Burn Down the Ground (16 page)

I had never been treated so professionally by a stranger. I was just a teenager, but she acted as though I were a member of this elite world. I let her know that I was there for an interview about a job. She told me to have a seat and disappeared into the kitchen. My mother wanted me to handle this on my own and left to chat with her co-workers. I chose a nearby table and awkwardly sat down, crossing and uncrossing my legs and wondering if I should place my hands on my lap or on the table. I simply did not know how to act in a place like this.

The dining room was grand with a floor-to-ceiling, circular brick fireplace as its centerpiece. The entire back wall was made of glass windows that showcased breathtaking views of the twenty-one-thousand-acre man-made lake.

The manager was a stout, middle-aged man, and almost bald except for a ring of dark hair at the base of his scalp. I was nervous
when he first sat down at the table, but he put me at ease by asking basic questions about school and my favorite subjects. He agreed to give me a shot. “If anyone asks, you say you’re fifteen,” he said.

Because I was underage, I was only permitted to bus tables. I was paid the minimum wage of $3.35 an hour and was given shifts that coincided with my mother’s hostess schedule. When I arrived for my first day, I was paired with a waitress named Shelly, who taught me how to balance a tray of dirty plates with one hand. I soon discovered this was the hardest part of the job.

“When you see someone’s water glass halfway empty, you take this pitcher and fill it up for them,” Shelly directed. “But you need to hold the pitcher sideways so the customers get ice in their glass. If they haven’t touched their plate in a while, go ask ’em if they’re done.

“The key is to be discreet. The better we are, the bigger the tip. If you do a good job, I’ll share my tips with you.”

When the first table was seated, I filled all their glasses with water as Shelly had demonstrated. I had a few minor spills but soon mastered it. Then it was time for the salad course.

Shelly emerged from the kitchen carrying the plates on a tray she balanced on one shoulder. “Here, take this,” she said, pulling what looked like a giant wooden chess piece from the pocket of her apron. “After I serve them their salads, ask them if they want any pepper.”

I looked around for a pepper shaker on the table but didn’t see one. Beads of sweat formed on my upper lip and the bow tie around my neck felt tight as I hurried back to the service station in search of pepper.

“Kambri, what’re you doin’?” Shelly yelled after me.

Busted, I confessed, “I’m looking for the pepper.”

Shelly laughed. “You’re holding it. You ain’t never seen a pepper mill before?” I shook my head as I stared down at the wooden object in my right hand.

“Dang, you gotta lot to learn.”

I had been working there about two months when my classmate Lance came to brunch with his family. I was at the service station and quickly turned away so he wouldn’t see me. I knew that some of my classmates lived in Walden, but it never occurred to me that they might be a part of this community. On the very rare occasion my parents took us out to eat, we went to Pizza Hut or Long John Silver’s. A trip to Bonanza Steakhouse in Conroe for an all-you-can-eat buffet dinner was saved for special occasions. I didn’t know any families that took their children to dine at fancy places like the Walden Yacht Club that had waiter service, live piano music, real china, and linen tablecloths. The realization left me momentarily thunderstruck, like in fourth grade when I discovered that teachers used the bathroom. It just seemed unnatural.

I turned around cautiously and watched Lance and his family take seats at a big round table by the fireplace. I had always thought he was just like me. He was one of the popular kids at Montgomery Junior High, and liked to make the girls laugh with goofy faces and jokes. I had had a crush on him all through seventh grade but always clammed up when he came around. But now our differences were glaringly apparent. He was a patron of a members-only yacht club, and I was his busboy.

I was mesmerized watching him interact with his family. They all looked so proper and well dressed. Lance was wearing pressed chinos and a buttoned-up pink oxford Polo Ralph Lauren
shirt and was behaving like a proper young man, not the class clown I was used to seeing. His father was even wearing a tie to breakfast. Lance caught me staring and smiled. In a uniform of black slacks, a white collared shirt, black vest, and bow tie, I was out of context. He looked momentarily confused, as if he was trying to figure out how he knew me.

I tried to look cool as I carried a tray with a pitcher of water and some glasses on one shoulder. Lance’s eyes seemed to be following me around the room. So I took the opportunity to show off: I spun a tray on one finger, balanced piles of dirty dishes, and joked and laughed with another busboy, a cute seventeen-year-old. When I reached to fill Lance’s glass with water, he fumbled and dropped his fork.

“Let me get you another one.”

I came back with a clean fork and the pepper mill and asked, “Pepper for your salad?”

“Um, yeah,” he whispered. At school he was full of charm and confidence, but now he could barely articulate an answer.

Maybe he wasn’t such hot stuff after all. Filled with newfound confidence and a pocketful of tips, I sauntered away with my tray of dishes like I owned the place. Suddenly the glassware shifted and slid from the tray and shattered on the floor. Two of the other busboys came to help me clean the embarrassing mess. I stole a glance at Lance, but he quickly looked away, pretending he hadn’t just witnessed my catastrophe.

Lance never spoke to me again after that day at the yacht club. Instead, whenever he saw me coming down the school hallway, he darted his eyes to the floor and whispered to his friends. I was certain he disdained me on the grounds he was wealthy and I was not.

Growing up deaf, my parents were sensitive to the plight of the Deaf community and the way they were sometimes disregarded. For the first time, I felt like I really understood what that meant. These were the days before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, protecting the rights of the Deaf, who were often subjected to discrimination at work and passed over for jobs or promotions. Many times they were gawked at like they were zoo animals when they used ASL in public or made fun of because of the unusual sounds they made when trying to communicate verbally. The most insulting thing for me was when someone deaf was ignored entirely by a hearing person because that person was afraid or even disgusted by someone they viewed as different.

Mom and Dad taught David and me the Golden Rule: to do unto others as you would have others do unto you. No matter what challenges anyone faces, physically or otherwise, he deserves the same respect as anyone else. Many in our circle of deaf friends were born with physical disabilities, so I was accustomed to being around people with special needs and developed empathy for them. As a schoolgirl I took special interest in the class outcast, who took medicine to control his wild behavior: I made sure he received holiday cards and party invitations. I couldn’t stand the idea that somebody would be excluded for something they couldn’t change.

The bond in our Deaf community was so strong that a person’s race, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation was irrelevant. They were deaf first. In the early 1970s, an openly gay lifestyle was almost unheard of, especially in the rural South. But in our community, Uncle Darold, a handsome man with a handlebar mustache who wore leather vests without shirts underneath, and
tight jeans decorated with silver studs, was just Darold. Phrases like “whatever floats your boat” or “to each his own” reflected my mother’s basic tenets.

I was raised in this community and Lance’s reaction of contempt was foreign to me. Like some people who couldn’t get past my family members’ hearing impairments and chose to reject them from social circles, Lance wasn’t able to look past my busboy uniform. To him I was the hired help. His inability to like or appreciate me for who I was and his willingness to judge me based on my social standing made him wholly unattractive to me.

Now that I was employed, Dad was going to teach me to drive. Or, technically, finish teaching me what Mom had started. She wouldn’t let me drive the Toyota—it was the nicest vehicle we had ever owned and, job or not, I was only thirteen. But I wasn’t too young to learn to drive. Lots of kids in Texas were driving farm equipment long before that age. By that time, I had driven a go-cart, a three-wheeler, and a dirt bike and often steered the Chevy down the busy Houston freeway on Dad’s lap as he worked the pedals. I had even ridden a bull bareback.

Mom chose to take me out in the old VW Bug they bought soon after the Chevy died. Its red paint was faded and dull from years of sun exposure and the engine sounded like a go-cart. It had no radio or, more important in the Texas heat, no working air conditioner. But it was perfect for letting a young kid get behind the wheel and give driving a shot.

It wasn’t exactly a smooth ride. The Bug had a stick shift,
which was hard to learn. And worse, David decided to tag along. His presence meant I was under extra scrutiny. Mom was on the passenger side and David sat in the middle of the backseat, right in the line of my rearview mirror, where he had room for his long legs.

I soon learned that driving a car was wholly different than driving anything else. The Bug required the operation of a clutch and gear while steering, and it was bigger and faster than anything else over which I’d had 100 percent control.

It was exhilarating. For about five minutes.

Once I got us moving, there wasn’t much to do except steer since Boars Head and the adjacent Honea Egypt Road didn’t have stop signs or intersections. Despite this, Mom was a horrible passenger. At every twist and turn of the country road, she pressed against the dashboard with open palms and stiff arms.

Bracing for a collision, she screamed in varying degrees of seriousness, “SLOW DOWN!” “YOU’RE GOING TOO FAST!” “KAMBRI, I SAID SLOW DOWN!” The windows were rolled down so the breeze distorted her hearing aids. She shouted even louder to hear herself.

I alternately screamed back. “I’M GOING TWENTY!” “WOULD YOU CALM DOWN?” “YOU’RE MAKING ME NERVOUS!”

For David, this was pure entertainment. I saw his wry smirk and squinty brown eyes staring back anytime I looked in the rearview mirror.

When we approached Webb’s Grocery and the paved two-lane highway, Mom told me to stop and turn around. She showed me where reverse was on the gearshift, but I released the clutch and sent us lurching before the Bug stalled. Mom reminded me how
to restart it, which took extra effort now that I was flustered. Again the Bug heaved forward and backward and stalled. After several failed attempts, Mom took over.

“You’re gonna burn up the clutch!” she said.

My face was hot from embarrassment and annoyance; my rapid heartbeat pounded my eardrums as I stomped around the car and got in the passenger seat with a big slam of my door, folding my arms tightly across my chest. Mom deftly got us moving again, trying to show me what she was doing with her feet. “See, this is how you do it. It’s not so hard.” I was too angry to look over and she drove us home in silence.

Dad was surprised to see us return home so quickly. “What’s wrong?”

I signed a big, fierce, “Mom!” and launched into an animated account of how scared she was. I screwed my face up, braced against an imaginary dashboard, and signed, “SLOW DOWN! TOO FAST!”

Dad smiled, which ticked me off even more. I tramped away as he tried to stifle his laughs. Mom had been his backseat driver since 1966. He knew exactly what I meant.

A few days later, I heard a knock on my bedroom door. “Come in!” I yelled, but nothing happened. That meant it was Dad knocking. A few seconds later, he slowly opened the door to make sure he wasn’t invading my privacy.

“I’m going to Webb’s, you want Jack Crackers?” he asked, switching the word order of Cracker Jacks, since ASL has rules differing from English grammar about word order and sentence structure.

“Yes, please.” I signed and went back to finishing my puzzle in
Games
magazine.

He flashed my light and said, “Kipree!”

I looked up and he asked with an impish grin, “You want to drive?”

My eyes grew big and I signed, “YES!” as I leapt up, threw on my shoes, and ran out of the trailer with Dad following behind me. I walked toward the Bug and waited for Dad to catch up but he was standing by the Toyota.

He swatted the air with a sour expression and pointed at the Toyota. “Better,” he signed.

“Really?” I couldn’t believe that he would trust me with our brand-new truck. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. “Come on, let’s go.”

I slid in the driver’s seat, so excited that I don’t recall adjusting the seat or mirror. I just cranked it up and drove.

Perfectly.

Dad was navigator and signed directions to me as I went. He trusted me so much that at one point he told me I was going too slowly and at another had me turn around on a bridge. He even had me drive into a ditch so I could practice getting myself out. He was an unlikely teacher, since he had wrecked every car we had ever owned. The irony was lost on me. I was thirteen and driving the Toyota!

At Webb’s, I loaded up on “Jack Crackers,” he on cigarettes and beer, and I drove us home. At the trailer, I handed back his keys and he signed, “Don’t tell Mama. She’ll get mad. It’s our secret.”

At the same time I got the job at the Yacht Club, Mom got us a gig running a roadside fireworks stand that was owned by my
parents’ friend Donna. They’d met her at Johnny B. Dalton’s, the nightclub in Conroe where they went dancing and drinking most weekends. My father said she managed Dalton’s and another bar called Cooter’s off of Coon Hollow Road.

“She’s real classy,” Dad signed. “She has really long painted fingernails, wears lots of gold and diamonds, and drives a C-A-D-I-L-L-A-C.” My father always equated sophistication in a woman with how she kept her fingernails manicured. Perhaps it was because hands were his tools of communication, but in any case, he seemed to fetishize them.