Sister of Silence (6 page)

I got lost in other reading adventures, especially Nancy Drew mysteries. I read every book I could get my hands on, and when it was time for our family vacation, I always took along a tall stack of books I had gotten at the library, or borrowed from classmates. About four hours into the first day of our trip, I could count on hearing one of my father’s favorite expressions. A geography and history buff who taught us all the names of the states and their capitals, Dad loved to relate tidbits of information about the places we passed, and it irked him that his eldest child wasn’t as interested in our travels as he was.

We were driving through St. Louis, Missouri, when he spoke up. “There’s Scott Joplin’s house,” Dad said to no one in particular. Or so I thought.

“Remember
, Daleen? He’s the famous jazz pianist.”

My ears barely caught the sound of my name being spoken, and by the time I looked up, I saw my father glaring at me from the rearvi
ew mirror. “For crying out loud Daleen, get your nose out of that book! You’re missing all the famous sites and some beautiful scenery.”

Groaning in protest, I laid the book across my lap, careful not to lose my place. I rolled down my window. “Moo, moo,” I said, talking to the cows grazing along the fences.

It didn’t take too long to pacify Dad, who soon lost interest in me and instead tried to debate some political issue or another with my mother.

“I’m telling you, Eileen, there is no way Tricky Dick wasn’t behind the break-in. Gordon Liddy’s crew isn’t smart enough to have done it on their own,” he said, thumping the steering wheel in earnest.

Knowing his tirade could take awhile, I grinned and quietly turned my book over—eager to find out what mystery my hero or heroine would take on next.

It wasn’t just the loosely structured history lessons or following the trials of my main characters that made the trips memorable. By day two, Dad would pop the top on a beer can, leading to Mom’s dismay, expressed by the thinning of her lips.

“Don’t worry, Honey. I’m just having this one,” Dad told her stony profile.

The rest of the trip became a battle of wills between them, with Mom growing silent every time Dad opened another can of beer, and Dad growing annoyed every time she tried to ask him to stop drinking.

“If you wreck, one of the girls could be hurt.”

“I’m a good driver, and I’m not going to wreck.”

“Well what if the police stop us, and realize you’re drinking?”

“They won’t. Now can we please talk about something else?”

In hindsight, I do think we were fortunate, because in spite of Dad’s drinking, he always held a steady job and he wasn’t usually a mean drunk. But Dad wasn’t home much, either, and most of the money he did earn, typically went to buy more beer.

With or without the beer, survival is something that seems to come natural to Appalachian people. I learned this after Dad, who hadn’t even had a drop to drink at the time, almost died because he wanted to watch the World Series. It happened early one morning after he climbed a tall ladder to install a TV antenna on our roof.

“I tried to tell him to wait until the dew was gone, because it was a slate roof and I was afraid he would fall,” my mother
said as she cried afterward.

Dad would have none of it. He was going to put the antennae up there, “by God or else!” Mom is fond of adding when she tells the story.

Turns out, it was “or else.” I was in the kitchen when I heard a noise and turned to look. I saw something go flying by the window at the same time I heard my mother scream. By the time I ran out the back door and around the corner, Dad was lying on the ground at her feet.

Mom was right there when it happened, standing on the same spot where he landed. First the tools came falling off, and she somehow managed to move the ladder and then leap out of the way, seconds before Daddy’s body came hurtling to the earth like a falling meteor.

“I knew he’d kill me if I didn’t move,” she said. “And he would have, because when he hit the ground, he bounced three feet back into the air.” The only thing that saved his life, the doctors said, was the deep layer of peat moss that covered the earth where he landed.

He broke his pelvis in three places, and his back in two. Dad spent the next five weeks in traction in the hospital, where we would drive to visit him each day. Because children weren’t allowed to visit, Mom would open the window to his hospital room so Carla and I could climb through. Then she would pull out the six-pack of beer Dad had asked her to bring, pop a top, and hand it to him.

After that night when Dad came home drunk and dragged Mom downstairs to make him dinner, he transferred to Martinsburg, West Virginia, leaving us behind. Somehow, one year later he convinced Mom to join him there. We lived in a spacious trailer park with yards so big we couldn’t hear our neighbors talking to each other. Tall trees were scattered throughout the park, giving us lots of shade. Second only to swimming in the neighbor’s pool across the street, my favorite pastime occurred when winter came and the ground froze, allowing us to skate on the pond behind the singlewide trailer Dad had rented.

Mom bought used ice skates from a secondhand shop for Carla and me, and we would walk down the hill to the pond below, where we would tie the laces over the worn, white leather. Then we carefully tested the water before skating onto the frozen pond. Mom made sure the ice was thick enough it wouldn’t break, but she was afraid of water, so she wouldn’t skate with us. Once I learned to skate, I went around and around on the ice, pretending to be Peggy Fleming. I was pulled from my childish reverie only after I tripped over a small branch that had frozen into the water’s rough surface.

I missed my
Grit
route, but my parents allowed me to babysit two neighbor boys on the weekends. And I mowed lawns, so I could add to my growing savings account. Because we were close enough to tour the nation’s capitol, I spent some of my money while visiting the Smithsonian Institute and other sites there. We visited the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and Ulysses S. Grant’s Memorial, but most often we toured the National Air and Space Museum, where Dad proudly showed us “The Spirit of St. Louis” and the Apollo 11 command module. He used those times to teach us the history of flight, from the Wright Brothers to Neil Armstrong and the NASA space program.

Aviation was the greatest part about living in Martinsburg with Dad. Since I was just a little girl, I had known about my father’s love of flying, because he would regale us with stories about famous aviators. I learned not only about such famous flights flown by Chuck Yeager, Charles Lindbergh and “Lady Lindy,” as my father called Amelia Earhart, but also about every space mission the American astronauts or Russians cosmonauts ever made.

Dad got his flight instructor’s certification, so he worked part-time as an instructor in the evenings and weekends—which was good because it seemed to keep him from drinking. He had also talked my mom into running the tiny airport café. The daughter of a chef, friends and neighbors had always praised her home-cooked meals. Each day Carla and I would get off the bus, don aprons, and help wait on the customers who called her “Crystal,” while Mom served them coffee for ten cents a cup.

Mom’s little café soon became quite a popular place for pilots, who would often fly there just for her delicious lunch specials—especially on Wednesdays
, which was spaghetti day. Several times, well-known politicians or celebrities would land at the little airport and eat there. Once, after Ray Charles’ jet landed there, the crew invited her inside.

“You should have seen it—even though he’s blind, he has bright colors all over the interior,” Mom told us.

But it was Paul Newman, who raced cars at the nearby Charles Town Racetrack, that Mom always dreamed of meeting. But she never saw him. “I waited for him, though.” She laughed when telling the story.

When we weren’t busy helping Mom, Carla and I would ride our bikes all around the property, or tease and torment the airport employees. Sometimes we even went flying with Dad or Mom, who was taking flight lessons herself.

Aside from the impression being an “airport brat” left on my mind
during this time, two major news events were molding both the nation and my young mind. Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the nation learned that Nixon had been involved in the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. At home, my parents closely followed the twists and turns of both stories. They had discussed the Watergate scandal at length, and kept abreast of Hearst’s subsequent criminal activity, talking about the incidents after the evening news. At age eleven I soaked it all in, keenly interested in the outcomes. It was summer before the climactic end occurred and President Richard Nixon resigned. After having watched Walter Cronkite talk about Watergate and Patty Hearst every day on the six o’clock evening news for what felt like years, I recognized the role the media played in the world. And by then, I knew I wanted to be an observer who wrote about that world.

Our move to the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia when I was ten became bittersweet because Dad’s drinking soon began to grow worse, causing more and more friction at home. That’s because Dad started spending every weekend and even some weeknights out drinking with Bruce, his best friend and coworker. When we finally met Bruce one night at a pizza parlor, I realized it wasn’t his fault, for Bruce drank far less than Dad did.

We soon grew to love Bruce during
occasional evenings spent together. He also became a cheerleader of sorts, for when I turned into a gawky teenager, Bruce would offer praise and encouragement whenever he saw me practicing the piano, reading my lines for a school play, or working on a writing assignment.

One day while Bruce was visiting us, I walked around the trailer with a book balanced on my head, trying to perfect my posture and dreaming of the day when I would model for some famous magazine.

“Why, how elegant you look. You’re going to end up modeling for sure, as tall and slender as you are. They won’t be able to resist you, with your great posture and poise!” he said, making me blush and yet feel graceful at the same time.

Because West Virginia is a rural state, by his or her twelfth birthday every child knows how to drive and shoot—not at the same time, though. People either need to put food on the table or they’re avid hunters, or perhaps both, so many children learn to use a shotgun or rifle. That’s why, when I was nine, Dad and my Great-Uncle Paul took me out for target practice—and much to their amusement and pride, I kept hitting the bull’s-eyes. The next thing I knew, Dad had gone to Heck’s Department Store to buy me my own 30-30 rifle, which I proudly carried while I tromped along with Dad through the woods behind our house during deer season. Knowing how jealous the boys in my class would be if they saw me, I was never more proud.

Driving a vehicle was equally common for preteens. A heavily agricultural state, much of the land is used for farming, and everyone in the family pitches in. Many of my friends also began driving as young as I did, but most of them learned in a cornfield on a tractor, not in a Pinto station wagon on a four-lane highway because their father was drunk.

At the airport, teaching flight students, Dad was sober as could be. But any other time he had an open can of beer in his hand. One Saturday, he talked me into going with him to a Navy surplus sale at the Baltimore harbor. We were there all day and not long after we left, he steered the car into the parking lot of a beer joint.

My heart sank as I recalled the words he and Mom had exchanged that morning. “All right Dale, she can go, but only if you promise not to drink and drive.”

He had given my mother a patronizing smile. “Eileen, I won’t drink while Daleen’s with me. I promise.”

So in the parking lot, with my father turning to me, I wondered what I should do to keep him from drinking. “Would you like to go inside and get something to eat?” Dad asked.

I shook my head. “Can’t we eat when we get home?”

“Aren’t you thirsty? I’m thirsty. Come on, let’s get a drink before we head home.” He was already opening his door.

“But Mom said—”

“I know what your mother said,” he said sternly, “and I’m saying we’re stopping here to eat. Now come on. You can’t stay in the car by yourself.”

I had never defied my father, but as I followed him inside, it was with crossed arms and a sullen expression. A few minutes later, as I sat on the tall bar stool sipping a soda, the door opened and Bruce entered.

I ran over, hugging him. “Uncle Bruce! What are you doing here?” He smiled and returned my hug, before shaking hands with Dad. “Hi there, Dale. How was the sale?” It dawned on me then they had arranged to meet in advance. I picked up the stack of quarters my father had left on the counter and walked over to the skee ball machine.

“Dad, why don’t you play a game with me?” I asked, thinking maybe I could get him interested in something else, so he wouldn’t be tempted to drink as much.

“In a few minutes, Honey,” he said. “Let me talk to Bruce first.”

I played alone, until Bruce came over and put his hands on my shoulders. “Hey there, it looks like you’re having fun. Can I join you?” he asked.

I beamed,
but couldn’t help but notice my father, his back to us, ordering another beer. “Yeah,” I said, handing him a quarter for the machine. “Mom’s going to really be mad at him,” I muttered.

He raised his eyebrows, and then smiled conspiratorially. “She sure is.”

It was hours later when we finally told Bruce goodbye and left. I made sure I fastened my seatbelt, because Dad was really drunk. I was terrified we would wreck, and had visions of dying in some horrible accident. But we hadn’t been on the highway for long when my father pulled off the road.

“Daleen, do you think you could drive? I’m having trouble seeing.”

“What?” I had never driven before, but it suddenly made up for all the hours I’d been forced to spend in the bar.

I get to drive!
The idea was so exciting my anger evaporated.

He was already out the door and staggering around the car when I scrambled over into his empty seat, which I slid forward until my feet rested against the gas pedal and brake. Then I put on my seatbelt and after a few minutes of instruction from him, I hesitantly pulled onto the highway. The drive home usually took about an hour, but with me at the wheel, it took much longer.

Nervous exhilaration combined with an odd sense of being older than I really was, but I was also terrified I’d do something wrong. When we were two miles from home, I felt fresh exhilaration.
We’re still alive!
Dad had somehow managed to navigate me from the Beltway to a two-lane road, to the narrow country lane we took to reach our house. Together we managed to escape any major mishaps.

But then he yelled at me.

“Daleen, slow down!” Dad yelled. “You’re going to miss the bridge!”

The bridge. A large, rusty, metal bridge. I braked too quickly, jerking us both, and the Pinto spun to a stop near the middle of the narrow road, just inches from the edge of the bridge and the steep embankment next to it. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would burst and my palms were
instantly wet from sweat.

“Okay, now back up a little,” he said, not quite as loud.

If you think you can do a better job, then you get behind the wheel,
I wanted so badly to tell him. But after we got home and Mom found out—she always did—she told Dad unequivocally that if he ever pulled such a stunt again, she would return to our red brick home in Independence. Like a child caught doing something wrong, Dad looked suitably remorseful and made her yet another promise I knew he couldn’t keep.

Some of my best Martinsburg memories came from my monthly flights accompanying my flight-instructor father as we flew to the orthodontist in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Pastel-blue skies punctuated by soft, cotton candy clouds made for a fairytale experience. To a twelve-year-old, climbing into a two-seat Cessna 152 and flying into the wild blue yonder was the most exciting thing ever.

Dad taught me how to scan for other air traffic, and while I watched him skillfully handle the controls of an airplane, I found I actually enjoyed being with Dad because he was completely sober. Each flight, I pestered him to teach me to fly, much like I had years earlier about taking dance or piano lessons.

One bright cloudless day during takeoff, adrenaline rushed through me as the little plane gathered speed on the tarmac. But I found fear joined the adrenaline’s coursing, too, so I prayed silently.
We aren’t going to crash. Dad’s a great pilot and he’s always careful while flying. We aren’t going to crash.

It worked—just like it did every time, allowing me to forget my fear while I learned to believe the mantra inside my mind.

“Dad, when are you going to teach me to fly?” I asked him, excited. Maybe this time he’d have an answer for me.

“When you’re older,” he said, smiling at me before returning his attention to the instrument panel.

“But that’s what you said last year,” I whined.

“How about when you’re fourteen? That’s not too much longer.”

I groaned. Fourteen was more than a year away. “Please, Dad, I want to learn to fly.”

“I’ll teach you when you’re older. The FAA won’t even issue you a pilot’s license until you’re sixteen,” Dad said.

It was a major promise, another of the many my father could never keep, leading me to bottle up my feelings tightly inside, so no one would know how their words or failings hurt me.

By the time the Martinsburg chapter of my life closed, I had succeeded in that effort—I was beginning to believe men couldn’t be trusted.
And that they didn’t keep their word. While my trust was tainted, though, somewhere within me kept hoping for better—for more from them. It seemed I was destined to be an eternal optimist, someone who, despite seeing the flaws in others, refuses to give up on them. Maybe that’s because my mother never completely gave up on my father. Ever.