The Moon Wanderers’ wanton freedom of expression, despite the opinions of others, gave me great insight into a world I didn’t know existed. Apparently, the Moon Wanderers stirred up controversy wherever they went, including Pine Log. Some journalist named Edna Rollins wrote a piece in her small weekly bulletin that said some pretty bad things about them and I was shocked that someone could actually talk about people that way, without knowing them. After I read it, I didn’t like Edna at all…and I normally like everybody. But not her. She just wasn’t nice at all. In fact, what sealed the deal for me was the next month, Maw Sue started acting really upset, more than I’d ever seen her before. She wouldn’t sit or relax, or talk. Just pace. Fret and mumble. I kept asking her what was wrong, and could I help, and she’d just wave me off with her hands. It wasn’t until a few days later, on the kitchen table I saw the newsprint of the Gazette. Edna was talking about Castle Pines Mental Hospital and there were references to members in the community, small details, without names, but recognizable to people in this town. Anyone could figure it out by reading it, who she was talking about. It was then I grew to hate Edna Rollins, a woman I had never met; I had only read her powerful words which caused harm. I wanted to hunt her down and tell her what-for, but who was I? Just a kid. I had no powers that be. I had to endure the mistreatment once again, of words, over the people I cared about. It took a few weeks for Maw Sue to overcome the power of those words, and how they shook and rattled her…but she did, and I was so proud. As for me, I just wanted to kick Edna Rollins in the vagina.
When Meg and I weren’t listening to stories we played games. Parcheesi, Monopoly, checkers, Crazy Eights, Go Fish. It didn’t matter what we played, though, Meg hated losing. And when I say hated losing, I mean she refused to lose. Denial. It didn’t matter if you won hands down, she refused to admit it by virtue of something or another. Whatever stupid reason she made up at the time.
Once I remember triumphantly winning and enjoying it. “Hoo-hah,” I said, slamming down the cards. “One-two-three.” I may have gotten carried away, but whatever. Her weakness—my trump card. “Take—that—sister-sue!”
Her eyes went slant. Her body tensed. Meg couldn’t lose. Not at cards, hopscotch, Red Rover, dodgeball, Chinese checkers, Old Maid—life. Queen Meg did not get the game player gene; she did, however, get the over reactor gene and played it to the hilt. Since she couldn’t lose, lest she die or something, she created a distraction, and not just once or twice, but every single solitary game. I mean, try playing hide and seek with someone who is clearly found but swears up and down she isn’t. Impossible.
I caught her in the act once, though she’ll never admit it. We had just finished a game of checkers and against my better judgment, I let her win, but only because I despised hearing her whine and carry on. Plus, she pinched like a crab. I had the bruises to prove it. While she was basking in the winner’s circle, I started a game of cards. I rammed it up a notch, ahead by three sets. Unfortunately, I had not considered the four glasses of water I drank earlier. My bladder screamed. I squirmed. I called a time-out and warned Meg not to touch anything, no cheating. She hem-hawed around. I suspected her toes were crossed—it was just too easy. When I returned—for the one hundred and fifty-seventh time—disaster.
“Act of God,” she said, all innocent and fragile. Act of God, my foot. Cards were strewn all over the porch, down the steps and across the yard. Checkers were littered on the grass and the board hung limp in the cleft of a sycamore tree.
“Meg?” I yelled. She just twiddled her thumbs and looked at me all innocent like. I started interrogating her as to what happened. The more I picked, the more elaborate the Act of God. Today, out of nowhere, she declared, and just so happened after I left to go to the bathroom, a massive wind swept across the porch and disbanded from its swirling vortex a mob of ugly, hairy, big-nosed trolls who tied Meg to the porch post, and then proceeded to ransack the game like a bunch of Viking savages. Meg acted shocked but I was suspicious. To top it off, she said before they left, all thirty of them licked her cheek with their crusty inflamed troll tongues, then tickled her silly, untied her and ran off in the woods.
“A mob of trolls?”
“Yep,” she said. “And they were horrific. Smelled bad too.” She fanned her hand over her face. Her story was almost believable by the way she told it. So once again, after our clean-up, we started a game of cards. I didn’t know why I allowed myself to be tortured by this crazy game Meg played, but I did.
“Hey, look!” Meg yelled and pointed toward the post. “It’s the crackles.” I was compelled to look before the epic debacle occurred. Simultaneously, out of the corner of my eye, several things took place. My head swiveled toward the defenseless crackle hanging by its tiny claws. I witness the mishap, the national emergency, the act of God, the tragic destruction. It was brilliant. Meg diverted my attention, stood up gracefully and made her way across the porch. Her big foot desecrated the swordfish. A smash and twist disjointed the goldfish. A high-kick karate move and the tuna was stuck halfway inside the floor slats with doglegged fins. I wanted to throw Meg off the porch and beat the big L off her forehead, but my love for crackles overtook my desire to whoop my sister senseless.
We were fascinated with these strange creatures. Their transparent skin left my mind to wander to the empty places inside me, fragile, void, hanging, waiting, and looking for their identity, their peace. If you mishandled them, their thin barrel chests would cave in and their tiny feet would fall off, plus they’d make the most awful bone-crushing sound since the dawn of mankind. I plucked one off the tree bark and literally thought my spine broke into splinters by the noise. It was a lesson which garnered a change of namesake. Their official encyclopedia bug name sounded like a hock of throat spit. Auchenorrhyncha. They were known as cicadas but it sounded French and this was the South. Unacceptable. On a hot summer day in Pine Log, Texas, the cicadas died and the crackles were born. And the South rose again.
Over the years, we collected armies of crackles and stored them in shoe boxes. Last summer we counted sixty-seven gutless creatures staring back at us. We dressed them up into wild, crazy characters using leaves, moss, pinecones and grass. We had puppet shows, villages and towns of crackles. Two of them had patchwork shorts like us. We even created a town similar to Pine Log. It had one Dairy Queen, one grocery store, one hundred and fifty Baptist churches, and one lucky beer joint on the other side of the Salt Flats River Bridge. Pine Log was the wettest dry county in Texas. When folks rattled off, they were “going across the river,” it had nothing to do with baiting a hook or fishing—they were talking about buying brew, hard liquor and rousing spirits.
Our favorite prank of all time involved two ninja crackles. Experts at covert missions and willing to die for the cause. We had a pre-war ceremony, painted their bubble eyes blood red with a yellow dot in the center and disguised their bodies with black coats of paint. We chiseled a sword out of sticks, painted it silver and glued it to their hands. Maw Sue finally settled in for her evening nap. We tiptoed across the squeaky floor, snickering and giggling. Meg was a clumsy boob and hit the roll-away table. The three-tiered table squealed out like a pig. The statue of Jesus holding a baby lamb went down face-first. We froze. The table eeked in judgment, then fell silent. I gave Meg the OH-MY-GOD-THAT-TABLE-HAS-BEEN-THERE-FOREVER look of doom. The ninjas were on lockdown in our fingers with swords in air, hollow shells of soldiers waiting on war. Maw Sue snorted and rooted around. We held our breath.
“We’re going to Hell,” Meg lip-synched with a look of dire straits.
“We live in Pine Log,” I whispered sarcastically. “I think we’re there.”
Maw Sue was in a deep sleep and we slithered in like serpents. Looking back on it now, I figure we should have turned coat and ran. Heeded the baby Jesus moment as a sign. Instead, we turned heathen and mounted two ninja crackles on the rim of her glasses. The hardest part was not laughing out loud. A few times, she’d jerk her arms or l
egs and we’d freeze up, nearly busting a gut giggling. Meg kept glancing over at Jesus and the squished lamb. We moved fast and swift. On the way out, Meg uprighted the Savior and petted the lamb so as to get us back in the Savior’s good graces. It took a while to get out the door since we had to silence the loud clanging bell. We hid behind the chicken coop for an hour, laughing and cutting up. We imagined her waking up from a dead sleep, staring into two bug faces. The enormous zoom on her bifocals would make them triple in size. The more I laughed, the more I saw the statue of Jesus giving me the stink-eye.
Just when I started to regret the whole thing, we heard a scream and a loud plunk. Loud plunks were never good signs. She came barreling out on the porch. She was madder than a boar hog with his nuts cut off. According to Dad, this is the maddest any Southerner can get. She paced back and forth a good five minutes, blowing and huffing and scanning the tree line. Finally, she walked to the washing machine and slammed the lid down. The reverberating clang made our bones clatter. She reached on the wall to a rusty nail and pulled off the paint stick. Meg’s knees started knocking. Maw Sue lifted her flowery skirt and whopped her bare thighs a good one. Her skin sizzled and sent out shock waves of laughter. If there was one thing which hadn’t lived up to its namesake, it was the paint stick. The stupid stick hadn’t seen a speck of paint its whole life, but you can bet it sure could etch out the back side of our thighs in a heartbeat. We avoided Maw Sue for three days until neither of us could stand it. We loved her too much to go another day without seeing her.
The screen door let out an eerie squeal and the bell clanged. Meg and I stood at the kitchen table. Maw Sue was sitting on the opposite side smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee. The air was thick and daunting. I gulped and fidgeted. Meg swayed and her knees knocked. From across the room, the statue of Jesus melted us with his hot stare, and inside my mind the lamb bleeped and bleeped. Maw Sue remained speechless. She didn’t have to. The message was clear. On the opposite end of the table, on top of the paint stick, were the mangled remains of two ninja crackles. They died for the cause, but Meg and I took the punishment. And it was 0ne-hundred percent worth it.
14
The House Inside Me
The scariest monsters are the ones
that lurk within our souls.
~ Edgar Allen Poe
Spiraling through the ceiling of my room were train tracks of aluminum beer tabs Meg and I collected, along with loops and weaves of folded Wrigley’s spearmint gum wrappers made into a bridge. It tied all four corners together like a trapeze in a circus. We spent hours making them as pre-teens bored out of our wits. Mother thought it was the trashiest thing she ever saw, and tried to remove it. Dad wouldn’t let her because it was self-expression. Since Dad drank like a fish, we never ran out of beer tabs and all Mother did was bitch about it. It led to friction between the two of them, which led to heated fights, unresolved issues, which led to more arguments, which always led to silence, and if there was one thing our house didn’t need, it was more silence. I never understood the tenuous state of our household so I took the brunt of the weight upon my own heart. I was a chaos controller, trying to meter out the moods of the family and fix them. Since I was invisible to Mother and her attention was diverted to Dad ninety-nine percent of the time, I turned to him for approval and love. I longed for him to hold me, talk to me, and see me. If he’d hold me like he held that aluminum beer can, drink me in, show me the love he did that damn beer, then maybe I’d feel all right, but that didn’t happen. I learned alcohol is a taker, not a giver. It takes and takes and takes. It never returns. It doesn’t exchange. It only takes. It takes the bystanders, those close enough to fall into its clutches. Those who care way too much.
It was always something in the Collard household. The simmering silence permeated the walls, followed by slammed doors, popping beer tabs, scowling looks and skid marks in the driveway. Meg and I feared the unknown. At any time, life as we knew it would end. It’s a terrible thing when the adults around you fall apart. There were shouts of blame. Dad seeing other women, Mother threatening revenge. Dad worried. Frantic and more fighting. Mother would lick green stamps or go on a shopping spree. Dad would drink. Mother would gripe about the drinking. Dad would drink more. Mother would disintegrate him with her slanted blue eyes of steel. He’d storm out carrying a six-pack. We’d hear the squealing of tires. This was followed by a solid ten minutes of breaking, slamming and crashing objects. Meg and I would flee to our rooms for safety. Late at night, long after the house had turned into a frigid refrigerator, we’d hear his truck pull in the driveway and a sigh of relief would fall over us. The next morning my mother would go stealth mode. Without question this meant Dad was being punished. In reality, we were all being punished. Silence for days on end, the brutal, incapacitated, begging-to-talk kind of silence, as if an army of skeletons rampaged our home refusing to leave. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SOMEONE TALK! It was followed by slamming cabinet doors, snubbed noses, burnt food and cold stares. I wanted to scream. Dig up the unspoken word bones buried inside the Hush cemetery and make everything right again. Words needed to be given life by lips, words of reconciliation and healing. Words to make everything right again. But I could say nothing. I had no voice. And then, as if the tragic silence never happened, the polar ice cap of the Collard family would melt, and the days returned to a normal that wasn’t normal at all.
In my family forest, deep in the thicket behind the pine curtain of my life, two important giants were being struck down, and there was nothing I could do but watch the two pines timber and fall. The dismantled limbs and branches, the pine thistles scattered were just casualties of war, and I was the sap bleeding from their wounds.
To patch myself up, I learned to lie. I made stuff up. I wanted attention. I wanted approval. I wanted them to work it out and love me. Be my parents. Make this work. Hold this forest together. I knew if they fell apart, I’d fall apart. And they more they tipped, the more inventive stories poured out, eccentric, overboard, dramatic, and fabricated. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the emergence of my co-dependency taking shape. I was so out of touch with myself, my fake self was forming a mold, relying on the feelings of others for identity, how to feel, how to act, how to perform, how to speak, how to make it—survive day to day. This was when I learned to wear masks. The cover-ups gave me stability to function without chaos, but instead with control. When I didn’t get approval, I had nothing left to give. Fear took root, so to manage I created another Cass. A more lovable and accepted Cass. The real me; the little girl denied and rejected waited inside the house, inside me. The House of Seven built out of necessity, fear, haunts and other delusions.
They say the most common things in life, those daily mundane nuances most familiar to you never leave. Regardless of age, status, location or time—they return. The relics of childhood, the sounds, scents, smells, songs, objects, patterns, places and things—come back. I’m little now, but I figure no matter how old I am, whether I live to be old like Maw Sue is, the sounds that will haunt me is my mother in the kitchen. Whisking, stirring, clanging spoons against bowls, the smell of bread, pies and cakes, cracked eggshells, scraped icing and the beaters’ loud roar. And me trying to help, be accepted, approved of; one whisk, one spoon, one taste, one crumb. Me trying to gain my mother’s love by using her most beloved affection—cooking. I would do what she did. I learned to cook. Although a good incentive for my future in housewife land, it was simply another mask I created out of necessity. Other than the fireworks cut-loose Mother Moonshine Gabby which I never saw again, cooking is how I got close to her. My mother’s affection metered out in measuring cups.
I will cook. I will clean. I will bake. I will knead. I will whisk and whip. I will win her love and approval.
Sometimes I actually saw the cold edge of her ice melting away, blending with the butter, flour and eggs. I licked the beater and tasted her love. I delighted in her expertise in the kitchen realm. I tried to do e
verything she did. I cracked the eggs like her. I beat the pudding like her. I mashed the dough like her. I iced the pies like her. I stirred the tea like her. I will earn her love one bite at a time, I vowed. As children looking for acceptance, we grab at whatever self-preservation methods we can find to get what we need, what we want. For me, not getting was sheer terror, measured one cup, one teaspoon at a time. Every day I sought with intensity to fill my cup: flour, sugar, butter, kisses, love, anything—just not empty. I would literally die if my cup, my heart, my soul was empty.
When I wasn’t trying to persuade my mother to love me, I was outside or at Maw Sue’s house. The house itself was a creepy, spooky fixture of my night terrors. I could be fifty feet away, and swear it noticed my presence. I heard it puffing and heaving. It came alive when you stepped on the porch planks. It knew it had visitors. It spoke its own language: squeals, creeps, moans, whistles, chirps, whispers, barks, bleeps or rattles. Inside every room, the corners slid off into a faded darkness, as if there was a slide to a hidden world, dark, damp and horrible. In those corners, I saw shadows in the shadows, figures absorbing light and others swallowing the dark. If I look too long, I felt myself being pulled and I had to flee and run outside. Her house was a labyrinth of holes and hidden things. For a long time, I thought it was me and my demented mind, my warped namesake, my gifts and curses, or the elaborate stories Maw Sue told us. I’d ask her about it and she’d say, “I see it too,” so I didn’t feel alone.
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