Riding in the Back Seat
Today, I’m taking a back seat to my mother-in-law.
I like it that way. When Irene comes to visit, we usually take her car
when we go out to eat. My husband, Dj, drives, Irene takes “shotgun”
in the front passenger seat, and I sit in the back seat behind her.
When I’m tucked in the back, Irene rarely talks to me or even
asks me whether I’d prefer Mexican or Italian food, which is fine
with me. The air seems lighter and affords me time to gaze out the window.
In the back seat, I can get out of my usual “gotta-be-in-control”
driver’s seat and let someone else for once make decisions (although
I do enjoy “guiding” Dj, a perennial driver-in-training
as far as I’m concerned). Something, I’m not always sure
what, encourages me not only to relinquish the steering wheel but also
the “shotgun” seat. Maybe safety. Maybe freedom. Maybe at
times I actually feel more control in the back seat.
The back seat isn’t a bad place to sit. It affords me one of my
luxuries, to watch other people in their cars. Like when a car was full
of children not buckled into their seat belt, the baby is cryingcrying
and the mom is yelling at the top of her lungs for everyone to sit down
and shut up. “I’m going to stop the car! Do you want me
to stop the car?” I can only guess what happened when she stopped
the car. Then there was the time two young couples were in the car.
The front couple sat buckled into their front seats sitting apart. The
two lovers in the back seat didn’t care that we could see them
making out. They were so close you couldn’t have gotten a piece
of thread between them. It was hard to tell where one left off and the
other one started. The doggies are my favorites: a little cocker pressed
up against the back window smiling and the very proud guard dog barking
at everything moving. Usually, when I sit in the back seat, I reserve
the right to tell the driver how to drive by pulling out my “Back
seat Driver’s license” that I had printed in a fifty cent
machine at a truck stop. It reads, “I, Elizabeth, reserve the
right to correct driving I deem bad, horrible, or just plain slow driving
from the back seat.”
Dj, Irene, and I had come to a stop light as Irene rattled on to her
son about her stomach is acting up again and she felt like she needed
fish or lean beef this evening and, what with her trying to lose weight
and all, she couldn’t decide what would be the best dinner for
her. I look back out the window. In the car beside us, rough calloused
hands casually clasped the steel gray steering wheel. Puffs of smoke
meander out the half opened window as ashes come flicking out every
second or so. He’s wearing old blue jean overalls. Next to him,
I can see two little pig tails on top of a little head in the front
passenger seat, which is turned toward her window. He is leaning on
the middle arm rest towards her. I press my car window button to let
in fresh air…suddenly the air seemed stale and heavy in the back
seat.
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Riding in the back seat reminds me when I was young and we traveled
all over the country with my dad’s job. Julius Reed isn’t
a tall American Indian but back then he looked the part with his large
nose, deep set eyes, jet black hair and the light side of dark skin.
He stood tall and proud and had a firm hand shake. He had carpenter
hands.
Everyday for as long as I can remember, my mom made his lunch and my
dad would save half of his desert for me to have when he arrived home
from work. I would run to him when he was walking down the driveway
and he would scoop me up and give me a big hug and his lunch box to
carry. I was daddy’s little girl.
My dad’s father was full blooded Blackfoot, or so the story goes.
My dad never spoke to me about his childhood. I don’t remember
meeting either one of his parents nor do I even know their names. I
remember a picture of them standing together. She was very tall next
to him as they stood side by side in front of a very small old wood
frame white house. I stayed at my grandmother’s, my mom’s
mother, when they died in a house fire. My dad had seven brothers and
sisters. I only met two of them. He didn’t want to talk about
the rest of them. He once called them “leeches.” My brother
told me about my dad being an American Indian and how when my dad was
in fifth grade the other kids ridiculed him, kicked him and beat him
and called him “half breed”. From what I have read about
Indian history, the Indians rejected half breeds because they were white
and the white men would call half breeds “Indian Squaw.”
It seemed Indian women must have been beautiful and the white men wanted
them for their own wives or because of the shortage of women out west
they were just “what was available.” There were a large
number of half breeds from these unions. At one point, the military
declared that no Indian women could remain within the military forts.
One officer resigned immediately and held up his son and said that to
remain an officer in the army he would have to deny his own name. It
seems that the term “half-breed” is still causing havoc
today both on and off the reservations. On the reservations the suicide
rate is seems high among the young who don’t feel “pure”
according to one observer. Off the reservations, the half-breeds are
still called “mutts” with term still carrying a negative
connotation, as in “you’re nothing but a half-breed”
with “drunkard” following in the same breath.
My dad never made it to the sixth grade. He left home as a back seat
citizen, an “Indian Squaw.” Once I tried to get him to go
to church with me, “Hell, no! They’re just a bunch of hypocrites!”
My brother said it was the “church people” who was the ones
who called him names; they were the ones who would spit on him and beat
him up. I don’t think my dad ever looked back but it was something
that followed him into my life.
My dad worked on a crew that built cooling towers for large manufacturing
plants. Once a tower was completed, the whole crew moved on to the next
job in another city, sometimes on the other side of the country. Once
we passed Disneyland not stopping because he had to get to another job.
I was five then and my dad threatened to “whoop me” if I
didn’t stop crying. My dad thought that if he hit me hard enough
with an old leather razor strap I would stop crying. That old leather
razor strap came from a barber who used it to clean the single blade
razors after a shave. It was about two and half feet long, three inches
wide and a quarter of an inch thick raw hide.
We lived in a small travel trailer, which my dad pulled behind our huge
brown and white Oldsmobile station wagon, the kind with the wood on
the sides. The station wagon had lots of room to move around in when
the seat backs were laid down flat. That was the early 1960’s
when cars were as big as boats and we didn’t have to wear safety
seat belts.
My older brother and I rode in the back all day and all night while
we traveled across country to my dad’s next job. That back seat
seemed as big as the prairies we drove through where the tall grass
was all you saw for what seemed like forever. I had my blanket and pillow,
my favorite stuffed animals, coloring books and crayons and my tiny
china tea set. When my brother and I weren’t fighting, my stuffed
animals and I would have a tea party. In very cold weather, I would
blow my breath on the car window and draw stars and angel wings. Sometimes
my brother and I would play “I Spy.” I spy a black cow.
I spy a blue Volkswagen bug. I spy a cat in the window. Then we would
argue about who saw what first. We must have driven our parents crazy
because they would yell at us to quiet down. I was always tried to stay
next to the back window.
I mostly wanted to be good. My dad could get really mad at me. He thought
that if he beat me with that old leather razor strap then I would be
his kind of good. He said he was beating the “hell out”
of me. When he pulled that strap out he would be so angry that his face
was flushed red and his hands shaking. I don’t think he ever knew
how hard he was hitting me.
In the back seat of that station wagon at night, I could prop myself
up on my pillow near the back window and fall asleep watching the stars
pass through the sky, or watching my dad’s cigarette smoke make
interesting funny little creatures on the car ceiling as I listened
to the wheels sing a lullaby over and over and over and over and over
again.
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After I graduated from kindergarten, we settled in Houston, Texas and
my parents traded the travel trailer in for a new house they had built.
I had my own room for the first time, so did my brother. I wasn’t
allowed to close the door though. We traded the station wagon into a
sedan. My mom didn’t have her driver’s license so my dad
drove us everywhere. My place was sitting behind my mom in the back
seat.
We would go to visit my grandparents after they moved up to East Texas
from Houston. We would stay with them. My grandfather’s ritual,
when we arrived, was to take off to the store for this or that and it
was mom’s ritual to insist that I go with him. My grandfather
always had an old beat up pickup truck; I had to sit on the bench seat
next to him. He was a tall man with thin hair and a long face. He worked
with wood and had the largest hands I had ever seen. He was an old farmer
type who wore blue jean overalls, the kind with lots of pockets and
had a wild story to tell about most anything. He grew his own vegetables,
slaughtered his own cows and pigs and made his own wine. My grandmother
and he fought all the time. She wished she would have been born a man.
She thought she could do things better than most men including the one
called her husband.
I was about eight years old when he started to put his large hand down
in my panties to have a feel around on the way to the store. When we
were at the store he would buy me all the candy I wanted. My parents
thought he spoiled me. Those at the country store that my grandfather
was a typical grand dad.
He nick named me, “Beautiful.” I was his beautiful little
treasure…little did anyone know where his real treasure lay. I
cried myself to sleep those nights. I would curl up into a little ball
with my knees up at my chin sleeping next to the bedroom window so I
could see the stars. It was like circling the wagons at night in case
of an Indian attack.
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I was a tomboy growing up. I mowed grass, worked on cars with my dad,
went bass fishing and squirrel hunting. I was the son he hadn’t
found in my brother. One fall, we were out in the woods, each of us
lugging our guns, and he stepped over a small creek. It was a bit wide
for me so I stepped on an old rotten log and ended up in the stream.
I held my gun up and it didn’t get wet. As for me, I was soaked.
My dad said, “Good job, kid!”
He meant I did a good job keeping the gun out of the water. I was proud
I did too. It didn’t matter I froze in wet clothes the rest of
the afternoon in the fall coolness..
I loved the woods. My dad taught me how to navigate them by the sun
and how to walk quietly so as to not alert the creatures to our presence.
We would walk for miles deep into the big thicket and we always came
back out where the car was parked back on the road.
Other than the kids at school calling me Bugs Bunny because of my buck
teeth, my days looked pretty much like my friends. The really bad beatings
stopped for the most part and we didn’t go visit my grandparents
very often because of some kind of misunderstanding. I learned to escape
into my own world with school, dolls and reading. I had a little bannie
rooster, bannies are a miniature breed of chickens. He was very colorful
and mean as the dickens. He tried to bite me every time I attempted
to feed and water him. I paid a months allowance for him. I didn’t
hold the meanness against the little rooster. It wasn’t his fault
he was like he was. I loved the way he would prance around his pen like
he was ready for a fight. I admired his courage. I would go out and
talk to him in a real sweet voice trying to convince him he could trust
me. It never worked. The damage was already done. Then there were the
times he would actually peck blood out of me when I fed him and I would
let out a holler. I’m sure it scared him even more and it didn’t
help me win him over. He never had a name. I couldn’t help but
think this little rooster and I shared things neither one were able
to talk about.
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My dad wanted to teach me how to drive when I turned fifteen. We went
to the deserted back roads of north Houston to practice my driving where
there weren’t any other cars to hit. The back roads cut a path
through the big thicket tall pine trees that grew so close to each other
they were nose to nose. The vines below entangled themselves together
and formed a wall you would have to hack through. In my memory, it was
shaded grey, even on the sunniest days.
My dad would drive the two of us to a deserted spot and stop the car
right in the middle of the road so that I could get out and change places
with him. He always flicked his cigarette on the ground as we passed
each other while we were walking around the back of the car so he could
ride “shotgun,” while I drove. After I was behind the wheel
and driving for a bit, he would lean over on the arm rest and then put
his arm above my shoulder then slip his rough hand into my blouse to
have a feel a round, as if I wouldn’t notice…we both just
looked ahead.
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I learned to hate my dad. My mom never understood why my dad would always
buy me anything I wanted. She hated me when she told me “no”
and I would appeal to my dad and win. Maybe she even learned to hate
my dad, too.
Sometimes my mom would talk my dad into letting her stay up to make
sure I came home from a date because the one thing my dad couldn’t
tolerate was me dating and she couldn’t tolerate the beatings.
If I came home late and my dad was waiting for me there would be a pile
of cigarette butts in the ash tray and his old leather razor strap lying
on the floor. He would call me “whore” while he was beating
the “hell” out of me.
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My grandfather died before I came to a place where I was willing to
even admit what had happened to me. Years later, my dad admitted to
touching me “one time.” He told me that he had a “religious”
experience right after that incident and had never done it again. His
withered hands were folded together as if in prayer, as he sat in my
dining room looking old and frail. I guess his religious beliefs took
a back seat to his desires.
I had always thought that there would be some closure if I talked to
my dad about those times he “touched me..” The little girl
in me still wanted her daddy. But the daddy she wanted would have protected
her and it certainly wasn’t the man who was sitting in the chair
in my dining room lying to me.
I learned to live in a constant fight or flight stance waiting for the
next time someone I knew would attack me. My body and mind needed relief,
needed safety, needed freedom from the past and to be in control. My
body and mind’s vigilance began to take its toll with illness
after illness and relationship after relationship. I began to long for
home, the home I had never experienced. I wanted to go home like a child
who was homesick and missed her family.
I arose from the subterfuge I had learned to live from and I retreated
to the country woods in upstate New York allowing the brilliantly colored
fall trees to cover me and the gentle breezes to wrap around me restoring
that which was lost. The silence there soothed my soul. The silence
was not a lack of sound but a lack of judgment, a lack of the past;
it was a lack of the old falling away like the fall leaves in the wind.
I felt free and safe among those tall red and yellow sycamores as I
lay in a hammock by the lake. I allowed my mind to become quiet. Truth
found me there and brought me to the place I had longed for, I discovered
inside of me was my home. I had come home to myself and my body began
celebrated with healing.
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A horn honks, the light turns green and Dj pulls even closer to the
car with the man and little girl. The man with the callous hands turns
to look at me with his cigarette in his mouth. I stare at him until
he turns toward the little girl then back at me. He smiles and flicks
his cigarette out the window. My husband says half looking back at me,
“What do you think?” he asks. I respond, “About what?”
And so the conversation goes on about which restaurant would I like
to eat at and where is that Mexican restaurant that we went to the last
time Irene was in town. I continue to watch as the car with the rough
hands and the little girl turn at the next intersection as we drive
on to dinner and I gaze out the window from the back seat.