Tent: A Memoir

Tent: A Memoir Debra Gwartney For Christmas, my sister gave us a tent. Green canvas with a rain flap, which we'd erect with long, flexible poles and keep in place with metal stakes tapped into the soft ground ofthe Oregon woods.The cardboard box it came in, from Sears, had a picture ofSir Edmund Hillary on the side, along with a list of the tent's best qualities: its waterproof coating, its sturdiness, its roomy interior that comfortably slept five. That Christmas Day we received it, I rubbed away the last of the red and gold wrapping paper cUnging to the box and flung it into the shiny pile of waste on the floor.The four girls and I, our loose cotton clothes stül rumpled from sleep, were settled around a tree dangling with paper chains, feathery angels, snowmen pasted together in preschool, and glass baUs that had somehow survived annual unpacking and repacking. I moved the box over to our pile ofrecently opened gifts, while the girls bantered about where we'd first pitch the tent—Alsea FaUs,WolfRock, anywhere on the coast—when winter gave way to spring. But even then, even before the real trouble started, I felt myself give up on ever seeing the five of us in that shelter. Through that faU, my older daughters' defiance had grown like the prickly taU weeds along our fence. My voice was hardly ever calm around Amanda and Stephanie anymore. I didn't use reason or soothing logic; instead I was often reduced to one statement, usuaUy deUvered with a throat-searing firmness :"Ifyou want to Uve here, you'U do it by my rules." Day after day that was met with a slammed door, the two girls stomping away across our lawn. At night, sleepless in my bed, I promised myself I'd walk the route to work the next day that would put me under a giant oak tree, where I would spend a few minutes stomping on the tiny acorns strewn on the sidewalk—the crack and the pop of each one under my shoe loosening the strain in my head. ? I knew the tent wouldn't hold us. 20 Debra Gwartney21 For so long, my intention had been to make sure the five ofus were a family . Operating as a family Maybe it had become my obsession. After our divorce, without their father around, I fretted that the girls would consider us an unnatural configuration, Uke a person missing an arm or a leg. An awkward rub with the two-parent symmetry surrounding the ?-plus kids at their school, the ones who got the awards at the assembUes and parts in the school plays, their own set ofcheering parents looking on. I tried to understand that he was part of what the girls considered whole, what they knew of family even if I found that notion unacceptable. I wanted him to have no part of who we were now. In the early years, their ache often came through conversation. "If Dad were here, he'd fix it," one would say about a car door that wouldn't shut right. "We should call Dad and ask him what to do," over buying a lawn mower or clearing a drain. Once I'd proved to them I could do those household things he used to, he haunted the house in a stream of subtle longings: the head of our table left unset for dinner; his picture tucked under their pillows . After a visit with her father, Stephanie came home with one of his Tshirts , which she roUed up and put in her dresser, opening it up to smeU at night before bed until the fabric released the last molecules ofhis scent. When we were six together, my famüy ate dinner around a table in the evenings. We read books aloud to one another, squeezed in on the living room sofa. We had a fairly orderly Ufe, tidy clothes and belongings. On the weekends, I baked, with one or the other of the girls sitting on the counter next to the whirring mixer, dumping in ingredients. Sometimes we packed up the car and rumbled...