Heather in Paradise

Little white rental house on 8th Street and Franklin, Winthrop Harbor, IL

Mom, Danny and I moved here when I was 5 or 6 years old, in 1976.  Danny was never mean to me, but it was always made very clear  that he was not my father and he took little or no interest in me.  At that age, I still longed for a daddy, and often tried very hard to do things that would be pleasing to Danny, so that I could be considered his little girl.  When I turned 6 years old that September of 1976, Danny gave me a birthday card made of delicate cream colored paper with a glittery butterfly that said, “To my dear daughter.”  I thought I would die from happiness.

 In December of that year, my mom brought home my baby sister, Rebecca, in a Christmas stocking.  Danny’s joy in his beautiful new (real) daughter was boundless.  He absolutely doted on her, and the sun rose and set daily on Becky’s little face.  Looking back as an adult, it’s easy for me to love him for his devotion to his child, but at the time, unfortunately, I was bitterly jealous of his attention and this created a rift of animosity between my sister and me throughout our childhoods.  As adults, fortunately, we get along fine and have no problems admitting our love for each other.  Back then, however, I daydreamed about putting her in the mailbox and sending her back to wherever it was from whence she’d come. 

As far as neighborhood playmates went, this was The Golden Age.  Rhonda-next-door’s mom was single and worked a lot, so we often had their house to ourselves.  We played a lot of Little People, with elaborate sets built from toilet paper tubes, aluminum foil, rubber bands, and sundry other household items.  She also had the coolest screen/glass front door, with an upper window that could slide down into the bottom section of the door.  To we children of the fast-food generation, this screamed “drive-thru,” so we played “McDonald’s,” switching off who got to be the order taker and who got to be the orderer.  Stupid shameful memory that I still carry with me:  Once when Rhonda was the order taker, she asked me, “Would you like any beverages?”  “What are beverages?” I asked.  “Beverages are something to drink,” she said.  “Ah, ok,”  I said, “I’ll take two beverages, please.”  She burst out laughing and explained, gently, that “beverages” was a GENERAL term for specific types of drinks.  Oops.

I went sledding on aluminum saucer sleds down a hill into a frozen ravine, sometimes crashing into a tree halfway down.  I was bullied by the big boys on the block into a giant tire and rolled down this same hill.  When I finally rolled to a stop and crawled out, the world spun so terribly I thought I had wrecked my eyesight and balance forever.  Steve, whose daddy was an accountant, made us play “office” and made my scrawny, mosquito bite-ridden, knobby-kneed self play the role of “Miss Sexybody.”  Denise and Diane’s mom had a brand new refrigerator delivered and the empty cardboard box entertained us as an elevator, time machine, and space ship for a full week before it finally gave out. 

Denise and Diane had a T-bar swingset in their back yard, the only one in the neighborhood.  One night as Denise and I debated which of us loved Shaun Cassidy the most, I was standing on the top rung of the ladder with my feet turned sideways, one in front of the other.  Suddenly, my feet slipped on either side of the rung and I fell straight down, landing hard on the metal bar.  I screamed in pain and ran immediately home, howling, “Mommy, mommy, I broke my vagina, I broke my vagina.”  I bled and apparently did break my hymen, 11-12 years too early.  It’s a pity there are not commemorative shirts for just such an occasion:  I lost my virginity to a swingset and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Lest you think there was nothing rotten in the state of Denmark, I competed for Denise’s affection with the one girl in the neighborhood I could not stand, Cheryl Fink.  Like royalty, Denise was secure in her position and played Cheryl and me off one another, one day favoring Cheryl and the other favoring me.  Just before Denise moved out of the neighborhood forever, I knocked on her door to ask her if she wanted to play.  She and Cheryl opened the door together, both of them eating one half of a twin popsicle, their tongues and lips stained blue raspberry.  Denise refused to let me in, shutting the door in my face.  Later that day, I wrote a letter to Cheryl that began, “Dear Cheryl, your name is what you are.”  This letter became the first in a lifelong series of unsent letters that serve no purpose besides making me feel better.

There were other indignities on 8th and Franklin.  After hotly decrying the wicked boy at school who said there was no Santa Claus, I found all my Christmas presents in the front hall closet, carelessly left there by my mom, whose heart was clearly no longer in the pretense.  I pinned all my hopes on the Easter Bunny, who left magical paw prints on the kitchen floor leading to a giant, stuffed pink rabbit hidden in the clothes dryer.  Unfortunately for my childish sense of innocence and wonder, my exhausted mom left the chalk she’d used to draw the paw prints on top of said clothes dryer, which made me say, “Hey, WAIT a minute!!”

I sold 72 boxes of popcorn at school to earn a black and white picture in the Zion Benton News and my very first baseball mitt, which was promptly stolen out of the front yard.  I was so distraught, I never stopped looking for it.  In fact, last April when I went home for a visit, I drove by that old house one more time, just in case I’d somehow missed it under the bushes.

Danny had a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and belonged to a motorcycle “club” with lots of long-haired, rough-around-the-edges, but mostly kindhearted “brothers” who called me “rugrat” and ruffled my hair.  One rainy night, my mom and Danny had a fight just before he left for his late shift factory job.  I was half-asleep and didn’t know what the fight was about.  In the middle of the night, I was awakened by horrible, half-human, animalistic screams from my mom, who was pounding the walls and shouting, “I TOLD HIM, I TOLD HIM TO TAKE MY CAR!!”  I sleepily stumbled to the living room and found my Aunt Bonnie sitting quietly on the couch.  I sat next to Aunt B and said, “I don’t know why mommy’s so mad, Danny will bring back her car.”  That’s when Aunt Bonnie took my hands and said, “Honey, Danny died tonight.  He got hit by a car on his motorcycle.”  I was stunned, not fully understanding death.  Not fully understanding that Danny was gone, gone, gone.  We were bundled up and taken over to one of Danny’s motorcycle brother’s houses so my mom could do what she had to do at the hospital and police department. Still in my pajamas, in the car all the way to the babysitter’s I stared intently out the window, looking for Danny’s body parts along the side of the road, expecting to see a finger, or a clump of hair, or his eyeglasses; something, some part of him.  I saw nothing, nothing of Danny, and never did again.

We moved out of the house on 8th and Franklin soon after Danny’s funeral.  Goodbye, Leif Garret poster on my bedroom door.  Goodbye, Charlie’s Angel’s dolls.  Goodbye, little tree in the front yard with the tiny orange berries perfect for a berry war. 

Goodbye.