Blue Balloon & Broken Umbrella

I loved the way she said "balloon." She said it as if she were blowing bubbles. Balllll….ooooooon! And, it was the big blue balloon I chose out of the colored bunch the pretty clown sold at the Springville carnival. I happily let Uncle Dan tie it around my chubby, little wrist and wrestle its tugging float into the car so that I wouldn’t lose it to blinding sky. Viv and Dan’s house was much nicer than ours, a mid-century modern with perfectly manicured yard, curved and smooth pebbled drive and a doorbell that sounded like lingering church chimes. When we got home I begged my uncle to cut the tight string from my wrist and tie it to the handlebars of my tricycle. I spent the afternoon pushing my bike up the drive and then racing, legs barely able to keep up with the spinning peddles, while watching the balloon chase behind me, like a real person and one who wasn’t able to catch up to my three-year-old speed! One of my first and happiest memories and also one with the camera shutter speed effect of partial, yes, for sure it happened, but memories then were just forming and were more like movie flickers than a continuous story line.

The house on the corner had always been the subject of gossip. I was the only one who knew the truth. She and I shared first names, but besides that we were different in every way. I was tall and strong with wiry brown hair and she was short and frail as a feather wisp, with equally as thin and flyaway, straight blonde hair. Her mother smoked and so did her various biker boyfriends. Living in Utah in the early eighties, one took note of who smoked and also who had tattoo’s and many of the men who spent the night in their sunken living room were covered in naked ladies and one Hell’s Angel had a hook for a hand and liked to slash the air in front of me when he caught me staring. Their furniture was white leather and there were mirrored walls, with gold flecks, a coffee table made of glass on a polar bear rug. In the morning, the room still darkened with closed blinds, there’d be white chalk and razor blades left out on the table amongst the brown, red and white wrapped bottles. In our pajamas we’d sneak past the snoring men while her whispering mother in white robe made us breakfasts of cinnamon sugar toast, with heaps of butter paired with kid coffee with two more lumps of sugar. Her mother sitting across us smoking and drinking hers black, making sure we ate in silence before making our way quietly out the back door. Of our classmates, I was the only one who ever went into her house and I cannot tell why my mother, a convert and with ten children allowed me, but she did. The truth was both of our mother’s knew how to avoid and appease angry men.

I’d grown from a happy child who raced ahead of her blue balloon, through the awkward age of learning whom could be trusted based on mere appearances and beliefs. Sitting at my breakfast table in this recently remodeled, but widely lonely house, I see myself as a crooked umbrella, which was taught to hunch over and not appear as if I can operate myself without a man there to slide my canopy open up metal ribs. Women weren’t supposed to dive off the high dive (once my closest brother ran home to complain I’d done just that) and again that time I’d left my first husband after he’d become a black-out-bruiser when he glugged. After a week at my mothers’ house, she explained how I really needed to go home to my husband. And, so I learned to adapt and to step around men sleeping off their Lord Calvert to avoid a full blown tirade which could include him throwing over the China hutch, breaking all of the small cups my great grandmother had given me, or getting my hair pulled from behind for cooking the burger into spaghetti instead of loaf. Now, away from the grasp of men, I sit alone and think how a crooked umbrella doesn’t do much against seaside storms. I take off my shoes, brush the sand from my toes, light a fire to warm them, blow bubbles across the brim of peppermint tea I’m drinking from the wolf mug I excavated from the hoarder’s house this weekend.

Photo credit: Jakub Jacobsky/unsplash