scared of the woods down on Burns Road; you were scared of who might be in there with you.
With the passing of each season, memories of civilization faded and life dwindled to a crawl. Where once I hummed songs from the Sunday schools we used to go to, the lines and eventually the chorus were washed over by the jingles of toy commercials that rang through the trailer on any given Sunday’s worth of television: Mon-chi-chi-Mon-chi-chi, oh so soft and cuddly my pretty po-nee, she gives me so much love Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down. Danny and I strung them back to back, changing key and pitch to mimic the TV as Dad clicked through the three country channels again and again and again, waiting for a new rerun to start.
By the time I was twelve, my father had grown to be one with his chair, plopping down in it from the time he came home from work until well after the late evening news. And, although I knew where he was physically, I couldn’t for the life of me find the dad I once felt so close to. He was still happy to see me when he walked through the door but, once he sat in his chair, efforts to reach him were futile. When I could, I’d sit on the couch for hours just to be there should he wish to talk to me. But he didn’t. I would rack my brain, think, think, trying to come up with something that might turn his attention from the television set. But the parting of my mouth, sensed out of the corner of his eye, would elicit a shush or be met by the swish of a forefinger in the air as he winced, leaning forward to piece together what he might have missed. As a last resort, I watched with him, anchored to whatever time we could have together. But even though I didn’t have the right things to say, I believed with all my heart that if I could find the secret words or right way to be, I could unlock the mystery and win back my father. We were so close when he broke his arms, surely I could find a way to resurrect our bond.
“Who’s the King?”
“You are, Dad!”
“Who’s the King in this house?”
“Dad is!” Danny and I ring in unison.
“That’s right. I’m King and you better obey.”
My father cackles with good nature while my brother and I disperse from the end of the couch to carry out orders. Dad’s throne was his La-Z-Boy chair and the food that piled up around it—corn nuts, pork rinds, almost empty boxes of popcorn, bags of corn chips—was the gold on his altar. The empties surrounded him like gilded gifts to be fingered when he needed reminding of his total reign. His was the authority to yell from the seat of his throne and have anything within a five-hundred foot radius delivered to him, without complaint and with total servitude by us kids.
“Fix me some toast Sissy, would you? I want the good jelly, not any of that marmalade shit your mother gets.”
And I would drop whatever I was doing and trot off to make the toast, trying extra hard to get it