THE HOUSE INSIDE ME

by Camelia Wheatley

  She smiled. “Don’t you think that’s something?”

  I sat traumatized. A hot fire steamed in my gut. Tears ran like rivers down my face. I felt like hard stone. Immoveable. My cheeks felt flushed as if someone had slapped me repeatedly. I was in complete shock. For a number of reasons. Too many to count. I sincerely thought I would have a mental breakdown. Right then. My mind tried to process all this information at one time. First, my sister Meg knew about me, everything, the rape, all of it for years and never said a word. Plus, she beat the shit out of Mark Addington. The guy who raped me, took my innocence, my soul. And I never knew a thing. Then my mother, who I have sought with every molecule in my flesh to KNOW all my life, and who I thought hated me, basically disowned me as non-existent in her world—IS NOT the mother I thought she was. Nothing is what it seemed. Just like me. Just like Maw Sue. Just like Meg.

  My mother has a story too. This awful, terrible sad tragic story. And now I realized, most frighteningly of all, that our stories connected us in disturbing ways.

  I blurted in haste, “Why didn’t someone tell me?” I wobbled to my feet and zigzagged across the floor. “Jesus Christ, Meg.” I turned to look at her. “Do you know how much goddamned therapy I’ve had? I mean seriously, like…a whole lot. Like half a year, once a week. This is crazy. I feel crazy. Hell…I am crazy, but I actually feel it energized in me now, like it’s out for blood. Like it’s poison! FUCK! This is too much, too much.” My voice was slurred and disjointed. “I just can’t, I just don’t get it.” My breathing rushed ahead of me. I laughed a hysterical cackle that turned into a waterfall of weeping tears and sorrow.

  “Shit! I thought it was me.” I said to no one, staring placidly into the nothingness of the walls. Then I spun around wild and enraged and filled with something I couldn’t describe nor rid myself of.

  “Oh my God. All that time, I thought it was me.” I mumbled and paced the living room. “All ME. It was always me. I’m the reason. Me. Me. Me. I thought it was me…. that’s what I thought the whole fucking time. I thought it was me.”

  “What are you talking about, Cass?” Meg said, confused and following me with her eyes as I bounced from one end of the room to the other.

  “ME! I thought it was me! I thought she hated me. I thought my own mother hated my guts. And it was all my fault. Me. I was the reason she couldn’t love me. I was unlovable. It was me. I tried to understand, make it right, fix it, correct it, rewrite it. GOD! I could never put it together why she couldn’t love me. I did everything I knew to make her love me. I blamed myself. It was me. I was the monster she couldn’t love.” I looked up at the pine board ceiling and let out a blood curdling wail. Part woman, part child, part something unnamed.

  “I THOUGHT IT WAS ME!” And then I collapsed to the floor.

  “Cass. Oh, my God, no. You thought it was you?” She said rushing to my side. “I had no idea. It wasn’t. No, oh no. It wasn’t you. You took too much of this on yourself and it wasn’t yours. It wasn’t you at all. It was him, the uncle and the craziness, the whole family actually, except for the sister. I think parts of Mom were just gone, lost from what happened. But she did try, Cass. I think she really did. And she loved us, she did.”

  Meg held me and rocked me as she spoke.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, I only found out two years ago. There were times, I meant to tell you, but either you and Sam would have a blowup or me and Bill would have one, so it was never good timing. Then you and Sam divorced, and the…”

  “Fire,” I spat, cutting her off.

  “No…I mean…”

  “Me losing my mind,” I said cold as ice.

  “Not really, I mean, I just didn’t know what was going on with you, it was a bad time, and I didn’t want to add to it.”

  “Umm-hu…” I said bluntly as I felt my mind slipping away. I was too liquored up to think straight. All I could think about was calling Doc and telling her everything, but that was an overreaction, so I had to find a better way to handle this. The next thing in my mind madness toolbox was to take everything out with activity. The intense desire to find a man to release my pain through wild and casual sex slid into the folds of my brain like an intense orgasm I hadn't had yet. My emotions were my nerve endings, alive and on fire, stimulating my entire system to overload. A need to release, to vent, to let go of what bound me. I felt crazed, on the edge of something destructive. At least being with Meg gave me a sense of protection I needed during this moment of impending doom. I couldn’t get into much trouble here, so at least I had that going for me. Plus, I couldn’t leave, I was too intoxicated. When I settled down a bit, Meg continued to talk while I stirred with chaos inside.

  “Why she told me, I have no idea, Cass. It just came out of nowhere,” Meg said, breaking the awkward silence of secrets. “You know how Mom is. How stuff suddenly spews out of her from the past. It never made sense to us. We didn’t know, of course. Normally, I just overlook it, but that day—oh my god. I couldn’t stop her. It was like listening to a little girl talk. She acted like a broken little girl. Our own mother. It was hard for me to see, to hear. It was the saddest thing. I can’t process it. What do you do when you hear something so horrible?”

  Meg’s voice faded—although I could still clearly understand her, I couldn’t mentally absorb it. The heat of my internal organs overwhelmed me. The house of seven convulsed and contorted. All the hate, anger, misunderstanding, sadness, confusion and rejection, sympathy and compassion I felt for my mother, past and present, clashed inside me. Her story, then my story all blended together. Would it have made a difference if I’d known—would it have changed things? The mere thought rocked me. The world I had been holding up with my little girl hands dropped and splintered into a million pieces, and I lay in the wreckage. Unable to withstand the onslaught of words circling in my head, the broken knob clicked and spun. I collapsed on the floor and bawled like a child. Meg rushed to my side.

  “It wasn’t me,” I said in whimpers. “It wasn’t me.” I screamed to the heavens, past the clouds, the black angels, the stars, the Mother Moonshine I’d tried so hard to reach. I cried tears unlike any I’d ever cried before. For myself. For my mother. For the little girls. For the women each of us had become—because of our past.

  “It wasn’t you,” Meg said, caressing my head. I could barely feel, acknowledge, listen, or keep my head upright. “It wasn’t either of us, Cass.” I reached for her arms and we intertwined like clinging vines growing up from disturbed soil.

  We were not the reason for the chaos and the undoing in our family. In therapy I’d learned about projection. What it meant. How it affected me. I see it from another perspective now. It was my mother who projected her feelings onto me. Her feelings. Not mine. Her past…her pain. Not mine. I wept and repeated three words over and over.

  “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.”

  In the moments following, when my mind settled into a quiet discontent, I began to ponder the night and everything spoken. I began to remember and put things together and take things apart. It was then that Doc’s words resonated deeply within me.

  Project. Throw onto. Put upon.

  Place onto an object in order to not feel it.

  She told me because I was a keeper of things, mostly words, intentions, life events and the like, I deeply internalize them, and hold them. Keep them close to me. I cling, I grab, I desperately believe I can fix them. And so, I make them my own. They become part of me. This is what I did with my mother. From beginning to end. Every single piece of it. But it wasn’t mine to keep. It was my mother’s. Her feelings, her pain coming out. None of it was mine to fix, to keep, to hoard.

  IT WASN’T MINE.

  IT WASN’T ME.

  As a child, for the longest time, all I could think about was why my mother hated me. Why she didn’t talk to me when I begged her to? Why she couldn’t love me—see me—hold me—kiss me. I watched other mother-daughter relationships with affecti
on and love and yet, I couldn’t get a word. When you do this for so long, you become aware that it might be you. And that is what happened. The whole time I thought it was me. But it wasn’t. My mother’s issues were her issues. What’s worse, my issues affected the whole of everything else, and meshed with all the other issues of the family. After the rape at the river, unbeknownst to me, I followed my mother’s example, and I didn’t even know it. Until now.

  It didn’t happen, I told myself. Everything is okay.

  I pretended. I pushed it down. I denied.

  But it did happen. Everything wasn’t okay. The horrible, awful terrible happened to me. Just like the horrible, awful terrible happened to my mother. It was neither of our faults—nonetheless, we were greatly affected by our response to the horrible, terrible. Now I understand why Doc puts so much emphasis on confronting, dealing, grieving and healing. To do otherwise will harm yourself and possibly others. Growing up I experienced my mother as a powerful and negative force in my life. I went to great lengths to garner her approval and put great effort into pleasing her, hoping to get love in return. I did the same with marriage and relationships. The horrible rape only intensified my own personal thoughts of unworthiness, and sealed my fate of re-enacting the event in hopes of righting it. My mother was unable to love me the way I desired and needed, because she herself had not received a form of love. Affectionate, hugging, embracing. Her idea of touch had been tainted, warped and damaged so she knew no other way, except caretaking, providing, giving gifts, tending, cooking and so forth. I never knew this to be a form of love until now.

  I can only assume when my mother struggled with her past, she had nowhere to put the feelings of pain, she had no outlet of blue lines or therapy to help her. Instead, her negative feelings of self-worth spilled out on me, on Dad, on Meg. But mostly, on herself. In turn, and because I didn’t know any better, I internalized the words and blamed myself. I was unlovable, unwanted, a bad little girl. I was the monster she couldn’t love. But it was projection all along. If you never deal with and confront your past, Doc says it will come out somewhere, in some form. Doc calls it denial till death. Back then, people just didn’t talk about their problems, and they certainly didn’t go to therapy to talk to a stranger about them. Taboo subjects were to be denied, overlooked, and stuffed down. The issues with her own mother had to contribute.

  Denial till death. My mother tried in her own way, perhaps, to rewrite her past and make it right. Stay. Be the mom. Be the caretaker. Never leave. Never confront. Never confess. But in doing this, shutting down her emotions, she also shut away her affection, her closeness to others.

  The unearthing of family secrets shifted me. Altered me in ways I can’t describe. It also changed my whole outlook on many things. I saw my mother. Really saw the essence of her. I understood her distance. Her withdrawal, her unavailability. Like both sides of the moon, I could now see the dark side and the Mother Moonshine. I saw the scared little girl. I saw the woman. I saw the mother. Underneath the parental role, my mother had a fear of abandonment, anxiety, worthlessness, and deeply misguided sexual issues she projected onto me. They were in no way of me—not at all. But as a child I had no way of knowing it. Her unavailability to love me the way I sought to be loved was not her fault. She loved the only way she knew how. Survival mode.

  As a young girl, my overt desire to be a woman, along with my early exposure to pornography magazines, all set off a threat in my mother, an internal alarm to protect and defend. Who knows, she may have seen Symphony in me, or had flashbacks of the times she stayed with the uncle. I may never know, but under the circumstances, who’s to say what one will do when it comes to our children? I cannot blame her anymore. She didn’t have therapy, pink pills or blue lines. My mother had no one. She kept her secrets. Denial till death. Well, up until she told my sister. Meg might be the only soul to ever hear the secret out of my mother’s lips. I pray it will start a healing in her. As it is starting to do with me. It will take time for me to integrate this into my life and absorb the impact it had, and will have in the future. But regardless, it is major. Words have power, to destroy and to heal. I know this all too well. I have a whole damn cemetery full of word bones. Now, I’m just trying to process how a bottle of tequila and slumber party with my sister completely kicked my ass, transformed my life and I’ll be damned, helped me understand my mother…Mother Moonshine, for the first time. Ever. Oddly, what kept us apart is now what ties us together, disturbingly connects us in ways we could have never imagined. It’s as if the dark and the light converged. And she doesn’t even know it. But that’s okay. Me knowing is enough.

  God. Is. It. Ever.

  Meg and I slept in her king-sized bed, and just like kids again, she hooked one leg ever so slightly on top of mine. I took a deep breath and tried to sleep as all the thoughts of the night spun in my head. One lone tear rolled down my face sideways and crashed onto the sheets, and I spilled off into twilight of sleep.

  The next morning, I didn’t remember where I was. I sat up in the bed and my head was as heavy as a tree stump. I turned to swing my legs off the bed and my eyes focused on a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin.

  “Oh, thank God,” I whispered, not able to talk too loud because of the echoes in my head. My mouth was dry as cotton and my head throbbed like it was a drum. Meg appeared in the doorway with two cups.

  “Coffee, Ms. Sunshine?”

  “Bless you, child.”

  Meg laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m right where you are. I’ve been up an hour, already took my aspirin. And girl, we damn near drank a whole bottle, can you believe it?”

  “Yep…by the drums in my head, I believe it,” I said, sipping the coffee. “Mmmm…this is so good.”

  “It’s a good kind of hurt though, right?” Meg said as if everything exposed last night was a necessary pain.

  “I suppose,” I said, gulping down the coffee and sitting up against the bed.

  “Well, don’t forget. We got the funeral today,” Meg said, frowning.

  My heart sank. I forgot about the funeral.

  “God. I don’t think I have any tears left.”

  “Me too, Cass. Last night was rough as fuck for me. I mean it. I’ve been carrying around those secrets for so long I swear to God I think they started to eat me alive from the inside out. I feel a hundred percent better now, well, minus the hangover.”

  “Well. I’m glad Mother told you, Meg. I’m glad we had this time together. We never do this enough, do we?”

  “No…we don’t. I think when Bill goes out of town, we’ll have to have one again. What do you say?”

  “Sure…. just give me time to recover from this one. I feel like I’ve been hit with a dysfunctional backwoods meteorite.”

  Meg started laughing loudly. “Too noisy,” I said. “Can I have more coffee?”

  “Yeah. It’s in the kitchen. I’m heading to the shower. Don’t leave, Sister Sue, okay? Wait till I get out.”

  “Whatever.” I nodded and made my way to the kitchen, my head heavy and wobbling.

  It took me three cups of strong coffee and two more headache pills to feel a tad bit normal again. I still felt a little drunk and in shock from all the confessions.

  I lingered at Meg’s kitchen bar, nursing my hangover with coffee until an hour or so passed and Meg strutted out like a peacock all shiny with clothes and makeup.

  “Not fair,” I blurted, “I look like crap and you’re all sparkly and shit.”

  “Well, believe me, I don’t feel sparkly. More like the shit. The clothes deceive. You want more coffee? I’ll make another pot?”

  “No, no. I’m good. I feel like a drunk jumping bean I’ve had so much.”

  “Ha…yeah. We drank a lot. But at least it will help us through the funeral today.”

  “I need to get home and mentally prepare myself, take a shower and get all sparkly like you.” I smirked.

  “Wait, Cass, before you go, I need to give you something. Don’t mo
ve. Wait right here.”

  Meg disappeared into her bedroom. If she comes out and tells me one more secret, I thought, I swear to God I will render her a throat punch. I can’t take another family secret. Meg came back smiling like a possum with her arms behind her.

  “I can’t deal with any more secrets, Meg…what is it?”

  “Aww pooh! Cass, just close your eyes. You’ll spoil it.”

  “Geesh. What if I fall off this barstool?” I whined.

  “Then I’ll get on the floor with you. Now close your eyes, smarty pants.” I made a face and closed my eyes. Underneath my lids, I felt out of control, spinning in orbit, black time, spirits and flashes of shadows and secrets. A mixture of House of Seven and a hangover. Bad combination.

  “Okay. Open your eyes,” Meg said in a voice too chipper for my ears.

  I opened my eyes. I blinked. I blinked again. Surely what I was seeing was not real. Was I delusional? Did I black out suddenly? I was brought fully alert when Meg started clapping her hands like she did when we were kids opening Christmas presents.

  “It’s your mirror bin,” she yelled. “Aren’t you excited?”

  “Meg! Whisper…okay, whisper,” I said in a hushed squint of the eye and pointed to my head.

  “okay, gah, grumpy. What do you think?”

  “I think…,” I said, hesitant. My thoughts were forming but I couldn’t pull them out. I didn’t know if what I saw was real. “Is that my mirror bin? I mean, where did you find it? I can’t remember the last time I saw it.” I fell deep into my mind, trying to recover memories of it, what happened to it. I just assumed it disappeared when I did. But there it was. It sat like a king on a throne, a long-lost idol waiting on me to bow to its majesty. The pewter mirrored lid on top flashed a prism of light I hadn’t seen in ages. My heart squirmed. I looked up at Meg in disbelief.