Hippie Boy: A Girl's Story Page 8

  I suddenly had the urge to cry and dove into Dad’s arms for another hug. I buried my head into his chest and felt tears streaming down my cheeks. I felt safe and warm in his arms and didn’t want to let go.

  We embraced for a couple of minutes, but then I felt Dad gently pull away from me.

  “Well, Ingrid, it’s time for you to go now so I can tell the other kids what’s happening,” he said quietly. “But just remember how much I love you. And remember, you will always be my Hippie Boy.”

  CHAPTER 7

  IT WAS LIKE someone had waved a magic wand over Dad and turned him into the parent I had wished for my whole life.

  A few days after our divorce talk, he stopped by the house for a surprise visit.

  “Well, kids, I’ve decided to move to Salt Lake City. I’m starting a tool business there. This way, we can see a lot more of each other.”

  His grin lit up his entire face and his eyes twinkled. All of the sadness was gone. He was back to being himself—only better.

  Even Connie, who never showed much emotion, let out a whoop of joy. I considered pinching myself to make sure it was real. I charged into Dad’s open arms for a hug.

  “This is so great, Dad,” I gushed. “It’s the best news ever.”

  Salt Lake City was just a ninety-minute car ride away, but it seemed like another world. I had been there only a few times in my life, mainly to go to General Conference, a twice annual event held by the Mormon prophet and his twelve apostles. We never actually got to go into the Tabernacle, the large gathering hall where the event took place; but Mom sometimes took us to hang out in Temple Square, the Mormon mecca that swallowed an entire city block in the heart of downtown. When we went, we would sit on the lawn outside of the Tabernacle and eat the egg salad sandwiches Mom had packed us while we listened to the prophet’s sermon over loudspeakers.

  Dad started dropping by the house at least once a week for a visit and often surprised us by taking us out to dinner at McDonald’s.

  My gut felt like it was going to burst with happiness. Dad was back in my life and I knew that I was now important to him. I had become his eyes and ears at the house, and he was counting on me to keep him informed.

  Along with his official visits at the house, Dad and I started having secret visits. Sometimes when I walked the few blocks to my elementary school, I found him waiting for me at the corner.

  “Well, how’s my Hippie Boy doing?” he would ask, his arms open for a hug.

  “Great,” I would reply, throwing my arms around his neck and breathing in his Old Spice aftershave.

  Then it was time to get down to business.

  “What’s going on in the house?” he would ask. “What’s your Mom up to? Do you think your brothers and sisters still love me?”

  I loved it that Dad now depended on me. He and I would walk slowly to my school while I recounted in detail all the happenings at home since his last visit.

  “The kids are all doing fine, but they miss you alot,” I would start out, stretching the truth about the “missing him” part because I knew it was what Dad needed to hear. “Mom’s just working a lot. And we had our scripture reading this morning as usual.”

  “Is she dating anyone yet?”

  “No, but she’s talking about going to some church dances when the divorce is final.”

  There was always a long pause after I mentioned Mom. The smile would leave Dad’s face for a minute and the same sad look he wore when he told me about the divorce would appear. But then he would snap out of it and come back to me.

  “Okay, you just keep me posted. Remember, you are my eyes and ears in that house.”

  Dad and I would part ways when we came to the school gate, but not before scheduling another secret meeting.

  “Just remember that you are my Hippie Boy,” he always whispered in my ear as he hugged me goodbye. “Don’t ever let them tell you something different.”

  The “them” Dad referred to was Bishop Jones and his two counselors, whom Dad blamed for destroying his marriage to Mom and taking away his family. Dad told me that even though things had been rough between him and Mom, he had made a decision on his way home that Easter weekend to change his life and fix their marriage. He said his plan was to give up his life on the road and set up a business nearby, which is exactly what he was doing now in Salt Lake City with the tool business he was putting together.

  “I really wanted to make things work, but that bishop convinced your mother I was no good and decided to destroy our family,” Dad fumed. “He may think that he’s holier than holy but I tell you what, Ingrid. He’s going straight to hell.”

  When Dad shared his personal thoughts, it made me feel closer to him, and in my mind, I forgave him for all the times he was gone when I needed him, or for scaring us when he lost his temper. I could see how much Dad was hurting and needed me. It made me feel special.

  When school let out for the summer, Dad invited all of us kids to Salt Lake City to stay with him at his new apartment for a few days. My brothers stayed behind with Mom, but Connie, Heidi, and I went. Dad still spent most of his time in business meetings, but he let us buy whatever food we wanted to eat at the grocery store, and even took us to Lagoon, a large amusement park near Salt Lake City.

  At home things were better too. Mom smiled a lot and sometimes we caught her humming songs as she moved through the house. Her job at the Health Department was going so well she decided it was time to get a real car. She traded in our piece of junk Buick for an almost-new green and orange mini station wagon with wood paneling on the sides. It was clean inside and smelled like the tree-shaped alpine air freshener that hung from the rear view mirror.

  I was proud of our new car. I was also proud of Mom. She had proven that she could support us and make it on her own just fine. She was even starting to be fun to be around.

  Mom had always loved board games and puzzles, and we began to spend several evenings a week gathered around on the kitchen table playing Monopoly or working on one of the five hundred-piece puzzles Mom picked up from the church thrift store. On Saturday nights, we all grabbed our pillows and headed to the living room for two hours of Mom’s favorite shows: The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.

  “Who wants to help me make the popcorn?” Mom would ask between commercials. “We need some snacks, don’t we?”

  “Maybe this divorce is what we needed to get our family back on track,” I confided to Heidi during one of our now-regular weekend walks to the mall. “I mean, everyone is so much happier.”

  “Yeah, so far so good,” she replied. “Let’s just hope it lasts.”

  Like the summer before, I was in charge at home—earning my dollar-a-day wage. Connie, who had continued working weekends at the park during the school year, was back to the maximum thirty-two hours a week she was allowed to work as a fifteen-year-old minor.

  For months, she had been saving up for a new ten-speed bike and a dog, and shortly after summer started, she was ready to buy both.

  “Ingrid, I’ve got a surprise for you,” Connie said one weekend, out of the blue. “How would you like my old ten-speed?”

  I looked at her in shock. We didn’t really hang out much anymore and I couldn’t believe she was willing to just give me her bike when I knew she could probably sell it for fifty dollars.

  “Are you kidding?” I blurted. “I would LOVE it! Thank you.”

  “Well, it’s yours,” she said simply. “Why don’t you take it for a test drive so we can see if we need to adjust the seat?”

  I would have hugged Connie but she didn’t like people touching her.

  “Okay, got it. Thanks again,” I called back to her, riding off on my new wheels.

  Later that day, Connie brought home Abbey―the purebred Irish setter she had been dreaming of for months. She had found Abbey through a newspaper ad and decided to name her after a small Irish town she had read about.

  “I even have papers to prove she’s a purebred,” Connie said prou
dly, pushing the document in front of me for proof.

  “That’s really cool, Connie.”

  I was still on such a high from getting the bike I would have told her anything she wanted to hear. But the truth is, I really did think it was cool. I wasn’t into animals the way Connie was, but for a dog, I thought Abbey was beautiful. She had warm, chocolate eyes and a long, reddish-brown mane that was so smooth and soft it felt like silk. Mostly I loved the way the word “purebred” rolled off my tongue. Just saying it made me feel rich.

  MOM’S DIVORCE FROM Dad became official in late June, and she immediately began going to the singles dances sponsored by the church. Now that Dad was around and Mom was happy, I didn’t mind her going out; I thought it was good for her to start having a little fun.

  Every Friday night, Mom made the transformation from weary working mother to single woman on the prowl. She spent an hour in front of the full-length mirror mounted to our bathroom door, curling her shoulder-length brown hair with Connie’s curling iron, coloring in her blondish brown eyebrows with a dark brown Avon eyebrow pencil, and carefully applying blue eye shadow. She would comb through her closet, looking for a skirt and blouse to wear, and then come back into the kitchen, where we all sat around the kitchen table watching her.

  “Well, children, how do I look?” she would ask as she twirled in front of us.

  Mom’s clothes all came from the Deseret Industries, the church’s version of the Goodwill, and she was drawn to dowdy skirts and floral printed blouses that looked like they belonged to the elderly sisters at church. Her petite five-foot-two frame was rounded out from five pregnancies, but I thought she had a pretty face and kind eyes. And though her thick Austrian accent made it hard to understand her at times, I figured some men would find it charming.

  “You look great, Mom,” Connie or I would reply. “You’re going to knock ’em dead tonight.”

  Mom’s happiness was infectious. It was fun watching her act like a teenager, and we could feel her excitement over the unknown future. Connie and I even started thinking it would be okay if she got remarried. Maybe she would meet someone really nice who would treat her like a queen and provide for her so she could stay at home and be a homemaker. And just maybe, Connie and I hoped, the guy would be rich and we would be able to move into a new house.

  We always stayed up until Mom returned from her night out and quizzed her about her evening like nosy parents.

  “So who did you dance with?” we asked as soon as she arrived. “What does he look like? Does he have kids? Does he have his own house? What part of town does he live in?”

  Now that Mom was in the dating scene, we wanted to make sure she was dating the right kind of guy. It was important to us that he was nice, decent looking, and had something to offer. Our question about where he lived was a big indicator of what he brought to the table. If the guy lived on “the hill,” chances were good that he lived in a nice house and was well-off financially. If he lived west of Main Street, on our side of town, he was likely to be poor.

  Mom would laugh and then recount her stories from the evening.

  “First of all, the music was magical,” she would say, settling to the living room couch. “They played really beautiful songs like, “Some Enchanted Evening.” And there were a few men who asked me to dance. They really weren’t my type. One of them wore a cowboy hat, which I think is silly. But I just always say “yes,” to dance with them once, and then thank them and return to my seat.”

  Given our hopes that she would meet a rich, intelligent, charming guy, Connie and I were disgusted when she started dating Karl, the only other divorced person we knew. Karl lived around the corner from us in a gloomy, one-bedroom basement apartment. He was a tall, lanky guy who was going bald and usually wore a blank, perplexed look on his face that made him seem like he had less brain-power than hair. He walked with his shoulders hunched forward and reminded me of a needy dog.

  We nicknamed him Bert, after the Sesame Street character. He was nice enough but I couldn’t stand the guy. He was a joke and I was embarrassed that Mom would stoop this low.

  “It’s nothing serious,” Connie assured me in such a confident tone that I wondered if she had snuck a peek in Mom’s journal. “She’s just getting back into the swing of things.”

  CHAPTER 8

  BY THE TIME mid-August rolled around, I was counting down the days until school started. I was finally going to be in junior high and I couldn’t wait.

  Though Dad hadn’t yet paid Mom the two hundred and fifty dollar monthly child support ordered by the court, he did give each of us kids seventy-five dollars for school clothes, which meant that for once I could start the school year with new clothes.

  I was ecstatic.

  To make sure our money stretched, Heidi and I spent days combing through the shops in the Cache Valley Mall searching for the best sales. I ended up with two new pairs of jeans, a couple of imitation IZOD shirts, and a copycat pair of Cherokee sandals, and I couldn’t wait to show off my outfits.

  I used some of the money I’d earned from my dollar-a-day babysitting job to pay for a “feathered” haircut and spent the week before school started perfecting my new hairdo by imitating Connie’s moves with the curling iron.

  “What you’ve got to do is put a big curl on each side of your forehead, then let the curl sit for five minutes so it holds better,” Connie said, coaching me through the process. “Then you can brush it back―just make sure you spray it so it stays in place.”

  My best friend Phyllis was back from the reservation, and the first day of school, the two of us walked the halls like we owned them. Because she had been held back a year in second grade, Phyllis was a lot bigger and taller than I was. She was also more mature, and I felt safe and sophisticated with her by my side.

  “This is going to be so much more fun than grade school, I guarantee you that,” Phyllis declared as we pushed our way through the packed halls to our new lockers.

  Though we didn’t have any classes together, the two of us met up at lunch each day and by the end of our first week, we’d made plans to try out for the school volleyball team—one of the few extracurricular activities available to seventh graders.

  It was Phyllis’s idea.

  “This way, we’ll be able to hang out together,” she said as we shoveled down the hamburgers now available to us from the school cafeteria. I was still receiving free lunches, but didn’t mind because I could pick up my lunch tickets from the office each Monday morning so no one knew about it.

  The tryouts were scheduled for 7:00 a.m. on the morning of September 11th. Mom offered to drive us and even agreed to get us there a half hour early so we had plenty of time to change and warm up.

  It was barely 6 a.m. when we left our house to pick up Phyllis and the morning skies were still black. Phyllis lived on a farm in a rural part of town where there were no streetlights, and Mom flashed the car headlights three times to let her know we were waiting for her. Minutes later, she came running out to the car, her gym bag slung over her shoulder.

  “How’s it going?” she asked as she climbed into the back seat. “Are you ready for this? Think we’ll both make the team?”

  “Of course,” I said, hoping that my sudden case of nerves wouldn’t cause me to throw up my Cream of Wheat. I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew Phyllis had a lot better shot at making the team than I did. For starters, she was tall.

  Mom headed north on the rural road, aiming for the intersecting highway that would route us back into the center of town. There were no streetlights announcing the highway, only a stop sign. It was dark and Mom was having a difficult time seeing.

  “We should be coming up on it at any time now,” she said.

  I felt the glare of bright lights through my window. I turned my head to see what it was. Then everything went black.

  I AWOKE TO SIRENS blasting through the shattered glass. The right side of my face felt hot and wet. A scream escaped from the back seat.
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  “Look at your face! It’s covered in blood!” Phyllis was sobbing and I remembered that she was in the car with us. Her noise pounded against my head, which felt ready to explode.

  I wanted to turn around to see what she was so upset about, but I couldn’t move. My right arm was pinned under a mass of metal. Large shards of glass covered my lap.

  My head throbbed. I couldn’t focus. For a minute, I thought I was having a bad dream. Then I heard moaning. I looked over at Mom, who was slumped back in her seat. I saw blood oozing from her head.

  “We’ve been in a car accident,” she mumbled. “Don’t move.”

  A jumble of voices and heavy footsteps erupted around us.

  “Are you okay in there?” I heard. “Don’t move. Your car door is crushed in around you and we’re going to have to cut you out.”

  The sobs coming from Phyllis were getting louder.

  “Are you okay, Phyllis?” I mustered.

  She didn’t respond and I didn’t have the energy to ask again. Two men were lifting Mom out of the car and onto a stretcher, and I heard someone help Phyllis out of the car. Then the men were at my door.

  “Don’t worry. We’re going to get you out of there,” a guy’s voice said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  A man reached through the broken window and put a brace around my neck. He said it was to keep my head stable and he told me I shouldn’t try to move.

  I closed my eyes and felt some sort of towel or cloth being pushed up against the right side of my face and head. A man’s voice said something about trying to slow down the bleeding.

  Then I heard the sound of metal cutting, and a few minutes later I was free. A sharp pain shot through my right shoulder.