Diamond in the Rough (2 page)

The two-hour drive to my grandmother’s in Mount Vernon, South Dakota, which had one paved road, was the general extent of my travels for a very long time. On the way there, you could pass through Mitchell, home of the Corn Palace, also referred to as the world’s largest bird feeder. This was as far out of Vermillion as I got. I honestly cannot remember the first time I saw an ocean, and the very first plane ride I took was when I was twelve and we were moving to London, Ontario, Canada.

A very big day could involve driving the thirty minutes to Sioux City, Iowa, where we might buy fabric or see a movie and eat at Bishop’s Cafeteria, where I would be overwhelmed by the array of choices and breathless knowing that at the end of the line I would be allowed to get chocolate cream pie with shavings of chocolate on top, a rare delicacy.

We couldn’t afford vacations, and my father adored the outdoors, so he purchased a pop-up camper trailer, which we would haul to various destinations and camp. One of our favorite places was Lewis and Clark Lake near Yankton, South Dakota, about half an hour from Vermillion. We’d swim all day and play cards by lantern at night, falling into exhausted, dreamless sleep in our beds, all of us cozily together in our little camper, waking up to crisp mornings of campfire bacon and eggs and toast.

Before my younger brother and sister were born, it was easier to take car trips. The four of us—my brother, myself, and Mom and Dad—made a number of journeys in our bronze Rambler. Of course, one of them had to have been to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore and the Badlands of South Dakota in the western part of our state, a world away from flat Vermillion in the southeast corner. These car trips could’ve been long, arduous, and thankless exercises in getting from one place to the next, but my parents made them into fun and games for Geoff and me, and I remember them dearly.

When we were quite young, we were introduced to the car game called Zitz. I think my mother or father must’ve made it up—“Zitz” was code for “cows,” and when one spotted cattle, one was to loudly cry, “Zitz!” It was a pretty ingenious game for little kids, since there was no shortage of cows in South Dakota. Eventually we graduated to the more sophisticated Stinky Pinky, a game that required actual thought. To play Stinky Pinky, you thought of an adjective and a noun that rhymed, hence the name “Stinky Pinky,” and described the thing without rhyming in order to challenge the other players to guess your Stinky Pinky. You started out simply; a “farm animal’s sea vessel” would naturally be a “goat boat,” and so forth, although single-syllable answers were called “Stink Pinks,” two-syllables “Stinky Pinkys,” and of course three-syllable rhymes were “Stinkity Pinkitys.” One of my father’s favorite words to rhyme was “gherkin,” as in “pickle.” Dad thought of a loitering pickle—a “lurkin’ gherkin”—a saucy pickle—a “smirkin’ gherkin”—a busy pickle—a “workin’ gherkin.”

Sign Alphabet Race was my mother’s game contribution. You had to go through the alphabet, finding each letter from a word on a road sign that began with that letter, so for
A
you might see a sign that read “Alfalfa Farm Ahead,” and there was your
A.
License plates didn’t count.
Q
’s and
X
’s and
Z
’s created a frenzy, and we learned to look for “Quality,” “X-tra,” and “Zoo” whenever possible. The first person to finish the alphabet was the winner.

Dad mostly drove, Mom sat shotgun, and Geoff and I took the backseat, no seat belts, and I sometimes slouched down and shoved my knees up against the back of the driver’s seat and drifted off into daydreams about the Beatles, and further down into motion induced sleep, waking up that much nearer to our destination. My parents called it “racking off the miles.”

When we weren’t playing games or sleeping on these car trips, we were singing. We had a perfect little quartet. You’ve perhaps heard the song “Daddy Sang Bass (Mama sang tenor, / Me and little brother would join right in there …),” and really, that was us. For some reason, no matter what time of year it was (and it was nearly always summer, which was vacation time), we sang Christmas carols. All of us having sung in the church choir, I suppose this was the material we were not only the most familiar with but had the most sophistication at as a group. The Gloria refrain of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” for example, included not only harmony but counterpoint melody, which I proudly provided. Mother sang lead, Geoff alto, Daddy did sing bass, and I sang a third above Mother.

Even though both my parents were big music lovers and had talent, neither of them pursued it professionally. We came from a place where that just wasn’t done. We were not Hollywood or New York; we were practical midwesterners. But I take pride in the fact that both my parents challenged themselves academically after we children were born, Mother especially. At forty-four she got a master’s degree in education. And then she went to law school a year later. With her law degree, she worked as the assistant state’s attorney in the D.A.’s office before starting her own successful family-law practice. Mom was a great defense attorney and an even finer prosecutor, and for this my father nicknamed her “Killer Barb.”

Mother graduating from law school, 1973

My mother made our clothes because her mother made her clothes, and she loved sewing, actually, and the economy in it. She made us matching mother-daughter dresses. One that I remember was a coral cotton print with a repeating Parisian cityscape and a tight bodice with a full circle skirt, fifties style. Another was made of navy and white dotted swiss. My mother made beautiful clothes, and it’s her fault that I have a clothes fetish. When I finally needed a training bra, we were forced to shop. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was rack after rack of ready-made clothes—and I couldn’t have any of them. That night I dreamed I got up one morning and all the exquisite things I had seen at the store were draped over my bed, on chairs, from hangers, a cornucopia of new-with-tags, honest-to-goodness store-bought clothes. This is probably the earliest sign of the retail maniac I would someday become.

Mother grew up in Mount Vernon, South Dakota, born to Esther and Homer Croson. She was one of eight children in a three-room house in a one-horse town. Her father was a mailman. Her mother raised the children and baked the bread and sewed the clothing, and these things anchored my mother, because at twenty years old she gave up college and her dreams of singing and writing poetry to marry my father and have children. Like her mother, she baked bread and sewed our clothes and cleaned house and took us to church on Sundays.

My parents were barely out of high school when they met and married, and they had my brother inside a year, then me. My mom was twenty-three when she had me; my dad was twenty-five. She had us, she raised us, she made our home, and she stood by Dad as he uprooted the family twice in order to get his Ph.D. My mother cared, she cared terribly, perhaps she cared too much. She was caught between having the gift of compassion and the curse of concern for appearances. And Mother believed she could or should control it all, fix it, make it right, make it perfect.

As a kid I so loved my mother. I wanted my mother to think I was the greatest girl on earth. She was perfect. She was gracious and kind and kept herself up. She was soothing and calm. Mother even drank her coffee with her little pinkie out. I thought she must know everything. I thought she was magic. With Mother everything would be all right. She had supernatural powers.

Mother had grace. She’s small-boned and delicate. She never moved with urgency or lost her temper except to say “Fudge!” now and then if she accidentally burned or cut herself or chipped a nail. Her hands were of great pride to her, and to this day she continually puts on hand lotion and files her nails, which are always polished to perfection. Her smile was warm and bright white and dazzling, and as a girl she was downright stunning in a Katharine Hepburn sort of way, with shiny curled hair and cheekbones for days. When she stood, she did so like a ballet dancer, posture perfect. Mother dressed crisply in the clothes she made for herself, whether she was going out for cocktails or gardening. To this day she may indulge in a sip of wine or beer. I remember when you could buy Miller in mini seven-ounce bottles—my mother would drink half of one, cap it, and place it back in the fridge.

I loved my mother, and I knew I would never be as wonderful as she was. I was awkward and careless, always fretting and worried over something. I had snarly hair and a space between my teeth. I played in the mud and dug up the flower garden to make hollyhock dolls. My white anklet socks for church fell down and got caught in the heels of my patent-leather shoes. I was scared of thunder. I was scared of dying. I was scared of the dark. And I was willful.

My mother had a different daughter in mind, I think, certainly a child more malleable and refined. Someone more like my older brother, Geoff, a model kid, smart as a whip and eager to please. He seemed to possess a certain sophistication right from the get-go. Geoff studied classical violin in favor of the guitar. While I grudgingly took piano lessons, it was the Beatles, not Bach, who snared me.

Now, my dad, he’s a performer. Dad has always held court with jokes and one-liners and philosophical tidbits. He’s got advanced Alzheimer’s now and can’t remember my name, but at lunch in the Memory Unit the other day I sat with him as the Hispanic attendant cleared his plate. “Are you feenish?” she asked, and my dad, not missing a beat, replied, “No, I’m German.” Which he’s not, but that’s not the point. Dad has a quick wit. My mother especially likes a comment I made in frustration once to Dad as he was milking me for attention. “React! React!” I shouted. And it stuck.

Although he got his doctorate in psychology, he chose not to practice but to teach—another form of performance. My father had a guitar and a banjo and longed to be a member of the Kingston Trio the way I would long to be a Beatle. He and a couple of his friends would convene in the backyard from time to time, donning matching short-sleeved striped, button-down shirts and play their favorites by the trio. Dad taught me a few basic chords on the guitar, and I fell in love with it. Yes, I got blisters and my fingers bled, but no matter. Although I had been taking piano lessons since I was six, I soon lost interest. The guitar seemed made for me, and the ring of each painfully learned chord was a thrill. I was ten, it was 1966. It was Dad who gave me this.

And it was Dad who had a hair-trigger temper. To this day he can furrow his brow in a way that still makes me shudder, although now it is nothing but mock anger, another joke. He even growls at the ladies in the Memory Unit to make them laugh. But I knew him when it wasn’t funny. I don’t know where it came from.

Dad as General MacArthur, 1966

Was my grandfather an angry person? Dad got it from somewhere. “It” was chasing me around the house in order to pin me down and smell my breath to determine if I had in fact stolen my brother’s peppermint candy. “It” was wrenching me from the chair at the kitchen table when I sassed, my feet catching underneath and dragging the chair across the linoleum, or pushing me against walls if I left the basement door open. It was Dad who sang me to sleep on the couch in the living room in front of the fire. And Dad who grew so frustrated with me for waking my mother up in the night that he kept me awake all night once, so I could “see what it felt like.” I was six years old.

I can’t help but think that my dad saw himself in me to a certain extent, which seemed both bad and good. Dad and I competed for attention; we were both headstrong smart-asses, passionate and volatile. Now, being a parent myself, I know that when you see your kids mirror back your personality and behavior, it’s interesting but not always positive. If anyone in the Colvin family is prone to having outbursts like my father, it’s me. I don’t exactly see stars, but I can become pretty angry. Mostly in my relationships with men, which I’ll get into later.

When I think of my dad, I see his shit-eating grin. I see his compact, taut body bent over a banjo or a sailboat or a power saw. I see the delight on his face at my imitation of LBJ. I see the black thunderhead of his temper blow in after we once again break the sprinkler by running through it in the hot midwestern summer.