The Summer of Dad-Jim
I remember when I made the decision. It was summer, 1986, in Texas, and I had just crushed the kids on my street at croquet. I was on fire—white hot fire and blazing out of control. My neighbor Leslie, indifferent to another loss, returned home to watch cartoons. Thank Jesus, too. I’d rather have listened to my brother slurp his breakfast cereal, one agonizing spoonful after another, than waste any more time with her.
So that’s when I did it, made my first big, grown-up decision. It was the right time, too. With third grade coming up, I had to start thinking about my own intellectual growth and well-being. I had to get smart about the people I surrounded myself with. I had to—indeed, logic demanded it—end my friendship with Leslie.
What did it matter that she lived across the street from me or that we had walked to school together since kindergarten? Loyalty, as a moral construct, was not available to me right then. I would have swallowed a vat of cough syrup before I subjected myself further to her high-pitched whine and sloppy reasoning (Of course God could create the world in six days, I had explained to her. That’s why we call him the Almighty. Duh).
Technically, Leslie reached spiritual maturity before I did. When Pastor George asked one Sunday if anyone would step forward to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, it was Leslie whose hand shot up first. Before I knew what was happening, she bolted down the church aisle, ran straight to the pulpit and confirmed her spiritual rebirth. Stunned, I did what any self-respecting six-year-old would do: I retaliated. I followed her right down that aisle and, when it came time for the baptism a month later, wheedled my way to the front of the line. Bam! Dunked first in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, before she could even get a toe in.
As soon as I ended things with Leslie, I banned her from the Tarzan Tumble I had built in the cluster of hackberry trees in my backyard. It was so genius—or at least I was convinced of its magnificence at the time. I had cut up Dad’s shiny green garden hose into three long sections, each one looped and tied to a different tree branch. With enough momentum, or so the idea went, you could swing from tree to tree without ever touching the ground. Of course you would have to touch the ground at some point, and when that point came, when you were sure you were ready, you would let go and tumble straight into the bramble below.
And you
would be
exhilarated.
I did this several times, dizzy with excitement. Just jumped up, grabbed hold, and swung like hell. I amassed a spectacular number of scratches on my arms and legs. Mom, less enthusiastic about my triumph, asked what was wrong with me that I would cut up the garden hose the way I did. I told her she failed to grasp my grand vision. Couldn’t she see I had created something greater than the Greatest Show on Earth!
“You’re bored,” she said. “Go play with Leslie.”
“But I’m tired of playing with Leslie,” I said back.
“Then go play with Heather.”
“I can’t play with her either. She smells sometimes.”
“Jennifer Rebecca.”
That’s what she always said to let me know the conversation was over. And she said it with the same tone she used with her worst students. One time in her school office—cluttered with books, science lab supplies and an inflatable alligator—I listened to her shear the tongue off of some boy who had boldly asked if I was adopted (my straw-colored hair and blue eyes looked suspiciously different next to Mom’s dark brown everything). “So it’s not true then?” I asked her in the car heading home. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “You weighed 9 pounds, 15 ounces. The doctor had to put his foot on the birthing table just to pull you out of me.” This small fact filled me with enormous pride. What an entrance I had made.
Turns out 9 pounds, 15 ounces were just a sneak peek at all of the burdens to come—like the time Mom caught me walking to elementary school dressed as a prostitute or later, much later, when I dropped the “bitch” bomb during an argument in the car and she forced me to walk the rest of the way home. I’m sure at some point she must have questioned my usefulness as a daughter.
My grandfather Dad-Jim got me. He understood I had real potential and that my antics were just manifestations of me coming into myself. Next to my dad, he was the most important man in my life. A hero. A paragon. A lion among men. And I was his angel, his little girl, the daughter he had never conceived despite his best efforts (he had fathered four boys across two marriages; by the third marriage, he stopped having kids).
We called him Dad-Jim because at some point my dad had decided his relationship with my grandfather would be better off based on friendship than a pretense of something more. This would be explained to me years later, but back then, when I was eight-years-old, such an unusual moniker only confirmed his status as an earth-bound deity. He wrote me a letter that year:
Dear Jennifer,
Thank you for the very nice note. You are a very sweet granddaughter. And I mean it! Maybe we can go on a trip this summer if you want to. We will all think about it.
I love you –
Dad-Jim
I waited in suspended animation that summer for Dad-Jim to call and whisk me away. I passed the time reading the Nancy Drew Files. I had traded up from the Babysitters Club, which still delighted and amused the girls at my school. Nancy Drew, though, was for the serious young adult reader. I wanted to be her: beautiful, popular, smart, clever, and older. Definitely older, like 18 older. 18 meant cartoons any time I wanted them. 18 meant MacDonald’s Happy Meals every day, not just Friday. 18 meant Freedom.
Kids my age, kids like Leslie, couldn’t understand bigger picture issues the way I could. I didn’t go on to win the Daughters of the American Revolution Award for Outstanding Student Achievement in American History for nothing. Nor had I logged in hours at church on Wednesdays and Sundays just to end up as moral equals to the rest of my peers. Nope, I was special. Touched by the Grace of God. And that meant that one day my destiny would lead me straight to the Oval Office—or to Hollywood. “She’s too cute not to be famous,” Dad-Jim had said.
Mom finally kicked me out of the house after I asked her for the gazillionth time if Dad-Jim had called. The backyard was off-limits after the Tarzan Tumble spectacle so I passed the time out front, watching the endless stream of cars whir by on our busy street. It was so hot that all I could really think about was ice cream and how one day I might have a flavor named after me, something like Jennylicious, a blend of French vanilla and lime. At the time, I didn’t know that Texas was considered hot compared to other places. I hadn’t been anywhere really, except to Disneyland the previous summer and to the Petrified Forest in Arizona, where a piece of ancient wood I found on the ground made its way home with me and onto the mantle above our fireplace.
As far as I knew, everywhere was like here—summers that sweltered, with asphalt shimmering like the surface of a lake as you drove down the interstate and the grass turning brown before school started up again. Our lawn was only brown in parts. I squinted my eyes so that the green parts blended together. Mom’s remedy for keeping the flower bed in bloom was to plant artificial flowers of every hue, including some unnatural, psychedelic colors that looked a lot like the crayons in my 96-count box: Electric Lime, Caribbean Blue, Hot Magenta, Laser Lemon, Magic Mint, and, my favorite, Purple Pizzazz.
I resented the way our yard looked. Even Leslie’s yard looked better than ours. Her dad, in his tall white socks that covered more flesh than his brown polyester shorts, would edge the lawn on occasion to keep the grass from creeping onto the sidewalk. Our yard was never so fortunate. The next-door neighbors on the east side of us complained that our unmowed grass illegally crossed the property line. I, too, had illegally crossed the line, they said, when I jumped off the roof and tumbled into their yard. They were the Bratchards, or the Bastards, as Dad called them.
It’s true. I did cross that line, and with wild, frenzied abandon. I had grown tired of listening to old man Bratchard issue his litany of complaints—the shabby fence my parents refused to replace, the out-of-control yard with its vile weeds, and the overflow of cars in our driveway (“You have two licensed drivers; do you really need three cars?”). So, on a particularly uneventful day, I motivated a troop of kids to come home with me to jump off my roof. I told them we were on a mission, like Indiana Jones seeking to destroy the Temple of Doom. One by one, we climbed the big oak tree in front of my house, pulled ourselves onto the roof, and jumped off right into the Bratchards’ side of the yard. It wasn’t far from the roof to the ground, but the weight of our bodies, guided by the laws of gravity and inertia, managed to flatten huge swaths of their precious Saint Augustine grass.
Victory!
Mom’s face must have turned purple that day, a deep Purple Pizzazz kind of purple. I can’t remember how she chose to punish me, but I do know several of the neighbors started tracking my whereabouts after that.
Punishment was predictable in our house. Sins like stealing Mom’s heirloom coins to pay the ice-cream truck man usually triggered a ban on Saturday morning cartoons. More egregious crimes, the kind that required parent-teacher conferences over an unpleasant outburst at school, rose to the level of The Belt—the only sure way to tame the Hobbesian beast in me. Dad was never the one to administer The Belt; it was always Mom. With great pomp and circumstance, she would lead me down the hallway, past pictures of all the Youngs and Swains who had come before me, and usher me into her bedroom to assume my position over the bed. She’d count to three as a warning and then lash me five times—sometimes ten—and always with the saddest, softest cotton belt ever made. With each lash, I would cry out in mock despair. There was an unspoken pact between us: she would pretend to punish me and I would pretend to feel the pain.
At daycare, I was never so lucky. I was up against a formidable foe. We’ll call her Nasty: pure evil in a five foot female frame and the czar of us kids for a few hours each day. For the crime of talking during quiet time? No playground time. For saying something intelligent and probing? Laughter in my face. Once, when I leaned back too far in my chair, she snuck up behind me and pushed the chair over, sending me careening onto the floor. But the worst happened when Nasty decreed I had to finish everything on my lunch plate, including the chocolate pudding. I calmly explained to her my lifelong abhorrence of chocolate and any derivative thereof. She was unmoved. So I sat there alone, in the darkened lunch room, after the others had long finished, moving my spoon around in the thick pudding. Sometime later, she let me go with a warning of even harsher punishment the next time I disobeyed her. I felt equal to the challenge. On chocolate pudding days, I made sure to wear my best hoody with the oversized front pocket. When Nasty wasn’t looking, I shoveled the pudding right into the pocket where it remained until I got home and threw the sweatshirt into the wash. I reveled in my secret conquest. When the police eventually arrested Nasty for child abuse (apparently, I wasn’t the only one who questioned her disciplinary methods), I retired my hoody for good.
I grew militant in my anti-chocolate crusade after that. I crossed Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and Easter off my list of celebratory occasions. Birthday parties, too, were avoided unless assurances could be made of a white cake with white frosting. Mom, deeply amused, claimed I decided not to like chocolate because Leslie didn’t like chocolate. I crossed Mom off the list, too.
. . .
Finally it came, the call, like a warm rush of wind. Mom informed me that Dad-Jim would be taking me on a trip after all.
Oh halleluiah!
With my cousin Chad.
Crap.
“Why him too?” I said.
“He’s your cousin. Don’t act like a brat.”
“But Mom—“
“I mean it, Jenny. Knock it off.”
If she only knew.
The previous year, after Chad had visited our house with Uncle Greg and Aunt Cathy, I decided to give my whole heart to him. Girls from school had given their hearts to prepubescent morons who tripped them and pulled their hair; I gave mine to the smartest boy I knew. I suppose I could have felt weird, ashamed even, for feeling such warmth toward a member of my extended family (we were straight-up first cousins like Albert and Elsa Einstein). But I never revealed it, the crush. I kept it folded and tucked away until it dissolved on its own free will.
Besides, I wasn’t delusional enough to believe our two houses could ever be united. Or that Pastor George would approve. No, I had to focus. I decided, in acknowledgement of the third grader I was soon to become, I would not allow Chad’s presence on the trip to interfere with my vacation. I certainly wasn’t going to split my allegiance between him and Dad-Jim.
I packed everything I could think of—a bathing suit, multiple pairs of Jelly shoes, coloring books, crayons, the latest Nancy Drew books, a stuffed Ewok, and a wallet with nothing but my Pink Poochies soccer team picture inside. I felt unhinged, breathless, over-the-moon-and-Mars-too. No more Leslie, no more Willow Ridge Drive.
When the day finally arrived, we all piled into his silver Mercury Grand Marquis and headed south, to the Gulf of Mexico, to Corpus Christi, to the beach. I’m sure I must have grimaced at his wife Mary when she took my rightful place in the front seat next to Dad-Jim. After all, she was only a third wife. Third wives never trumped first granddaughters. But instead, I rode the whole miserable seven hours—all 25,200 painful, heart-rending seconds—in the backseat, next to Chad—my love for him quickly overshadowed by an even greater need for approval and acceptance by my grandfather.
I trained my eye on the rearview mirror to catch glimpses of Dad-Jim. The dark sunglasses he wore obscured most of his expressions, everything except the small smile that would form at the corners of his eyes after I said something particularly witty. I traced a mental finger along those smile lines, like crevasses, deep and lovely. The greatest moments came when his laugh revealed nickel-sized dimples on both cheeks—just like mine! The dimples sealed it of course: we were the same, and since we were the same, I was the sure favorite, first among grandchildren, second to no one, especially not Third Wife.
We arrived to Corpus Christi—a true, honest-to-God wonderland. Everywhere: ivory beaches, sun streaked sidewalks, diamonds dancing on water, salt scented air. My excitement bubbled up and over. I wanted to see, hear, taste, touch, smell everything.
Because everything existed just for me to discover it.
We spent most of our time at the beach, gathering seashells, tumbling our way through the water, and eating rainbow-colored snow cones and mustard-dipped corn dogs. And there was me, with Dad-Jim’s hand laced through mine, my small heart swelling with so much love and life.
Then things, as they do, changed.
At some point towards the end of the vacation, Dad-Jim must have turned his attention to Chad, causing me to swoon with jealousy. Maybe he helped Chad with his own sand castle or maybe he swam with him for too long in the water. Maybe he even laughed at one of his jokes. I don’t remember the initiating incident, but I do remember when it flipped—the switch. And I couldn’t simmer the prideful rage that boiled,
Up
Up
And up.
I hated everything about the vacation in that moment. I had become a prisoner, held captive against my will, and all I wanted to do was return home. Right then. No delay.
Dad-Jim must have guessed at something stirring inside me. Back at the hotel, as we rode up the elevator, he asked if I had had a nice time at the beach.
Up
Up
And over.
It was thunderous, the “no” that flew out of my mouth. In the elevator, so close together, those two, tiny, insignificant letters bounced off the walls and rattled around until they rested somewhere between us. Dad-Jim just stood there in pure, unmitigated silence.
I was in shock. I couldn’t believe what I had done. I wanted to rewind the moment, take it all back, but it was too late. The damage done. The wreckage complete. The smile I had so adored disappeared from his eyes. My face tingled with hot despair.
I knew, from stories Dad had told me, that my grandfather bore little patience for disobedient kids. He once locked my uncle in a closet as punishment for shaving my dad’s hair off. Plus he had served in the United States Marine Corps so who knew what he was capable of. I just stood there, on the gallows of the elevator, waiting for my execution.
The doors dinged open, and we stepped into the hallway. I followed him to the room with my head hung low, like poor Tom Turkey hanging his head down to die.
Dad-Jim chose not to punish me in any obvious way—maybe because I wasn’t his child to punish. It didn’t matter; he didn’t have to. The long shadow of his disappointment inflicted enough damage. I felt like Lucifer, a fallen angel, cast down from Heaven, shunned by God.
The way I remember it, he stopped speaking to me. He stopped speaking to me until one day, after a miserable few weeks that felt like eons, my parents brought me over to his house for lunch. “Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?” he said in his fake British accent as I stood in his kitchen eating a bologna sandwich.
Oh, hallelujah! I’m back!
Life could resume as normal.
. . .
When Dad-Jim died five years later, at the age of 69, the funeral was held in the Masonic tradition (my grandfather had been a long-time member of the Tannehill Masonic Lodge of Dallas, also known as the Mother Lodge). A “Worshipful Master” officiated, assuring us all that my grandfather had “reached the end of his toils.” While we listened to music from Mozart (Mozart had been a Mason, too), I kept sneaking glances at Dad-Jim in his casket. His hair was combed, his face translucent—almost silky blue—arms neatly arranged to the sides of his body with only the hands stacked together like pancakes. He looked good, better than he did a few nights earlier when he was in the hospital room barely able to speak, able only to squeeze our hands. I heard the Worshipful Master call out my name, and I ascended the steps to the podium. Apparently, the grownups in the room thought it would be a nice idea for the granddaughter to give the eulogy.
I said something like “he was a great man” and “down the sandy beaches we once ran.” I went on like this, couplet after couplet, until I started crying. Then came the crying-induced snot that got caught in my throat as I croaked out the final stanza. Later, at the reception, the grownups patted me on the back and told me what a fine job I had done. All I could think about, though, was that stupid elevator and the even stupider tantrum I had unleashed inside it.
You could say I learned a lesson that day and carried it with me as my prefrontal cortex got wiser. Wise enough, anyway, to stop blaming Leslie for my summer-time ennui. Wise enough to fall in love with other people’s cousins instead of my own. And wise enough to avoid elevators at all costs when indignation and pique swelled up like a balloon.
“She was always so…determined,” Mom said of me once when asked what I was like growing up.
Just like the spanking, she knew how to soften her blows.