What Did You See on Mulberry Street?

William Stanton

A large amount of my youth was spent on military bases. These places have no reason to be visually appealing; they simply serve functionality purposes. As such, nearly all of them are categorized into the old, ‘70s feeling California vibe, a unique, dirt brown feeling that prevails in a lot  of buildings in the west. If one were to enter Camp Pendleton today, (a navy base in San Diego), the look of things becomes much duller once one passes the tall, barbed wire fence.

Everything is organized logically, from the local markets that require your military I.D. privilege card to the government subsidized housing, the library, the gym, a bar, and a gas station. Other buildings seem far less interesting, and more devoid of life except for the occasional man in uniform, and these windowless buildings take up the majority of bases. All buildings on the base, housing, other buildings with function unknown, and uninteresting to the young child me, are rectangular in shape, and are usually tan or occasionally gray. Directions are not given by a map, but simple signs that wear the most unremarkable white font in plain brown give directions to where you want to go. The most interesting and visually appealing building usually is the fast food joint on the base, and mostly this is a McDonald’s or a Taco Bell.

Perhaps this monotony was one of the more stable aspects of my surroundings. We moved a lot as an active duty, enlisted navy family, and so at some point I came to accept the rectangular cloned buildings that predominated the bases that we stayed at in South Carolina, Connecticut, California, Washington, and Hawaii. The few bases outside of the country that we were located to were perhaps the most interesting, but hardest to remember as I was less than five years old then. They were in Germany and England, with an in-between stop in France to further my mom’s attempt at an opera career. I vaguely recall the architecture being more interesting.

Temporary military housing is nothing but a glorified, yet unadorned hotel room. Your kitchen is part of the living room and dining room, separated not by a wall but by a boundary where cheap white and black tile turns to muddy colored carpet, all in a single room. This room is adorned with a small shower and toilet. A small door separates the living space from a bedroom containing a queen-sized bed, which is normally where my parents slept. I slept on the transformable sofa bed. It was pretty exciting to be an only child at this time because at night I got an entire room to myself.

My immediate family was in that particularly interesting category of families in which there were many difficulties. At the same time, those parents wanted to “shield” me from their mistakes, when the inevitable divorce happened. Looking back all those years ago, I’m truly impartial to what happened--as outrageous as it may be. My parents, when I was twelve, both seemed infallible, incomprehensible creatures. Now, it just seems like some escalated high school drama with mistakes that one of us, a child, could have made.

My favorite children’s author was Dr. Seuss-- I literally had a mini shrine dedicated to the man that could only be described as a library of his books-- and I’m not sure if it was my fathers' or my favorite book personally, as our opinions were so intertwined at my early age. That book was And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. The book, as it turns out, was Dr. Seuss’s, aka Theodor Geisel’s, first book published, perhaps having that special quality of a book that is an author’s first and holds a certain charm and originality that a first artwork has and that its copies lack. The earliest memories I have are of my father and me reading this book together, with me under my covers and his vascular hands guided by strong arms turning pages, his eyes obscured by lighting reflecting off his cheap prescription glasses, and his mouth moving, talking about all the absurdities that Dr. Seuss had in store for us.

Since my father was in the navy, he was usually out to sea on six-month to year-long trips, so when we lived with him, we didn't really. Yet, we lived with him more than anyone else, as where he was stationed changed frequently, making us move more than twelve times across different states and countries based on where his current ship of residence was. We (my mother and I, I was an only child then) lived in the temporary military apartments close to or on each of the bases where the ship was. I’m sure it didn’t seem like it then, but as I look back, the only significant times that mattered to me and are remembered with any clarity are times that my father and I were together-- all other faces, friends, and peers, faded into obscurity. I remember being in constant awe of my father. The few times he wasn’t asleep from his nightshift when he was not on the ship, he was working out, always running, lifting weights, or something along those lines, and I wanted to be like him, too. On choice weekends we would go out to the closest track and field late at night, and I would ride my bike next to his almost gazelle like gait as he did his laps, as the street lamps faded into a neon yellow line with the only stationary thing being him and my bike. Those moments were the ones I looked forward to the most, even if they only happened three, four times a year. 

Truthfully, I don’t know what I remembered most-- the few days out of the three hundred that I saw him-- or the rest I spent waiting for him to knock on the door.

I never paid a lot of attention to the interactions between my father and my mother, but looking back on all of the pictures they had taken together smiling, I suppose times then weren’t turbulent and stormy. But perhaps they did a good job of hiding it. I remember vaguely the shouting at four in the morning when we lived in Connecticut and this was three years before everything was taken apart, by whom or what, is still a little unclear, even today. Even now, I still wonder if they tolerated three years of being “married” for me, their only child? The shouting that night in Connecticut, I couldn’t remember what was said, or what happened afterwards-- they acted normal the morning after, so I wonder if I just dreamt the entire thing. Their lies were so believable, in regards to everything, that I took their word as my only truth. Maybe if I had half of a brain, I would have recognized the distance when they took separate cars on the trip across the country to where we were stationed next in San Diego. I was too busy feeling loved by both of them.

In San Diego my dad took up carpentering as a spare job, and when I got back home from school (I was now in kindergarten) we would go on little trips to Home Depot, which was as exciting for my dad as Toys R us was for me. The first birthday my father wasn’t out at sea was my eighth, and after receiving a crazy, elaborate 2000 piece US Nimitz Lego set, we spent the rest of the day sawing wood and coughing up sawdust outside under the hot sun, for some job that he had, some job I couldn’t remember for the life of me. Perhaps I didn’t care, or perhaps I was too busy coyly pretending to be bored out of my mind. Even if where we were was just a dirt hill near a construction site near our militarized apartment (where my dad set up a little workbench), and not the beach, I set up a little clay sand castle and pretended twigs in the ground were invaders and I was defending my cute steeple with an army of sun dried, brown leaves. There weren’t too many bugs that were annoying-- all I remember now were the snails that came out after the rare night of rain. When I think back, it’s almost unnerving how much of my father’s time I remember with him and how little of everything else I remember when he was gone.

I remember crying after he returned after being gone for nine months, and how I ran across a park that was near the ship, how he almost was a stranger but he smelled like the familiar aftershave he always used. I remember how mad I was when he was passed out on the couch the same day because he was exhausted instead of playing with me. I also remember him being out to sea when I was in the hospital day in and day out for my severe asthma. It was hard to remember how many times I collapsed in the summer heat and woke up in the hospital on the base, or the late night blurs in the car on the way to the emergency room. I remember thinking, “I wish my dad was here,” when staring at the clinically white ceiling. My mom talked about my dad often-- and then she just stopped. It was around this time I met David Silverman, the father of my sister.

For some obscure reason, which is obvious to me now, my mother and I went on month- long trips to Oregon, a state above us, while my dad was on eight-month trips out to sea. My mom at this time kept hinting about how we were going to move up to Oregon eventually, and she claimed that this was for my benefit, trying to get me to get excited about leaving my homeschooled education and going to a private middle school in Portland, the biggest city in the state. My first impressions of David were as follows-- he was super cool, he had the latest computer games, and he got me a cool gift nearly anytime I met him. He drove one of the coolest cars I’ve seen- a BMW sports two seater, that seemed so much faster than the station wagon from the 1970s that my mom was still lugging around. I was a bit more mentally developed than an infant at the age of seven, so I asked my mom where David came from. She just replied, he’s my best friend from high school.

Back in San Diego my mom became visibly pregnant. The timing was such that it seemed it was Dad’s kid. I was eight at the time when I accidentally walked into my parents' bedroom. I had no idea what sex was at the time, and I left when they said get out in a tone they never used before with me. I went to go play with my Legos, mostly confused about why they would act so strangely.

I forgot about it and moved on.

The time with my pregnant mom was interesting-- she had a lot of cravings that she didn’t normally have, but perhaps the memory is exaggerated by all the times she was complaining about having them. My father, as usual, was somewhere out to sea. When her belly was really big, I remember my dad getting special permission to come home-- and looking back, I was much more excited about seeing my dad again than actually having a sibling.

 By this time I knew it would be a girl, and I personally didn’t know what to feel about it-- what would it be like? I was worried that she would take some of Dad’s limited time with me away, but I would be gracious and allow it if she (my new sister) recognized who was in charge.

Following the turbulent time of the child’s birth, full of sleepless nights for my mom and me, I remember thinking about how different my sister looked from me, in facial features and skin tone. She was redder than I was when I was small, a bit chubbier, and her hair was a dark blonde when it grew out. My hair was a near black brown. My dad wasn’t really there for her development, and I don’t remember him around much of the time. In retrospect, David, the real biological father, had no say in naming Tamara and wasn’t there for her birth-- instead, my dad was.

When Tamara was two years old, my mother and I moved up to Oregon, which was strange. As limited as my knowledge was, I knew that there were no navy bases in Oregon. My father was still stationed in San Diego, and this was the last time I would have seen him in person. Now I was ten, and my mom tried to fill in the gap by sending me to cub scouts, but she still homeschooled me, so I didn’t have the experience of meeting normally with my peers. I went on a few camping trips in the beginning, and they were fun, but unmemorable, and I decided cub scouts wasn’t for me. I was still fairly sickly at the time, and I quickly developed a need for glasses when it turned out all the late nights reading with a flashlight under the covers destroyed my eyesight for seeing things far away. I weighed forty-five pounds at age eleven, which was apparently underweight for my height, and I never went anywhere without my inhaler.

Two years later, my mom left her email open after the death of her sister, and I saw something I shouldn’t have, or perhaps I was meant to see. It was the court terms between her, and Mr. Stanton,(as it stated in the header) and contained unfamiliar words like child support, division of money, etc. My sister was four now, and developing fast-- she nearly weighed as much as me. She was overweight for her age vs. my underweight status. It hit me, suddenly, that I hadn’t seen my dad for two years. It couldn't be that long, it was normally eight months. I asked my mom at dinner, if my dad was on a longer trip than before.

I forgot how, but she seemed to have turned me against my dad. The atmosphere in the new apartment that we lived in seemed anti-him. She wouldn’t talk about the guy that I grew up with and idolized for so long. She somehow tried to make herself seem victimized-- I still believe that both of them were in the wrong. I forgot the conversation after I asked that question, and I forgot how she incriminated him. It was something about him finding someone else overseas, from some other country.

  She never told me, never mentioned that crucial detail about my sister not being his child-- I found that out in another court letter. It was court ordered to video chat my father, though, and I remember almost crying every time I head his voice. One day I buried my head into my pillows and couldn’t stop tears from wetting the cotton after a particularly fake cheery goodbye to my dad. At the time I genuinely didn’t know why I felt so sad when I heard my father again, over the grainy filter of prehistoric Skype-- if he was such a “scumbag” and that “I shouldn’t care about him” from my mom. The entire affair was so distasteful. He was the opposite of my mom-- she seemed all fire and brimstone, and my dad seemed cooler, and a quiet kind of strong. Even if they both seemed like titans of strength, at the time I felt weak for feeling that way with my dad. It hurt to think about him or read his emails, and it hurt more to say good-bye again. I didn’t know why I couldn’t see him in person.

I didn’t know why, but one day the video chats disappeared. Maybe they didn’t have internet at sea at the time, or perhaps other distractions got in my way, like starting middle school and going on into high school. Over time I learned my father did find someone else, and that I had a third half-sister somewhere, whose name I didn’t know. At the same time, I was introduced to my pseudo-step father’s kids, Leo Silverman and Daniel Silverman. It was as if I was never an only child, except I didn’t really like anyone.

I made an email when I was eight on Yahoo once. I realized when I was sixteen, in the summer before attending this school, that this was the only email that my father knew existed, and he didn’t know about the ones that I regularly checked, like my Gmail account. I saw one email from him, dated four years ago in 2010, titled- “What’s new?”

Dear William,

            Is there nothing new to tell?  Did you see nothing interesting

on Mulberry Street?

Love Dad