Irregular shaped orange rocks and a big concrete porch with rock pillars on each side of the steps where I punched Gail in the stomach because my brother dared me to. Towering coniferous tress on each side produced blue berries we knew not to eat. Instead we pelted each other with them.
In the side-yard there was a tree-house and a tractor-tire sand box and a swing set where we swung until the legs of the frame came off the ground. I just knew if we jumped, we’d fly out into the traffic of Old Cavern Highway.
Mom said I was born there and I took that literally. I was much older when she laughed at me and said she only meant that we lived there when I was born. That was the first time we lived there.
The whole house was paneled with orange tinted wood, chipped white in places where nails had been driven and removed. There was no hallway to take you through the house. Just one bedroom connected to another. Both rooms scary for the doors that opened off of them.
The back door opened off the back bedroom onto the covered driveway, where you could see the rock shed that matched the house. During the day, I felt quite fancy with the covered driveway, as though a chauffeur might let us out there and then go to park the car.
But the back door changed in the middle of the night. It was a different door altogether when the window turned to a pitch black mirror. The boogey man stood on the other side and watched me through the glass, even on nights that we didn’t tell each other scary stories like “Bloody Bones and Dirty Diapers.” I tried so hard to stay awake, certain that if I closed my eyes he’d begin to turn the knob. Slowly.
The front bedroom had a door to the basement. A windowless box of plastered white walls. Someone had written the word love in red lipstick on the far wall. They wrote it so small that from the stairs it looked like bloody teeth marks on the wall.
Mom put our toys down there, to make it our play room. There were no windows, so I’m not sure why it mattered, but during the day the toys were just barely worth playing down there. As long as we didn’t turn our back on the red smudges. At night, no thanks.
Also attached to the first bedroom, but not scary at all, was the only bathroom. My cousin would literally be born in that room a few years later. One night my aunt got up to go to the bathroom and had Jody.
Mom put the black couches in the dining room, where the big velvet painting of the matador hung. That was where we goaded my little cousin, Heather, into saying smart aleck things like “nunya beeswax,” and then complained that she never got in trouble.
The second time we lived in that house my parents were separated. I know I made a big deal about missing my daddy. I wanted to buy a Trans-Am, like the one in Smokey and the Bandit, and go find him. But now I see it as an illustrious time in my memory. We lived in the sacred house of my birth and Mom had lightness to her then, like the bounce in the loose curls from her hot rollers. My beautiful mother and her sister lived together, picking up shifts at the Stardust and dating men who drove sports cars.
Until we moved to North Dakota, where my dad had gone to find work. I hope it wasn’t my obsession with Trans-Ams and my daddy that drove her to that wasteland. How could I have known?
We came back to the rock house from North Dakota, a family intact. We stayed there with my aunt until we found a rent house next door to my uncle. The house was still the same. The same step-stool chair with the vinyl covered flip-up seat by the side door off the kitchen. I still had my grandmother’s phone number memorized. The braided oval rope rug was still in the living room floor.
Other things had changed. My aunt Connie died while we were gone. She drowned in a flash flood. I can’t describe what that looked like in my five-year-old imagination. It would be disrespectful to her children to put words to it. Suffice to say it was a horror in my mind. My mother loved her.
And even worse, the replacement aunt was cool and aloof. I’m sure I knew this aunt before the move. I know I remember my cousin, her daughter, and how she used to say “oyoyoyoyoyoyoy” over and over again. We thought she was pretty funny. But my corner-stone memory of the replacement aunt was seeing her open the door of her trailer house when we came back to Carlsbad. She stood there dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, all irritated and constipated looking. I could feel my mother’s disapproval, could feel her upper lip stiffen, saw her eyes widen. She still feels like a replacement aunt, like any minute she’ll just flounce away in a pouty huff.
I don’t know where we lived when I ran away from Pate Elementary in third grade, somewhere in Carlsbad. In second grade, I was diagnosed as a “gifted child.” In third, I couldn’t keep up. Mrs. Kartoonen knew my dad when he was a kid. Among other acts of harassment, I think he may have once asked her who dumped popcorn down the back of her pants. Maybe she was taking this out on me. Maybe she wasn’t.
She slammed my math book closed on my last math problem, and told me “I said take out your Mad Minute.” And I said, “Get off my case...” with equal parts frustration and hope that I would get a laugh out of my dad, make a name for myself as a smart-ass Baker. I didn’t get to finish the rhyme, “...toilet face.” before she clamped her hand over my mouth and drug me out into the hall.
She left me alone out there and I was so mad, so frustrated, that I just walked out the door. I crossed National Parks Highway and went to the tree-house in the side-yard of the rock house. I guess I was waiting for my aunt to come home. My mom’s sister, my second mother. I was so pissed off I forgot she didn’t live there anymore. It wasn’t our house. Strangers lived there.
I also thought my mother would be happy to see me when she finally drove up. She wasn’t. She took me back to the principal’s office. I heard my dad’s footsteps behind me when he came in the door. Until that moment, I sort of thought he would be proud of me for standing up to Mrs. Kartoonen. He wasn’t. He blistered my ass later. But not before my mother laid it out for the principal. Mom didn’t care how that teacher felt about my daddy, that woman was not going to mistreat my mother's kid.
By the end of the year, I truly believed Mrs. Kartoonen liked me. She was a real pro. They just don’t make teachers like that anymore.
