I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (9 page)

We would all then end up on those lazy Saturday summer nights at a designated final home and watch our fathers take turns churning the ice-cream makers all lined up in a row as each of the kids waited his or her own turn to help them sprinkle the rock salt on the ice packed about the ice-cream canister to make the ingredients our mothers had concocted freeze more quickly. We children would then eat as many bowls as our parents would allow us of the sweet, soft, luscious stuff that was finally spooned out.

The next morning we all went to church in the clothes our parents told us to wear and then started kicking off our shoes on the car ride home so we could be barefoot before we arrived in our driveways. We walked to and from the elementary school every Monday morning without any parent concerned enough to accompany us on our twice-a-day trek across town. I can’t recall any door ever being locked when I’d run up to it and walk right in. I knew every mother’s name on that circle of faculty homes and knew exactly which fathers I should avoid just as I knew when to avoid my own.

I was certainly avoiding him that first Sunday I told him that I had decided to go with my mother and my little sister to the Methodist church and not with my little brother and him to the Baptist one. It had been an unspoken rule in our family that the “men” were Southern Baptist and the “women” were Methodist, since the latter was considered by my father somehow a less masculine form of religion. I never understood the distinction, but I did understand wanting to be less masculine in any form it took when I turned six years old. That morning—after I fed our two Chihuahuas in their pen in the backyard, which was the one chore I loved to do around the house—I had made my father momentarily mad at me when I told him I wanted to go to the Methodist church with my mother. I had already practiced what I was going to say to him by telling it to Chico and Coco, the Chihuahuas who had become my confidants since my father had purchased them several months earlier. My father, to my surprise, did not put up a fight when I told him my decision. He even seemed a bit relieved not having me tag along with my little brother and him, who were much more of a team together as a pair than we ever were as a threesome. When he had first brought the Chihuahuas into our family, he and I had surprisingly bonded over our love for the little creatures, but that now seemed so long ago, months being eons when one is a child. My father and I both knew that I—after each having confused our shared love for the family’s dogs for a renewed father/son bond that no coach and his sissy son could ever maintain—had taken sides for good that morning. Not the Methodist’s. Not my mother’s. But the women’s.

After a lunch that day of baked potatoes and a green bean casserole and a roast, which filled the house with the scent of the powdered French onion soup that my mother had sprinkled atop it to melt into a muddy beefy crust, we changed into our summer shorts and shirts. My brother and my father went outside with the plastic bat and baseball I had no interest in and I, carrying my little sister back to my parents’ bedroom, helped my mother put her down for her nap. I placed my parents’ pillows from their bed around my little sister to protect her from rolling off the bed, then went back to the kitchen. I cleared the table and put the dishes in the sink for my mother to wash. I went out to the backyard to play alone with Chico and Coco in “our pen,” as I’d come to think of it. I fed them some of the table scraps left over from our lunch and told them about what the Methodist church looked like and how nice all the women had been to me when I arrived there with my mother. I even sang them a bit of the song we had sung from the Cokesbury hymnal—“The Church Is One Foundation”—for I was amazed at how the pronoun references in the hymn were all feminine ones, how it confirmed to me that the Methodist church was more welcoming to women. I sat and read the first verse over and over during the sermon attempting to memorize it knowing I would try to sing it to Chico—and especially Coco—when I got back home. “The church’s one foundation / Is Jesus Christ her lord; / She is his new creation / In water and the word,” I softly sang. I stroked Coco. “From heaven he came and sought her / To be his holy bride; / With his own blood he bought her, / And for her life he died.”

I hummed the song a bit more and gave Chico a few strokes he too was insisting on having from me, then went back into the house and picked up the two bulletins from the Baptist and Methodist churches left on the kitchen counter. I took a pencil and a notebook with “Hinds County Junior College” emblazoned on its cover from the top of my father’s old oaken rolltop desk that stood like a sentinel—stolid, unmovable—next to the dining table. I sat on the kitchen floor and opened the notebook to a blank page. I placed the bulletins precisely side by side on the floor by me. I held the pencil the way my first-grade teacher, Miss Bridges, had taught me and on the blank page wrote the words “BAPTIST” and “METHODIST” in capital letters as they had appeared on the covers of the bulletins. I tried to decipher why one was for men and one was for women. I studied each letter that made up each of the words. Listening to the plastic ball hit the plastic bat outside mixing with my mother’s soft soprano singing “Love Me Tender” to my sister in the back in her bedroom, I began to transform the capital
T
s in both the words before me into people. The
T
s in “BAPTIST” I made into men with muscles and baseball gloves. The
T
s in “METHODIST” I made into women wearing bracelets and earrings and whose gloves were not big-fingered leather ones used for baseball games but dainty and laced and looked like the gloves my mother had worn that past Easter, the ones she had let me try on when my father wasn’t looking.

I suddenly heard the laughter of a neighboring coach and his two rambunctious boys who were a few years older than I as they came bounding into our yard to say hello to my brother and my father. I stopped my drawing and went outside. The other coach had a small baseball uniform that his boys had outgrown and was offering it to my father. I assumed it would be mine because I was the older child and had first dibs on such things but my father took the bat out of my brother’s hand and stripped him down to his underwear and put the uniform on him right there in front of all of us. The uniform was pin-striped and had the word “YANKEES” written across it. My father was a New York Yankees fan and I had heard him often argue with that other coach about two men named Maris and Mantle who played for the Yankees. My father was a staunch Maris man. The other coach always stuck up for Mantle.

“Turn the kid around,” the other coach told my father once he had gotten the uniform on my little brother. There it was—Maris’s number 9 on the back. My father laughed and picked up my brother, Kim, and held him to his chest and kissed him all over his laughing face.

The other coach then reached into his back pocket and retrieved a little Yankees baseball cap and plopped it on Kim’s little head. I pouted at all the manly bonhomie about me and sat down on the driveway next to our father’s new pale blue Volkswagen he loved so much. I dug my finger in the groove of the tire that I leaned against and watched the rubber darken beneath my fingernail. “Don’t do that, Kevin,” my father scolded me, which I knew he would since he hated when I touched the odd little car and smudged it with my fingerprints, which I had already planned to do once my fingers were blackened with the rubber.

My father put Kim down and then turned to the other boys, who always picked on me when we were alone. “You kids want to have a race?” he asked, and pulled me up from where I sat. He led us all down to the circular street and lined us up. He and the other coach taught us all how to get into a crouched position as if we were in our starting blocks and on the junior college track team ourselves. I looked over and realized my brother and the other two boys had on sneakers, but I had not put any on when I came outside. I was still barefoot, but I knew my father would get mad if I asked to go inside to put on a pair of sneakers myself because I’d be making everybody wait for me and interfering with his own excitement of finding a way to combine yet again his love of coaching with his role as a father.

“Nan!” he shouted to my mother inside. “Bring me my starting pistol! We got a race on our hands here! Kimbo there is raring to go.”

The other boys and I sat down on the hot pavement, but my brother would not move from his crouch, so ready was he to race and gain my father’s approval. The front door opened and my mother carried the pistol in one hand and a magazine in the other. “Don’t shout so loud,” she told my father. “I just got your daughter—remember you have a daughter—down for her nap.” My mother had gotten up late that morning so had to rush to get us all ready for church and had complained about having to skip her shower. She had even put her unwashed, unbrushed blond hair under a Sunday hat, which she said made her feel oddly old. She was now hatless, however, and her hair lifted in the sudden breeze about her head. By taking off that Sunday hat and her sedate flowered dress that went with it, she looked no longer odd nor old. She effortlessly looked like a movie star to me. Indeed, it was when she put no effort into her appearance at all that she was the most beautiful to my six-year-old eyes. She wore red shorts and a white blouse. She too was barefoot and her toenails were painted the exact same red as her shorts. I looked at the magazine she held and deciphered the word “REDBOOK” on it. It thrilled me that I had begun to make out the flow of letters more easily now that I was six and I could combine them into words and then the words into sentences. I smiled at my burgeoning knowledge—how it could remain so silent inside me—and how the magazine’s deciphered name matched my mother’s toenails and shorts. She handed my father his pistol. When she turned to walk back into the house my father slapped her on her butt in front of the other coach, who laughed with too much bluster. My mother turned back around and slapped my father on his own butt with her
Redbook
magazine. He grabbed her in his arms and kissed her on her mouth. The boys next to me giggled, but I was accustomed to seeing such displays between my parents. It was a natural and regular occurrence. After the kiss my mother’s hips had an extra little wiggle in them in those red shorts as I watched her walk back through the door. The other coach winked at my father, who grinned his lopsided grin back at him before they shared a chuckle. A lawn sprinkler came on next door.

“Okay, boys, back into your starting positions like Kimbo there,” my father ordered us, and raised his starting pistol. We obeyed and readied ourselves like my little brother, who had still not moved from his crouch. “On your mark,” my father said. I looked down at the toenails on my bare feet. “Get set.” I wondered what my toenails would look like painted red like my mother’s. “Go!” The report from the gun startled me and I fell backwards from my crouch. When I looked up, the other boys and my little brother were already rounding the first bend of the circular street. “Goddamn it, Kevin. Get going. Go! Don’t let Kim outrace you, boy. Go, Kim!” shouted my father. “Kimbo, go! Go!”

I scrambled to stand as quickly as I could and began to run. But the faster I ran the more I knew my arms flapped about in a way that the other boys’ arms did not. I then focused on my little brother and tried to catch up with him and match my arm movements to his as he pumped them by his sides, but I couldn’t make my movements match. I could not. I couldn’t. The pavement was growing hotter and hotter beneath my bare feet and the gravel in the roughly paved road was embedding itself into my soles. A sharp pain began to throb in my side the more I exerted myself. My arms became more frantic. My wrists were wrong. This was not the way a boy should run. I could see that by the three examples in front of me. But I could not mimic what I saw. In my panic, I could not right myself. I couldn’t. I began to cry.

The other two boys went straight into their yard when we rounded the third curve where they lived and began to play with their dog. They weren’t even going to finish the race. If they were not then I decided I wasn’t either. I sat on the next lawn over and watched my brother hit the finish line and race right into my father’s waiting arms. The other coach shaded his eyes and looked past me at his sons playing with their dog. He walked past me on his way home without acknowledging my presence. I looked at the bottoms of my bare feet. They were pink from the heat of the pavement. I scraped the loose gravel from them. I limped home, thankful for the cooling green feel of the grass from yard to yard, careful to avoid the summer stickers, until I reached my father, who would not acknowledge my presence now either. I stared at the pistol sticking out of his pocket as he handed my brother back the plastic bat and began again to pitch him the plastic ball to hit.

I went inside the house and stood at a window and for the first time enfolded myself in a curtain to hide and watch my brother be a boy and wonder why he had such ease at it when I did not. I heard my mother turn on the shower back in her bedroom and I tiptoed back to her bathroom. My sister was sleeping amidst the pillows I had carefully arranged about her little body. I stood in the bathroom’s doorway and stared at the shadow of my mother’s naked outline behind the shower curtain as she soaped up her small breasts. Her red shorts and white panties were on the bathroom floor. Her white blouse was hanging from the doorknob. I saw her tiny bottle of red nail polish on the bathroom counter. I quickly grabbed it and put it in my pocket. The tiles on the bathroom floor felt so cool beneath my still-burning feet.

My mother pushed back the curtain and for a moment I caught a glimpse of her glistening body. There was a flash of nipple. She gasped at my presence and pulled the curtain around her like I had only moments before pulled another curtain around me at the window in the living room. “Kevin, honey, what are you doing?” she whispered.

I shrugged.

“Is the race over?” she asked. “Did you win?”

I shook my head no and, shrugging again, tried not to cry.

“That’s okay, honey. That’s okay,” she said. Her hair was slicked back and wet, the steam from the shower encircling her face. “Would you hand Mommy that shampoo over on top of the lavatory there?” she asked. I handed it to her and when she reached for it the shower curtain slipped. For the second time I saw a glimpse of her nipple. It was as pink and dimpled as the soles of my feet had been when I had scraped the gravel from them earlier. “Let me finish my shower,” my mother said from behind the curtain.