Free Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility by Hollis Gillespie

a waterslide!" she'd exclaim, and we'd all squeal with
excitement, my father included.
    Because it was my father who was in charge of all the hookups.
There was a panel along the side of the trailer with big outlets behind
it that he attached things to, which magically enabled us to do a wide
variety of things that weren't nearly as amazing at home, from cooking
sausage links to flushing toilets. My mother would actually show him
affection, because in our real home, where my parents customarily
fought like rival tigers, my father was not nearly as proficient as he was
in the miniature-trailer version of our home. In the miniature-trailer
version, everything was compartmentalized, cleaner, newer, and more
manageable. In the miniature-trailer version, my dad was in charge
and my mother was enamored with him and my sisters and I basked
in the entire harmonious mirage of it all. Look at us, a happy family.

    I purchased the vintage Shasta trailer without really thinking
about particulars, such as towing the damn thing home. I thought
maybe I could have it hauled here and sit it in my yard as a lovely
restored relic or something. But my daughter bought the whole harmonious mirage from the moment we started researching travel trailers on the Web. To her, the purpose of the trailer is not simply to
plunk it somewhere in order to make a fun statement. To her the
trailer is paradise on wheels.
    "Where are we taking it?" she asked excitedly. "Disney World?"
    So I started thinking maybe I could tow the damn thing myself.
I had never towed so much as a red kiddie wagon with this car before,
but I got a hitch put on, and damn if that little Shasta trailer didn't
tow like a (kinda wind-resistant) dream all the way back from Indiana.
I would not have believed it possible if not for my girl. That's one of
the surprise perks of parenthood: When you have kids, you get to
believe everything all over again. I can't wait to see her face when I
show her the trailer. "That right there," I'll say, pointing to the panel
on the side, "is where you put the hookups."

    Growing up, we drifted to so many addresses that often the only people
my sisters and I could count on as friends were each other. Jim was old
enough to move out while we were still in grade school. But my sisters and
I are almost exactly twenty-two months apart in age, a fairly perfect gradation in maturity for being best friends throughout childhood ... only
to go on drifting, apart and then back together again, through marriage,
parenthood, and other various estrangements. My little sister, Kim, sees the
good in everything, which I used to find exasperating. But then she recognized goodness in a young, drunk, part-Swiss, part-South African who
dressed like Crocodile Dundee-and she married him. My brother-in-law
Eddie turned out to be my unexpected savior when I attempted a nearly
disastrous foray into real-estate investment after finding myself abruptly
unemployed. Therefore, I believe, if Kim sees the good in something, then
the good must be there.

    I CAN'T PINPOINT THE EXACT TIME WHEN my sister Kim got right with
God, except to say that maybe she always was. It's true that she never
seemed to go through that phase where she did drugs and fucked
around like her other sisters-me, admittedly, and my older sister,
Cheryl, not so admittedly-but it's not like Kim carried a Bible
around and spouted Scripture, either.
    For one, if she did that my mother might have parked a roll-away
bed on the balcony and demanded she live out there until it was time
for her to attend college. It was tough enough, I know, for my atheist
mother while we were young, when my dad would belt one too many
Budweisers and break open the hefty children's Bible we still kept
hidden in the bottom drawer of the big room divider. He'd insist we
gather around and he'd read to us in his James Earl Jones voice. After
a few minutes our mother would attempt to save us by