indiana essay #1

I part the white sheers of the living room window to see my dad waiting in the yellow submarine. He is parked outside in my Grandma Hazel’s driveway honking his horn impatiently. It’s code for ‘Hurry your Ass up Barb!’, but I’m not the kind of girl that takes long getting ready. I quickly finish putting on my shoe and run outside to meet him. If I don’t get out there he’ll leave without me. He did one time. That is the type of person he is.

 I run out the door. “Make sure you eat some breakfast now Lil’Barbara!’ My Grandma Hazel calls after me.

I climb in the bus and look at Dad. Dad looks at me and casually asks what Agatha is going on about? Whenever Dad is annoyed with Grandma he calls her Agatha, Aggie, or best of all, Ag the Nag. He calls her this because a long time ago when my dad’s family lived on a farm in Attica, Indiana they had a neighbor, an ugly old woman named Agatha.

He knows this annoys her, but it’s exactly why he does it.

Oh …nothing. I say slamming the door. He starts backing out of the driveway and we are off. The morning rounds begin.

Our first stop is the bank. Dad goes through the drive-thru to make a deposit and while he does this I sit and look at myself in the side view mirror of the yellow-orange vollkswagon. I don’t do it because I’m vain, but because I am trying to determine whether or not I am pretty. I just got my hair cut short at Mary Berry’s salon. It’s the salon where my grandma goes to get her hair done katty-corner from her house.

I don’t even have to show him my hair to know that he won’t like it. I have been hiding it under a soft pink baseball cap. My dad says he has always been partial to long hair.

I’m partial to looking like Belinda Carlisle in the Head over Heels video and that is the reason I’m in this predicament.

I take another glance at my face in the mirror.

I look like an unhappy basketball with lips I conclude, readjusting the mirror so that I’m out of the line of vision. It will grow I tell myself consolingly and impatiently think Oh yeah in two years!

After we get done at the bank it’s time to pick up breakfast. Today Dad stops at Hardee’s. It’s not my favorite fast food restaurant, but it’s where Dad wants to go and I don’t argue. We pull up the drive-thru and Dad orders us two steak, egg, and cheese sandwiches with a coke and a diet coke. We collect our food at the window and hit the road to the store. The sandwiches don’t smell too bad I think grudgingly as I pull them from the paper sack. I hand one to Dad and start peeling the wrapper from mine. Surprisingly it tastes good.  As we drive along Dad pops in a Hank Williams cassette and starts singing along.”Hey good lookin` Whaaaaaatcha got cookin`? How about cookin` something up with meeee?” I just laugh. I’m eleven years old and I can’t believe what a kick he gets out of this terrible music.

At last we take a right and glide on down the parking lot to the store. My dad has his own business, actually he has two, The Radio Shop, formerly a Radio Shack, ( he later would be sued for the similar name) and a  small college town bar called Victor’s Pub.

The Radio Shop is one of two businesses that are dying a slow death in an already dead strip mall. The other is a our next door neighbor, a little drugstore called Hook’s. Dad usually sends me over later in the afternoon with a couple of bucks from the register to get Klondike Bars which we nibble away on as we watch t.v. Next to Hook’s there used to be a grocery store called The Big D. I remember vaguely going shopping there with my mother when my parents were still married. It went out of business ages ago. It still just sits there empty. On the other side of our store is Schultz’s, a family discount store that has just recently passed.

Once we get to the store Dad and I part ways. He goes to turn on the lights and open the store up, while my job is to pick up the litter in the parking lot. I walk around the large mass of asphalt picking up empty Mcdonalds cups and wrappers  and whatever else there happens to be. Once I found a beautiful pale green Luna moth, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it so I left it. Sometimes there’ll be used condom and I leave that too, wondering what it would be like to be loved like that and feeling a vague sense of disappointment that no one does.

Sometimes when I’m bored I go over and peer through the dusty windows of The Big D and think about the last time I was there with my mother.

I had just recently lost my place as mama’s little sidekick. Everywhere my mother was I still was, but now there was something new to our dynamic, something that cried a lot. Her name is Elizabeth.

I can see my beautiful mother pushing my small sister in the cart and I imagine myself following at their side.

I picture my mother turned away from the cart, her long dark ponytail falling at an angle as she bends to more closely examine some cans. Precisely enough time for a tiny outstretched hand to send a glass jar crashing to the floor.

I sit outside the locked and dusty automatic doors in the hot summer heat remembering.

It all seems like a dream and I can’t understand why things are like this, why he doesn’t love her anymore.