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Moving back to the family home, I guess I had expected, would be like
returning to how things were fours years earlier before mother pulled
me away to the apartment town. Here I was in the house I'd spent all
but fours years of my life in, but my bedroom was gone. I was
back in the same town that my friends had originally been in, yet
the age of after-school-play-dates was over with. In fact my two
closest friends at the time, Van and Luke didn't live within walking
distance and, without public transportation existing or being old
enough for a drivers license, the best I could do was call them on
the phone and say ''Hi.''
My first day back from Colorado, after sleeping on the unmade bed, I
searched the upstairs and found where the sheets were kept and some
old blankets. I found a pillow as well, stuffed on the upper shelf
of a closet. My father had gone off to work so I spent the morning
learning how to use the washing machine. My eldest brother's bed,
while made, hadn't been used for a long time and could use a
stripping and washing, too.
With this under my belt, I called my friend Jonathan to let him know
I was back in town. As the years had progressed, his father had
curtailed his social time during the school year to a minimum to
ensure his son would be fully devoted to his studies after school, so
seeing Jonathan had become more of a summer time or school break
opportunity. With my cassette of computer programs in hand and him
having a Trash-80 computer of his own at home, I gave him a call to
see if he was interested and available? He was and he and his
mother were kind enough to pick me up. While we talked a bit of
Colorado, we mostly focused on the games I brought and listening to
the new music albums he'd gotten over the Summer. This would become
an annual first day back from Colorado event for the next few years.
Getting home, I made the beds, mine and my eldest brother's. I found
my old bedroom desk and chair had been moved to the white bedroom
when my father had otherwise tossed everything else over the Summer,
so I moved that into the new bedroom I was in. At first unsure where
to put the desk, I came up with the idea of placing it in the closet.
As I didn't need it for clothes, I had the suit case after all,
I could use the closet as a study nook. The desk slipped nicely into
the portion of the closet with the sloped ceiling and the closet had
a window to the side allowing me to look out and ponder as need be.
Over time, I found a spare plastic laundry basket in the basement.
It was partially melted on one side, I assume from being left too
closely to the baseboard heater at some point, but still it held
clothes just fine so I replaced the suit case with the basket to hold
my clothes.
That weekend I got a flash of memory and went to the closet of the
white bedroom. At the foot of its closet was the door to the
additional storage space. Opening it, I found the box I had
squirreled away there as a kid. Inside were a number of childhood
keepsakes from years earlier, such as a musket ball, which I had been
keeping safe from my mother's hands. Now sorting through this box,
much of it no longer held much meaning for me, but it was a
connection to my past. So even though my bedroom and its contents
were gone, I still had something which affirmed that this was my
place and I belonged here.
Labor Day Monday, just before the start of school the next day, I
noted to dad that mother had given me a dollar a day to pay for
school lunch. While in reality she hadn't and I'd been using my own
work money for that, I got the desired results of a five dollar bill
each week. One of mother's oversights of the move to Colorado was
that she didn't have me close-out my bank account as she had done
with hers. As a result my saved money was still in New England
except with one small wrinkle. The branch bank I had used was twenty
miles away at the apartment town, and the main branch of the bank
twenty-five miles away at the larger town nearby. My money was safe,
but from me as well. One day in the Fall, I was walking along the
shopping strip front toward the drug store and noticed a small room
had been added just passed the hardware store windows, but before
their outdoor garden lot. It had the logo of my bank, but just had a
machine inside. It turned out it was an 'automated bank machine' and
I called the main branch to find out about it, one of the early
versions of the Automated Teller Machine we know today, they mailed
me the paperwork to apply for a card to use it and then they sent me
the bank machine card. I once again had access to my money.
So by Fall, I'd settled into my new life. My new bedroom was for
sleeping, reading and school work, my eldest brother's room was for
listening to music as it still had the original component stereo and
some left behind albums, it also worked for reading as well. But
unlike the years living with my mother at the apartment, my father
neither spent hours each day telling me how terrible everyone else
was, nor giving me the occasional hit, and Pappy kept mostly to
himself as well. This allowed me time to emotionally decompress.
Sometimes I'd sit at the desk in the closet and stare out the
window, other times I'd just wander the woods and fields surrounding
the house and soak in the peacefulness. As a stoke of luck, the ski
area the previous year had added some cross country skiing trails and
I had taken my skies and shoes to the park one weekend just before
Spring to try them out. As a result, the skis and shoes were at the
family home when my mother packed everything up for the move to
Colorado, and so I had them with me and could use them in the
surrounding woods and fields once the snows came.
Then one day in Fall, I'd gotten cocky while doing the laundry.
During the two years of wearing the ACE bandage around my chest, it
had never been washed. In fact, I doubt my mother had washed it
after she had originally used it for her dislocated knee a decade
earlier. I was unaware of hand washing at the time and I had only
just figured out how to machine wash, so I thought I'd toss it in
with the bedsheets one weekend. Once the machine was done, I found
that the bandage had gotten caught up in the auger and stretched and
pulled apart. Once the rest of the laundry was in the dryer, I
struggled to get the ACE bandage debris out of the machine and
finally did, but it was unsalvageable and I was panicked. I had
become so used to using it to bind my beasts down and keep them from
showing that I now had no clue how I could get another ACE bandage
without being in public with my breasts bobbing through my shirt. It
was a chicken and egg problem.
Then a solution occurred to me: In the room with the dryer was the
family coat rack. As the years went on, once one coat was no longer
being used by a family member it ended up forgotten on the coat rack
with the new coat being added to the hanger next to it. As a result,
over these many years, there was a selection of tattered coats just
hanging there. In fact, as my mother hadn't packed-up my own winter
coat for my return to New England, I'd have to pick one out of this
rack once Winter came anyhow. I looked through what was
there, most were torn or badly worn, but I found one light blue, down
coat with its billowy surface that would fit me. Given its puffy
shape, it hid what was underneath very well and, even though it was
still Fall, I figured it was cold enough outside to get away with
wearing it.
I walked to the drug store to pick up a new bandage and visit the
money machine on the way there. Over the two years of using the ACE
bandage around my breasts and not washing it, I'd developed quite the
acne patch over my chest. I had become quite good at ignoring it in
public as it itched, and it occurred to me that as I was picking up
the bandage I could get some acne cream as well. When I got to the
drug store counter, the clerk gave me an odd look. While some of it
might have been due to me wearing the puffy winter jacket in Fall, I
think it was mostly because of the handful of acne cream tubes I had
brought to the counter along with the bandage. She looked at my face
and didn't think I'd need so much; I froze as I didn't know what to
say. As she was waiting for an answer, I stuttered out something
about having some on hand for later.
At the time I was the only customer there and she left the cash
register and had me follow her. I was sweating, not only from
wearing the jacket as I followed her, but not knowing what this meant
or what was going to happen. She brought me to a shelf and picked
out a bottle of witch hazel and then snatched a pack of cotton balls
on the way back. She explained that the witch hazel would work just
as well and would cost pennies per bottle, rather than the dollars
worth of acne cream tubes I had picked out. Transaction done, I
returned home and coated my chest with the witch hazel and tried out
the new clean ACE bandage. It also came with a little note of
instructions talking about hand washing which I kept in mind for the
future.
I also kept the puffy jacket in mind as well. During the first year
of High School some students, rather than trying to stuff their
winter coats into the little cubbyholes we had in place of lockers,
would just wear the jackets all day in class, unzipped. When the
snows came, I decided to be daring and do this too, but in reality
this was so I could be out in public without the ACE bandage
strapping me down. During the previous years with the bandage, I had
kept to wearing tee shirts all year long to let the pent-up heat
leave my body through my bare arms. Now with the jacket on, but no
bandage, it really wasn't all that much hotter than what I'd been
used to. I started to do this trick a couple times a week just for a
change of pace.
Once December came, my father told me I'd be going back to see my
mother for Christmas break. When I arrived in Colorado wearing the
old puffy jacket, my mother was appalled and insisted I have a new
one. I at first protested, but then agreed as long as I got to pick
it out. I did and made sure it was another concealing jacket.
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