Mobile Home

In April of 2009, my youngest sister and I were trying to kill some time before her bridal shower. We didn’t want to show up at my aunt’s home too early. We found ourselves driving down the roads near Hertford Grammar School which I attended until 5th grade and which my sister, Edna, attended for at least part of a year.

Just a few streets away from the school, we stopped and snapped a picture of where we used to live. No one was living there or at least not legally. The white siding of the trailer was streaked with green mold and there were red painted boards over the windows and doors, although the piece covering the door has been pried forward. If we had been daring, I guess we could have gone inside, but we didn’t get out of the car.

The condition of the trailer shouldn’t have surprised either of us given that we had not lived there in almost 18 years but there was something forlorn about the fact that no one called it home anymore. Edna seemed to be more effected than I was. I tried to think back to the first time I ever revisited a place I used to live. I realized my sister had only ever lived in a few places whereas I had moved quite a bit more.

Maybe all the moving I did, especially after I graduated from high school, was what pushed away the memory of this trailer because if I had not take a picture back in April of 2009, I’d be unable to provide a description now.

In the picture, the trailer sits perpendicular to the road on a grassy lot. The grass appears to have been mowed. There are a few trees and the entryway steps are still there next to a somewhat leaning wooden railing. Facing the street is a boarded up window which is probably part of the master bedroom. I have a vague memory of a large bed that took up most of that room. I do remember staying in bed all day, at least once, with my mother as we read books. At least one of those books was “A Brave New World.” My mother had read it and it was on some list of recommended books for AP English which I was taking in just a few months. She read my copy of “Homecoming” and “Dicey’s Song.” We loved to discuss books.

I never thought to ask her why or when she read “A Brave New World.” She never went to college and wasn’t even a particularly good student although she could type faster than anyone I knew on a manual typewriter. I had an electric typewriter by then, in 1992, but she could still type faster than me.

1992 was an idyllic summer. I was a rising senior exploring colleges and scholarships. My two sisters and I were spending the whole summer with our mother instead of the normal two weeks we usually spent with her since we had moved in with my father when I was 13. My brother was in college already but he came by for a few visits that summer. At first I was torn about being at my Mom’s because I had hoped to go to Governor’s School. I wasn’t accepted. I could justify that I wasn’t accepted because I was nominated in Theater and not Academics. I even turned down another summer opportunity called Summer Ventures because I wanted, so badly, to attend Governor’s school.

Governor’s School was a summer program in North Carolina where students were nominated in Academics and Fine Arts. I auditioned in Theater and came away thinking I was going to get in for sure and I took it pretty hard when I received a rejection letter. Even though I had competed in debate and speech events all through high school, I still took being rejected from Governor’s School pretty hard. I felt dejected and left out even though the number of people who were selected for Governor’s School was extremely small.

I recall sitting on some kind of couch, that summer, and talking with my best friend, Tara, who was at Governor’s School. I tried not to be jealous. I can’t see any of the furniture for sure. I do remember a red bike my step father gave me and that I was able to ride to the public library, grocery store and to my mother’s job at Hardee’s without much exertion. I’d even ride to the post office because my boyfriend was gone for part of the summer to Germany as he had been a part of the exchange program the year before.

There are moments that I remember from the summer, but I can’t picture the things that were around us. I remember incidents like calling the health department to make doctor’s appointments for Mom and I. Mom was tired and kept complaining of stomach problems. I needed to get a copy of my immunization records for my college applications. Even though I called early in summer the only appointments I could schedule were well into the Fall.

If I go back just months before my mother moved into that trailer, I can picture in great detail the trailer we lived in before, the second trailer as I think of it now. The one I can’t remember, that one that was near my Grammar school, was the third. The second trailer was on the other side of the county. Because of moving there I had had to switch schools between 5th and 6th grades. I had been at Hertford Grammar for K through 5. Hertford Grammar was a small school with maybe two full classes for each grade. I knew no one when I started 6th grade at Perquimans Union School.

Even though I only lived in that second trailer for perhaps two years full time before I moved in with my father, I can still see the terrible green carpet; I can feel the lines between the pieces of paneling on the walls; I can laugh about the awful brown couch that was part of the “furnished” rental.

That trailer was set back behind a house and butted up to a huge ditch which separated us from an actual trailer park. The lot had been improved with a storage building, picnic table and a two room addition onto the back of the trailer itself. In that addition I had my first room to myself. The walls were lined with shelves big enough for a pre-teen me to sit on when I wanted to read. I have always read widely but during the time we lived in that trailer I was particularly into studying the history of witches, psychic phenomena and the apocalypse. I kept track of the books I read in a notebook where I also tried to write song lyrics even though I couldn’t carry a tune.

Even after we moved in with my father, we came back to that trailer for years, usually every other weekend and the aforementioned two weeks during the summer with alternating holidays – a Thanksgiving here, a Christmas there. My youngest sister Edna never moved with my other sister and brother. My parents divorced when she was a newborn and she lived with my mother until she was 8 years old.

The very first trailer we lived in was only a few miles from the house where I grew up. We had first been in a house until my parent’s divorce. My father kept the house, for a time, while my mother moved to her first trailer. My father kept us for a time before we moved in with my Mom and our future stepfather. I was only maybe 9 or 10 years old when we moved in to that first trailer. It is still, however, fairly clear to me: the two bedrooms, the open kitchen, the built in bookcase of the living room. All the kids shared one bedroom which had bunk beds along one wall and vinyl floors. Edna was still young enough to be in a crib. The yard was fairly large with a pile of sand where many a game was invented. We were close to the water. We went swimming and fishing just down the street or, more often for me, pier seating where I could daydream in the off season when no one was using the dock.

Why can I remember the first two trailers so well, but not the last? I try to picture the furniture, the shape of the rooms but the image always shifts and one of the other trailers merges in to fill the gaps that I cannot recall. It all feels imagined and in my imagination I see my mother trying to dial an old rotary phone because she didn’t take the doctor’s orders and left the emergency room. She somehow says enough, during that call, for the ambulance to come even though she is having trouble breathing. My youngest sister, Edna, is, for some reason, in a white dress watching her mother struggle.

I have seen real items from the last mobile home, like a very girly day bed, Disney movies and posters. Things my sister had because she was the one who lived there full time until her mother, our mother, died suddenly when my sister was 8 and I was 17.

Almost 18 years later and we could have stopped the car. We could have tried to go inside that last trailer. I could have drawn a floor plan and noted the color of the walls, maybe even the carpet, but there was something derelict about that little trailer, in its tiny yard, off an unlined street without sidewalks or stoplights that seemed old enough to remain closed.