Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [6]
The summer of 1957 my father went off to Officer Candidate School. Like my mother, he wanted to get out of Louisiana, but that’s not why he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He enlisted because of two things his father had said. On their quiet street in Lafayette, my father had spent a lot of time playing imaginary games outside. This was during the war, men dying over in Europe and the South Pacific. Once his father yelled at him, “Goddamnit, all you’re good for is shooting Japs in the backyard.” When my father was a teenager, my grandfather looked down at him and said, “When are you going to grow hair on your arms? You look like a woman.”
Within a few months of meeting, my mother and father had eloped; she had married a writer and a Marine second lieutenant, he had married a bright beauty from the working class. A few days after the justice of the peace had joined them for life, my mother’s father said to her, “If you get divorced, don’t bother coming home. There’s been no damn divorces in our family.”
IT WAS the six of us: my young parents and all four of us kids born in a five year period beginning in 1958. We were each born on Marine bases, delivered by Marine doctors, Suzanne at Quantico in Virginia, me and Jeb on Camp Pendleton in California, and Nicole on Whidbey Island in Washington State. During these years, our father spent a lot of time aboard the USS Ranger off the coast of Japan. When we did see him, it was for brief stretches in cramped Marine base housing. His head was shaved, his face smooth and clean, but he was a man who didn’t smile much, a man who seemed locked into a car on a road he didn’t want to be on. But then my father’s father died in 1963, and almost immediately after that Dad retired from the Marines as a captain and was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City.
Though I didn’t have words for it, I’d never seen him happier; he laughed often and loudly; he hugged and kissed our mother at every turn; he’d let his hair grow out long enough you could actually see some on his head, thick and brown. He’d grown a mustache, too. At night before bed, he’d sit me, my brother, and two sisters down at the kitchen table or on the couch in the living room and he’d tell us stories he made up himself—adventure stories where the hero and heroine were Indians defending their families and their people from the white man. One of them was Running Blue Ice Water, a kind and brave warrior who lingered in my imagination long after we’d been tucked in upstairs in a large room all four of us children shared.
My memory of that time is the memory of parties, though we were so broke we ate canned meat and big blocks of government cheese. Once a month Pop sold blood. But the parties went on. They happened at night, the house filled with talk and laughter and cigarette smoke. There were parties during the day, too. Blankets laid out on grass under the sun. Men and women eating sandwiches and sipping wine and reading poems out loud to each other.
Some parties were at the Vonneguts’ house next door. All the Vonnegut kids were older than we were, but the father, Kurt, would walk down to our house every afternoon and sit with us four kids in the living room and watch Batman on the small black-and-white.