It was all the kind of stuff that everyone would regret saying in the morning, if they could remember saying it at all. How many people were wholeheartedly scheduling coffees, trips to the sunny shores of Galveston or mall outings that they never intended to really go on? And, which of these polyester-clad drinkers had promised to watch the Watsons’ kids when they went to New Orleans in February?
They would regret that, and wonder how they could get out of it, but at least it wouldn’t be on Facebook.
“Thanks for talking to me about that bitch,” one lady told Mom, “You saved my life, Sue, you f-ing saved it.”
“That’s what friends are for,” Mom said, relishing in the joy that only being needed can bring. As the long embrace continued, the lady rested her huge head of hair on Mom’s shoulder, her makeup leaving an ugly mark on the orange polyester. The streak would remain long after the memory of the night itself drifted away into drunk slumber.
Dad, usually the unemotional rock, was not equally emotional, but for him, it was a scene.
“Come again, friend,” he said to Steve. “You’re one hell of a guy, and, well, I like you,” he said, almost as if he was addressing his long-lost brother.
As the last few neighbors exited, I began to panic, realizing that while everyone else was going home to the respite of their spousal beds, I was staying here. Of course I was staying here— where the hell else was I going? It was 1:30 a.m., in 1978. This was my parents’ house, and I was ten years old and asleep upstairs. There was no escaping this. Some of us were more inebriated than others, some of us had memories that hadn’t happened yet, some of us knew too much, had baggage, had kids back in the future. And a husband who would have told her to go directly to bed.
And then there were three. That’s when I realized I hadn’t said goodbye to my paternal grandparents. I hadn’t even seen them leave. When did they go? God, I loved them. But, that said, maybe it was better that I just got to say hello again and left out the final, repeated goodbye. Maybe that’s the memory I was supposed to be left with. I could have never said goodbye properly anyway.
As Dad started turning off lights, he half-slurred, “Sue, it’s time to go to bed.”
She evidently wasn’t ready to call it an evening. “How about one more drink?” she said, looking at me. “Kind of a, well, nightcap?”
“No ma’am,” I responded, trying to escape. “I’m good, I better get to bed. You know, I’m still tired from the travel …” My voice tapered off as she caught up with me in the family room.
“You know what, Amy?” Mom said, grabbing my hand in a way-too-familiar fashion. “You are loved here. You are loved.” Tears welled up in her eyes as she continued, “Everyone is loved here. We’re so happy. We’re so happy that you are here. You made tonight so special.”
I knew she meant what she was saying, but she didn’t. She didn’t want me there, but she did. She didn’t like me, but she did. She didn’t love everybody, but oh my God, she really did. It was complicated. Life was complicated. She wasn’t the only person in the world with layers; she was just the only one who also gave birth to me. That apparently gave me the right to be harder on her than anyone else in the whole world. But she had rights too. Hers were in the here and now, mine were in the then and later. Both of us could abuse them, screw them up, and with any luck, we’d love each other anyway.
“I love being here,” I said, desperately, because I needed the moment to end. “I love your family. You have great kids.”
“Oh God,” she said dramatically, like the next breath could be her last, “I love them so much, I love Dick too, even though he bugs the living crap out of me. I love that damn man so much.”
“You did a great job with Thanksgiving,” I thought to say. “I think people forget about the mom, I think that happens a lot.”
That struck her with the gravity that I had hoped it wouldn’t. Yes, I wanted her to feel good, but no, I didn’t want to hold her in my arms. Rocking forward, she grabbed both my shoulders. She was unsteady, so I stood firm. She wasn’t the only drunk one in the room, she was just the drunkest. That was an important point really, because it wasn’t like I was better than her, or above her. I had just stopped before she did.
Dropping her head, she emotionally whispered, loudly, if that’s possible, “Thank you … you have NO idea how much I needed to hear that.”
I knew we weren’t going to talk about her mother dogging her at the Thanksgiving table, any more than I would tell her about my own mom’s comments or Professor Plum’s short rope.
It all made a lot of sense.
Dad poked his head back out of the little hall leading to the master bedroom. “Sue, time for bed. We should let Amy go to bed too.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it’s time.” She hugged me with all the force a small-framed suburban wife and mother can muster at almost two o’clock in the morning on the Friday after Thanksgiving. “Good night, friend,” she said slurring, staggering back to her room. “I love you, girl. I’m glad you were here today. You are good for Little Amy. She needs people to love her.”
As she disappeared around the corner, I stood quietly alone in the family room. As the door to Mom and Dad’s love chamber closed loudly, the only light remaining drifted down from the stairs. It was dark and I was groggy, but I found my way easily. Running my hand down the long cast-iron fence, I heard the motion detector click, sensing my presence. As a teenager I had learned to jump the beam and move around undetected. As an adult, I couldn’t get off the radar of this place, no matter what I did.
Chapter Sixteen
EMOTIONAL DIARRHEA
Stumbling into the third-floor closet, I tried to hold it all in until I could get the door shut behind me. It was almost like trying to get to a toilet before dramatically hurling. I fell to the harsh, gold carpet and sobbed uncontrollably.
What was I even crying for? Why had I been sent here? It made no damn sense.
I realized how wrong I was, how right I was, and how memories are nothing more than aged perceptions.
I was right about my mom and I was wrong about her too. It hurt almost inexplicably to witness actual events that validated my feelings. I had always thought that I had made half that stuff up, playing the victim with no real evidence to validate what was deep inside. But seeing the way she treated Little Amy and spoke about her—even in front of a stranger, who she would have made her best effort at normalizing for—was cold, hard validation. These were actual facts, not feelings. It was shocking and disturbing, only because it meant that all the other memories—the ones not on display in this crack-induced voyage through time—were true.
It was, in equal doses, healing and freeing.
I hadn’t made it all up in my head. It wasn’t all my fault. I had hurt myself, and I was responsible for that, but there was a reason for it. And that reason had nothing to do with a personality defect.
On the other hand, and it was a big hand to be sure, Mom was a product of the swirl of crap that had been the life that led her to her adult one. She was the daughter of oppressive people who, while they loved her, expected perfection, or their precise version of it. Yes, she had it good, in a big house in a beautiful suburban neighborhood. She had a loving, decent, hardworking husband. She had respectable parents who showed up, sober, to family functions. She had friends who liked her. She had beautiful, healthy children. But, as happy as she was, and she really was, somehow she wasn’t fulfilled, or complete. There was something missing because she didn’t like herself. She didn’t completely accept who she was. For this, she was normal. But she was still my mother, and she either didn’t like me or love me. Either way, something in me triggered something in her.
I didn’t and couldn’t understand how the one hand affected the other. There was no way to figure that out. Regardless, I was seeing Mom in a different light, an experience that was both very good and very bad. It was progress, I guessed.
Yes, it was all freaking marvelous with one
huge exception. In no way would Little Amy comprehend all of this so she could be better equipped to handle life as it was. First off, I couldn’t tell her. I was just a stranger, here on a one-time basis for twenty-four very short hours. Even if we could get closer, if I could gain her trust and get her to calm down long enough to listen to me, she wouldn’t understand. She couldn’t get it not because she wasn’t smart, but because she was too young and she thought this situation was “normal.” In fact, she would think that for the next thirty years.
Even though that was true, it was her take on what was happening now that would shape her future emotional foundation. It would be as big a part of who she thought she was as being born a native Houstonian, becoming a Texas Tech alumna, a wife and a mother. Naïve ten-year-olds shouldn’t be given the responsibility to remember important emotional stuff. Without any premeditation, they are destined to mess it up, and then their forty-something-year-old future selves mess it up even further.
My natural reaction to this wild set of revelations was to call somebody, text somebody. I was a girl who needed to talk, and I needed to talk to another girl. This was something that needed to be laid out on the table delicately, carefully dissected, put back together again and then reopened fifteen minutes after it was declared solved. This is what lady friends are for, the essence of their absolute necessity in the life of, well, a lady.
So, I could sneak down to the game room, where one of only three phones in this house was, but who the hell was I going to call?
My best friend at the time, Catherine, was ten years old, across the neighborhood in bed and totally unacquainted with the adult me. Sure, I could call her, at two-thirty in the morning, half-drunk and forty-six years old, sobbing hysterically, and her parents, Edna and George, would have me arrested. My best friend in the future, Julia, lived in England. Sure, she was twenty years old in 1978, but she had absolutely no clue who I was, plus I was pretty damn sure my parents didn’t have an internet phone line, meaning there would be no magically free international calls offered to desperate time travelers. Then there was my other bestie, Mary Barr. I didn’t know where the hell she lived in 1978, but she was only eight years old. If I could have found her, she would have believed me. Really, Julia, Mary Barr, Willie, Will and Matthew were the only ones who would have ever believed this. Or at least they would have said that they did so I wouldn’t think I was crazy. But they weren’t here. No one knew me here. Crap, I didn’t even know myself.
I kept going back to young Amy—primed to be different, not a clue about fashion, rough around the edges, wound tight and uncomfortably unique. Yeah, she was funny, creative and spirited, but she was destined for a run of awkward, painful years. She would struggle because of a lethal combination of who she was mixed with her situation in this house. Though it wasn’t anywhere near what other children faced, it was real. That and the perceived perfection of suburbia and middle-class financial security made it more sinister because it would never be recognized, discussed or validated. “Come on, you had it so good growing up. You lived in a beautiful home and had beautiful things. So your mom drank a little too much and yelled at you, pushed you and made you feel bad. Suck it up, there are a lot worse things in the world.”
Maybe there are a lot worse things in the world. But, maybe there aren’t. Who established the meter for “good” and “bad,” and who set the priorities for what constitutes a “good childhood” or a “good life”?
Having a swimming pool in your backyard is fun, going to Disneyland on vacation is awesome, but feeling truly loved and accepted is better than both. You will never see a television commercial in America that reflects that theme. Or, at least not one that won’t end by trying to get you to buy fabric softener, or a Hallmark card, or sour cream.
Nobody would explain any of that to Little Amy. In fact nobody would ever talk about what was going on, what was really going on. Why would they? Everything seemed to be going so well, I got that about my own adult life, and frankly the thought of the perceived goodness scared the life out of me.
And the best part? She had no clue. I wanted her to have a damn clue. I wanted her to suddenly “get it.” I wanted her to see the bigger picture. She needed to change herself. To be like everyone else, just so she didn’t have to spend the next nine years being convinced that she wasn’t good enough. Or, maybe I just didn’t want to see her doing it. God, I was glad I wasn’t transported into 1984 or 1985 when things were even more intensely weird and painful. That would have been the era of perms, braces, lots of acne and fake attempts at wearing ruffles and shoulder pads. God help us.
Maybe that was it. Maybe I was still so uncomfortable with my past self that I couldn’t see that the Little Amy was nothing more than a victim of the Big Amy. Oh crap … what did that even mean?
“Oh, Mom and her drinking … Oh, I’m the least favorite … Woe is me, the mistreated middle child …” Even though it was true, really true, truer than I had ever thought, and way more justifiable all at the same time, maybe the bigger truth was that I was an awkward child. An awkward, graceless, uncoordinated, angry girl who was difficult to love; mostly by herself, mostly by her adult self.
Was she unlovable because of the freak she was, or, instead, was she a freak because she wasn’t loved?
Did she throw herself down the stairs in the middle of the night, just to see if anyone would come and check on her, because there really was something wrong with her, something dysfunctional, or as a reaction to what was going on under the surface in this house? That actually happened, I was there. Did they ever discuss it, because they never talked about it with me? Were they worried? Or did they, like certain people who hallucinated, drank a lot, and almost got raped, just act like it never happened? How deep did this all go and what parts was I not remembering?
Was it any coincidence that the crap that only Jack Daniels could manage to squeeze out was the same messed-up stuff that Johnnie Walker had initially put in? Why was it that only after drinking almost half a bottle of Jack did I finally tell someone— my college roommate—a bunch of the real stuff that had happened to me? The sick irony was, I couldn’t remember what I told her that night any more than my Mom could remember everything she’d done.
In both instances, it was a choice. She chose the scotch and I chose the bourbon.
Wiping my eyes on the leg of a polyester pantsuit hanging over my head, I realized that the really screwed up part of this whole business was that everyone was going to forget about all this shit. Yeah, there would be pictures of the actual events, and sharp flashes of memory, because they were real, but still, everyone would forget. Because that was the thing to do. It wasn’t on purpose, it was human. And who wanted to go through life with all those memories in their head anyway? Maybe the luckiest people were those who couldn’t remember.
Eventually, thankfully, I lay in the fetal position on the floor and passed out, slobber moistening the gold-shag surface. Sometime before dawn I awoke, opened the door to the closet and crawled over to the bed. It was quiet and I felt sick. I began to question myself, almost completely subconsciously. Why did I let myself drink so much? Idiot. Why did I cry like that and fall asleep in the closet? Idiot. Why did I go outside at the party? Total Idiot.
It was all my fault, but at least I didn’t drunk-post on Facebook or text a bunch of people. At least there was that. As I drifted off, I thought about how lucky people were, thirty years ago, not to have the internet.
Chapter Seventeen
SMOKED ANKLES
Of all the things I had ever been at 24314 Creekview Drive, hungover wasn’t one of them. But, like any other day, tomorrow finally caught up with me.
Stretching out on the non-Tempur-Pedic mattress, not equipped with a down topper or even a fluffy mattress pad, I turned bleary eyed to the bedside table where a white clock sat. Rubbing my eyes, I zeroed in on the black and white numbers: 7:07. Staring, I heard a low buzz and then watched as the entire unit heaved. The last number sudde
nly flipped, turning the “seven” magically into an “eight.” 7:08. Cool.
Sitting up slowly, propping myself on the smallish pillows draped in dusty pink, I watched the sun begin to break behind the tall loblolly pines. Yes, loblolly pines. I had read that somewhere, and boy, wasn’t it coming in handy now? The scene would have been even more beautiful, breathtaking really, if my head wasn’t pounding and I wasn’t still pretending I was in 1978. I had to admit, if I had dreamed this up, I had done one hell of a job.
Finally willing myself to get up, I made my way to the bathroom and took a long, hard look in the mirror—it wasn’t pretty. Tear-smeared mascara mixed with blue eye shadow steaked across my face. I had tried the old half-drunk, soap-and-water routine in the wee hours of the night, but that didn’t even get half of what had been slapped on twenty-four hours ago.
Rifling through my cosmetic case, I pulled out the blue tub of Noxzema. Pulling back my massive, wild hair with what looked like a tennis sweatband, I slathered the thick cream on my face. Turning on the faucet, I realized, too late, that apparently the water pressure was weak during time travel. This stuff was going to be in my pores for the next thirty years. It was like trying to scrape peanut butter off a tortilla, only I didn’t have a spatula.
Finally rubbing off the last bit with an abrasive maroon-and-pink textured towel, I jumped in the shower, which had the same feeble water pressure as the sink. I was impressed with my naked self, though. Yes, if I was going to be delusional at least I was going to look freaking amazing in the all-nude. Maybe people ate better in 1978, despite the Crisco, butter, fat and oil. Maybe they dined out less, ate fewer snacks and had less access to access.
You Cannot Mess This Up Page 17
