Datti & Matti

1.

I had many homes when my parents separated. Some were constant, like the red house that my mom owned and Papa and BeeBee’s place in Saint Paul, Oregon. Others were less so, the many couches of friends of my dad’s, most of which never made it into my memory bank.

At Papa and BeeBee’s we had a trundle bed, with pillows that changed during the seasons but always had delicate beaded patterns. The dresser was stacked with Scooby-Doo DVDs and other movies I wasn’t allowed to watch. There was an old DVD player and a two-foot black box with a screen, that I used to rub the static off of before we watched a movie. On my dad’s weekend nights with me, the ones he was actually present for, we watched Scooby-Doo.

Between the removal of static and being allowed to push play, we had to pray. We would pull the trundle bed out—my bed was the bottom one—and we knelt on the floor and he would take my hands in his and begin his prayer. I always tried to close my eyes in the beginning, but after twenty seconds I preferred to squirm around and stare at Scooby and Shaggy dancing, waiting for me to push play, but my hands were trapped inside my dad’s praying ones.

My dad’s hands were rough; calluses covered the entire inside, rough, thick patches of skin that were like ant mounds on his palms. Sometimes, despite how much he scrubbed them, they were stained the color of dirt from his endless hours as a Union Rigger, a job he had had since he was fifteen. He’s the man that puts MRI machines inside hospitals and directs the operators of cranes and things. He became the “boss man” when I was older, but the exact details of his job have never been clear, except for the endless hours, dirty hands, and his interest in nothing else but work. He liked to drone on about how I was his princess and something about God and other things. I liked to look at him with his closed eyes while he preached or prayed his nonsense. His nose was large and crooked, broken many times (once by me) and his ears were cauliflowered worse than any big-time wrestler you’ve ever seen.

His nose had been broken during his years of high school wrestling and cage fights as a young adult. After years of damage to it, he could only breathe out of the right nostril and eventually went to get it fixed when I was three. After he had his nose reconstructed, he would sit on the couch with bandages covering his face. Once, I unintentionally got excited at the prospect of my father at home and not at work and head-butted him in the face, rebreaking his nose. To this day he can’t breathe out of his right nostril and often snores too loudly.

Eventually, his prayer would come tapering to an end, and I would close my eyes again and we would say amen together. I then rushed to the play button on the DVD player and would lie down to watch the movie.

My dad after praying would always whisper, “I love you, kiddo.”

“I love you too, Datti.” That was our thing, we were Matti and Datti. This was the only routine we ever had and it died when I was six.

With my mom there was routine. Every morning she tugged at my hair with a brush while we stood in front of the bathroom mirror. “Put your head down, no, look down!” She would move my head for me and begin the process of weaving my hair into two braids. In the evenings it was dinner, then bath time, story time, and I was in bed asleep by 8:00 p.m. This was my routine with some changes from the time I was three until middle school.

But Wednesday nights and every other weekend I had no routine. I developed my own when I was six and about to move across the country with my mom. I began washing my hands vigorously. Someone would say something and I would run to the bathroom to scrub my hands and if I touched something as I left the bathroom or didn’t keep my hands folded in my lap, I had to wash them again. This went unnoticed until one Wednesday night. My mom and I sat on the small green lawn directly in front of the red house. My dad was running late as he usually was.

“Mom, I’m going to go wash my hands really quickly.”

“Your hands are fine don’t worry, just wait for your dad to get here.”

“But they hurt, Mom.” She took my hands in hers; my knuckles were bloody and chapped. She ran into the house to get lotion and rubbed it on my hands while we waited for my dad. It burned and I sobbed on the patch of grass, muttering it hurts it hurts I don’t want to go I don’t want to, it hurts it hurts. He blames me for the divorce and us moving.

My mom was whispering, “I know” and forcing a smile as my father pulled up in his souped-up Suburban to take me to Sherry’s or some other restaurant for “DattiMattidatenight.”

A month later Mom and I left the red house in a U-haul truck and drove from Oregon to Indiana. I never washed my hands again…. Well, of course I washed them before I ate and after playing outside—I was deathly afraid of having white squiggly things in my poop, something Mom said I would get if I didn’t wash before eating. But I didn’t wash them after someone spoke to me or any of the weird things that caused my knuckles to bleed. The fear of those worms was a lot healthier than the fear of words my dad spoke that I can no longer remember because I managed to wash them off.

2.

As first grade approached summer, my mom told me I had to spend eight weeks with my dad. She had an internship in Cambodia working for an NGO, and the divorce agreement said my summers must be spent with him.

I spent it with multiple grandparents or at my best friend’s when he was too busy or too tired or watching TV. One of the places we stayed was the home of someone he called my Uncle Derek—his last name was Stone but he wasn’t my dad’s brother or stepbrother or even cousin I think…. Or maybe he was. I think his home was where I got lice. Or maybe it was the home of another man my dad worked with that I don’t remember. I didn’t even know I had lice. But I did from the beginning of the summer until the day my mom picked me up. I slept on a lot of people’s couches, falling asleep to different reality fishing shows.

I was seven and my father took me to his mom’s cabin. Grandma Linda, he insisted I call her. She was an angry little woman who had campaigned when I was only six months old to have me taken away from my mom–claiming she was bipolar and a danger to me. My father did not speak to her again until after the completion of his divorce from my mom five years later.

There was a little spot on the beach in Detroit, Oregon, that my father and I used to go to when we were done fishing in the morning. We bought different floats at the local grocery store. The store consisted of liquor, cheap flip flops, swim floats, Hubba Bubba gum, and Lunchables. I, of course, managed to get all of that from my father as long as he was allowed his chew and a new drink I didn’t recognize until months later when I saw it again as an ad and exclaimed to my mom, “Dad was drinking that this summer at the beach!” It was Bud Light Lime in a glass bottle.

My mom’s face was poorly concealed shock and horror. “Are you sure, you’re sure he was drinking that?” She pointed at the TV in a restaurant at which I vigorously nodded my head, yes! She exchanged glances with her friend that a seven- almost eight-year-old doesn’t understand.

But yes, my dad and I would lie out on a beach by Detroit Lake. I spent most of the time begging him to get in the water with me, to which he always explained he wasn’t warm enough or he had to finish his drink. And see, I could swim but I was afraid of the great big catfishes and the swirling, sucking-in underwater hurricane called drowning. But on land, I didn’t like the dragonflies. I believed they would bite me. I don’t remember who told me that. It may have been the same person (Papa) who told me the catfishes were big and liked to eat the bridge fixers unless they had other men to protect them from the catfishes. I believed a lot of things at eight. I believed my father loved me and I believed in God and if I could believe in those two things, why shouldn’t the catfish eat me?

Eventually, my dad would get into the water with me. He laboriously would blow up the float and we would go where neither of us could touch the sand under our feet, which wasn’t far because he was a short man and I was even shorter. We went beyond the rope of the little Detroit Lake beach. We both hung onto that float and laughed and talked—I, imagining the swirling of drowning just below my feet.

Not long after our trip to the lake, when we were back to our daily summer existence of couch surfing, I was playing at my Papa and BeeBee’s and he came home to tell me, “Guess what kiddo, I’m going to quit chewing tobacco as you’ve asked me. The doctor gave me some medicine to help me stop.”

My eyes grew wide–see, tobacco and energy drinks were the smells of my childhood with him. He left empty Gatorade bottles filled with gobs of chewed-up tobacco and sometimes when he got out of the car he would spit onto the ground by his feet. I hated it. His teeth were stained yellow-brown and in between them, in his gums, no matter how much he brushed his teeth there were specks of that blackish chew. The inside of his lip has a permanent pouch for it to go in. Even if he wasn’t chewing, it looked like he had it there. “You are? You are?” I jumped into his arms, so proud of him. “Thank you, Daddy, thank you.”

“I love you, kiddo.” Soon after that we moved back into my red house. This medicine and no chewing caused him to sleep a lot and have weird dreams. He was in the bath one day not long after we moved back into the red house and I called my mom on my little flip phone with a plushie hippo case. “Mom we are moving back into the red house.”

“Tell your father I could call the police.”

“What, why?”

“Never mind, I won’t. I won’t do that to you. I love you.” My mom still owned the house, and was still in mounds of debt on the house because my father refused to help her pay it off. He wasn’t allowed in that house for another two years. But he took it from her and I was unknowingly his accomplice.

My routine became this: 8:00 in the morning I walked out the front door and to my best friend’s house, where I would knock and wait for someone to let me in. From 8:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m I was there. And occasionally I ran to the red house to get a soda or tell my dad I was spending the night. But he was usually asleep and this didn’t matter for his responses were often about silverfish or diapers or something else bizarre.

This was a peace I grew to love until one day I found a can of chew on the kitchen counter when I came home in the middle of the day. “You promised me, Dad. You promised me.”

“I know, kiddo, but the medicine was making me sick, I couldn’t keep feeling like that.”

“Okay, Dad.” It hurt. It was just another promise my dad never kept. Later he brought me a build bear named Snazzy that wore clover boxers. This was one of his wordless apologies. A way that he bought my trust.

“I love you, kiddo.”

“I love you too, Dad.”

This medicine was really never to help him quit, it was for his high heart rate or bad heart, and the chewing would counter that medicine. It was a suggestion like they suggest to quit smoking. But he quit trying to quit and he stopped sleeping less and the summer ended. Mom found me with lice-ridden hair and a head full of eight weeks of sores.

3.

The next summer was to be spent with him, too. Only it was in Canada in a strange apartment where a woman named Peggy took care of me most days because he was working and her husband was a friend of my dad’s and therefore as the woman at home she had to take care of the child in the apartment next door.

She had fake teeth that she put in in the mornings and short hair and maybe tattoos. I don’t remember her much except for our bike rides to the pool or library or Dairy Queen. On a special occasion, she drove me to the local animal shelter in Kitimat, Canada. There were kittens with crusty eyes and puppies.

I had two cats that lived with my Nee Nee (my mom’s mom) in Oregon. And when I was a baby I had had a calico cat named Matilda who was best friends with my Great Dane named Magnum. My dad hated Matilda and she was not fond of him, and so one day when my parents had moved homes when I was two or three he left the door open for her and we never saw her again. When my mom left my dad and he emptied their bank account, my mom could no longer afford to pay for both my food and Magnum’s, and so she gave him to a friend.

I cherished cats and dogs and so the shelter was a treat because my dad wouldn’t let me get one, and my mom and I weren’t allowed pets in the family housing at Notre Dame.

Peggy taught me that I could make money from old cans and bottles. My dad told me I wasn’t allowed to keep the money. My summer was spent collecting beer bottles and soda cans from my father and all the men he worked with. There was one time when I made a whole $36 from the beer bottles. I had a little blue piggy bank that I put the money in, and I brought it to the people at the animal shelter and gave away the money.

After six weeks in Canada, my dad brought me back to the red house for a week before I would be sent to my grandma’s for the last week of the eight weeks. My last night at the red house a pregnant woman with four children came over. She had brown hair and was shorter than my dad and had a basketball for a tummy. She and my father were friendly, and I liked the girl Paris who was eleven months younger than me. We played until it was dark out and my father put on Scooby-Doo for us all to watch.

He called me over near my room where the woman and he were standing. “That’s your brother in there.” He pointed to her belly. “Touch her belly and you’ll feel him kick.”

“No thank you.”

“Touch her belly.” He looked at me hard.

“I don’t want to.”

He brought me into my room and closed the door. We lay on the floor and he took my hands like we were going to pray, only he began to cry. “Don’t tell anyone, I made a mistake but I am going to fix it.”

“Okay.” He continued to talk and cry and I stared at this man. I didn’t understand mistakes and children and not being married. I thought the equation was:

Married man + Married woman = Baby.

Not:

Dad + Woman I just met = Brother

So, I nodded my head like I understood him. But I was eight and had gone to Catholic school and my mom shielded me from the men in her life except for the one she met the year before and was marrying in eight months.

4.

I was nine and it was the following summer. I was only staying for five weeks. I met my little brother, Jaxson, twice. Once at the home of the woman my dad could barely look at. He ignored Jaxson and just watched my interactions with him. Soon we left.

The other time only the woman and Jaxson came to the red house. They took a few pictures of Jaxson and me. I was an only child for eight years, my friends who had siblings were an anomaly to me. This idea of a brother fascinated me, and even though it never felt real, I wanted pictures to prove I really had one.

5.

I don’t remember much from the summer I was ten. But the woman now had a name. It was Tanya and she came around more often.

6.

They got married in the summer when I was twelve. My dad had moved out of the red house and bought one in the Bayou for this family. I shared a room with Paris. And when Tanya and he came back from their honeymoon we went on one as a family. My stepbrother opted to stay back with my now uncle who was thirteen. We went to a hotel at Pacific Beach; we got two adjoining rooms. Paris and I shared a bed; Vienna and Milan shared a bed; my father, Tanya, and Jaxson shared the king bed in the other room.

My Nee Nee had taught Tanya when she was in middle school. She was a kid who could barely read but was fascinated by farway cities in places she would never go to, and thus her children’s names reflected the life she could never have because she chose welfare and men with a love of drugs.

We watched the new Nicholas Sparks movie from that summer, and Paris and I giggled over our new bras that held nothing, which we had gotten from Walmart that afternoon. My father drank a case of Mike’s HARDER Lemonade. He was cold and told us to shut up and go to bed. Paris and I giggled while re-watching the Sparks movie while he slept snoring loudly in the next room.

7.

Tanya had another baby when I was thirteen; his name was Jacob.

8.

When I was fourteen, I was no longer allowed in Paris’s room. We wanted to be friends so desperately, but she hated my father, and I was too busy taking his side and laughing at the comments he made about her body. These were the afternoons when he started drinking at lunchtime and when her father would come to the house to pick up one of the kids. My dad and her dad hated each other. Her dad was a meth head who never loved her and my father was an ex-meth head who didn’t love her either. They would fight over things I can’t remember, but I always took his side even when his comments about how she was flat chested made me uncomfortable. I was fighting for the love of a man who had given that ability away to drugs a long time ago.

Some nights Paris and I slept on the floor in the basement with everyone, including Tanya, but not my dad who stayed in his room, watching movies until four in the morning, and other nights I wasn’t even welcome in the basement because the cities of Europe waged war over things like one wrong word or the front seat of the car, and I wasn’t a European city I was just Jarett’s kid, Matti. The front seat of Tanya’s car had to be Paris’s or Roman’s because it was their mom’s car and not mine.

Those nights I would go to my dad’s room to watch movies with him. I would find him in the bathroom chugging a Mike’s HARDER Lemonade. “Shhh, don’t tell Tanya, kiddo. She hates alcohol but I just need a little drink after a long day at work to deal with her kids.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“I keep it in the bathroom drawers or the ‘empty’ cooler in the back of our closet. That can be our little secret.”

“I love you, Dad.” This was my promise to keep his secret no matter what.

“I love you, too.”

9.

The next summer, I stayed ten days with my father, three of which we spent at the cabin on Detroit Lake. My brother Jaxson who was now six or seven stayed one night with us, but he fell asleep early the first night we were there. My father and I sat outside eating dinner. He occasionally got up to grab another beer.

“You know, kiddo, that swimsuit you wore today doesn’t cover enough. Your mom should use that child support money to buy you one that actually fits.”

“Mom uses the child support to pay for school and things like my summer writing program.”

He liked to disregard the good my mom does. “I know how men look at young women who have bodies like you. I was one of those men and you look just like your mom. They’re only going to want your body and if you sleep with too many men then you’re just a whore. And you don’t want to be a whore.”

I wondered if in his drunken stupor he was talking to my mom. He had never liked when she wore skirts too short or anything that enhanced her beauty. He was forever threatened that my mom got away and was now living an existence in which she was happy and didn’t need him.

“You know,” he continued, “I used to like to see how many virgins I could sleep with. You just don’t want to be a whore because you’ll leave the man who works at the gas station for the man with money. Men can’t just hand money to you, you can’t just expect things from people. Just don’t be like your mom….”

I listened, wondering if he knew that he made more money than my mom and Christopher combined. I wondered how many cans were in the trash can. I wondered if the gun in his overnight bag was loaded and if I should lock the bedroom door that night. Yes, I have hated him. But I had never been afraid of him until that night. Because until that night I was still separate from my mom, but he had confirmed that he saw my body as my mom’s, and his hatred for my mom was becoming his hatred for me.

The next night he told me that he had only seen Jaxson a handful of times in the first few years of his life, that he had hated Jaxson. He told me he hated Tanya and could leave her if he wanted to, but didn’t because he knew Jaxson and Jacob loved their mom, an excuse that never made sense to me. Really, I think he liked it when a woman depended on him. She had never worked a day in her life and had been on welfare until he had been “gracious” enough to “rescue” her.

He told me he had forced women to get abortions. He told me after I left Canada, he had used cocaine and knew he couldn’t ever do it again because it would kill him. I wondered if it was because he tried to use the amount he was able to use at the peak of his drug-taking days before he OD’d for the second time and almost lost his job and ended up in rehab.

He told me that Tanya didn’t like it when I came because she knew what it was like when I left, how he drank more and dropped into a depressive solitude within his room or disappeared into his work. I found this hard to believe because every time I came to visit she always stocked up on my favorite French Toast Eggos and was the first to greet me when I arrived.

We left the cabin and I spent the rest of my trip in Oregon avoiding him. I slept two hours every night and dropped to a weight that should’ve hospitalized me. I didn’t know that the trigger for me being a whore was that he had overheard me saying I had lost my virginity that summer.

I left and began at a new school. I called and told him I was worried about his drinking. Two months later I got a text from Paris saying he and Tanya were getting a divorce.

Months later he would call me every night to tell me he wouldn’t drink if I was there, if I just spent a little more time with him. His beers became Chopin’s Vodka. He told me it was made from potato starch, which made it healthier for you; he said he would be less likely to get gout again. There were a few conversations in which he discussed the Bible and why gay people were wrong. It was less about lesbians but more that “a dick in the ass just isn’t right.” If I didn’t mention a boy during one of these calls, he would say with a horrified voice: “You don’t like girls do you?” But if I mentioned a boy, he would talk about protecting my virtue and not letting them get what they wanted.

There was brief mention of the police looking for him.

He went on a date with a woman and her daughter. He said the daughter reminded him of me when I was little. Polite and smart.

A few months passed by and he was back with Tanya, no longer living in a trailer park. He would call me every day to discuss the same thing we had talked about the day before and that was when I realized he no longer remembered what he was saying.

He texted me when he was two months sober and I threw my phone and burst into tears. He would be dead if he was sober. I told him I was proud of him but in reality I was wondering what he had used to replace his nightly vodka.

10.

The last time I saw my father he claimed to be four months sober. That was the moment I decided I would not be going to the Bayou that summer and that from then on he was Jarett. Instead, I stayed with my best friend—the one next to the old red house. I no longer felt safe inside the Bayou.

I wasn’t there two days before Jarett and Tanya’s clan of children started harassing me. I got a spam of texts in which my stepbrother Roman told me I was a selfish bitch for hurting my father. He said I didn’t love Jaxson and Jacob. He told me he didn’t hate me, that he just cared about my father. He told me what my father had done was not bad and that he had apologized. Again, he reiterated that I was a fucking bitch.

Jarett took to calling me six times that day.

Call one: How are you, kiddo? When am I going to see you, kiddo?

Call two: You can’t blame Roman for what he said. He’s just protective of me and you haven’t seen me yet.

Call three: Hey kiddo. Okay, I’ll let you go, I see you're always busy.

Call four: Matti, I don’t understand why you haven’t seen me yet. We never see each other. One day you’re going to hate your mom because she never lets us see each other. What about your little brothers? They want to see you. You’re really hurting me.

Call five (fifteen minutes after the fourth): Hey kiddo, I’m going to my energy drink store in Sherwood. I’ll be leaving Mac in maybe twenty minutes. Would you like to come with me?

Call six: It was so good to see you, kiddo. Let’s do something with the whole family tomorrow. Maybe go up to the crick?

I left a week later for boarding school. Paris called me to ask if the little yellow pill that Tanya had found on their bedroom floor was mine. Jarett had said it was my antidepressant.

Inside that house it was Tanya and the European nations against Jarett. Those household wars were no good for Jacob or Jaxson and so I told her, “Yes, I must have dropped my antidepressants when I was in the house.”

My pills are blue and white and I had only been in the house for thirty minutes and so I called Jarett. “Hey, Dad. Paris called to ask me if I dropped a pill in your room.”

“Yeah, I thought it might be yours, kiddo. You know since you take those meds.”

“Well, it’s not. It’s not yours right?”

“No, no. Sorry for saying it was yours. Maybe it’s Roman’s. Never know what those kids get into.”

“Okay, Dad.”

He called me three more times to apologize and explain whose pill it might be. And of course I knew it was his.

“I just don’t know whose it could be,” he’d say.

“Okay, Dad.”

“I love you. kiddo.” His plea for my ignorance and acceptance.

“Love you, too, Dad.”