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.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Is that all there is? Is that all there is...
I don’t think it is going to wear off. This anger and residual revulsion I feel towards my mom? I think it may lessen and fade some with time but I don’t think it is ever truly going to go away. How sad is that?
My mother decided on the evening of June 17th, 2007 that she was angry at me, and was going to stay angry at me for the rest of her life. Angry at me for wanting to leave her hospital room before she had explosive diarrhea. Really.
We (we being myself, my father and my husband) had already spent an hour standing around her room chatting and pretending she wasn’t passing chokingly noxious gas, because that’s what you DO when someone is in the hospital, when she told me she was about to get sick. I was like, “you’re going to throw up?” and she said, “no, the other way” and looked down at her stomach, which was audibly rumbling. So I started making, “well, we really should be going to dinner… getting hungry… had an early lunch” comments trying to get us out the door before, well, yuck happened.
And I’ll own this now. I am incredibly squeamish when it comes to other people and their bodies and the gross things they do. Working in an animal hospital I cleaned up every conceivable combination of biological messes and it never bothered me. When I worked at a coffee shop in college I didn’t even like having to touch people’s used cups and plates and silverware. I literally am in awe of dental hygienists because even with gloves I could NOT stick my hands into people’s mouths all day. I think people are icky. I’d found my mother’s morbid obesity repellant for years. And just laying there sick and unwashed in a hospital bed, she looked disgusting to me. Not a warm daughterly feeling, I know. For years I had looked at her, this obese crazy angry woman hiding in her house thinking people were trying to listen in on her phones and hack her computers, and thanked GOD that I was adopted. Since she had screamed at me several times in my life that she wished they’d never adopted me, I never felt too guilty for how grateful I felt that I wasn’t looking at my own genetic future.
So my dad, who has always been one of those men who, if you were kicking him under the table to get him to shut up would say, “why are you kicking me under the table?”, looked at my mom and said “do you want us to leave?” And here is where my mom and I apparently differ greatly because if my bowels were about to erupt I wouldn’t WANT it to happen in front of my husband and daughter and son-in-law. I wouldn’t actually want it to happen in front of ANYONE but I’d take nurses over family, especially family on their way out to eat Mexican food to celebrate my husband’s birthday AND Father’s Day. But no. My attempts to ease us out the door angered my mom and she answered, “No, but your daughter wants to leave”. And that woman might have been unable to move or even swallow on her own but she could still make it very clear when she was pissed off. And she was pissed off.
So my dad looked back at me and I flailed for a second and said, “you know… just getting really hungry… I thought we should get going” and John, who hadn’t even made a face during the last hazmat-worthy hour, backed my play by moving slightly closer to the door and my father, who never ONCE understood an interaction between my mother and I, was like “okay… I guess we’re going to go… I’ll be back later after they go back to the hotel”. And since John and I were not planning to come back to the hospital before we left town (we were getting up super early the next morning so after we drove back John would be able to work a half day), it was the last time I was going to see my mom that trip. I tried to say a nice goodbye but she wouldn’t even look at me and was very “whatever” and I was thinking, “okay fine… I’ll fix this sometime when she’s not about to explode” and I’m sure I said something about “see you next time” or “talk to you soon” and we left.
I never talked to her again. Actually, she never talked to me again. After that visit she refused to talk to me when I called the room and my dad told me that he tried to get her to look at the cards I sent but that she refused. Flowers I sent were dispatched to the nurses station.
The next time I saw her, over four months later, she was no longer conscious. I don’t think she was aware of the very last contact she and I had the day before she died. Her doctor, to be fair, was great to my mom and came to the hospital every day and never gave up on trying to heal her. I give her props for that, but she fully believed I should have moved back to Bakersfield for the eight-month duration of my mother’s illness and never missed a chance to tell me stories about how when SHE got sick her son moved back home to take care of HER and generally made it clear she thought I was a horrible daughter.
<*deep breath*>
Okay even now, trying to type about this, my chest hurts. Her doctor had decided I needed to, I don’t even know, reach out to my mother or something and she got me up out of my chair and had me standing right next to my mom (who had been totally unresponsive for over two days at this point) and was prompting me “talk to her… she knows you’re here”. So I’m there feeling about as awkward as I ever have and I’m fumbling out something like, “Hi mom… it’s me Laurel… I’m here and dad’s here and” and the doctor interrupts me and says “she’s gotten deaf, you have to be louder”. So I try to say it louder and it sounds all wrong loud and then she grabs my gloved hand (we had to wear gloves and gowns whenever we were in the room) and forces my hand down to pet my mom’s forehead and the plastic sounds really loud against my mom’s skin and the room starts to go sparkly and tilty and I spin away from her, bounce off my dad and fling myself into the bathroom and manage, after a few minutes with my head between my legs and some deep breathing, not to vomit everywhere. When I came back out I tried to give her a look that said “touch me again and I will cut you” and made my way back to the corner of the room. As soon as I was stable I excused myself and went outside to call my friend so I could say, “oh my god I almost threw up all over my dying mother and then passed out”.
I sat in my mother’s hospital room with my dad that whole last day and (this would have made her angry too if she’d been aware of it) my dad and I would have totally missed her actual death if the nurses (who were apparently monitoring her much more closely than I’d realized from the nurses station) hadn’t come running into her room (interrupting a nice chat we were having) saying “this is it” and then, when we didn’t move, with more urgency, “Now! This is it now!”
So we stood on either side of her bed, my dad with his hand on her face, and she died. There wasn’t one of those machines you always see on TV hospitals that goes “beep… beep… beep… beeeeeeeeeeeeee” so it was actually very quiet. And one of the nurses said “she’s gone” and my dad started to cry and I stood there feeling something like relief and mostly just empty and then my cell phone went off playing “Sally’s Lament” from The Nightmare Before Christmas (“I sense there's something in the wind… that feels like tragedy's at hand”) and I grabbed at the phone to stop it singing and tried to squelch the little laugh in my throat at the irony of the lyrics floating through the room and whispered to the friend who called “I have to call you back my mom just died”. I still don’t remember who it was that called. And then there was paperwork and my mother’s doctor, who had arrived about ten minutes after she died, making snide comments like “will you be leaving now or staying for the funeral?” I almost called her a bitchy cunt right there in front of my dad and all the nurses because I knew that I was not only going to be attending the funeral I was going to be planning every single bit of it.
We finally left the hospital, me to go back to my hotel room to call John and tell him that he needed to drive down tomorrow, my dad to the house to probably cry a lot more. And so I planned the funeral. I picked out flowers and the casket and the design and what the gravestone would say. I wrote her obituary and picked out the photo to go with it. I picked out the clothes and jewelry she would be buried in. I’d say “Mom would have liked this” and dad would agree with me. I told him that mom wouldn’t mind if the minister of dad’s church did the service even though she’d asked for someone else. I said that she’d want what was best for my dad which was to have his minister there. I lied about that but I didn’t feel bad about it. All my dad had left (since my mother had chased pretty much everyone away with her craziness) was people from church and I was damned if we were going to alienate any of them by having someone else perform her service. Since I’ve always believed that once you die it immediately ceases to be about you and immediately starts being about the people you’ve left behind I had no problem arranging it all in a way that would be best for my dad.
The worst moment of all of happened the Sunday evening two days after she died. I had spent all day on the phone calling all my mom’s old friends to tell them that she’d died and then find out if they had understood that she’d been seriously mentally ill the last several years of her life. Most of them had. I had painful, arduous, intense conversation after painful, ardous, intense conversation. Friends who had loved my mom. Friends who had tried so hard to hang in there but finally couldn’t take it. Friends who hadn’t known and thought they must have done somethng wrong. They all had stories they needed to tell, explanations to give or that needed to be given. And every single one of them made sure to tell me how I had to take care of my dad now. What I owed him. I needed to call him every day. I needed to come visit him every weekend. It was my job. My duty as a daughter. By the time I hung up the last call I literally felt like someone had beaten the crap out of me. I was actually still sitting on the floor leaning agaist the guest bed after having hung up the phone on the last call when my dad burst into the room in a panic, “Oh my GOD! We forgot your Aunt Nancy’s birthday! What are we going to do! Tomorrow is her birthday!”
And I lost what was left of my frazzled exhausted mind. Because all the funeral planning I had done? Was for a service that was going to take place on MY birthday, the day after tomorrow. My dad never realized it, no matter how many times the man at the mortuary said “December 4th”, and I decided to just leave it because it wasn’t like waiting one more day to have the service was going to make my birthday suck less. My dad hadn’t realized that he was planning his wife’s funeral on his daughter’s birthday. But he had realized he forgotten his wife’s sister’s birthday and THAT was worthy of panic. That was important. And I realized that if I didn’t get out of the house that second I was going to break things, throw things, say things that could never be taken back, and I ran out of the house. The house that John was in. I ran past my own car without seeing it. It was almost like I was back in high school when things would get so bad sometimes I would just start running.
So I ran and sobbed in the dark and the cold and after about 15 minutes my cell phone rang, which I hadn’t even realized was in my pocket, and it was John wanting to know what happened and where I was and could I tell him so he could come get me. And I said no. And he was like “let me at least bring you a coat it is freezing out there” so I told him the address I was running to and hung up. I was running to Evelyn’s mom’s house. Luckily Evelyn’s mom had been briefed that I might at any time show up crying (it was something I had done several times over the years).
Evelyn’s mom was home, thank God, and held me and let me cry and spill out the story and her little dog danced around and licked the tears out of my nostrils which made it really hard to keep crying. When I could finally talk and breathe normally again I went outside and John was sitting in our car parked across the street. I knocked on the car window and John took me back to the house.
Where my dad was waiting and still had no idea what had happened. I told him, “I’m going to explain to you why I ran out of here in tears but you DO NOT get to have another crying fit about it. I don’t want to take care of you more right now. So you just have to deal with this”. And I told him that he had completely forgotten MY birthday while planning mom’s funeral on it but that he remembered Aunt Nancy’s and that really that just sucked. And he started to have a fit, I gave him a LOOK, he went out to the garage and had his fit there and John just hugged me and said “I’m so sorry babe” over and over again.
The day before the funeral I found almost all of the jewelry that supposedly had been “stolen” by “them” over the years. I was actually just looking for a warm pair of socks in my mom’s top dresser drawer when I spotted what looked like a makeup case wrapped in enormous maxi pads. Weird enough to warrant further investigation. I pulled it out and it was heavy and went “jingle clank.” I opened it over her bed and jewelry poured out. Maybe 60 rings, pins, a tangle of necklaces. She had taken all her jewelry out of its boxes and hidden it in this case so “they” couldn’t find it and then forgotten that she’d done it, leaving her with empty boxes as proof of the theft. Her wedding ring was in there. I thought my dad would be happy it wasn’t lost after all but the proof that she really had been delusional seemed to just make him more sad. He also said it was all mine now.
I took all the good pieces, put them back in their boxes, stuffed them all in a gift bag and took them home with me. I gave them away to friends and family for Christmas when I got back home. Lord knows I wasn’t in the mood to shop and everyone else seemed pretty excited. Since my mother’s jewelry shopping was almost as compulsive as her doll buying there was something for everyone. I kept a couple of rings because I felt like I should and because people told me I would want to have them later. I still can’t wear them. I actually don’t even like touching them when I paw across them in my jewelry box, but maybe someday. Maybe people are right.
Nine months after she died my father got around to telling me that my mother had left me a substantial amount of money. Not like “we’re rich!” money but a sizeable chunk. Money my dad had given to her but that she had put in an account with only her name and mine on it. The account had been created so long ago that my name was so faded on the account card you could barely make it out. My best guess is that it was her emergency divorce fund. I certainly don’t believe she ever meant to leave me a lot of money. He actually told me about it because he wanted to know if I would give it back to her estate so he wouldn’t have to deal with the paperwork of proving it wasn’t part of the estate.
I thought maybe he needed the money but was able to finally ascertain that no, he didn’t need the money, he just really didn’t want to fill out the forms and wait for the paperwork to come back. I actually asked this exact question, “So you are asking me to give you this life-changing amount of money back, money we could use to put a down payment on a house, not because you need it, but because you don’t want to deal with some extra estate paperwork?” and he said, “Well, yes.” And then I told him I thought he needed to take some time to think about just how fucked up and selfish that was and I got off the phone. And cried. And apparently he did think about it and realized that, wow, that was INDEED fucked up and selfish. So then I pointed out that if I closed out the account that paperwork would automatically be generated that would show, since now that it was gone, that it was not part of the estate. That I would be happy to give him copies of all the paperwork they would be giving to me. So he wouldn’t have to worry about the paperwork. And then I drove to Bakersfield, closed the account, drove a mile down the street to my bank and deposited the check. And then had a very nice lunch with my father.
The money was fun. I set aside some of it as “my mom was a bitch but at least I got some money” money and I got a personal trainer and a day at the spa and now my friends and I all have Coach bags. They say money can’t buy happiness but I think that’s not true if you’re spending it on other people along with yourself. And now we have a larger cushion in place if the economy gets even worse or John loses his job.
Despite all the admonishments from my mother’s old friends I do not call my dad every day or visit him every weekend. My dad would get out of my mother’s way so she could throw something at me and he backed her up on every horrible thing she ever did to me. One year when I came home for Christmas my mother somehow figured out that I was sleeping with an ex-boyfriend. She chased me around the house calling me a slut and a whore. At that time in my life I had had sex with a grand total of two people. On the way to church the next morning I told my dad that if my mom didn’t stop calling me horrible names I was going to drive back home and have Christmas by myself. He said, and I quote him here, “Well, Laurel, if you weren’t acting like a slut your mother wouldn’t have to call you one” and then we went into church together.
That’s my dad. The last time I went down to visit him he was ten minutes late to church (which I was only attending because he wants me to go) because my Aunt Nancy decided at the last minute that she wanted a Dr. Pepper that morning. He didn’t tell her, “Laurel is in town for the weekend and I’m supposed to meet her for church at nine so I will get you a Dr. Pepper after she and I have brunch.” Instead he went and got her a Dr. Pepper and let me sit there by myself for the first ten minutes of the service. Then he cried when I got in my car to drive home after brunch. He gets Christmas-ish visits, Father’s Day weekend and a phone call every couple of weeks. And I’m okay with that.
My mom decided to hold a grudge against me. As far as I know she was still mad at me when she died. She never said anything to my dad like, you know, tell Laurel I love her. Never in all this drawn out protracted dying process did she try to say goodbye or acknowledge any of my attempts at further contact. I know she was crazy but it was still a horrible thing to do to your only child. And it surprised absolutely no one that knew me or my mother. I know I’d made comments over the years that she probably would die angry at me over something stupid but the naïve part of me was still shocked when it actually happened. My mom really did die not speaking to me over something petty.
And that’s what I’m left with. Some money, an embarrassing story with the word diarrhea in it, anger I can never resolve and a wound I can never fully heal.
My mother decided on the evening of June 17th, 2007 that she was angry at me, and was going to stay angry at me for the rest of her life. Angry at me for wanting to leave her hospital room before she had explosive diarrhea. Really.
We (we being myself, my father and my husband) had already spent an hour standing around her room chatting and pretending she wasn’t passing chokingly noxious gas, because that’s what you DO when someone is in the hospital, when she told me she was about to get sick. I was like, “you’re going to throw up?” and she said, “no, the other way” and looked down at her stomach, which was audibly rumbling. So I started making, “well, we really should be going to dinner… getting hungry… had an early lunch” comments trying to get us out the door before, well, yuck happened.
And I’ll own this now. I am incredibly squeamish when it comes to other people and their bodies and the gross things they do. Working in an animal hospital I cleaned up every conceivable combination of biological messes and it never bothered me. When I worked at a coffee shop in college I didn’t even like having to touch people’s used cups and plates and silverware. I literally am in awe of dental hygienists because even with gloves I could NOT stick my hands into people’s mouths all day. I think people are icky. I’d found my mother’s morbid obesity repellant for years. And just laying there sick and unwashed in a hospital bed, she looked disgusting to me. Not a warm daughterly feeling, I know. For years I had looked at her, this obese crazy angry woman hiding in her house thinking people were trying to listen in on her phones and hack her computers, and thanked GOD that I was adopted. Since she had screamed at me several times in my life that she wished they’d never adopted me, I never felt too guilty for how grateful I felt that I wasn’t looking at my own genetic future.
So my dad, who has always been one of those men who, if you were kicking him under the table to get him to shut up would say, “why are you kicking me under the table?”, looked at my mom and said “do you want us to leave?” And here is where my mom and I apparently differ greatly because if my bowels were about to erupt I wouldn’t WANT it to happen in front of my husband and daughter and son-in-law. I wouldn’t actually want it to happen in front of ANYONE but I’d take nurses over family, especially family on their way out to eat Mexican food to celebrate my husband’s birthday AND Father’s Day. But no. My attempts to ease us out the door angered my mom and she answered, “No, but your daughter wants to leave”. And that woman might have been unable to move or even swallow on her own but she could still make it very clear when she was pissed off. And she was pissed off.
So my dad looked back at me and I flailed for a second and said, “you know… just getting really hungry… I thought we should get going” and John, who hadn’t even made a face during the last hazmat-worthy hour, backed my play by moving slightly closer to the door and my father, who never ONCE understood an interaction between my mother and I, was like “okay… I guess we’re going to go… I’ll be back later after they go back to the hotel”. And since John and I were not planning to come back to the hospital before we left town (we were getting up super early the next morning so after we drove back John would be able to work a half day), it was the last time I was going to see my mom that trip. I tried to say a nice goodbye but she wouldn’t even look at me and was very “whatever” and I was thinking, “okay fine… I’ll fix this sometime when she’s not about to explode” and I’m sure I said something about “see you next time” or “talk to you soon” and we left.
I never talked to her again. Actually, she never talked to me again. After that visit she refused to talk to me when I called the room and my dad told me that he tried to get her to look at the cards I sent but that she refused. Flowers I sent were dispatched to the nurses station.
The next time I saw her, over four months later, she was no longer conscious. I don’t think she was aware of the very last contact she and I had the day before she died. Her doctor, to be fair, was great to my mom and came to the hospital every day and never gave up on trying to heal her. I give her props for that, but she fully believed I should have moved back to Bakersfield for the eight-month duration of my mother’s illness and never missed a chance to tell me stories about how when SHE got sick her son moved back home to take care of HER and generally made it clear she thought I was a horrible daughter.
<*deep breath*>
Okay even now, trying to type about this, my chest hurts. Her doctor had decided I needed to, I don’t even know, reach out to my mother or something and she got me up out of my chair and had me standing right next to my mom (who had been totally unresponsive for over two days at this point) and was prompting me “talk to her… she knows you’re here”. So I’m there feeling about as awkward as I ever have and I’m fumbling out something like, “Hi mom… it’s me Laurel… I’m here and dad’s here and” and the doctor interrupts me and says “she’s gotten deaf, you have to be louder”. So I try to say it louder and it sounds all wrong loud and then she grabs my gloved hand (we had to wear gloves and gowns whenever we were in the room) and forces my hand down to pet my mom’s forehead and the plastic sounds really loud against my mom’s skin and the room starts to go sparkly and tilty and I spin away from her, bounce off my dad and fling myself into the bathroom and manage, after a few minutes with my head between my legs and some deep breathing, not to vomit everywhere. When I came back out I tried to give her a look that said “touch me again and I will cut you” and made my way back to the corner of the room. As soon as I was stable I excused myself and went outside to call my friend so I could say, “oh my god I almost threw up all over my dying mother and then passed out”.
I sat in my mother’s hospital room with my dad that whole last day and (this would have made her angry too if she’d been aware of it) my dad and I would have totally missed her actual death if the nurses (who were apparently monitoring her much more closely than I’d realized from the nurses station) hadn’t come running into her room (interrupting a nice chat we were having) saying “this is it” and then, when we didn’t move, with more urgency, “Now! This is it now!”
So we stood on either side of her bed, my dad with his hand on her face, and she died. There wasn’t one of those machines you always see on TV hospitals that goes “beep… beep… beep… beeeeeeeeeeeeee” so it was actually very quiet. And one of the nurses said “she’s gone” and my dad started to cry and I stood there feeling something like relief and mostly just empty and then my cell phone went off playing “Sally’s Lament” from The Nightmare Before Christmas (“I sense there's something in the wind… that feels like tragedy's at hand”) and I grabbed at the phone to stop it singing and tried to squelch the little laugh in my throat at the irony of the lyrics floating through the room and whispered to the friend who called “I have to call you back my mom just died”. I still don’t remember who it was that called. And then there was paperwork and my mother’s doctor, who had arrived about ten minutes after she died, making snide comments like “will you be leaving now or staying for the funeral?” I almost called her a bitchy cunt right there in front of my dad and all the nurses because I knew that I was not only going to be attending the funeral I was going to be planning every single bit of it.
We finally left the hospital, me to go back to my hotel room to call John and tell him that he needed to drive down tomorrow, my dad to the house to probably cry a lot more. And so I planned the funeral. I picked out flowers and the casket and the design and what the gravestone would say. I wrote her obituary and picked out the photo to go with it. I picked out the clothes and jewelry she would be buried in. I’d say “Mom would have liked this” and dad would agree with me. I told him that mom wouldn’t mind if the minister of dad’s church did the service even though she’d asked for someone else. I said that she’d want what was best for my dad which was to have his minister there. I lied about that but I didn’t feel bad about it. All my dad had left (since my mother had chased pretty much everyone away with her craziness) was people from church and I was damned if we were going to alienate any of them by having someone else perform her service. Since I’ve always believed that once you die it immediately ceases to be about you and immediately starts being about the people you’ve left behind I had no problem arranging it all in a way that would be best for my dad.
The worst moment of all of happened the Sunday evening two days after she died. I had spent all day on the phone calling all my mom’s old friends to tell them that she’d died and then find out if they had understood that she’d been seriously mentally ill the last several years of her life. Most of them had. I had painful, arduous, intense conversation after painful, ardous, intense conversation. Friends who had loved my mom. Friends who had tried so hard to hang in there but finally couldn’t take it. Friends who hadn’t known and thought they must have done somethng wrong. They all had stories they needed to tell, explanations to give or that needed to be given. And every single one of them made sure to tell me how I had to take care of my dad now. What I owed him. I needed to call him every day. I needed to come visit him every weekend. It was my job. My duty as a daughter. By the time I hung up the last call I literally felt like someone had beaten the crap out of me. I was actually still sitting on the floor leaning agaist the guest bed after having hung up the phone on the last call when my dad burst into the room in a panic, “Oh my GOD! We forgot your Aunt Nancy’s birthday! What are we going to do! Tomorrow is her birthday!”
And I lost what was left of my frazzled exhausted mind. Because all the funeral planning I had done? Was for a service that was going to take place on MY birthday, the day after tomorrow. My dad never realized it, no matter how many times the man at the mortuary said “December 4th”, and I decided to just leave it because it wasn’t like waiting one more day to have the service was going to make my birthday suck less. My dad hadn’t realized that he was planning his wife’s funeral on his daughter’s birthday. But he had realized he forgotten his wife’s sister’s birthday and THAT was worthy of panic. That was important. And I realized that if I didn’t get out of the house that second I was going to break things, throw things, say things that could never be taken back, and I ran out of the house. The house that John was in. I ran past my own car without seeing it. It was almost like I was back in high school when things would get so bad sometimes I would just start running.
So I ran and sobbed in the dark and the cold and after about 15 minutes my cell phone rang, which I hadn’t even realized was in my pocket, and it was John wanting to know what happened and where I was and could I tell him so he could come get me. And I said no. And he was like “let me at least bring you a coat it is freezing out there” so I told him the address I was running to and hung up. I was running to Evelyn’s mom’s house. Luckily Evelyn’s mom had been briefed that I might at any time show up crying (it was something I had done several times over the years).
Evelyn’s mom was home, thank God, and held me and let me cry and spill out the story and her little dog danced around and licked the tears out of my nostrils which made it really hard to keep crying. When I could finally talk and breathe normally again I went outside and John was sitting in our car parked across the street. I knocked on the car window and John took me back to the house.
Where my dad was waiting and still had no idea what had happened. I told him, “I’m going to explain to you why I ran out of here in tears but you DO NOT get to have another crying fit about it. I don’t want to take care of you more right now. So you just have to deal with this”. And I told him that he had completely forgotten MY birthday while planning mom’s funeral on it but that he remembered Aunt Nancy’s and that really that just sucked. And he started to have a fit, I gave him a LOOK, he went out to the garage and had his fit there and John just hugged me and said “I’m so sorry babe” over and over again.
The day before the funeral I found almost all of the jewelry that supposedly had been “stolen” by “them” over the years. I was actually just looking for a warm pair of socks in my mom’s top dresser drawer when I spotted what looked like a makeup case wrapped in enormous maxi pads. Weird enough to warrant further investigation. I pulled it out and it was heavy and went “jingle clank.” I opened it over her bed and jewelry poured out. Maybe 60 rings, pins, a tangle of necklaces. She had taken all her jewelry out of its boxes and hidden it in this case so “they” couldn’t find it and then forgotten that she’d done it, leaving her with empty boxes as proof of the theft. Her wedding ring was in there. I thought my dad would be happy it wasn’t lost after all but the proof that she really had been delusional seemed to just make him more sad. He also said it was all mine now.
I took all the good pieces, put them back in their boxes, stuffed them all in a gift bag and took them home with me. I gave them away to friends and family for Christmas when I got back home. Lord knows I wasn’t in the mood to shop and everyone else seemed pretty excited. Since my mother’s jewelry shopping was almost as compulsive as her doll buying there was something for everyone. I kept a couple of rings because I felt like I should and because people told me I would want to have them later. I still can’t wear them. I actually don’t even like touching them when I paw across them in my jewelry box, but maybe someday. Maybe people are right.
Nine months after she died my father got around to telling me that my mother had left me a substantial amount of money. Not like “we’re rich!” money but a sizeable chunk. Money my dad had given to her but that she had put in an account with only her name and mine on it. The account had been created so long ago that my name was so faded on the account card you could barely make it out. My best guess is that it was her emergency divorce fund. I certainly don’t believe she ever meant to leave me a lot of money. He actually told me about it because he wanted to know if I would give it back to her estate so he wouldn’t have to deal with the paperwork of proving it wasn’t part of the estate.
I thought maybe he needed the money but was able to finally ascertain that no, he didn’t need the money, he just really didn’t want to fill out the forms and wait for the paperwork to come back. I actually asked this exact question, “So you are asking me to give you this life-changing amount of money back, money we could use to put a down payment on a house, not because you need it, but because you don’t want to deal with some extra estate paperwork?” and he said, “Well, yes.” And then I told him I thought he needed to take some time to think about just how fucked up and selfish that was and I got off the phone. And cried. And apparently he did think about it and realized that, wow, that was INDEED fucked up and selfish. So then I pointed out that if I closed out the account that paperwork would automatically be generated that would show, since now that it was gone, that it was not part of the estate. That I would be happy to give him copies of all the paperwork they would be giving to me. So he wouldn’t have to worry about the paperwork. And then I drove to Bakersfield, closed the account, drove a mile down the street to my bank and deposited the check. And then had a very nice lunch with my father.
The money was fun. I set aside some of it as “my mom was a bitch but at least I got some money” money and I got a personal trainer and a day at the spa and now my friends and I all have Coach bags. They say money can’t buy happiness but I think that’s not true if you’re spending it on other people along with yourself. And now we have a larger cushion in place if the economy gets even worse or John loses his job.
Despite all the admonishments from my mother’s old friends I do not call my dad every day or visit him every weekend. My dad would get out of my mother’s way so she could throw something at me and he backed her up on every horrible thing she ever did to me. One year when I came home for Christmas my mother somehow figured out that I was sleeping with an ex-boyfriend. She chased me around the house calling me a slut and a whore. At that time in my life I had had sex with a grand total of two people. On the way to church the next morning I told my dad that if my mom didn’t stop calling me horrible names I was going to drive back home and have Christmas by myself. He said, and I quote him here, “Well, Laurel, if you weren’t acting like a slut your mother wouldn’t have to call you one” and then we went into church together.
That’s my dad. The last time I went down to visit him he was ten minutes late to church (which I was only attending because he wants me to go) because my Aunt Nancy decided at the last minute that she wanted a Dr. Pepper that morning. He didn’t tell her, “Laurel is in town for the weekend and I’m supposed to meet her for church at nine so I will get you a Dr. Pepper after she and I have brunch.” Instead he went and got her a Dr. Pepper and let me sit there by myself for the first ten minutes of the service. Then he cried when I got in my car to drive home after brunch. He gets Christmas-ish visits, Father’s Day weekend and a phone call every couple of weeks. And I’m okay with that.
My mom decided to hold a grudge against me. As far as I know she was still mad at me when she died. She never said anything to my dad like, you know, tell Laurel I love her. Never in all this drawn out protracted dying process did she try to say goodbye or acknowledge any of my attempts at further contact. I know she was crazy but it was still a horrible thing to do to your only child. And it surprised absolutely no one that knew me or my mother. I know I’d made comments over the years that she probably would die angry at me over something stupid but the naïve part of me was still shocked when it actually happened. My mom really did die not speaking to me over something petty.
And that’s what I’m left with. Some money, an embarrassing story with the word diarrhea in it, anger I can never resolve and a wound I can never fully heal.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Facebook: Did Satan actually DO the R&D or did he just luck into it?
It seems so FUN and harmless at first. You log on, enter some info, upload a picture or few if you want and BANG you start getting friend requests and hearing from people you haven’t talked to in 20 years and people you worked with ten years ago and you’re like, “this is so cool and I don’t even have to try and make my page look cool like on MySpace” and really you (and by you I mean me AND, well, you too) were too old for MySpace anyway and you knew it.
But with FB all you really have to do is find the RIGHT profile picture (which is way different than choosing the perfect MySpace photo which had a nice amount of cleavage in it) and try to come up with a witty status statement.
You, stuck home with a cold and bored out of your skull, sign up about a week after you return home from your 20th year high school reunion. Your first week you get over 50 friend requests from people you grew up with and/or saw last week for the first time in 20 years. It turns out, after FB interfaces with your AOL e-mail, that about half the people you regularly exchange e-mail with in the present are also on FB so you send them friend requests. You also get about ten friend requests from people who you have no recollection of whatsoever. You’re excited and just accept everyone (you figure something will jog your memory on those random friends).
And you post pictures of your life and husband and friends and cat. And because you’re the kind of person that still HAS pictures of everything carefully stored in photo albums (AND a really nice scanner you haven’t used in a couple years) you scan pictures of plays and dances and homecoming floats and other random stuff from high school. People get a kick out of it. You tag photos and OTHER people tag your photos and some serious reminiscing happens and it is pretty cool.
Then you see you can join a group of the Fraternity you were a little sister for when you were at University. So you do that. And you realize no one has posted any pictures yet. So you pull the scanner back out of the closet, plug it back in and scan all your fraternity photos. Parties, ceremonies, formal events, random hanging out at the house. You get in touch with a bunch of those people and there’s more nostalgic chatting. You get to see what they look like now and what their kids look like. It turns out a bunch of the brothers actually married little sisters so you know the husbands and wives in the pictures. Everyone has kids.
During all this people have been unrelentingly sending you virtual hugs, plants, drinks, blow jobs (well, practically) you get winked at and hugged. People want you to be a virtual pirate and vampire and to know what 80’s movie best describes you. After about a week of trying to keep up with this (okay they sent me a plant so now I send them a plant and then they sent me another plant) You let these requests and updates build and stack up until you happily discover the “Ignore all” button because you just really aren’t in the mood to constantly keep giving virtual plants (and creepy little plant-girls) to people even if, somehow, if you give enough of them some rainforest somewhere gets saved. You don’t want a virtual beer, you want a real one.
The first warning tremor that FB is not all cute pictures and happy memories occurs when you’re at home visiting your dad and attend church with him. On your way out the door you shake your minister’s hand and tell him how happy you were to see his daughter’s last FB update about how, after surgery, she is now totally cancer free. You say that is the best status update EVER and he agrees. And then he says something to the effect of how you still need to connect on FB. And you nod and smile and forget about it. Until you get back home and there, from your minister, is a friendship request. You stare at it. You’re already friends with his son (whose unofficial project your senior year of high school was to destroy as much of your life as possible and study the psychological effects) and his daughter (who has always been nice) and you think “there are pictures of me and my friends getting drunk with my friends… I can’t have my minister looking at my slut-o-ween pictures.” And then you remember that he always kind of thought you were a vapid slut anyway and give up and hit “accept”.
People suggest friends to you… you recognize about half of them. "People You Might Know" has some really interesting ideas. You do your first culling of people that, after a couple of months, you still have no idea who they are. Occasionally people (like your kidnapper ex-boyfriend from high school and psycho ex-roommate from college) send you friend requests. You are please that you can not only deny them but also BLOCK them so they can’t see you or any of your online activity.
Then, the week before the election, it starts getting political. This is fascinating. You are surprised by some of the people who so fervently want McCain to win. You immediately delete anyone who is openly for Prop 8. You get excited when a guy from high school posts a clip of himself being interviewed on the national news about why he was volunteering to help elect Obama. You hit the delete key really hard on the women who posts an entire video on the evils of partial birth abortion (the next day she sends you a friend request which you deny) On election day you see some people have given up their status statement to make a pitch for McCain. You figure out how to make your status remind everyone to vote for Obama.
Obama wins (yay) and the next day there are grumblings and statements like,
“Well so much for the government not taking ALL our money, better spend it now guys” and “We need to pray to figure out why Jesus let this happen.” So you delete those people too.
One morning an official status update (when you modify some of your core data it automatically announces it to everyone) says “Dude’s relationship status has changed from married to it’s complicated and it seems rather odd to announce to 134 random people you’re “friends” with online that your marriage is in trouble. Dude’s status updates start to include things like “Dude is mourning the destruction of his marriage” and “Dude is pondering the meaning of wife.” You barely knew Dude in high school so while you feel bad he’s going through a rough patch (made worse by the fact that interspersed between these statements he is uploading new pictures of his kids) you can’t really comment. What would you say?” “I never actually talked to you in the 6 years we went to school together but I’m really sorry your marriage fell apart.” So you read other people’s comments to him and think, again, how weird FB is. One morning you wake up and realized that he had tagged a couple people in one of your albums. At 3:06 in the morning. This, more than anything, makes you realize what a mess he must be if he’s going through your pictures in the middle of the night.
It slowly dawns on you, as people’s comments and responses pop up on your page that people are using FB to actually REALLY reconnect with people. Trading e-mail, getting on the phone. Making plans to see each other after all these years. Several people are trying to help Dude cope with his impending divorce. Where everyone can read it. You realize you have no desire to do any of that and that, just like you had no real interest in attending your high school reunion, you have no interest in actually talking to most of your “friends.” Lurking and checking out photos is fun but you have no desire to really talk to any of these people. Once an aloof antisocial bitch, always an aloof antisocial bitch.
Then Party Boy pops up from your experimental phase in college. He’s one of the few people you’d actually wondered about and you’re happy to "connect" with him. You spend an hour catching up on the phone. You find out that Party Boy turned into Addict Boy for several years before finally becoming Sober Boy. You, of course, have some pictures of those adventurous times as well and so you scan and upload them. You decide to be nice and unblock your ex (not the kidnapper one from high school, the one that broke your heart in college) who actually sent you a friend request about 3 minutes after you signed up for FB (but you’d denied and blocked him) and send him a short message that you’re going to be uploading pictures that include him and that this isn’t a friend request, because you are not friends, but a heads up and by the way Party Boy is on FB now and he should look him up.
You log back on a few hours later and there are fifteen comments on one photo alone… a picture of a makeshift bar (with a “Closed on account of dunkness” sign taped too it) in a dorm room from a Cinco De Mayo party. Only the first two comments are actually about the photo, the remainder are essentially a conversation (between Party Boy and his college roommate) about a trip to a Dead show to buy drugs and how funny it was that whoever it was that was driving didn’t know how to drive stick. You think “Oh well, I guess I never really wanted to get another job anyway” but it seems wrong that you’re now going to be disqualified over some great drug adventure you weren’t even ON and hadn’t heard about until now. Old Friend tells you that you can delete comments, which is the best news you’ve had all day. You delete all the comments and then, just to be safe, the picture that inspired them. You hope, that since no people were in the picture and it therefore wasn’t tagged, that it is truly gone.
Unfortunately Old Friend also tells you that he’d never seen those pictures before and wants to know why he wasn’t invited to the Cinco de Mayo party. Or on that trip to Disneyland. You of course have no idea. All you remember from that party was that drinking tequila before noon that day was about one of the worst decisions you made during college. All you really remember is the headache. All you remember about the trip to Disneyland is meeting the heartbreaker ex and learning that love at first sight did actually exist. You have no idea who put together the guest list or organized the trip.
Heartbreaker ex writes back wanting to know WHY you can’t be friends, and you realize that, thanks to FB, you’ve now re-opened a door you had carefully nailed shut for a reason. You send an e-mail to your ex explaining ONE MORE TIME why you aren’t friends. He, of course, tells you you’re just being silly. You remember WHY you stopped talking to him in the first place.
So now here you are, mad at an ex-boyfriend who you haven’t actually laid eyes on in almost 20 years. That you have been happily married for 12 of those years doesn’t mitigate how freaking irritated you are. One of your best friends is upset about party he wasn’t invited to 20 years ago. People you don’t even remember because it WAS 20 years ago are leaving comments that would cause any future employer nosing about to toss your resume in the round file, and the best part? Your MINISTER can see all of it.
But with FB all you really have to do is find the RIGHT profile picture (which is way different than choosing the perfect MySpace photo which had a nice amount of cleavage in it) and try to come up with a witty status statement.
You, stuck home with a cold and bored out of your skull, sign up about a week after you return home from your 20th year high school reunion. Your first week you get over 50 friend requests from people you grew up with and/or saw last week for the first time in 20 years. It turns out, after FB interfaces with your AOL e-mail, that about half the people you regularly exchange e-mail with in the present are also on FB so you send them friend requests. You also get about ten friend requests from people who you have no recollection of whatsoever. You’re excited and just accept everyone (you figure something will jog your memory on those random friends).And you post pictures of your life and husband and friends and cat. And because you’re the kind of person that still HAS pictures of everything carefully stored in photo albums (AND a really nice scanner you haven’t used in a couple years) you scan pictures of plays and dances and homecoming floats and other random stuff from high school. People get a kick out of it. You tag photos and OTHER people tag your photos and some serious reminiscing happens and it is pretty cool.
Then you see you can join a group of the Fraternity you were a little sister for when you were at University. So you do that. And you realize no one has posted any pictures yet. So you pull the scanner back out of the closet, plug it back in and scan all your fraternity photos. Parties, ceremonies, formal events, random hanging out at the house. You get in touch with a bunch of those people and there’s more nostalgic chatting. You get to see what they look like now and what their kids look like. It turns out a bunch of the brothers actually married little sisters so you know the husbands and wives in the pictures. Everyone has kids.
During all this people have been unrelentingly sending you virtual hugs, plants, drinks, blow jobs (well, practically) you get winked at and hugged. People want you to be a virtual pirate and vampire and to know what 80’s movie best describes you. After about a week of trying to keep up with this (okay they sent me a plant so now I send them a plant and then they sent me another plant) You let these requests and updates build and stack up until you happily discover the “Ignore all” button because you just really aren’t in the mood to constantly keep giving virtual plants (and creepy little plant-girls) to people even if, somehow, if you give enough of them some rainforest somewhere gets saved. You don’t want a virtual beer, you want a real one.
The first warning tremor that FB is not all cute pictures and happy memories occurs when you’re at home visiting your dad and attend church with him. On your way out the door you shake your minister’s hand and tell him how happy you were to see his daughter’s last FB update about how, after surgery, she is now totally cancer free. You say that is the best status update EVER and he agrees. And then he says something to the effect of how you still need to connect on FB. And you nod and smile and forget about it. Until you get back home and there, from your minister, is a friendship request. You stare at it. You’re already friends with his son (whose unofficial project your senior year of high school was to destroy as much of your life as possible and study the psychological effects) and his daughter (who has always been nice) and you think “there are pictures of me and my friends getting drunk with my friends… I can’t have my minister looking at my slut-o-ween pictures.” And then you remember that he always kind of thought you were a vapid slut anyway and give up and hit “accept”.
People suggest friends to you… you recognize about half of them. "People You Might Know" has some really interesting ideas. You do your first culling of people that, after a couple of months, you still have no idea who they are. Occasionally people (like your kidnapper ex-boyfriend from high school and psycho ex-roommate from college) send you friend requests. You are please that you can not only deny them but also BLOCK them so they can’t see you or any of your online activity.
Then, the week before the election, it starts getting political. This is fascinating. You are surprised by some of the people who so fervently want McCain to win. You immediately delete anyone who is openly for Prop 8. You get excited when a guy from high school posts a clip of himself being interviewed on the national news about why he was volunteering to help elect Obama. You hit the delete key really hard on the women who posts an entire video on the evils of partial birth abortion (the next day she sends you a friend request which you deny) On election day you see some people have given up their status statement to make a pitch for McCain. You figure out how to make your status remind everyone to vote for Obama.
Obama wins (yay) and the next day there are grumblings and statements like,
“Well so much for the government not taking ALL our money, better spend it now guys” and “We need to pray to figure out why Jesus let this happen.” So you delete those people too.
One morning an official status update (when you modify some of your core data it automatically announces it to everyone) says “Dude’s relationship status has changed from married to it’s complicated and it seems rather odd to announce to 134 random people you’re “friends” with online that your marriage is in trouble. Dude’s status updates start to include things like “Dude is mourning the destruction of his marriage” and “Dude is pondering the meaning of wife.” You barely knew Dude in high school so while you feel bad he’s going through a rough patch (made worse by the fact that interspersed between these statements he is uploading new pictures of his kids) you can’t really comment. What would you say?” “I never actually talked to you in the 6 years we went to school together but I’m really sorry your marriage fell apart.” So you read other people’s comments to him and think, again, how weird FB is. One morning you wake up and realized that he had tagged a couple people in one of your albums. At 3:06 in the morning. This, more than anything, makes you realize what a mess he must be if he’s going through your pictures in the middle of the night.
It slowly dawns on you, as people’s comments and responses pop up on your page that people are using FB to actually REALLY reconnect with people. Trading e-mail, getting on the phone. Making plans to see each other after all these years. Several people are trying to help Dude cope with his impending divorce. Where everyone can read it. You realize you have no desire to do any of that and that, just like you had no real interest in attending your high school reunion, you have no interest in actually talking to most of your “friends.” Lurking and checking out photos is fun but you have no desire to really talk to any of these people. Once an aloof antisocial bitch, always an aloof antisocial bitch.
Then Party Boy pops up from your experimental phase in college. He’s one of the few people you’d actually wondered about and you’re happy to "connect" with him. You spend an hour catching up on the phone. You find out that Party Boy turned into Addict Boy for several years before finally becoming Sober Boy. You, of course, have some pictures of those adventurous times as well and so you scan and upload them. You decide to be nice and unblock your ex (not the kidnapper one from high school, the one that broke your heart in college) who actually sent you a friend request about 3 minutes after you signed up for FB (but you’d denied and blocked him) and send him a short message that you’re going to be uploading pictures that include him and that this isn’t a friend request, because you are not friends, but a heads up and by the way Party Boy is on FB now and he should look him up.
You log back on a few hours later and there are fifteen comments on one photo alone… a picture of a makeshift bar (with a “Closed on account of dunkness” sign taped too it) in a dorm room from a Cinco De Mayo party. Only the first two comments are actually about the photo, the remainder are essentially a conversation (between Party Boy and his college roommate) about a trip to a Dead show to buy drugs and how funny it was that whoever it was that was driving didn’t know how to drive stick. You think “Oh well, I guess I never really wanted to get another job anyway” but it seems wrong that you’re now going to be disqualified over some great drug adventure you weren’t even ON and hadn’t heard about until now. Old Friend tells you that you can delete comments, which is the best news you’ve had all day. You delete all the comments and then, just to be safe, the picture that inspired them. You hope, that since no people were in the picture and it therefore wasn’t tagged, that it is truly gone.
Unfortunately Old Friend also tells you that he’d never seen those pictures before and wants to know why he wasn’t invited to the Cinco de Mayo party. Or on that trip to Disneyland. You of course have no idea. All you remember from that party was that drinking tequila before noon that day was about one of the worst decisions you made during college. All you really remember is the headache. All you remember about the trip to Disneyland is meeting the heartbreaker ex and learning that love at first sight did actually exist. You have no idea who put together the guest list or organized the trip.
Heartbreaker ex writes back wanting to know WHY you can’t be friends, and you realize that, thanks to FB, you’ve now re-opened a door you had carefully nailed shut for a reason. You send an e-mail to your ex explaining ONE MORE TIME why you aren’t friends. He, of course, tells you you’re just being silly. You remember WHY you stopped talking to him in the first place.
So now here you are, mad at an ex-boyfriend who you haven’t actually laid eyes on in almost 20 years. That you have been happily married for 12 of those years doesn’t mitigate how freaking irritated you are. One of your best friends is upset about party he wasn’t invited to 20 years ago. People you don’t even remember because it WAS 20 years ago are leaving comments that would cause any future employer nosing about to toss your resume in the round file, and the best part? Your MINISTER can see all of it.
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