She seemed even smaller next to my dad. Bill Gregory is six foot four, with chiseled features and olive skin owed to Cherokee blood somewhere in the line. I am a perfect combination of Sheila and Bill, a mix that could have gone horribly wrong. I had tight, super curly blond hair, and I am smart like my dad. We traveled for his work as an architectural engineer, going to new water treatment plants to map out where the electricity should go. My mom was not what you’d call a big thinker. She’d never had a job in her life, and I can’t recall her ever even picking up a book.
What my mom did care about was my father. They had a very passionate relationship, and she had a jealous redhead temper. She liked to throw things, though never at me. Just warning shots at him. She had had her pick of men and went on some dates with Kurt Russell when she was seventeen. She met him at the Louisiana State Capitol while she was with my grandmother, who had jury duty. Kurt was there shooting a movie, The Deadly Tower. He took one look at my mother and he was a smitten kitten. He asked her out and my grandparents let her go, but supervised. Even my grandmother would talk about the night Kurt Russell picked my mom up in a limo and they went to a fancy dinner. Then he didn’t get anywhere because she was underage. They held hands, so that was the end of that.
Bismarck was just a quick stop for us. We kept a house in Baton Rouge, where I was born, and my father’s parents lived next door so they could keep an eye on the place. But we were rarely there. Our Suburban was always packed up, and my dad had a matching boat, which went everywhere with us, no matter how landlocked the new place might be. Any chance he had to take it out for waterskiing, he took it. Otherwise, it was just a trailer. We’d load all our stuff in it, put the cover on, and drive to the next place.
I have a photographic memory, so I can put myself right back in every place we lived. There was Kissimmee, Florida, and the winter in Kalamazoo, which my mom hated. All she did was complain and smoke in the house because Michigan was too cold to go outside. After Bismarck we moved to Idaho Falls. We rented a house on Amy Lane, a tiny street dotted with spruces that looked like Christmas trees. We had a big beautiful backyard with a long concrete sidewalk leading to a barn that still had horse stalls. Somebody who lived there had kept horses, and I would sit in the cool of the barn, trying to summon the ghosts of these horses.
Mom made a friend, Nicky Fontenot, who I called Miss Nicky. She owned a horse named Prissy Puddin’ and she barrel raced. One day I was at the stable, and Miss Nicky was cooling out the horse after racing. Prissy was sweaty and tired, and someone put me, all of two, up on the horse to sit in front of Miss Nicky. I can remember the smell of the saddle and the horse sweat, her bay coat and black mane. It was magic, and I don’t know a time since that I haven’t wanted to ride.
I was an only child, and my mom made no secret about the fact that my father never wanted kids in the first place. I have always known that she got pregnant on purpose, and he tolerated the one. He was never bad to me, but he just didn’t have that dad instinct. He barely acknowledged my existence, and I adored him.
So naturally, when I was four and needed to start school, there was no question about my father’s lifestyle changing. It just wouldn’t. My mom and I moved into the house in Baton Rouge, and he took a job in Alaska. For a while, he sent me stuffed animals from that region. My favorite was a little husky. Dad would take pictures from his job site, great big eight-by-tens of this desolate flat land and the arctic foxes he trained to come near him by feeding them fried chicken. “I almost have them eating out of my hand,” he told me on the phone.
He wouldn’t answer when I asked when he was coming home or when I could visit.
The house on Mcclelland Court was small, with a front yard that was two equal rectangles of blacktop driveway and patchy grass. The street was a part of a horseshoe-shaped development where every house had the same look and layout. We lived in a three-bedroom ranch-style house they had no business calling a three-bedroom. I had a waterbed tucked in a vinyl-covered frame, so I at least thought that was cool. The houses next door were just a few feet away from each other, and if you want to buy one of them today, the estimated going price is twenty-four thousand dollars.
My mom took me to a dance class because I wanted to be a ballerina. My dance teacher was Miss Vicki, and her crotchety old mother, Miss Donna, owned the studio. The recital that year had a Disney theme, and I can still see my costume: baby blue and fully sequined with a little ruffle on my butt. And white tights, white tap shoes, and a white sequined hat. What’s funny is that I now have the same hat in black for when I play a magician when I do my feature dancing gigs in clubs on the road. Every time I put on the magician hat, I think back to that recital.
Backstage, it was full-on Toddlers & Tiaras, with all the Baton Rouge moms teasing out their daughters’ hair. Everyone was smoking, and my mom was trying to secure my hat to my hair by bobby-pinning it directly to my skull. With all the hair spray and polyester, I was a pint-size fire hazard for sure.
“Ow,” I screamed over and over as she pinned the hat on. “That hurts!”
Miss Donna hobbled over and shook a finger at me as she exhaled smoke. “You have to suffer to be beautiful,” she rasped. “Beauty is pain.”
Then she hobbled on, and I was speechless. But no truer words have ever been spoken. Little did I know the future would involve plucking and waxing. High heels, corsets, and underwires.
It was around then that I had my first boyfriend. Jason Beau Morgan lived next door to my mother’s mother, who I called Mawmaw Red. We were dating because I said so, telling him in my grandmother’s front yard, “You’re my boyfriend.” He had blue eyes and curly hair the color of light sand. I actually cut out a picture of his face and put it in a locket that I still have. We lost touch after elementary school, and in middle school I heard he died of a brain aneurysm. Jason was the first boy I ever held hands with.
I was especially close to Mawmaw Red and loved visiting her, not just for the chance to play tag with Jason. She would give me café au lait—with extra milk and sugar in a tall, skinny brown plastic cup—and had blocks that she hid from her other grandkids. They were just for me to play with. “You are special, Stephanie,” she would tell me in her Louisiana drawl.
Mawmaw Red had emphysema. When I went to her house in the last several months of her life, she wore an oxygen mask, and the big green tank went around the house with her until she just stayed in one room. I remember the smell of the oxygen, how it triggered memories of when we lived in Idaho and my asthma was so bad I had to be hospitalized in a crib with a bubble canopy. I pretended I was a fish in a bowl, until I got bored and decided to escape.
The August after my dad started work in Alaska, Mawmaw Red deteriorated, and my mom took me to the hospital to say good-bye. She couldn’t talk and was so close to death. I remember thinking she looked like the death scene in E.T. “You must be dead,” Elliott says to E.T. “’Cause I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything anymore. You’ve gone someplace else now.”
I spent the night at my father’s parents’ house next door, and the next day I was at home when my mom came into her room, where I was playing. I was standing by the bed and she sank down to her knees to take me by both arms.