Burn Down the Ground (15 page)

That evening, when the light for the phone flashed, I raced to answer it, hoping it would be Mom with birthday wishes. “Hello?”

I was heartened when I was correct, and listened to her off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.” I excitedly told her about the fishing trip I’d taken with Grandpa, our visit to the local Deaf club, and the special place we had gone for my birthday lunch. Then it was Grandma’s turn to take the line. I put the phone on the coupling device for the TTY and signed, “Mama wants to talk to you.”

Grandma shut the door to the spare bedroom and typed with Mom for a long time before finally emerging to prepare dinner. I waited until she was out of sight before I slipped into the guest
room, where I dug the paper transcript of her conversation with Mom out of the trash. I was surprised to see that she was upset over the fighting going on between my brother and me.

Mom insisted that it was nothing more than sibling rivalry, which is what she always told me, but Grandma disagreed. “The fighting is terrible. It makes my heart beat too fast and it scares me.”

My heart sank as I read on. Grandma was refusing to stay alone another day with David and me, prompting my mother to change her reservation and come to Tulsa earlier than planned.

When she arrived, she laid into us with a scathing lecture. “You two are so bad even your own grandmother doesn’t want you!”

David was ashamed he had distressed Grandma Worth. She was so easygoing and rarely complained about anything. Upsetting her filled him with guilt that he had crossed the line. He softened his mean streak, much to my relief. The change was almost immediate. Of course, he still teased me now and again as brothers do, but the physical harassment stopped.

On our last night in Oklahoma, David and I turned in early in anticipation of our morning flight home to Houston. We shared the hide-a-bed sofa in the living room but I couldn’t sleep. I lay wide awake, my stomach in knots, listening to the sound of David’s low, heavy breathing signaling me he was asleep. In a few weeks, I would be starting sixth grade, joining my brother at Montgomery Junior High, where he was starting eighth grade. I had a respectable number of friends, but David was reigning king of Bus #9 and the proud owner of a yearbook so packed with signatures from classmates, I was sure he was the most popular kid
in his class. Facing this unknown entity called junior high, and hoping he had insight from his years of experience that he could pass down to me, I worked up the nerve to ask him for advice.

“David? You awake?”

“Huh? I am now.”

His annoyed voice made me second-guess whether I should have awakened him. “Oh. Sorry. Never mind.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar. What’s wrong?”

It took a while for him to draw it out of me, but finally I managed to tell him.

“Well … I’m just scared about starting school.”

“What’s to be scared about?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m worried about finding my way from class to class.”

“The school’s not that big. You’ll see. It’s easy.” David rolled over and covered himself with the blanket.

I couldn’t let him fall back asleep; I hadn’t gotten the answers I was looking for and I wouldn’t dare wake him again. I took a deep breath and plunged into the real reason I was worried. “I want to be popular … like you.”

The words had barely left my lips when he broke into a guttural laugh. He looked over at me and saw I was hurt by his laughter.

“It’s not something you can make happen. Anyway, why do you want to be popular?”

“I just want people to like me. I want to have a lot of friends like you.”

“I don’t know, Kambri. You’ll be all right. Just don’t try too hard.”

WORKIN’ FOR A LIVIN’

D
avid was right. With about seventy-five students in each grade, Montgomery Junior High wasn’t big or hard to figure out. But I hadn’t confessed to him my real insecurity: I was uglier than an armadillo. Unlike Mom and Dad with their big, white perfect teeth that looked like Chiclets, my adult teeth were
growing in like David’s. They were crooked and small and my gums were always swollen from chronic gingivitis. My formerly golden silky hair had turned into stringy, dirty-dishwater blond strands. In an effort to spruce it up, Mom gave me an Ogilvie home perm. But the “Afro” only called attention to my long, skinny face and Joker-like smile, so I let it grow out, which made the top half of my greasy hair stick-straight and the bottom half kinky curls. I couldn’t attract a magnet if I were covered in foil. While Mom was blessed with boobs so big her bra straps made deep indentations in her shoulders from the weight, I was still flat as glass and so skinny I could hide behind a stop sign.

Money was tight and our trips to the grocery store were scheduled around my parents’ biweekly paychecks. Sometimes we ran out of staples before it was time to stock up again, so I scrounged around for anything to quell my appetite. I balled up slices of bread, sucked on dried sticks of spaghetti, gummed spoonfuls of butter, or ate peeled and salted raw potatoes, tomatoes, and cucumbers plucked from our garden. My brother and I were bottomless pits of hunger and never gained weight. For David, Mom purchased special high-calorie protein shakes to supplement his diet. She took me to a doctor, convinced I had worms. Luckily the doctor told her what I already knew—I wasn’t getting enough to eat for my rapidly growing body—but I was humiliated just the same.

Not only was I exceptionally unattractive and skeletal, I was shamefully unfashionable. All the girls at school wore Gloria Vanderbilt or Jordache jeans with Izod and Polo sweaters, the iconic logos branding them rich and popular. I wore cheap clothes from the discount department store, Weiner’s. I begged Mom for my own pair of designer jeans, but she refused. Not
even for Christmas. “I’m not gonna spend all that money on one pair of jeans. You won’t fit in them for very long, anyway.”

She was right; I was growing fast. A sweater that fit one day was too tight just a few months later. I felt my bones stretching at night, so Mom gave me aspirin and massaged my legs to ease the excruciating pain. David and I were head and shoulders taller than everyone else in our respective grades. We kept track of our growth rate with marks on the kitchen wall. I climbed on top of a stool and marked the wallpaper with a pen where David’s head was, and then he’d do the same for me, until the wall looked like a six-foot ruler with all the measurements we had taken over the years.

The weekends at Galveston beach and blistering sunburns had covered me in freckles, which the boys teased me about.

“Hey, Kambri, did you stand too close to a mud flap?”

At home I took out my frustration on Mom, a natural redhead with plenty of freckles of her own. “I’m ugly because of you! It’s all your fault I have freckles!”

Mom’s attempts to comfort me with the tale of the Ugly Duckling backfired.

“So, you think I’m ugly, too!”

“I didn’t say that, Kambri.”

“Well, you told me one day I’ll turn into a swan but how can I do that without being ugly
first
? YOU THINK I’M UGLY!” I shrieked.

I flung myself onto my bed crying, kicking and screeching hateful rants about Mom into my pillow.

What I lacked in looks, I made up for in effort. I invested all my energy into school and extracurricular activities. Throughout junior
high, I was a straight-A student and teacher’s aide, served on the Youth Advisory Council, participated in theater arts festivals, and competed in poetry readings, readers’ theater, and pantomiming. I was on the track team and a starting player in both volleyball and basketball. If I could have joined the boys’ football team, I would have. Instead, I settled for playing with them on Boars Head.

One evening after school, I was in a basketball game against the Magnolia Bulldogs. I heard a familiar voice coming from the stands and was surprised to see my father sitting alone on the top bleacher. My heart fluttered. No one had ever come to see me play. I stopped and gave him a big wave. He waved back and signed, “Don’t look at me. Look at the game!”

Energized to have someone there to watch me, I raced down the court, caught up to the other players, blocked a shot, and grabbed the ball in midair. Before anyone realized, I was headed toward my team’s net unguarded. The only thing between the basket and me was fifty feet of court. The crowd leapt to their feet screaming wild cheers, including Dad’s signature piercing shriek.

I dribbled to the basket and slid a layup toward the hoop. I missed.

The crowd let out a collective groan and everyone took his seat.

I glanced up at Dad. He snapped his fingers as if to say, “Aw shucks,” but I still hung my head in shame. After the game, Dad patted me on the back and signed, “Next time. You just need practice.”

If the night hadn’t been bad enough, Dad made it even worse by driving our old Chevy to the game.

The once-beloved truck that we had decorated with red, white, and blue balloons and streamers to carry David’s baseball and my softball teams in parades back in Houston was now a blemish on the façade I was attempting to create. The bench seat had holes worn through and the metal was riddled with rusty spots. Dad had patched them up before spray-painting the interior a bright royal blue.

I was usually one of the last kids to be picked up after practice so my classmates never saw it. But there was no avoiding it now. Ducking my head, I climbed into the cab convinced that every person in the whole wide world knew I was a freckled, ugly loser who lived in a trailer, rode in a rattletrap truck, and missed the easiest shot in the history of basketball. I wanted to die.

The Chevy had outlasted any other car we owned. Mom’s four-door sedan still looked decent, but because of the bumpy dirt roads, it was rattled to the core and eventually fell apart. The miles we logged demanded an upgrade to something that could handle the backwoods of Texas, so we became the proud owners of a brand-new four-wheel-drive Toyota truck. I’d never seen anything so cool.

“The cab comes off so when we go to Galveston we can drive it like a jeep,” Dad signed.

“We really can’t afford it,” Mom said. “But it’s built to handle these roads so we’ll save money on all the repairs and your daddy won’t have to spend all his time working on it.” She rattled off the speech like she was still convincing herself that getting in over our heads with the high monthly payment was the right thing to do.

To make ends meet, my mother got a second job working nights and weekends as a hostess at the members-only Walden Yacht Club in Montgomery. I took the opportunity to ask her if I could work there, too.

“Why do you want to work? You’re only thirteen.”

“Please? I can use the money to buy my own clothes and books.”

To pinch pennies, my mother had discontinued my book club membership, and I desperately wanted it back.

“Let me talk to my boss and see what he says.” Mom told her manager I was fourteen, but very mature for my age. He agreed to meet me so my mother told me to get dressed in my nicest school clothes before we drove forty minutes to Lake Conroe for the interview. Mom told me the Walden Yacht Club was a really swanky restaurant. I imagined it to be like Red Lobster, since anytime I heard adults talking about where to go for a special anniversary or celebration, Red Lobster was
the
choice. I had never been to one, but knew from the TV commercials that it was really expensive and served you fish that you couldn’t catch in a lake.

The yacht club was part of a gated community of new estate homes, single-family houses, condominiums, and townhouses under development on the shores of Lake Conroe. I had never seen anything so luxurious. The homes had sprawling manicured lawns and carefully sculpted evergreens. There was a golf course, swimming pool, multiple tennis courts, a clubhouse, and even a playground. “This is how the other half lives,” Mom said as she steered us toward the yacht club. She pointed out a house owned by Farrah Fawcett and said, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

The nicest house I’d ever been in was my grandparents’ two-bedroom
ranch in Tulsa. How rich must these people be to afford homes like these? I couldn’t contain my awe as I stared out my passenger-side window trying to imagine what these houses looked like on the inside. We drove for six miles before we reached the yacht club. I was captivated by its grandiosity. It was modern and sleek, using both brick and glass in an ornate, impressive architecture. Enormous columns marked a grand entryway. Two lofty glass doors were reached by a sweeping stone staircase. The clubhouse, a half-acre big, was directly on the waterfront and befitting of such a posh community. As I climbed the stairs, a young, pretty hostess greeted me. She was tastefully dressed in a slim taupe pencil skirt, peach silk blouse with ruffles and lace, and beige pumps. She flashed a beautiful smile and said, “Hello, ladies, how may I be of service to you this afternoon?”