Freckled Read online

  Freckled

  A Memoir of Growing Up Wild in Hawaii

  T W Neal

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Afterword

  References

  About the Author

  More Titles from Toby Neal!

  Connect With Toby

  This is a work of creative nonfiction. The events are portrayed to the best of T.W. Neal’s memory. Memoir is written from memory, and we all know that human memory is flawed. It’s almost impossible to recall a conversation word for word, but I have a talent for remembering dialogue, and kept a lot of journals growing up. Freckled is how I remember things, and if the words aren’t exact, the spirit of them is. Where possible I fact-checked, but as with all firsthand eyewitness accounts, impressions will differ. If I got something wrong, I apologize—I have done the best I could, to be as truthful as I could.

  * * *

  I have changed some people’s names and basic descriptions. Kauai is a small island and Hawaii is a small place. Anne Lamott has famously said, “Own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

  That is true. And it’s also true that we writers are the ones holding a pen and chiseling someone’s actions into history without their knowledge or consent. I have tried not to be unkind; hence, some names and descriptions have been changed to protect privacy.

  © Toby Neal 2018

  http://tobyneal.net

  * * *

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-7327712-0-8

  Print ISBN: 978-1-7327712-1-5

  * * *

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the author/publisher.

  * * *

  Cover photo by Kim S. Rogers

  Cover design by Emily Irwin

  Interior photos by Pop, unless otherwise noted

  “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

  ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

  * * *

  For Mike, Caleb, and Tawny

  Thank you for being the family of my hopes and dreams.

  * * *

  Me, age 2

  Foreword

  By John Wehrheim

  Toby Wilson Neal’s memoir begins in 1965 and ends in 1983. She writes in the first person, present tense—a child’s point of view growing up as a redheaded girl born to hippie surfer parents. From within her narrative it wasn’t possible to present a historic account of the overarching cultural and racial tensions in Hawaii at that time. So, Toby asked me to write an essay that would provide context for her coming-of-age tale, referencing stories from my book Taylor Camp, an iconic photographic record of a hippie/surfer community on Kauai’s North Shore in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

  At any time as you read, you are invited to skip to the Afterword to consider the social, economic and cultural aspects of the times presented through my essay.

  ~John Wehrheim

  Mom reading to me in the van on Kauai

  Chapter One

  Swimming

  Mom, me, and Pop

  Age: 4, Rocky Point, Oahu, 1969

  Sand. Big yellow mountains of sand. So much, and a long way, a giant tabby cat napping in the sun. Mom’s holding my hand, and I’m naked because we’re going swimming when we get to the bottom of the long wooden stairs leading away from our house.

  I drop to my knees and dig into the big smooth grains, wriggling my body deep in to feel it all over, sinking in delicious warm because the sun is hot on my head. When I push my arms into the sand and they come up, my skin is the same color. My freckles look like the beach. This always makes me happy.

  The sand feels different as the day changes. Morning, it’s gray, cool, and the air is blue. The mynah birds talk, and the ghost crabs are out running on skitter legs over the beach. The coconut tree next to my window makes a sound like clapping when the wind first comes up; it’s cheering that we have a new day. And when the day ends, the sand is orange, warm, and soft when we sit on it and watch the sun go down.

  I love having no clothes on. I can feel everything better that way. I feel a shivery-good sensation in my legs. I come up out of the sand and walk out of the way by the naupaka bush and squat to pee.

  “You always do that,” Mom says, and I laugh, because what else would I do when I get that feeling?

  The ocean is the color of the stones in Mom’s silver bracelet as she reaches to take my hand. Her skin is hot and brown and smells like coconut oil, and I want to lick it as we walk down to the water, slow because her belly is so big now with my brother or sister inside—hapai it’s called.

  Mom wades in, and the cold water hits us. I squeal and cling. She laughs some more, sinking down so it covers us, prying me off to hold me by both hands.

  “Opihi,” she says, and she means the little round pointed shells that stick on the rocks. Sometimes we pry them off with a screwdriver and eat them. They taste like rubbery seaweed.

  She holds my hands. “Kick! Kick!” she commands.

  I kick, the feeling of the water sliding over my skin like the silky blanket I sleep with. I kick and kick and she swirls me through the water, and then puts one hand on my tummy and says, “Now rainbow your hands,” and I do, making the paddling rainbow motions she’s showed me before, and suddenly her hand is gone and I’m swimming! And I see the yellow beach, our little blue house, the coconut tree beside it, and the windows that watch the ocean.

  Then I’m sinking. I gasp for breath, and I paddle harder, but I’m under now, my eyes stinging, but still open to see the waves ahead hitting the white foamy sand and my breath held, tight and burning, until Mom’s hand comes and lifts me back up.

  I cough and cough. The water stings inside my chest, much more than the pool or the bath. I’m mad that I sank and surprised that I can’t swim yet. I was sure I could!

  “Again!” I say when I’m done coughing.

  “You never give up, my sassy bug. You’re going to get this. I know you are.” We start over with kicking, and rainbow arms, then
she lets me go and I sink . . . but this time I know it’s going to work. I hold my breath and keep my eyes open while I kick and rainbow. Underneath I see fish—shiny aholehole and green-striped manini, and the black rocks on the bottom that make this place called Rocky Point.

  I like it under the water. I feel like I can fly, and this time my kicking and rainbow arms bring me back up by myself. I blow out my breath, drops spray off my lips, and I grin big even though my face is barely out of the water.

  “You did it!” Mom catches me, and I cling around her giant belly, and the belly pushes back at me. I push back at it, and it’s like we’re talking. I can’t wait to meet who’s in there. Mom laughs. “The baby’s excited too. You’re just going to get better and better at this.” She lets me ride on her back as she swims, holding onto the strap of her crocheted top. My legs trail behind, and sometimes touch her, a silky feeling.

  Pop’s watching from the top of the stairs. He is big and tall, and the sun shines on his blond hair. He has his camera out. He takes pictures a lot, and he’s looking to see if there’s any surf, because he takes mostly surf pictures. There’s no surf today, and I can tell he’s grumpy by the way his mouth makes a line—so do his eyebrows. He’s usually grumpy when there’s no surf or he drank a lot the night before, and I want to cheer him up.

  Maybe he will be happy that I swam. I wave to him from the water. “I swam! I swam!”

  Pop nods, enough so I know he heard me. I should have known that wouldn’t cheer him up, but I can’t think of anything else.

  I drop to roll in the sand again when we get out, because it’s warm and feels so good.

  Mom hoses us off outside the house, and she chases me with the cold water as I squeak and laugh. We go back out to the beach, and I help her dig a hole in the sand for her belly to go in. She puts her towel over the hole and lies down with a sigh. “Untie my top, will you?”

  I pull the cord of her top so there’s no tan line on her back; I burrow into the sand beside her and feel it’s warm fingers all over my skin.

  Pop comes down the stairs. “She really did it this time?” He sits beside us in that way all the surfers do, with his knees up and arms looped around them. His eyes look a little red, how they get after he’s been smoking a doobie. Good. He’s not as grumpy when he’s had a joint.

  “You know Toby never gives up.” I hear the smile in Mom’s voice. I lie next to her and rub a piece of her long, chocolate-colored hair between my fingers and suck my thumb, happy.

  Nanee, me, Mom, and Gigi

  At preschool I heard the ladies talking about ESP. There are two kinds of ESP: the kind where you hear other people’s thoughts, and the kind where people can make other people do what they want just with their thoughts.

  I always listen to grownups so I can know things— “Elephant ears” Mom calls me. Grandma Gigi, Pop’s mom, believes in ESP too. “I can tell when you’re thinking about me, so that’s when I call,” Gigi says. She does usually call when we need something, and I love when her packages come in the mail, even though Pop grumbles that I’m getting spoiled.

  I want to have the make-people-do-stuff kind of ESP.

  We’re at dinner, and the sun has gone down behind the ocean. I can hear the surf outside; it’s coming up bigger with a shushing sound.

  “Should be good tomorrow,” Pop says, sipping his beer. Because my dad’s a surfer, we always pay attention to what the surf is doing and the weather conditions. There’s “onshore,” which means the wind is in my face off the ocean and that’s bad for surf—I don’t really know why. Then there’s “offshore,” which is best to make the waves good, and “Konas,” which means the wind is light and from the side.

  Mom is sitting between Pop and me. Her tummy is super big, almost touching the table, and she’s wearing her favorite blue muumuu that she sewed herself. There are some oven-baked fries, special because they are not goodforyou, and fish Pop caught, and Mom’s salad with bean sprouts. We have white plates with a flower border, a milk bottle filled with daisies, Mom’s favorite flower, and everything is pretty and good.

  Even after he smoked today, Pop was still grumpy. I can see how he’s feeling like a black cloud over his head. Bad things can happen when I make him mad, and I do that a lot because I’m noisy and too bouncy. I’m always trying to get him to like me and see that I’m smart and can do things as good as a boy. Because I was supposed to be a boy and be named James Theodore the Third.

  Mom and Pop didn’t know what to call me when I was a girl, so they named me Toby after the redheaded boy who runs away to the circus in a movie Mom watched at the hospital. I have no middle name because “when you’re old enough, you can choose your own middle name.” This worries me. How do I pick the right name? I wish I could just be named James Theodore the Third, even if I am a redheaded girl.

  Maybe I can make Pop do something with ESP.

  PICK UP THE KETCHUP, I think. PICK UP THE KETCHUP. PICK UP THE KETCHUP.

  Pop looks up at me. His green eyes have red around them. The overhead light shines on his curling blond hair, going thin at the top. I stare at him, my lips moving, as I think as hard as I can—PICK UP THE KETCHUP.

  “What are you looking at?” His voice is a low thunder sound. He narrows his eyes. I don’t look away or answer. He’s going to PICK UP THE KETCHUP any second now. I just know it!

  “Stop staring at me.” Pop gets louder and seems to swell.

  I can tell how mad he’s getting, but I stare until my eyes hurt because I can feel it almost working—he’s going to hear me any minute now. I don’t blink. I want to be scary: eyes wide, mouth tight, staring hard as I think PICK UP THE KETCHUP. I will make him do what I want!

  “I said stop looking at me, disrespectful little brat!” He stands up and his chair flies back and lands on the linoleum with a thud. He’s enormous.

  My mom makes fluttery noises, but it’s too late. Roaring something I don’t hear, he comes around the table and whips me off the chair by my hair. I crash onto the floor and hold onto my head and use my legs to hold myself up, trying to keep from being dragged—it hurts so bad, as he hauls me down the hall, but I won’t cry. I’m stubborn like that. I’m not afraid of pain.

  I’m still thinking, PICK UP THE KETCHUP. Like it’s going to save me. Like he can hear me.

  But he doesn’t.

  He drags me all the way into my little white bedroom, sits on my bed, and throws me over his knees, lifting my cotton dress. He spanks me hard, and it goes on and on.

  Tears start against my will. I wriggle and bite my lips and finally scream—a loud shriek because I’m so angry and sad that ESP didn’t work; the spanking hurts, and he hates me more than ever now.

  The scream’s what he’s been trying to get out of me, though, because he’s done with the spanking. He throws me onto the bed. I bounce, and my head smacks the wall.

  I lay there stunned. I guess I don’t have ESP.

  He slams my door so hard it shakes the walls of the little old house.

  He rages at Mom outside my bedroom. “Goddamn spooky kid, staring at me like that. I can tell what she’s doing; she’s trying to get inside my head! Goddamn it, you better straighten her out . . .”

  Mom argues with him. I feel bad for her because I hear her crying as he yells about how bratty I am, what a pain in the ass, why did we have a kid in the first place, and now we’re having another one.

  I put the covers over my head and suck my thumb, rubbing the silky edge of my blankie and thinking about my favorite story. Aladdin can ride a carpet like it was a floating car, and he has a genie in a magic lamp. I wish I could ride a carpet to get away, and if I got three wishes, the first would be that Pop would be nicer.

  Mom reads to me every night, and I can’t wait to be able to read to myself. Miss K at preschool says I’m almost ready—sometimes I can even read the books Mom has read to me the most because I remember what each word was.

  Mom sneaks in with my dinner plate after Pop has gone
outside with his evening six-pack. She sits on my bed, and it dips toward her. I come out from my nest of covers and rest my hot, angry face against the mound of the baby under her muumuu, and the baby pushes at me. I put my hand on her belly and push back, and it bumps my hand again.

  Mom strokes the hair off my face. “You shouldn’t irritate him like that.”

  I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. Even when I’m being good I irritate him. He’s never been happy with me. She knows this, too. I’m pretty sure the real problem is that I wasn’t James Theodore the Third. “Would Pop like me if I was a boy?”

  Mom jumps a little like maybe the baby kicked her. “Oh, no, honey. You two are just oil and water.”

  I sit up and eat my dinner, my plate on my knees, and I know a secret. Maybe I don’t have ESP, but I can get into his head. And he can spank me all he wants, but I’m not afraid of him.