The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir (5 page)

“He went to get Dilly Bars,” she answered, unaware of the effect of this information. Tina and I froze, remembering my father’s final words: “The Dilly Bars are coming.” We were terrified. Who were these Dilly Bars and what had they done with our father?

When my dad returned twenty minutes later, he saw us at the window with our faces pressed against the glass and decided to play a joke on us. He parked his car behind the house and crawled across the lawn on his stomach until he was situated directly under the window. He unwrapped two Dilly Bars, held on to their sticks, and slowly lifted them above his head.

When you’re a kid, the world is just starting to make sense and yet you still have this expectation that anything can happen at any time. When the two dark brown circles appeared outside the window and bobbed back and forth, Tina and I thought it was an event on par with an alien invasion. We screamed at the top of our lungs. Tina started crying, “The Dilly Bars! Not the Dilly Bars!” I peed my pants.

My dad rolled back and forth on the grass, laughing and slapping his leg. We, on the other hand, had nightmares involving ice cream bars for weeks.

While my father was busy playing pranks, my mother raised us. She used to play the piano for us kids to dance to. It was one of our favorite things to do. We’d spin in circles to “The Entertainer” until we were sick, and then lie on the floor and giggle. My mother was always pregnant. I remember nuzzling my head into her round belly, listening to my new sibling’s heartbeat. I knew Julia, Britain, and Jill before they were born; I knew them as heartbeats in my mom’s tummy. It makes me feel like I somehow own them. That’s how Tina must feel about me.

Then there’s my father. My dad did not want four girls. He wanted boys. Instead, he raised my sisters and me to be strong women. I hated him for it. I hated it when he’d throw me off the high diving board, or force me to ask strangers for directions when I wanted to be shy. I especially hated when he would scoop me up and stand me on top of the fridge. He’d tell me to face the wall, and without looking back or bending my knees, I was supposed to fall backward and trust that he would catch me.

My father had a way of making our home a party. On one occasion, he came home from a boring day at the office and yelled, “Line up, tallest to shortest.” He’d seen this in
The Sound of Music
and had been using it ever since.

All five of us kids lined up against the wall.

“Do you guys know what cereal killers are?” he asked.

We shook our heads no.

“You guys are the cereal killers!” he said emphatically.

He piled us into the van and drove us to Fred Meyer. While he bought us masks, gloves, and squirt guns, we each got to pick out any cereal that we wanted.

From there we headed to several of his friends’ houses, assembling in a clump on their doorsteps while Tina, my oldest sister, rang the bell.

As the door opened we cocked our squirt guns with one hand, and held up our cereal boxes with the other: “Hands up,” we yelled. “We’re the cereal killers!” Then, at my father’s instruction, we went into his friends’ houses and forced them to eat cereal.

It’s only when I tell stories like these to friends that I realize exactly how bizarre my childhood was—bizarre yet simple. But something happened in the spring of 1991 that changed the course of this simplicity. My father got a job offer to work for Boeing in Madrid, Spain. We’d never been out of the country. He brought home a map of the world and pointed to a potato chip-sized country on the other side of the ocean. Spain.

I didn’t understand countries, leaving, or the other side of the world. And it was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that if I left Sumner, it would still exist. As a result, in the weeks preceding our move, I became a bit of a hoarder. Especially food. I had to try every single candy bar at the grocery store for fear that I would never see them or get the opportunity again.

The day before our departure, we went to Fred Meyer to get a few things. We were standing in the checkout line when I spotted a large gum-ball machine.
There probably isn’t gum in Spain,
I thought.
Oh, how I will miss it!
I tugged on my mother’s sleeve. “Can I have quarter?” I asked. “I
need
a piece of gum.”

“Absolutely not,” she answered. “You’ve had too many sweets today.”

My mother didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. So what if I’d already had M&M’s? M&M’s aren’t gum. I needed to say good-bye to
gum
. I waited for her to get distracted, reached my hand into her coat pocket, and pulled out a quarter. That’s the joy of having four brothers and sisters; you can get away with this sort of thing. I crept over to the gum-ball machine, put the quarter in the slot, and twisted the knob. A blue gum ball spun around and around until—
whack
—it hit the small metal door.
Blue.
I held it up in amazement.
I wanted you!

Were it not for the fact that I chew like a cow, I would’ve gotten away with it. But unfortunately, as we turned onto our street, my mother heard me chomping on my piece of gum.
Why had I disobeyed her, where had I gotten the money, didn’t I understand how busy and stressed she was?

My punishment: I had to walk the rest of the way home. It was actually a good thing for me to do; it gave me the chance to say good-bye. As I turned up our gravel road, Zeb, our sheltie, ran down to meet me. Leaving him with my grandparents was more sad than anything.
I won’t forget you.
I scratched him behind his ears
. I promise.
Reaching my hand into my coat pocket I took out the rest of my M&M’s. I fed Zeb the entire bag, one by one. There’s no other way to say this: I was a fat kid and this was the most selfless thing I could think to do; give up my chocolate.

I looked up at our house. The sun was going down and light was shining through all of the windows. “Good-bye,” I said. There’s a particular feeling I get when I say good-bye. It’s not nostalgia; it’s more like I miss something even while it’s still there. In my adult life this happens when I’m incredibly happy. I’ll look around and my eyes will fill with tears because I know it can’t last forever. But this was my first experience with it—the first time I recognized
just because you like something doesn’t mean it won’t go away.

My dad’s getting the job in Spain was a huge leap for my parents. They were still living like poor newlyweds, only with five kids. And so, when Boeing offered to either ship ten thousand pounds of their belongings or give them ten thousand dollars to buy new things, they took the money and paid off their debts. We went to Spain with only the luggage on our backs. Prior to leaving, my mother checked to see how many bags we were allowed. Two checked bags, two small carry-ons. Multiply that by seven people, you get twenty-eight bags. Back then there wasn’t a weight limit to luggage; the only limitations were on size. According to the airline, the largest bag a person could check was eight feet by three feet. They don’t sell bags this size. And so my mother sewed her own. She made ten giant eight-by-three-foot duffel bags and filled each one to the brim. In addition to those body bags we had four rolling suitcases, and fourteen small carry-ons.

Two adults, five children, and twenty-eight bags left the Seattle airport in route to Madrid. It wasn’t a direct flight either. We stopped in San Francisco and my parents collected all twenty-eight bags and re-checked them. From there we flew to New York City where they did it all over again. It was chaos, the airport was overcrowded, and the other passengers were giving my parents dirty looks. I was only nine, but I knew enough to understand that their thriftiness was humiliating. In the midst of piling up the body bags, my mother looked up. She’d lost Britain. He was three at the time and he’d wandered off somewhere in baggage claim. We split up and searched the airport. He was missing for a total of five minutes. My mother nearly had a meltdown; in an attempt to save money and still bring as many things as possible, she’d sacrificed a child.

Once our bags were checked and my brother was found, we went into the bathroom to change into our nicest clothes. Officials from CASA, the Spanish equivalent of Boeing, were greeting us at the airport in Madrid and my mother wanted us to look our best. She’d bought an outfit for the occasion, a silk mustard pantsuit, high fashion for the early nineties.

It was a nine-hour flight to Madrid. The airplane was a newer model and each seat had its own TV. Tina and I thought this was incredible. We could watch TV and our parents couldn’t control what we watched or how long we watched it. Instead of sleeping, we made the most of this opportunity and watched movies for nine hours straight. Meanwhile, the little kids slept on my mother. Julia had her head on one leg, Britain was sleeping on the other, and Jill was resting in my mom’s arms, her head on a thick mustard shoulder pad.

Halfway through the flight my mom got a terrible migraine. She handed the baby to my dad, moved the sleeping little kids, and walked to the bathroom. It was only in the light that she noticed them: three giant drool spots, one on each knee and another running down her shoulder. She looked in the mirror. Her silk mustard suit was ruined, her eyes were bloodshot, and she was exhausted. She opened the toilet lid and started vomiting.

We arrived in Madrid the following afternoon. Tina and I had gone a total of twenty-four hours without sleep. To top things off, the CASA officials were three hours late. By the time they got there, Britain’s outfit (he was wearing a white suit and playing on the floor with his toy train) had turned dark gray. It wasn’t the first impression my parents had imagined: twenty-eight bags and five zombie children in stained clothes.

We drove to our hotel and dropped off our belongings. My biggest concern with moving to Spain was that I would never see American food again. Ironically, the first thing we did was head to a McDon ald’s. I was too tired to appreciate it. Both my older sister and I fell asleep on the plastic table. When we woke up an hour later, still in McDonald’s, my father said it was the next day, and for some reason we believed him.

I remember looking around at Ronald and the Hamburglar and being genuinely perplexed.
How did an entire day go by? Where did I sleep? What did I do? Why was I at McDonald’s again?
I couldn’t remember a thing.
Even time is different when you live in Spain.
I cried.

 

We adjusted to the life of vagabond children rather well. My mother was worried that the Boeing execs would change their minds and make us go home at any moment, so she insisted we see everything that we possibly could. We spent the weekends driving from city to city. “Not another castle” became a family catchphrase. One summer we drove through twenty-five countries. My parents never made plans, either. We’d just pull into the center of town and ask the first person we saw what to see and where to stay.

I was ten years old and got to experience history before I’d read or heard about it. I learned about the Battle of Normandy while I was looking at a huge field of white crosses. I learned about concentration camps while visiting Auschwitz. And I learned about the slave trade on a slave ship off the coast of Portugal. At the time I already knew I wanted to be a writer, so I wrote about these events through the eyes of a young girl who was experiencing them. I thought my stories were great, too. It’s only now that I realize what they really were:
World War Two
,
The Holocaust,
and
Slavery
, written by and starring Elna Baker.

But each experience helped expand my knowledge of the world—which is what my parents were aiming for. During a family trip to Morocco, they dropped off us kids at a carpet factory and paid the foreman to make us do manual labor. Tina, Julia, and I sat on a bench next to three other little girls. They tried to teach us how to weave a carpet by smiling, quickly pulling the strings, then crossing them. It reminded me of a popular playground game, Cat’s Cradle: one girl wraps a piece of string around her hands, another takes the string, creating a new pattern. Only in this circumstance there were hundreds of strings and the pattern we were making was an actual carpet. I tried to help, but I kept getting in the way. At one point I pulled on Tina’s sleeve.
This is a really bad day,
I was about to complain, when a different tan girl turned around. I’d mistaken one of the Morrocans for my sister. It totally startled me, like when you gulp down water and get Sprite.
She could be my sister and my sister could be her.
It made me realize that I couldn’t take my life for granted. Other kids didn’t get to have my life. And this upset me. Because no matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t figure out why it was fair.

I always considered my upbringing to be a positive thing. Only back at the family reunion, rereading a prediction for a future I hadn’t experienced, I started to rethink things. It wasn’t just the letter. It was something my sister Tina had said to me earlier in the day.