This story began more than 30 years ago but the catalyst for actually writing about it was a phone call with my father. My mother still hospitalized after 2 months and my dad wanted me to come down to visit again (I had been there for several days after her initial hospitalization). He also wanted me to stay with him. When I mentioned getting a hotel room he said something he probably thought was innocuous,
“I don’t understand why you can’t just stay at the house and sleep in your mom’s bed. I washed the sheets.” That sentence made my skin crawl and my stomach knot and my hands clench. I was truly horrified by the idea. And the horror and the idea kind of stuck in my brain. I tried writing about it in the first person and could only get a couple paragraphs in. I realized that I was going to need the safety and distance of writing in the third person if I was going to get through the story. So the story is about Charlotte (in all the fiction I write I am always Charlotte) The part where I actually let myself get talked into staying at my parents house? Total fiction. I wish the rest of it was.
The Metallic Gold Cherry Blossom Wallpaper
Charlotte sat at the kitchen table, staring through the wavy glass at her thighs and wondered for the hundredth time why her parents’ had what was essentially high-end patio furniture, yellow painted wrought iron with a circular glass top, in their kitchen. The set was, in fact, almost identical to their actual outdoor patio furniture except for that outside the top of the table was metal and the chairs weren’t padded. Probably the same reason the line between the kitchen and family room was a wavy gold foil line between carpet and linoleum. It was a 70’s thing. A lot of the 70’s stuff had gone, the different colored carpet in every room, wallpaper relentlessly glued to every single wall, the paisley couch. She missed the paisley couch actually. Of course the mirror at the end of the hall with the gold marbled effect, which had fragmented every full length look she’d ever taken of herself, dated it almost as effectively as a timestamp over the door.
Mom had remodeled a bit after she’d left for college. After Charlotte had assured for the 30th time that she would never, ever, be coming back home to stay for longer than a holiday break, her mother had turned Charlotte’s room into a cotton-candy pink quilted nightmare of a guest room. Everything matched. All four walls were covered with the 1990’s most heinous trend in wallpaper: one flowered pattern, a floral border halfway up, then another contrasting pattern of ribbons and flowers above that. The poofy curtains, bedspread, chair, pillows and wallpaper were all from the same pattern family. Every surface sported ribbons roses or both. The art on the walls had been chosen not for the conents or because of a particular love of the artist but because it matched the room.
Into this saccharine confection had gone beautiful maple furniture including a four poster bed, nightstand and dresser. And on top of these sat glass doll cases filled with specimens from her mother’s enormous collection of porcelain dolls. Dolls her mother had been willing to “ruin” by displaying them and exposing them to light. No longer “mint in box” their value decreased radically the moment her mother removed them from their boxes, which is why the vast majority of her dolls had only been removed once, to insure there were no flaws, before being restored permanently to their box where they then laid undisturbed for decades. These sacrificial dolls had been chosen, like the art on the walls, because their outfits matched the room. To Charlotte this was all made worse by the fact that this wasn’t a tacky room in some mobile home somewhere. If the furniture had been used, if the curtains and bedspread and pillow shams had been made at home on someone’s sewing machine instead of special ordered, if the wallpaper had been lovingly put up by hand, if the dolls were someone’s beloved collection and this room and been painstakingly created to give them a home it would have been okay. It still would have been tacky and nothing Charlotte would ever had wanted in her own house but she would have understood it.
But she could not understand this room. It was jarring to her senses every time she walked in. Whereas the trailer park version of this would have at least felt cozy and cluttered this felt antiseptic and claustrophobic. The expensive furniture and the custom made curtains and bedding and the dolls all made the room worth god only knew how many thousands of dollars. The most bewildering part was her mother had created a dream room she did not, and could not actually spend time in and enjoy. The only chair in the room was a tiny delicate chair that had doll the size of a toddler sitting in it. And it was sitting in the corner of the room furthest from the door. To get to it you’d have to go all the way around the room and squeeze between the dresser and the bed. Her mother had known that the furniture she wanted was “a little too big for the space” but she’d ordered it anyway, because she wanted it. Also not only was the bed too high for Charlotte’s mother, with her weight, to heft herself onto, but the bedspread itself had been created to create the illusion of a quilt. The fabric was smooth to the point of being slippery and as stiff as a newly starched shirt. Far past not being inviting, the bed actively discouraged being sat or laid upon. It you tried to sit on the corner you slid unceremoniously onto the floor. So, other than standing in the doorway and looking at it, her mother never spent any time in this dream room of hers.
Charlotte, on her visits home, had spent several nights in that room and she’d hated it. She’d had to remove the comforter completely from the bed when she got into it because you couldn’t fold or smuch it down, it would pop back into place over your head as soon as you let go of it. It was like the worst hotel bedspread imaginable. And there still wasn’t a lock on the door. The weekend before her first visit home as a married woman when she and Gil would be sharing that bed, her father had announced to her mother that he was off to the hardware store to get a doorknob with a lock on it. She’d shot him down. If he replaced that doorknob then the rest of the doorknobs wouldn’t match. All new doorknobs? Nope.
Charlotte had been none too surprised that she couldn’t sleep comfortably in that room with Gil next to her. There was a boy in her room. Not that it looked like her room anymore but it was still the actual square footage on the planet where she’d grown up. And boys were Not Allowed. Sure it was allowed now, even by God, but you can’t just toss out 20 years of conditioning. When he’d stripped down she’d hissed,
“what are you doing?” at him. Gil had just looked at her,
“I always sleep naked.” She’d just stared at him.
“There’s no lock,” she’d gestured at the door. He’d shrugged and gotten under the remaining sheet and blanket. It figured. This wasn’t his nightmare. He didn’t have a voice in his head screaming that she was going to get caught, going to get grounded. She’d yanked a nightgown over her head and gotten in next to him but she hadn’t slept. It had only taken a few trips before salvation had come in the form of a friend’s casual mention that when she and her husband came to visit her parents they just got a hotel room. GENIUS! And Charlotte had sold it. Wouldn’t it be so much easier for you if we stayed in a hotel? No sharing the bathroom. No having to get the bed all made. No extra laundry. Less work for her parents. So much better for everyone.
And it had been. For almost 10 years staying at a hotel, even a crappy one, had allowed her to visit her family and maintain most of her sanity. And of course the fewer hours they were actually in that house the fewer fights she got into with her mother. And after the really bad days they could go back to the hotel, open up the beer they’d stashed in the mini-fridge and decompress. It had worked.
Why WHY hadn’t she just insisted it would still be better for her to stay in a hotel even though she was alone? She was a grown woman. She’d stayed alone in hotel rooms before, on business trips. But there was no way to bail now, with it heading for nine and her dad yawning. He’d be hurt or worried or confused or some combination of all three and it would be worth more trouble than it would save at this point. She hadn’t spoken up when it mattered. She was just going to have to suck it up. Almost sure that she could now go out to her car and get the rest of her stuff without actually flinging herself into it and driving away, she walked outside and popped the trunk. And stood there. After insisting on a hotel the next thing on her list of things she should have insisted on was that she get the guest room. In any normal family she wouldn’t have needed to insist. She was the guest. It was her old room and as far as she knew only three other “guests” had ever slept in it since the remodel.
But now it was her father's room. Still pink and poofy and dreadful and filled with dolls. But now her dad slept there. She slammed the trunk and stared at the front of the house. First at the lit up window of the guest room, then at the room next to it, dark and opaque. The den. The den where her dad, her dad who had the job, who made the money, who paid the bills, who did all the work, slept ever night for twenty five YEARS on the fold out sofa. The den where every morning he woke up before everyone else, pulled all the linens off the bed, stowed them in the closet and made the sofa back up. The den that looked so normal during the day.
The house had been built, somewhat to order, mostly within the narrow choices of tract home specifications, in 1977 and from the time they moved in he’d slept in that room. Her mother had taken over the master suite with its its Asian (or Oriental as it had been called then) styled furniture and metallic gold cherry blossom wallpaper and walk in closet and private bath. Charlotte had gotten the room directly across the hall with her beloved green furniture and grass colored carpet. And busy floral wallpaper. She had wanted plain old paint but her mother had insisted. So wallpaper she’d had. And her father had gotten the den with the fold out couch, bookshelves and sewing machine. He dressed and undressed in the master bedroom. His clothes hung in the walk in closet. He showered in the tiled slower with the heat lamp. But he slept on the couch. Years later she’d wondered why the HELL they hadn’t bought a four bedroom house. They could have found one they could afford, had a guest room and her dad could have actually slept in a real bed every night. There were a thousand questions she’d never asked and that was just one more on the list.
One question she had actually asked, in a rage when she was about fifteen was,
“when you weren’t able to have kids did it ever occur to you that maybe God didn’t want you to be parents?” One thing she was eternally grateful for was that she was adopted. And she gave her parents credit for that one. They’d played it right. She’d grown up always knowing and thinking it was a good thing. That her birth parents hadn’t been able to keep her because they wanted her to have everything and to be raised by a good mommy and daddy who were married and who would love her. They’d sold it. Once, during a particularly ugly fight, her mother had expressed a different opinion about her adoption when she’d screamed,
“I wish your mother had had an abortion! I wish you’d never been born and we’d never adopted you!” Charlotte had just stared at her and said,
“it wasn’t legal yet, sorry” and then locked her bedroom door the only way she could. She pushed her dresser in front of it.
She had it down to a science. She could remove all three drawers, shove the dresser away from the wall, around the corner and in front of the door and have all three drawers back in place in less than 5 minutes. Usually she had the task completed before they realized what she was up to. They could scream and bang and threaten but since they weren’t willing to take a chainsaw to the door or break her window she could keep them at bay until they calmed down. More than once, after shoving the “lock” in front of her door she had curled up on the floor and repeated
“I’m not related to these people. I’m not related to these people” over and over again until she stopped crying. It helped, somehow. That she didn’t actually share blood with them. That she wasn’t growing to grow old and become her mother. That genetically she wasn’t doomed to being the angry fat woman on the couch. It was infinitely better to be related to no one than to be related to them.
As a child, having friends over to spend the night (Charlotte’s bed had a trundle under it that popped up into another bed with a mattress just as comfortable as hers… a bed, she had realized decades later, much better than what her father slept on every night) she’d been embarrassed that her father slept in another room and had made up excuses she could no longer remember. She hadn’t known at the time how many other classmates’ parents were sleeping in separate rooms.
By the time she reached junior high she didn’t bother to explain and her best friend Rachel was around enough to have a pretty damn good idea why Charlotte’s dad was exiled down the hall. Because her mom and dad hated each other. Sometimes there were truces but there was always a quiet air of resignedness coming from her father’s corner and one of loathing and disrespect coming from her mother’s. He could never do anything right. By the time she was in college and had some perspective she and Rache had actively speculated on how her father kept from murdering her mother. “Seriously,” she’d said once on the phone, after a few beers,
“I honestly do not understand why he hasn’t killed her yet. Just stab her to death in her sleep, grab the cat, pack the station wagon and run… I’d never turn him in.”Growing up she’d felt sorry for him and the fact that he got back at her mother by buying her things like, for example, a brand new sports car on her 16th birthday, hadn’t hurt. He’d been the good guy. She’d been the bad guy. Later, as an adult, she’d realized that while he might not have signed up for living with the most ungrateful bitch who ever lived, he certainly could have gotten out of it. She remembered asking her parents, before they’d even moved into the new house, why they didn’t just get a divorce. But he was old school, Texas old school, and he meant his vows and he stayed with the ungrateful bitch. The fat ungrateful bitch.
And that was the other part of why he slept down the hall. Her mother, who had battled her weight all her life and who defined binge eater and comfort eater and every other kind of eater, was fat. There was a pretense of being on a diet much of the time and her weight fluctuated but in the end it always went up. When she was ten Charlotte’s mother told her that the reason she made her father sleep in the guest room was that he wouldn’t have sex with her.
“He’s not attracted to fat women” she’d spat. It had been too much information at ten. It was still too much information.
But that wasn’t the whole story. It wasn’t that she was fat. It was that it was Charlotte’s father’s fault that she was fat. For some reason the memory of the day that everything got worse was still fairly clear considering she’d only been five when it had happened. It was a Saturday and her dad was making a run to the dump. He’d lain the seats down in the station wagon down and covered the entire interior of the back with a huge tarp to protect the interior. He’d then piled the trash onto the tarp. Charlotte had had to work the next bit out for herself but the tarp must have slipped or he must have miscalculated or something. Anyway somehow the tarp ended up short. Her dad had been at the back of the car shoving and her mother had been reaching over the front seat trying to pull the loaded tarp forward. Her father had been yelling at her mother to pull harder, angry and frustrated and red faced. Charlotte’s mother had pulled and yanked and then yelped and pulled away from the car and her dad had kept on yelling and yelling… and then it was a blank.
But she knew the rest. Her mother had really injured her neck yanking on the tarp. Since her mother thought chiropractors were quacks just waiting to paralyze you her remaining options were painkillers, which she was against on principle, and surgery, which she was sure would (also) leave her paralyzed. She’d chosen option C) stay in bed, in pain, for the better part of 6 months doing nothing but sulking and eating. She’d put on 50 pounds in a year. And that was it. That was now the crux of their marriage. Her mother hated her father for making her yank, for making her hurt her neck, for refusing to have sex with her now that she was fat. Everything was her father’s fault. He had ruined her life. Her father’s guilt caused him to mostly take her abuse, rebelling in his own silent way. And that was their marriage. Her mother brought up her neck injury several times each year in front of Charlotte and god only knew how many times she used it in fights when Charlotte wasn’t there.
So the years had passed and her mother had gained more and more weight. Incidents like not having any snacks when she had friends over after school (something she did less and less as she got older) because her mother had gone to the bakery while she was at school, bought a dozen cookies and then eaten them all before Charlotte got home, were common. When she wasn’t eating she was usually heaping abuse on Charlotte’s dad or on Charlotte herself. She was bitter and hateful. She liked yelling and had a seemingly endless supply of cruel things to say.
Charlotte dealt with it occasionally by yelling back, mostly by running away (to her room, to the backyard, to Rachel’s house) whereas her father mostly just took it and then served it back like the lord of passive-aggressiveness he was. He constantly did things to annoy her. Got little details wrong, forgot the one really important thing on the list while he was at the store, bought food she hated, if he could find a dented can or torn box of something he’d buy it and then insist there was nothing wrong with it while her mother screamed at him to take it back to the damn store. A 20 minute errand took hours. An errand with multiple stops could take an entire afternoon.
For a while Charlotte harbored the fantasy he had a girlfriend stashed somewhere but the reality was he probably just drove around or sat in the car or went to the park. Anywhere quiet. Her mother never figured it out. It had happened the last time she was home. She’d sent Charlotte’s father on what was probably his third run to the store that day and it had taken him almost 2 hours and she’d listened to her mother ranting about how her father was the slowest most incompetent man on earth and what the hell was taking so long and have marveled that her mother hadn’t figured it out yet. That by stretching a 20 minute errand into a 2 hour outing he got both two blissful hours of peace and quiet and the bonus of annoying the hell out of her and insuring that those same two hours were, for her, spent being impatiently angry.
Charlotte had been amazed to learn, when she had started spending the night at Rache’s house, that not all families worked like that. Rache’s mom and Dad loved each other. She’d never actually seen parents kiss before. And they loved Rache and Seth, Rache’s older brother. The first time she had dinner at Rache’s house she’d been in shock. Everyone sat down at the table (Charlotte’s mom had started eating in front of the television, because it was more “comfortable” for her, around the time Charlotte turned ten) and talked about their day. And enjoyed it. No one was sulking or squirming or counting the minutes until they could go hide in their room. Charlotte didn’t know what look she’d had on her face but Seth had actually jokingly said,
“haven’t you ever seen people eat dinner before?” Not like that, she hadn’t.
When they were thirteen Charlotte and Rachel made a pact and it cemented their friendship for life. Charlotte had lots of spending money (her parents, when not yelling at her, often just threw money at her) and, having just completed a “personal improvement modeling class” she had a wealth of information about clothes, fashion and makeup. Rachel had a real family and an understanding of relationships and of love. They would trade. Charlotte would teach Rachel about clothing and makeup (something her hippie-esque parents had no major interest in) and do her colors and teach her to dress to flatter her body type. Rachel would teach Charlotte about being a good and decent human being. She would help Charlotte NOT become her mother. It had worked. By the time they started high school together Rachel had learned that she rocked the color red, that blue eye shadow didn’t look good on anyone, and that if you had boobs you might as well show them off a bit. And Charlotte had learned that when you were mad you didn’t say whatever horrible thing came into your head. That before you said anything mean you should stop and think about how it would make the other person feel. That you could tell some people your deepest darkest fears or dreams and they wouldn’t use them against you. She’d learned to trust. Rachel certainly got a lot more attention from boys after her makeover but Charlotte knew even then she’d gotten the better end of the deal.
She had hoped that maybe she could use what she’d learned to help her parents, to make things better at home. But the changes she’d gone through didn’t even register with them. After spending a weekend at Rachel’s house she’d have the put her emotional armor back on before she went home. And as the years proved that her parents were both very committed to this unhealthy union, she’d given up on fixing them and made her new goal surviving and getting out. And she had. Graduated and gone off to college. When they’d dropped her off at her dorm her first day of University she’d wept. Not with homesickness but with relief that she’d made it. She was out.
At home the war continued. There were fewer actual battles, because Charlotte was no longer there to fight about, but it wasn’t anything you’d call peace. Her mother still treated her father like dirt. Her father still took it. He continued to sleep in the den. She continued to gain weight. Charlotte went home every year for Christmas. Sometimes when she walked in the door she got a hug. Sometimes her mother started screaming at her for something before she’d made it through the entryway. She went to summer school every summer to avoid the possibility of having to come home for three months. Every year her mother was fatter, bitterer, and had started to add in a new personality trait: Crazy.
She’d become convinced that her sister (a bitch of the first magnitude, but not a criminal mastermind) was out to ruin her, set her up, get her arrested for something she hadn’t done, get her sent to jail. She was being watched, they were tapping the phone, reading her mail, breaking into the house and going through their stuff. Charlotte only got bits of this because her mother wouldn’t discuss it on the phone. She’d come home every time to a new level of crazy. Every window was covered, even during the daytime, because there were devices you could aim at windows and hear soundd. They didn’t talk out loud about anything important. These devices could even pick up a whisper.
At the height of it her parents wrote notes to each other and shredded them as soon as they’d been read. The house was bugged, the cars were bugged, did you see that cop car? The cops are always following us. There was always someone watching, listening. Explaining that 24/7 audio visual surveillance spanning a period of years would cost millions did no good. Charlotte’s shrink had explained that her parents had “Folie à deux” which meant, literally, a madness shared by two. Her research revealed that her parents fit the profile: two people living together in close proximity with little interation with the outside world. Trying to break it would just cause them to turn on her. Since no one was getting hurt it was best to just humor them and stay out of it.
Slowly Charlotte’s parents alienated everyone. They’d never had a large extended family or many friends but there had been other people in their lives. Slowly they all gave up or, like the cleaning lady who had been a friend of the family for a dozen years, gave up. Marnie had cried when she told Charlotte she couldn’t deal with her mother anymore. Charlotte’s mother had taken to following her from room to room and watching her while she cleaned. She’d been insulted and hurt and she’d quit. When Charlotte had confronted her mother about it she’d insisted that she was spying for “them”.
They did try to hide the crazy from Gil. She’d actually thought maybe her parents were pulling out of it one Christmas until her mother had suggested a trip to the mall for some last minute Christmas shopping and then driven her to the park, shushing Charlotte the entire trip while gesticulating to indicate that someone was listening. She’d made Charlotte get out of the car and walk with her to the center of the park. Only there would her mother allow her to actually speak although she didn’t get many words in.
Standing there with the mud seeping into the leather of her boots her mother had accused of being in on “it” and being one of them. She’d been asked,
“what did they tell you, what do you know?” with such venom it left her first speechless and then furious. Charlotte had snapped. She’d wanted so slap her mother, right there in the park,
“I fucking put up with you and your insane bullshit and now you drag me out here and accuse me of being one of them. What a merry fucking way to celebrate Christmas and, you know, treasure spending time with your loved ones. Drive me home you crazy bitch.” Shaking, Charlotte had stalked back to the car and silently waited for her mother to make her ungainly way back up the hill. She got through the rest of the visit, during which her mother pretended that the whole park incident had never happened, and then driven home with Gil, swearing she was never coming back.
But of course the guilt, the fear of being a bad daughter, the responsibility of being not only an only child but the only person left, kept her from sticking to it. So she stood on a sort of mental balancing beam trying to figure out how much the right amount was. It was a difficult calculation. Too much and not enough both led to anxiety attacks. She finally figured out that one visit every year between the holidays, a Thanksgiving/Christmas combination holiday plus one visit every other year for Father’s day and her father’s birthday (which usually fell on the same weekend) worked. Three days, two nights, valium and a bottle or two of wine.
Gil was great about it. He was also grateful she was adopted. She’d asked him once,
“Does knowing I’m not related to them make this easier? Would you have been afraid to marry me if that was my genetic future?” and he’d admitted that her being adopted made a difference. Made it safer to marry her.
Of course they couldn’t keep the façade up all the time. Eventually Gil was doomed to experience a family free for all. And boy had he. One holiday weekend it had taken them an extra two hours to make it to Charlotte’s parents’ house. Traffic had been grueling and they were both exhausted by the time they finally pulled up to the house. They walked inside and Charlotte’s mom immediately began screaming at them for being late. This had been before they’d had cell phones so they’d just kept driving, worried that getting off at an exit and finding a phone would make them even later.
Since this wasn’t an actual holiday they hadn’t ruined anything other than Charlotte’s mother’s plans. No dinner was getting cold or overcooked or ruined. There were no people sitting around the table waiting for dinner. Just her mother and her anger. This was one of the times Charlotte chose to engage instead of retreat and it had been a full verbal battle complete with threats, by Charlotte, of getting back in the damn car and going back home. When things finally cooled off Charlotte had found Gil hiding head first in the guest bed. His parents had their own share of stupid fights but he’d never experienced anything on that level. His total bewilderment,
“we drove 300 miles to see them… we got here as soon as we could” was not eased by Charlotte’s explanation of,
“she’s a crazy bitch. I’d say one out of every ten times I come home the first thing she does is scream at me.” She was pretty sure it was after that trip they’d starting staying at a hotel. Gil had no desire to be trapped with the crazy people.
Charlotte heard the front door close. She’d been standing outside so long her dad had come out to see if she needed any help. She froced a smile onto her face, let him grab her suitcase and then followed him into the house, into her mom’s room. Because after two solid years of hearing about how her father’s back was giving him so much trouble somehow, finally, her endless suggestions of
“why don’t you have dad sleep in the guest room? With the nice bed and the actual REAL mattress?” had finally taken. For years she’d been suggesting her father move into the guest room since she never actually slept there anymore.
It had actually been her dad who resisted, sure that the moment he laid down in there Charlotte was going to show up and need the room.
“It isn’t MY room dad,” she’d said,
“It is the guest room, there haven’t been any guests for years, Gil and I stay in a motel when we come down, dad please use the room.” And finally, a few years ago, he’d moved in. His clothes were still in the walk in closet (her mother refused to empty the guest room closet of Charlotte’s high school prom dresses and her own stacks of hundreds of dolls) and showered in the master bath but at least now he was, for the first time in over 25 years, sleeping in a real bed. Within weeks the back problems that had plagued him for years had gone away.
Which is why Charlotte hadn’t been able to ask him to now give up the guest room and sleep in mom’s bed. It was even less HIS bed than it was Charlotte’s. And now her suitcase was laying on it.
“Goodnight hon… need anything else?”
“Nope… I’m good. What time do you want to go see mom tomorrow?”
“I like to get there by eight so I can feed her”
“Okay I’ll set the alarm and be ready. Nite”And she’d closed the door. Standing there, with her hand still resting on the knob, she almost absently pushed in the lock. She looked down. Lying there, right next to her mother’s empty jewelry box (she’d hidden all of her real jewelry in other places around the house years ago but “they” had found it and taken it anyway) was a small portable lock. The kind advertised to make your hotel room safer or something. She picked it up and it clinked in her hand. Something was tugging at her memory but she couldn’t place it.
She made her way to the walk in closet (which you could walk into maybe a foot it was so filled with clothes and doll boxes and random crap) and pulled the sliding door behind her. She scrunched down and crossed her legs, leaning back against a wall of clothes covered in dry cleaner bags. She was pretty sure if she kept her voice down her father wouldn’t be able to hear her in here. Shoving things a bit to make room to sit down she pulled her cell phone out of her purse and said
“Rache” into it.
The phone rang once… twice and then Rache’s sleepy voice,
“Hello?”“Oh hey hi Rache it’s me… sorry to call so late… I need to ask you something.”Charlotte’s parents had never bothered to hide who they were from Rachel. It was probably because her mother had decided, 10 seconds after meeting Rachel, that she was poor Jewish trash. She didn’t understand why Charlotte wanted to be friends with her but since there was nothing to actually object to, what with Rachel being a good student in the same honors classes as Charlotte only with better grades, she hadn’t tried to break up the friendship. Also, she knew her daughter and the best way to get Charlotte to do anything was to tell her not to do it. Charlotte was immune to peer pressure from kids her own age but with her mother defiance was an almost automatic reaction. Her mother had obviously decided it wasn’t worth the fight and had left them pretty much alone. And since Rachel and Charlotte were best friends and shared the same after school activities Rachel was around the house, a lot. And, unlike when her other friends were over, her parents didn’t hold back.
Charlotte could remember being mortified when she and Rachel had come through the front door to find her parents screaming at each other. They didn’t stop when they saw the girls. Charlotte had dragged Rachel into her room and closed the door as quickly as she could but it barely affected the volume and muddied none of the content. Charlotte had just stared at the floor until Rachel said,
“Wow, you weren’t kidding” and laughed. It had broken the tension. Rachel had then briskly put a record on the player and turned the topic to boys. That was only the first of many times Rachel got to experience the no holds barred screaming matches that were everyday fair in Charlotte’s house. Once Rachel had made sure that it never went past screaming, that no one actually got physical, she did her best to pretend she wasn’t hanging out in a loony bin. Charlotte did her best to make sure they did most of their hanging out at Rachel’s house. Instead of screaming parents Rachel had two Labradors, a water bed, a TV in her room and parents who knocked on her door instead of just barging in. Heaven.
“Hey, what’s up?” Are you okay?” whatever was in Charlotte’s voice had woken Rachel up.
“Yeah, I’m okay. I think…”
“Where are you?”
“In Bakersfield. In my mom’s room.”
“I can’t believe you let your dad talk you into staying there.”
“I know… I just… anyway I’m stuck here now but I need to ask you something. Do you remember the lock? That lock my mom had for her door?”“Oh yeah,” Rache paused for a second,
“I hadn’t thought about that in ages. What about it?”
“I just found it on her dresser. She still has it. What do you remember?”
Aside from being her best friend, one person support group and mentor on being a human being Rachel was also, to some extent, Charlotte’s memory. At a very early age Charlotte had learned to cope with all the cruelty, anger, fear and sadness by repressing it. It was a very quick process. Charlotte could have a fight with her mother and by the time she called Rachel about it she could no longer remember what had been said. She’d know it was awful, if there had been screaming, what it was about, what the gist of it was but the actual words would be gone, already locked away in a box deep in her subconscious. Rachel, however, remembered all the things she saw and heard at Charlotte’s house. Years later Rachel admitted that more than once she had cried to her own mother once she’d gotten home from Charlotte’s house because her parents were so awful and the things they said were so ugly. She remembered them for the same reason Charlotte forgot them.
“I remember her locking herself in at night. I asked her once, why she needed an extra lock and she laughed and said it was to keep your dad from sneaking into her bed.”
“Oh my god she did NOT… oh like he even would”
“I know. I always thought that was so fucked up. Her locking you out like that”
“What?”
“Char, she wasn’t just locking your dad out, she was locking you out. I remember she’d make this big deal about how she was going to bed and so if we needed anything we needed to tell her then before she set that lock… Char?”
“I’m still here… I’d just… forgotten.”
“Okay, now I have a question. What the hell are you doing in her room?”
“Well, my dad sleeps in the guest room now so that’s his room so…”
“Why couldn’t you sleep on the damn fold out couch? I mean if it was okay for your dad for 25 years why wouldn’t it be okay for you for a few days? I mean, wouldn’t you rather be in there?”
“I’d rather be anywhere but yeah… fuck… I didn’t even think of that. I think this whole visit has my brain frozen.”Rache yawned,
“Are you okay… I mean I can talk more if you need me but it is really late here and I am beat and,”“Yeah I’m okay… I’m sorry I woke you. Thanks for talking to me… I’ll call you as soon as I get back to San Francisco”
“Okay, take care”
“Promise”Charlotte hung up. Looking down she realized she was still holding the lock in her other hand. And then a memory, something she’d completely forgotten, surfaced. She could remember being little, maybe only eight, and having a nightmare and knocking on her mother’s door and the sound of her taking the lock down, and how long it had seemed to take. She wondered why she hadn’t knocked on the den door. Her father didn’t have a lock either. It had something to do with the fact that he wasn’t really supposed to be in there. Somehow it was almost like, once he changed into his pajamas and padded into the den, he ceased to exist until the next morning. She’d never gone to that door. Not once. More weirdness.
Charlotte looked across the room to the sliding glass door that led to the patio. She knew it had screws in it that only allowed it to open 6 inches. All the windows did. But this extra lock? She looked at it again and realized she had no idea how it actually worked or how to set it. She’d never been on this side of the door when it had been put in place. But she could remember the metallic clinking coming from her mother’s room as she’d set it each night. As she’d locked out her husband and daughter.
Taking a deep breath she stared again at the bed. Fuck. She didn’t even want her suitcase sitting on it. She put the lock back on the dresser and then leaned over and pulled her suitcase onto the floor. She stared at the bed. And knew, with absolute certainty, that there was no way she was going to be able to sleep in that bed. She couldn’t even bring herself to touch the comforter. Laying down on it, or IN it, was… oh god her stomach knotted. She backed up a step. She was tired and she was so angry at herself. She should be in a hotel. Or at home in bed with Gil. Not here.
Standing there, looking around the room, she realized that she hadn’t spent more than a few cumulative minutes inside for years. She never came in here, not even when they were visiting. She always put their coats, her purse, any gifts, on the guest bed, her dad’s bed. If someone was in the hallway bathroom she waited. She never opened the door to her mother’s room and used that bathroom even if she knew it was empty. She couldn’t remember the last time she had used that bathroom and now she had to. She slid that door open and flicked on the light and the heat lamp. She peed and washed her hands at the sink avoiding the mirror.
“Okay” she said to herself,
“you are going to handle this. And you are not going to make this worse by calling Gil. He won’t really understand but he will be worried you’re freaking out. Breathe. Stop freaking out.” She grabbed her purse off the floor, fumbled for the bottle of diazepam and dry swallowed two tablets. Gack. Deep breath. She stared at the bed, picturing her mother laying there. Even with the puffy comforter on it the bed obviously listed to the right from all the years of her bulk crushing the springs. Her mother had never shared this bed with her father for even a day, yet she’d always slept on the far side. Why? Because it was furthest from the door? Because it was too hard, at her weight, to wiggle over to the middle? Why the hell hadn’t they rotated the mattress? Did knowing she’d never lain on the left side mean Charlotte could lay there? Nope. Sickeningly Charlotte’s “side” of the bed was the same as her mother’s and she was afraid she’d wake up over there out of habit.
She heard her dad’s voice in her head, one of his sayings,
“what’s the worst that could happen?” But just thinking about laying there where her mother had wallowed and stewed and hated all these years made her ill. In her mind Charlotte saw herself being forced to get between the sheets and lay down where her mother slept. Saw herself struggling. Saw herself screaming. Horror movie scenes flashes through her mind, the bed swallowing her up, being unable to escape it, an overhead view of herself asleep as the malignancy of the bed seemed into her, possessed her. She shuddered. This was so fucked up. This was not a healthy reaction. Not sane. Not normal. She knew that.
Her mother made her ill. Her mother revolted her. There it was. In the hospital, earlier, she’d felt that way but she’d blamed it on the tube of urine winding out between her mother’s swolledn legs and down the side of the bed. Blamed it on her mother’s uncombed hair and greasy skin. Everyone was gross in the hospital, she knew that. She’d visited enough people to know that. One of her best friends had almost died in a hospital and during the worst of it, when the fever was so high he was delirious, he’d been incontinent, unaware that pulling away the sheets that were making him so hot meant exposing body parts that, normally, he wouldn’t put on display if someone held a knife to his throat. It had been icky. But she hadn’t been revolted. She’d been scared. Scared he was sick. Scared he wasn’t going to get better. And she’d stayed by his bed during the day, doing what little she could, so that his boyfriend could go to work and then get some sleep before coming back to keep watch over him at night.
She was supposed to be feeling those things now. She was supposed to be scared she might be losing her mother. She should want to do anything she could to help. Like staying here with her dad. But all she feared was the mess to follow. Her mother staying sick, her mother dying, what to do with her dad, with this mess of a house, every inch of it packed with crap and knickknacks and fucking dolls that no one had ever seen, much less played with.
She took another deep breath. She thought she could feel the valium start to kick in. Thank god for valium.
“Plan” she said, keeping up the conversation with herself, something she tended to do when she was really nervous,
“I need a plan. The long term plan is, obviously, to get the fuck out of here. Tomorrow I’ll tell dad mom’s bed was too… something and I will get a hotel room. But I have to get through tonight first. So….” She trailed off and then walked back over to the walk in closet,
“Please” she thought and flipped the light back on.
She carefully made her way to the back of the closet and reached for where she remembered there being extra blankets. Her hands closed around something fuzzy and she slowly exhaled. Yanking, she extracted a fuzzy throw blanket with teddy bears on it. She tossed it over her shoulder into the bedroom and then reached further. Her fingers hit slippery plastic. She leaned over more and shoved old suits out of the way and yes, a blanket in the plastic cover it came in. She could work with that. She managed to unwedge it from the detritus surrounding it and pull that out as well. She checked the other corners of the closet but there was nothing promising. It was okay. She could work with this.
Gathering up the blankets she dropped them into a heap at the foot of the bed. She pulled the larger one out of the plastic and, folded it into threes and then laid it down forming a very hard narrow mattress. She took a second to thank GOD she was the kind of picky girl who took her own pillow whenever she traveled and then laid her pillow down on the blanket. Her back would hate her in the morning but at least now she was pretty sure she’d make it until morning. Reaching for her suitcase she unzipped it and pulled out her pajamas.
A blue envelope fell out. She smiled. She and Gil always slipped a card into the suitcase of whoever was going away. She tore the envelope open. On the front of the card was a stick figure laying alone in a very large bed with a very sad look on his face. The irony won out and Charlotte laughed, opening it she read,
“Hey love, I’ll be missing you. Come back to me. The bed and I miss you.” “Oh Babe” she said to the card,
“you have no idea” she kissed the front of the card. When she got home she would kiss Gil, the bed and maybe the actual dirty disgusting San Francisco ground.
Yanking off her jeans she realized how tired she really was. 300 miles of driving, a visit to the hospital and facing off with the bed had fully kicked her ass. Valium. Really wonderful stuff. She pulled her pajamas on and looked around for an alarm clock. There wasn’t one. Had there ever been one? Had her father always been the one to wake her mother up? Why hadn’t he said anything when she’d told him she’d set the alarm? Another mystery. She was too tired to care at this point.
She’d just have to hope that her tendency to wake up early whenever she was in a strange place would get her up in time. It wasn’t like she’d need a bunch of time to make herself look extra nice for the hospital. She carefully lay down on her makeshift mattress and pulled the fuzzy throw over her. She’d slept in less comfortable places. Not since college, but she’d done it. She closed her eyes and thought about home. Thirty six more hours and she’d be in her car on the way home. She could survive 36 more hours. And when she woke up it would be closer to 28… that was only really one day. She could do this. She exhaled again and let sleep take her.
