Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [15]
Not that he wouldn’t wear ridiculous outfits. He wore a revealing wrapped skirt to a luau on the base. He wore a truly ludicrous plaid suit and a matching plaid oversize hat and “played” a guitar, gyrating like Elvis, at the officers’ club talent show. He and a few other brave men wore pink bikini tops and matching skirts and did a Rockette-ish routine—hairy legs and all—at another club event. And that was all just while we were in Jacksonville. It wasn’t complicated; my father liked to make people laugh. Absolutely nothing embarrassed him. And when I was seven, nothing he did embarrassed me—although that would change over the next few years. At this point, though, I was a child living in the circus. Other children went to watch Peter Pan? Well, Dad was in it, and so my brother and I got to be Lost Boys. Then he was Captain “Ironsides” Brackett in Jacksonville’s Starlight Theatre production of South Pacific. And then he was Harry Brock in Born Yesterday. But he didn’t need a play—anywhere was a stage to him.
It never occurred to me that there could be people who were shy or reclusive. We certainly weren’t; we couldn’t be. Believe me, once you have seen your father dancing in a pink bikini, walking into a new school or playing a boy in green tights onstage is a piece of cake. So suburban Venezia Elementary School, my new school, was just a new school, and I made new friends, fell for a civilian boy—Steve Alston, who chased me on the playground, which I think means he fell for me, too—and had my first of a series of teachers who enchanted me.
The summer I turned eight my father got orders to return to Japan, this time to the Marine Corps Air Facility in Iwakuni. But first Dad would be in survival training in California for several months, so the remaining four of us moved in with my grandparents in Pensacola. Not every place has a smell you can remember, but my grandparents’ house did, and it was the smell of starched and ironed linens, fresh starched linens in those days, and later, when the bedrooms of their house were no longer regularly filled with family, the smell of stale starched linens. Anyone who has been in a Southern home where the heat collects in every fold of cloth or skin and undoes every sweet odor in time knows the difference.
There we played with cousins and—for the first time—really got to know our grandparents. Grandmother Thweatt would spend her days in the kitchen, while my grandfather sat in his leather chair in the living room playing solitaire or Scrabble. The grandchildren would gather around him and watch him play. Every once in a while, someone with a short memory would ask him what a word he had put down on the Scrabble board meant. Then, as he did anytime he thought we didn’t know the definition of a word, he would send us to the back hall, where the Webster’s Third Unabridged Dictionary stood on a tall stand. None of us was tall enough to reach it, and we had to pull a stool from the kitchen to read the words at the top of the page. When my grandmother died, nearly thirty years after her husband, that dictionary stand and Webster’s Third were all I wanted. They sit in my house today, and I play the role of my grandfather.
CHAPTER 3
IWAKUNI, JAPAN
WHEN I COMPLAINED to my mother that I was called Maleficent after a base theater showing of Sleeping Beauty featuring the evil witch of that name and that some of the children had thrown stones at me, she promptly cut my long straight black hair into a boyish cut. Based on the photographs of me at the time, it is safe to say that she cut it rather than