Hippie Boy: A Girl's Story Page 7

Nanette and I were the only ones in our class who got free lunches. My teacher never said the envelopes contained lunch tickets. But it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know what they were. I could hear some of the kids in my class snickering when I walked up to her desk to grab the envelope. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

  Sometimes, when money got really tight, Mom couldn’t afford groceries and had to call the church welfare office. They provided her with vouchers to pick up free food from a large brown warehouse. I felt like Mom had paid for the groceries plenty of times over with her tithing money, but it was still mortifying to go there and pick out food while the warehouse manager watched us. It was even worse for Connie because Mom made her help the church janitor clean to work off the food donations we received.

  After Mom’s surprise announcement, she ended with a prayer, just as she did for every family gathering.

  “Our dear Heavenly Father,” she said. “We want to thank you for all of your blessings and especially, Heavenly Father, for sending this new special spirit to us.”

  Her prayer droned on for a few more minutes, but I stopped listening. In my head, I was saying my own prayer. “Please, Heavenly Father, please let this all be a mistake.”

  DANIEL WAS BORN in late August, just before I started the fifth grade. Dad came home to witness his arrival. A few days later, he left again. Money was so tight that Mom—who was determined to be a homemaker like all the other women at church—finally broke down and started a daycare in our house.

  I arrived home from school one day to a living room packed with crying, snot-nosed toddlers. The room stunk of dirty diapers and sour milk, and as soon as I entered the house, Mom roped me into a round of diaper changing. This meant rinsing soiled cloth diapers in the toilet and figuring out how to pin down squirmy kids with one hand so I didn’t accidentally stick them with safety pins when I put on their clean diapers.

  The routine lasted most of my fifth grade year and I couldn’t stand it. Mom must have tired of it too, because as soon as the school year ended, she gave up on the whole homemaker fantasy and landed a job at the County Health Department as a public health nurse.

  Mom’s new job consisted of making home health visits to elderly patients in the valley, checking in on them, taking their blood pressure, changing their catheters, and inserting IVs. Because it had been ten years since she had worked as a nurse, Mom was nervous about sticking needles into people’s arms to get the IV going. She practiced on oranges for a while, but she worried that she wasn’t getting it right so she came up with a solution.

  She called Connie and me into the kitchen and made us an offer.

  “I need to practice on people,” she explained. “If you two let me practice on you, I’ll give each of you a quarter every time I stick you.”

  Connie, who had just turned fourteen, was finally eligible for a job through Manpower, an employment agency that put low-income kids to work. She had recently landed a job caring for animals at a park located about a mile from our house and wasn’t about to get tortured for a measly twenty-five cents.

  “You’re kidding, right?” she asked, rolling her eyes. “You’ve got to be out of your mind.”

  With that, Connie turned and walked out of the kitchen, leaving just Mom and me. I didn’t like the idea of being jabbed with needles either. But I had already started adding up the money in my head and envisioning all the trips I could take to the candy store, a corner gas station located only four blocks from our house. The promise of instant cash for a few seconds of pain seemed worth the trade off.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, rolling up my sleeve so she could get started.

  Mom practiced on me over the next two weeks. She would dot a cotton ball with alcohol and rub it mid-arm, where my veins were most prominent. Then she would tie a rubber tourniquet just above the spot she was targeting to cut off the blood flow and make the vein pop. On the count of three, she would insert the needle, trying to get it into the heart of the vein.

  Sometimes Mom missed the vein altogether and had to start over. It hurt, but I prided myself on having a high tolerance for pain and I never made a sound.

  By the time Mom was done practicing, my right arm—which housed the biggest veins—had needle tracks resembling a drug addict. Fortunately, summer was about to start and I wore long-sleeved shirts the remaining week of school so no one noticed.

  CHAPTER 6

  FOR THE FIRST time since the Mississippi fiasco, I felt free and was having a little fun.

  With Mom working full-time at the health department, and Connie putting in thirty-two hours a week at her park job, I was now in charge at home.

  “I really need your help this summer,” Mom had confided a couple of weeks before school ended. “What I need most is for you to take care of Daniel. But you’ll also need to keep an eye on Heidi and Jacob and make sure work gets done around the house. Can you handle the responsibility? I’ll pay you a dollar a day.”

  My eleven-year-old brain went into overdrive. A dollar a day for five days a week was twenty dollars a month, plus the occasional quarters I was paid when Mom wanted to get in more practice drawing blood.

  My insides were buzzing with excitement over the pile of money that awaited me.

  “Of course I can handle it,” I replied, making my voice sound as mature as I could. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ve got it under control.”

  I had already babysat a couple of times for a lady at church, and between that and helping Mom care for all the toddlers in her makeshift daycare for the past year, I knew I was plenty capable of caring for Daniel, who was now ten months old. I figured Heidi and Jacob could look after themselves.

  Within a week of summer break, I had the home routine down pat.

  Mom still got us out of bed at 6:30 to read scriptures and eat breakfast as a family. But then she and Connie were gone and the day was mine.

  “TV time,” I would call to Heidi and Jacob as soon as the door shut.

  We would grab our pillows, plop down onto the living room floor, and spend the next two hours soaking up Giligan’s Island reruns and whatever else we could find on the three channels we could get.

  Once Daniel was up, I changed him, made him a bottle of milk and put him on the floor in the living room—shutting all the doors in the hallway so he couldn’t crawl far.

  As much as I had been against the idea of another sibling, I adored Daniel. He had thick red hair, hazel eyes, and deep dimples that erupted over his chubby face when he smiled. And he rarely cried or made a fuss. He just hung out, and was so mellow and good-natured that we all wanted to be with him. Every day I spent hours bathing, feeding, and rocking him. In the afternoons, I carefully buckled him into his stroller and walked him up and down our block, humming lullabies until he fell asleep.

  Before she left each day, Mom taped a list of chores with our names on it to the end of the kitchen table. Heidi and I had most of workload. Our jobs included cleaning the kitchen, washing and folding laundry, vacuuming, and occasionally washing the floors. Jacob, who was now six, only had to put away the laundry.

  Heidi and I soon figured out that if we started our chores by 4 p.m., we could have them done by the time Mom arrived home at 5:30. Even with my Daniel responsibilities, that left us plenty of time for fun. And at least some of our fun involved tormenting Jacob.

  Jacob had dirty blond hair, serious brown eyes, and a quiet demeanor like Mom, and it was no secret that he was her favorite. She doted on him and declared nearly every morning at scripture reading that she was raising a future Mormon prophet.

  “You’re my little Nephi,” she would coo to Jacob as she cradled him in her arms. Nephi was an ancient prophet we read about in the Book of Mormon. Sometimes Mom jokingly referred to Connie and me as Laman and Lemuel, Nephi’s evil older brothers.

  Mom had Jacob on such a pedestal that Heidi and I decided he needed to be put in his place.

  Sometimes, we would convince him to stand on the front porch while we t
hrew darts at him. Other times, we blended together ice cubes with the most disgusting mix of ingredients we could hunt down—tomatoes, eggs, Tabasco sauce, salt, and peanut butter—and served them to him as shakes.

  “I know what we could do,” Heidi said once when we were bored. “Let’s invite Ernie over for a play date. That will really tick off Jacob.”

  Ernie lived down the street and was the one kid that we knew Jacob couldn’t stand. We both doubled over in laughing fits just thinking about the look on Jacob’s face when Ernie showed up at the door.

  Heidi flipped through our church phone directory and found his family’s last name. Then I made the call.

  “Well, hi, Ernie,” I spoke sweetly into the phone. “Jacob has been begging for a play date with you the entire morning. Do you think you could come over and hang out this afternoon?”

  We didn’t tell Jacob about his pending play date until Ernie knocked on the door. Jacob didn’t say anything. But he was so angry he balled his hands into fists, and I thought he was going to hit us.

  When we weren’t pulling pranks on Jacob, I could count on Heidi for other entertainment ideas. Unlike Connie and me, who both had auburn-brown hair and brown eyes, Heidi was a spitting image of Dad. She had strawberry blonde hair and blue-green eyes, and a temper every bit as fiery as his. She also had his manipulation abilities.

  During the school year, I usually hung out with my friend, Phyllis. She was a Navajo Indian who came up from a reservation in New Mexico each school year as part of the Mormon’s Indian Student Placement Program. But she always went back to the reservation during the summer, and with her gone and Connie at work, Heidi and I quickly forged a bond.

  Along with spending all of our time together during the week while Mom was at work, the two of us started hanging out on weekends.

  Now that Mom had regular money coming in from the Health Department, a lot of her stress disappeared and she was less strict. On Saturdays, after our chores were done, she let Heidi and me spend entire afternoons walking the three-mile stretch to the Cache Valley Mall to spend the hard-earned money I had accumulated during the week.

  And on Sunday afternoons after church, she allowed us to walk around the neighborhood visiting elderly widows from the ward―whom we referred to as “sisters.”

  It was Heidi’s idea. Mom had once made us visit a few of the widows in the ward as part of a fellowship effort, and they’d been so happy to have guests that they’d given us cookies and chocolates.

  “Just think it about it,” Heidi said in her “we’d be crazy not to do it” tone. “It’s a way to get out of the house and get dessert.”

  One Sunday afternoon, we picked three of our favorite widows and began making the rounds. Heidi knocked on the door, but I always did the talking.

  “Well, hi there, Sister Williams,” I would say in the kindest voice I could conjure. “We were just thinking about you and wanted to drop by and say hello.”

  We could count on the response.

  “Well, aren’t you two just the sweetest angels. Why don’t you come in and visit for awhile? Are you thirsty or hungry?”

  “Well, we had lunch but we could always go for a dessert,” Heidi would say quickly. “But we can’t stay long and don’t want to be any trouble.”

  “Oh, you girls are no trouble. You just sit right down and relax, and I’ll be right back.”

  Heidi would always shoot me a sly smile as we sunk into the afghan-covered sofa and waited for our snacks.

  “See,” Heidi would say as soon as we got out the door, sometimes packing a loaf of banana bread or a plate of chocolate chip cookies the sister had insisted we take with us. “Isn’t this a lot better than hanging around at the house listening to Mom’s Tabernacle Choir music?”

  DAD STOPPED BY for a one-day visit sometime in September and then didn’t come home again until Christmas. Soon after he left, Mom started talking about divorce.

  Mom had mentioned the possibility of divorce before, but now that things were going so well with her Health Department job, she brought it up a lot―like she was trying to get up the guts to do it.

  “Part of it would be for protection,” Mom told Connie and me after dinner once. “Your dad has bad credit and I don’t want to lose the house.”

  Mom already had permission from Bishop Jones, who couldn’t stand Dad and told her it was time to move on with her life. She asked Connie, who was almost fifteen and sometimes acted as her advisor, what she should do.

  “I think you should do whatever you want to do,” Connie replied with her trademark eye roll. “I don’t know what difference it’s going to make, do you?”

  Like Connie, I didn’t have a strong feeling either way. I still loved Dad as much as ever and waited by the phone when we were expecting his call. But he had only been home a couple of times since Daniel had been born and my life changed a lot since then.

  Though Mom hired a babysitter for Daniel when I started sixth grade, I was still in charge after school because Connie played sports and Mom didn’t get home until nearly six. Between watching over Heidi and Jacob, doing homework, and working through my list of daily chores, I didn’t have much time to think about Dad.

  I had given up on the idea of escape. In my twelve-year-old mind, I couldn’t imagine how divorce would change anything.

  After months of talking about it, Mom went to see a lawyer, and when Dad dropped by again on the Saturday before Easter, she greeted him with divorce papers.

  “What in the hell is this?” he yelled before storming back out of the house.

  The next day, he and Mom locked themselves in their bedroom and stayed there for what felt like hours. Connie and I waited in the kitchen, anxious to know what was happening.

  When the bedroom door finally opened, Dad came out and shut the door behind him, leaving Mom inside. We watched him enter the hall and make a left turn into the living room. A minute later, his voice thundered for Connie to come to the living room.

  Connie shot me a knowing look and headed for Dad.

  I was so nervous my stomach was in knots, and the suspense was driving me crazy. I was dying to know what they were talking about, but I didn’t dare make my way into the hallway in case Dad caught me eavesdropping.

  I watched the second hand drag its way around the clock that hung on our kitchen wall. I wondered what Dad was saying to Connie and if Connie would let on that we already knew about the divorce. After five minutes that seemed to stretch into five hours, I saw her casually strolling toward me.

  “It’s your turn,” she announced, her face blank.

  I couldn’t tell by looking at her how things had gone and I was too rattled to ask.

  I raced down the hall, rounded the corner, and found Dad seated on the green woven couch the church had donated to us. He hated that couch because he viewed it as the bishop stepping into his business.

  Dad looked different than I had ever seen him. His shoulders slumped forward and his face was pale. He didn’t smile when I entered the room and his eyes were red, like he had been crying.

  His appearance caught me off-guard. I didn’t expect him to be upset.

  I took a seat next to him and leaned into him for a hug. He gave me a quick squeeze and then broke away. I sat in nervous silence, waiting for him to speak.

  Dad stared straight ahead for what seemed like an hour. His hands were balled up into fists in his lap, not in an angry sort of way, more like he thought they would give him strength if he just clenched them hard enough.

  His right fist was trembling.

  I reached over and rested my hand on top of it until he opened his grip. Then I slid my hand into his and squeezed hard so he would know how much I loved him. This seemed to break Dad’s trance. He looked over at me and his soft hazel eyes penetrated mine.

  “Well, Ingrid,” he said finally. “Your mother and I are getting a divorce.”

  Dad said it like he had just announced the world was coming to an end. His sadness surprised
me. I didn’t think he would care. He wasn’t ever home anyway, and he and Mom fought so much when he was home that I thought it would be less stressful for everyone if they weren’t married anymore.

  I wanted to react appropriately to his mood, but since I had already known that the news was coming and hadn’t really been bothered by it, I was having a hard time acting surprised or grief-stricken. Still, it was upsetting to see him so sad.

  I couldn’t find the right words so I buried my head into his chest and hugged him hard.

  “I love you, Dad,” I said.

  Dad let me hug him for a minute and then once again pulled away. Suddenly he was sitting upright and his face changed from sad to serious.

  “Ingrid, I want to tell you something and I want you to listen to me real good. If you ever love another man or call another man ‘Dad,’ you won’t be my daughter.”

  Dad’s words stunned me. I looked at him to see if he was joking but his hazel eyes stared back at me hard.

  I felt like I had been slapped. I was confused and my mind was racing. Why would I call another man “Dad?” I couldn’t conceive of such a thing. Plus, that would mean that Mom would be married to someone else. I hadn’t thought of that possibility.

  I tried to digest this new bit of information, while focusing on what Dad had said about me loving another man or calling him “Dad.”

  “I could never love anyone else, Dad. And I would never call anyone else ‘Dad.’ You’re my dad, no one else.” I drew out my words and punctuated them to make it clear I was on his side, and that I was offended he had questioned my loyalty.

  The tension between us melted as soon as I spoke. Dad smiled and hugged me, and then reached into his shirt pocket.

  “I have something for you,” he told me. He pulled out a gold bracelet with jade stones and fastened it around my wrist. I didn’t know what to say. Dad had never given me a present before, not even on my birthday.

  I lifted up my wrist to examine my new treasure. It was beautiful. The jade stones were oval and circled the entire bracelet. The bracelet made me feel special. I knew that Dad must really love me to give me something like this. But I also felt the weight of everything that was happening. Even though I hadn’t expected anything to change, there was electricity in the air and I could feel things shifting.