Subway Wrappers and Wood Chips (CW semester one draft)

I brushed the once perfectly formed curls; now white girl Afro status, from my hazel eyes. I was six, skin as white as the bathroom walls, with bony knees that liked to knock together when I ran down stairs. My mother wasn’t home. She was waiting tables at an all you can eat buffet only found in southern towns called Western Sizzlin. At the time she was waiting on old men chomping on buttered rolls by day and attending local college classes by night. That left my father to entertain us on the weekends. My outfits rarely matched and he had no clue what to do with my wild locks. He just brushed his back and out, letting the hair add height to his already 6’3 stature.

I fumbled around under my bed, a space no man should ever travel. It was like a vacuum, sucking up every thing in its wake. Shoes, candy wrappers, bobby pins, missing socks, half-dressed Barbies. I was searching for my white Keds, the ultimate 90’s accessory. I ran my fingers around the laces for a bit and decided to give up. I left the white, tattered strings in some impossible knot. I didn’t want to ask my father to help tie my shoes. I was embarrassed. My mother always did that weird rabbit hole and the tree little number in the mornings before school to help me learn how to tie them on my own. Now, I couldn’t remember which part came first, last or where my fingers were supposed to loop or tie. So I gave up, letting the shoes slide up and down my heel the remainder of the day leaving blisters.

I threw my curls into a messy ponytail, the only thing I knew to do with it. My mother always had a matching bow for every outfit in my closet. Not today. She was escorting rib eyes twenty minutes down the pothole-infested freeway and I was going to the park. My older sister called down the hallway at me. I didn’t make out what she was yelling, but I guessed we were about to throw ourselves in the red car and leave.

Kim was older, taller, a tom-boy and louder than me. She could do things like dribble a basketball and build things with her hands with my father. They bonded like that. They would sit and just put things together, shoot hoops and be rough. I don’t think dad knew what to do with me early on. I liked pom-poms, hair bows and wanted nothing to do with things like dirt or mud pies. Kim could fly her dinosaur kite with ease, my father smiling up into the June sun with pride. Then there was me. My Barbie kite flapping on the thirsty Arkansan soil like a fish out of water. That’s how I felt most of the time.

We hopped in the cramped back seat, Kim reminding me to buckle the seat belt I was conveniently squashing with my 60-pound rear. It was 1996 and the windows in the red car were still manual, making my father pump his freckled, sun-kissed arms hard and fast to get any air flow to our flushed faces.  As we hit freeway, the wind was thrashing our hair around so hard that it was slapping us in the face. I looked over at Kim and smiled. We both began to laugh because we couldn’t hear a word each other was trying to  say. So we began to just pretend like we were having a conversation. It was as if we were in the bottom of our neighbor’s pool again, pretending to have an underwater tea party. Our mouths were moving in an exaggerated way, making us look like those apes dad took us to see last Saturday afternoon at the local zoo.

My head was now resting on the back window as I peeked through one eyelid to see our destination. The tires hit some gravel pieces as we pulled up to park benches and faded seesaws. The park. Our park. Kim ran ahead onto the grass, hopping onto the swings. She kicked her head back and forth violently, propelling her board straight bangs to the sky. I staggered behind, head down and in search for roly-poly’s.

“Go play, kid.” My slender father slumped on a bench to watch us through his biking sunglasses. Kim ran around in her grass-stained cut off shorts and Winnie the pooh t-shirt, hollering for me to come on, come on, come on. I didn’t want to swing or run across that wobbly wooden bridge that scared the crap out of me. I wanted to search for roly-poly’s and sit in the grass. I followed her for a while, eventually plopping myself down to empty my shoes. Wood chips. I hated those wood chips. How did they always manage to get in there anyway?

I peered over through my furrowed brow to see dad hunched over in the red car grabbing our sandwiches. The lunch of all lunches. Subway sandwiches and Capri sun pouches. My mother would have packed a full- blown picnic, probably involving heart shaped jelly sandwiches and napkins with sweet notes scribbled on the back. I half-smiled picturing my father preparing that sort of lunch.  My father was quick and efficient like subway sandwiches. No time for nonsense or ignorance. He was a computer programmer, focused on solutions and data. I didn’t understand him yet and all he knew to do at the time was to ruffle my hair and call me kiddo.

We sat in the grass, unwrapping our deli deliciousness and watching moms in high-waisted jeans push their snotty children on the swings. Kim was of course inhaling her lunch like the space under my bed does Barbie shoes. She wanted to be done already to go run around some more in those stupid wood chips. I looked to my father and let out a quiet enough giggle so he wouldn’t hear me. The bread crumbs from his sandwich were having a party in his curly strawberry blonde beard hairs. He didn’t seem to care or notice. Things were always getting in his beard, especially vanilla ice cream. My mother would always look over at him, chin dripping with melted vanilla and gasp, ”Joseph Todd! Look at the mess you’re making!” He would just laugh, making the mess worse.

It was windy already, the wind getting worse even though the sun was getting higher and brighter in the summer sky. We kept having to hold our napkins and wrappers down with random parts of our body, still trying to stuff our faces. Our attempts of restraining them with our elbows eventually failed. All napkins and wrappers went up in the sky further and higher than that stupid Barbie kite I had ever did.

I crawled on my knees at first, grasping at the air in vein. Kim was running full throttle towards the plastic bag then veering off to the playground forgetting about it. It was just my father and I. Chasing subway wrappers. His legs were long like the tree trunks in our backyard and lean from biking miles and miles of pavement every morning before the earth woke up. His arms reached up and snatched his Bull’s ball cap from his scalp. He was now swiping at the wrappers, like somehow the red angry Bull glaring on the front of his hat would help his cause.

My Keds took me up and down, up and down. I was wailing my arms and maneuvering my scrawny legs around toddlers picking their noses and eating rocks while their mothers flapped their tongues to other mothers about K-mart sales and Huggies. My index finger grazed the corner of a wrapper just enough for me to cup my hand together around it like I was holding grains of sand, trying not to let even one grain slip away. I don’t know why I didn’t just let the wrapper go and hop onto one of those rusted park toys and move on. I ran back to where my father was still chasing flying napkins with his hat. I held the Subway wrapper high over my head like an Olympic athlete on their Country’s victory lap.

“Daddy! Daddy! Look! I caught the wrapper!” I hollered, still flapping towards him like a wild goose. He turned around and looked at me through his dark glasses. I couldn’t see whether his eyes were smiling or even possibly looking straight past me to somewhere else. Then he smiled through his facial hair, took the wrapper from my tight grip and took it to the nearest park trashcan.

We walked to find Kim, probably swinging like a wild ape on the monkey bars somewhere. As we walked in silence my father ruffled my curly knob head and I knew what he meant. On the way back to our blue-gray house I looked to my father’s rear view mirror, catching him watching his youngest daughter. He smiled with his eyes, letting them wrinkle in the corners like they did when Kim flew her dinosaur kite, looking into the sunlight. I smiled back and he knew what I meant. I wasn’t chasing Subway wrappers that day and neither was he. We both knew that.