#12 South Dietz

Moving from our own home to post housing was a transition, to say the least.  It wasn't all terrible. Once the decision had been made, the worst of the fights concluded and my parents slipped into a 'Let's just get through this and see,' fugue. The major downside is the loss of my tennis coach, Coach Harding. 'I'm sad to see you go, kiddo. You really have something there. If you keep at it, I can see Junior ATPs.

The duplex we moved into had been build in the 1940s and I loved it. I loved the arched doorways, the parquet floor, the original bathroom with its tile work.  We only had one bathroom now as opposed to 3 and the rooms were smaller but I honestly felt more at home 

As compensation for moving on to post - something we had never actually done in all the years my dad did not climb the military ladder - I was allowed to have a television in my room.  American Movie Classics became a mainstay, back when AMC showed old school cinema.

THE walls of my room were clean and white. Bliss, after living in a pink team cozy of a room.  I love a good William Morris print but to be surrounded by it...Yeah. Let's peal off some wall paper.

THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR, MR BRANDING BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE, PALM BEACH STORY, THE HAUNTING...the list went on and on. I would leave the television on at night, a low ghostly hum, so I could hear the dialogue and film scores.  I dreamed my way through Otto Preminger's LAURA before I ever saw it, the score sending shivers of deja vu down my spine.

The television  also provided me with the cover I needed to slip outside.  It was November when we moved into the South Dietz housing area.  IOU sweatshirts, leather bomber Jackets, and layered socks were the rage.  At 14, I am already knee-deep in an affair with Bulimia courtesy of a 6th grade research project into Eating Disorders but I am also curvy.   I prefer skirts or wide-legged trousers, Peter Pan collars and cardigans.  I use babysitting money to buy Victorian night dresses and I wear sweat pants underneath them, jumping over the gate into the copse of trees at the back of the housing area.

At the other side of the copse was a fenced know area with a small wooden frame chapel a cemetery of 23 graves.  One of the graves was a of a 14 year old.  I would spend hours by her headstone, reading to her and gossiping about the world.  She had died of influenza, an every day tragedy.  The Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings were on CNN and I spent a lot of time in the school library, watching them. And hiding in plain sight.

I don't remember exactly how it came that I brought the dead girl home for a sleepover.  But I did and we watched _Arise, My Love, with Claudette Colbert and Ray Milland.  I remember very clearly my dad knocking on my door on his way out to PT.

'Girl, what are you doing awake??  It is 4:30 in the morning!' We muffled our giggles.

'Just reading, Daddy. It is a very funny story.'

I made a friend at school: Rebecca. She lived a few houses down from us. Her dad had original recordings of Adrian Cronauer in Vietnam.  Garth Brooks 'Shameless' is on the radio every 7th song.  She asks where we've moved from and I say 'Vine Grove.'

'But that's just down the road!'

'Yeah.' I unfold the tale. I share all of it, too much, including the stuff I'd never told anyone, like why my dad still slept on the couch sometimes, why he had gone back in the Army, why my brother had a limp.   I was so grateful to have a friend, so un-nuanced in friendship , I laid it all out.  And on Monday morning, I walked into school and they knew: I was officially the court-martial girl.  It only went downhill from there.

A few weeks later, my mother takes me to Louisville on a girl's trip and we do what we do best: we bargain shop. And we go to see _The Prince of Tides_.

One of the heads of THE school clique - Caitlin , of course - is the Post Commander's daughter. And she already knew the story and the rumours. 'My dad says he stole, like a lot more than $810, that he probably steals other things.' I'm hiding in one of the stalls, trying desperately to poop. Sleep and the ability to open my bowels will be two things to contend with for the next 30 years.

I walk out of the stall, wash my hands, raise an eyebrow at Caitlin in the mirror. I’m willing myself not to cry.

‘Is that a new outfit?’

'Obvioisly. What with all those ill gotten gains.'

The rest of the semester went downhill, pretty much from there, except that Daddy didn't get sentenced to 25 in Leavenworth.