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by Taryn Frazier
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No matter where we moved, an old cedar chest stood at the foot of my parents’ bed. A hundred random nail holes made constellations in the red-gold wood, and its varnish was cloudy with age.
I liked to perch on its battered lid in the morning, playing with the heavy iron latch while my father got his uniform ready. He’d take the blue Oxford shirt out of the cleaner’s plastic and lay it on the bed. The smell of cheap starch would waft over me, and I’d breathe it in like fine perfume. As he pinned the fruit salad on, I’d ask what each ribbon meant, even though I knew them by heart. Two silver captain’s bars went into each epaulet, and the blue plastic name plate fastened over his heart.
“Have a good day, Scout,” he’d say.
I’d slide off the chest and try to keep up with his long, swinging stride, his blue envelope hat in one hand and brown plastic briefcase in the other, off to do… whatever he did. My seven-year-old self wasn’t entirely clear on what that was. Something to do with Intelligence, which made sense, because he was a smart man. No matter how I tried, I could never beat him in chess, even if he took away both of his rooks and a bishop.
He drove me and my sister by his office once—stopped the little Toyota outside a concrete barricade and pointed to a drab trailer surrounded by garlands of razor wire.
“That’s where the magic happens.”
I made a polite noise, and Mouse pulled her thumb out of her mouth long enough to ask, “What do you do in there?” Mouse wasn’t her real name of course, but it suited her better.
Dad shrugged. “Read emails, mostly.”
Mouse, at five, was too old to be sucking her thumb, but Mom had told me to leave her alone—that it was a coping mechanism.
I’d rolled those two words—”coping mechanism”—around in my mouth, pleased to be trusted with all those syllables. I wasn’t quite sure what they meant, but maybe it had something to do with the grownups’ drawn faces or the dusty soldiers and fighter jets I’d seen on TV. Those planes looked like the ones that flew over the base school in formation, making desks shake and teachers pause. Mr. Chris next door flew an F-16 and sometimes brought home old parachutes for the neighborhood kids. We’d play “Whale’s Mouth,” a game in which two of us would pull the silky swathe of khaki fabric along until it bellied out, then the rest of us would jump in, half a dozen tiny Jonahs leaping into the leviathan’s gullet.
A stern, coiffed news anchor was talking about a Golf War and Sodom when my mother came in and snatched the remote. I wasn’t sure what golf had to do with those images of war and fire, but I remembered the story of fire raining down on Sodom and Gomorrah. That must be it.
As my mother fumbled to change the channel, I asked, “Where was that?”
“Far away,” she said, in her end-of-conversation voice.
She and Dad had another one of their whispered conversations that night when I was supposed to be asleep. Somehow the images on the TV had to do with Dad, but I couldn’t figure out how.
The chaos on the screen didn’t match up with my clean, dignified father. The Pentagon might as well have special-ordered him: first to come into the office and last to leave; always buying a round for the squadron but never drunk; serious, yet always ready for a joke.
He’d mow trails in the lawn for me and Mouse to follow, tell us shadow stories with a flashlight, and teach us how to throw a baseball. We worshiped him.
Mouse and I were playing hide and seek with Dad one day when it first occurred to me that I could open that cedar chest.
I was too young to know that the act of opening a box is a solemn and momentous thing. Nothing stays the same when you open a box. You learn things you hadn’t known before, and not always things you want to know.
While Mouse slid into her usual hiding place under the bathroom sink, I heaved open the nail-pocked lid like a runny-nosed little Pandora. To my surprise, the chest was mostly empty, so I climbed in and eased it shut. Darkness and the sharp smell of cedar surrounded me as I nestled between folded wool sweaters.
A sharp metal something jabbed into my lower back, and I reached back to feel what it was: another, smaller box wedged into a corner. No matter how I shifted, its cold edge dug into me. Still, I stayed quiet, my pulse pounding in my ears, listening to Dad’s footsteps through the house. He talked to himself, heightening the tension of the game.
“Not behind the curtains like last time, and not in the closet. Could they be under the bed?”
My sister giggled from the bathroom, and Dad ignored it. He’d let Mouse think she’d fooled him for a while. After a while, he “found” her, and the two of them searched the house for me. To my seven-year-old self, it felt like eons before they found me, but it couldn’t have taken them more than ten minutes.
When Dad finally lifted the lid, I popped out of the chest like a jack-in-the-box, and we laughed together at my cleverness.
“You really couldn’t find me,” I gloated.
“I really couldn’t,” he agreed.
I pointed back down into the chest at the metal box. “What’s in that?”
As Mouse wandered off, Dad hauled out the box and opened it. Yet another box: this one a plastic clamshell in khaki green. With his long, clever fingers, he pried it open to show me the greasy paste. “It’s camouflage paint.”
I frowned at the rectangles of paste—green, gray, black, white, and tan. “For what?”
“If I’m ever in combat, it makes me less easy to see.”
“Why don’t you want people to see you?” Maybe this was an adult version of hide-and-go-seek. I thought of the chest and the dark and the heart-pounding waiting.
Dad shifted beside me on the bed. Always honest, he replied, “Someone might try to hurt me.”
I scooted away from the box as if it could bite, chin trembling. Dad had laughed–a gentle, uncomfortable sound. It was different than the I found you laugh. This one meant, You won’t understand.
I started crying in earnest because I was sure I did.
“Don’t worry, Scout,” he’d said. “It may never happen.”
But I never hid in that chest again—would hardly look at it for all the long months he spent overseas, where fire rained down from the sky and the land burned.
Call it a coping mechanism.
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Taryn Frazier grew up the proud daughter of her father, a USAFA officer, and her mother, a dedicated military spouse. Today, she is an educator, writer, and mother of four. She works to raise awareness of children’s experiences of military life—the good and the hard.
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