Chapter One
I was two years old when my mother’s boyfriend forced his way into our house as I slept and wrapped his powerful hands around my mother’s neck, trying to extinguish her existence upon this earth. My mother took hold of a rusty kitchen knife resting on the counter and wildly thrashed about, stabbing him in the arms and legs until his grip was broken, and he ran out of the door, never to be heard from again. He was unsuccessful in his quest to kill my mother, and to this day I don’t know if his failure was a blessing...or a curse.
I’d made the decision early on that I wasn’t going to be one of those girls that gets straight As and gold stars, like the heroine of some teenage novel desperately seeking the love and approval of her mother; rather, I was going to accept the fact that my mother wasn’t worth the effort to seek approval from. I was going to be the antithesis of good—no gold stars for me, only the shared egocentric lifestyle where only I counted. I would not try to be something I was not. I would clearly and defiantly embrace my legacy. It was as though I was sitting at the top of the highest rollercoaster, front and center, staring down into a minuscule ebony tunnel. I was going to descend into that deep black abyss jubilantly and recklessly with my arms waving high above my head I was going to be exactly what everybody expected me to be—nothing.
According to the calendar, it was the sixth of March, but the sweltering heat and stifling humidity made it feel like a day straight out of July. We’d been in the throes of a heat wave in Louisville when my Aunt Audrey came to take me to Charlevoix, Michigan. The date held steadfastly in my mind because I’d never experienced such a drastic change in weather in such a short amount of time. It went from sweltering to snowy, all in less than eight hours.
Audrey Starling, my aunt, who I’d heard of but never met, came down to Louisville to bring me back to live with her in Michigan. Audrey, who I guessed was about thirty-five years old, pulled up in my foster mother’s driveway in a 1966 red Chevy truck. Her antiquated truck was lipstick red with a white stripe that ran uninterrupted along the side. It looked as though it had been restored to its original glory. I wondered if she was the one responsible for its restoration. I looked on intently from the stoop on the front porch as I watched her step out from the refurbished relic. I caught a look at her shoes; you can tell a lot about a person from their footwear. She had on Birkenstocks. Great, I thought. She’ll have me eating granola and posing in downward dog to find my inner peace. The rest of her followed, and she was definitely not dressed for the sticky Louisville heat wave we were currently experiencing. She had on faded jeans and a black turtleneck. What was with the Birkenstocks? Was she afraid of sweaty feet?
She tentatively walked up the driveway, and as she removed her sunglasses she asked, “Astrid?”
“Ya,” I replied without budging from my spot on the steps, as I slowly laid my hand across my guitar, and the black garbage bag that held all of my belongings.
“Hi, I’m Audrey, your aunt.” She said the last part as though she were asking a question rather than making a statement.
“Ya, hi,” I said as I pushed my hair back out of my eyes, attempting to get a better look at her.
Audrey moved towards me, folded her arms over the black railing and said, “Do you need help with the rest of your things? I brought my truck in case you need more room.”
I cracked a sideways smile, tapped my garbage bag and said, “This is it.”
Audrey seemed surprised and said, “Oh, well then. I’ll grab that for you.”
She stretched her arm over the railing to take the bag, but before she could grasp it, I abruptly snatched it up and snapped, “I got it.”
I couldn’t believe this woman. Who did she think she was? I didn’t even know her, and here she was thinking she would be some kind of savior coming down from on high to rescue the poor little foster child. I climbed in the rickety truck, and I imagined that the entire contents of whatever was under the hood were probably held together by a bungee cord. I threw my stuff under the dash and stared out of the window, managing a fake smile as I glanced her way. This was going to be a long trip, I imagined.
Audrey drove like a legally blind grandmother. She was set on driving fifty-five miles per hour, even though the speed limit was seventy in Northern Kentucky. As we drove, I wondered why on earth someone who wore Birkenstocks, which in my mind meant that she was some kind of granola crunching, trash recycling, yoga posing fiend, would drive such a disaster of a car. She certainly didn’t seem like the truck driving type. Her personality seemed to scream MINI COOPER. She continued driving at least ten miles below the legal speed limit through Kentucky, which made the ride seem even more tortuous and never-ending.
As we crept like molasses through Kentucky, a place I’d lived all my life, I knew that I would miss it, even though most of the memories I carried with me were painful to say the least. The countryside in Kentucky was rounded with emerald green hills and white fences that kept the thoroughbreds from running free. In March, the terrain was a lush green, and the flowers announced their presence as their ripening buds exploded from the granitic ground. As we rode in the old truck, I hung my head out of the window and felt the warm Kentucky air dampen my clothes and hair.
During the spring and especially in the summer, to call Kentucky hot seemed to be an understatement. The scalding cement sizzled beneath my feet, and the heavy air could make the most spirited person languid and sloth-like. The oppressive air hovered over the ground—suspended in a constant state of windlessness. It wasn’t just hot, it was wet too! The one hundred and twenty percent humidity seemed to leave me with many bad hair days. As we cut through the hills and valleys, I thought about how the other girls in school got their hair so smooth—it never frizzed, not even the tiniest bit, while mine just seemed to look as if I’d just stuck my finger in an electric socket. I couldn’t entirely blame it on the weather though, most girls spent hours in the morning making themselves pretty. I’d always had a hard time with the morning— we’d been long-time adversaries. I figured that kind of stuff had already been biologically programmed into my DNA; there was nothing that I could do about it. I usually made it out of bed in just enough time to jump in the shower, throw on my trusty jeans and a T-shirt, and put my startled corkscrew hair up into a ponytail.
As we drove, the sticky humidity of Kentucky was exchanged for the chilly rain of Northern Ohio. I silently stared out of the window allowing the persistent thoughts about my mother to ravage my mind. It scared me to think about having her DNA, or my father’s for that matter. My mother, who I simply referred to as A—, was a real screw up, and my father, well, since I didn’t know who he was, could be anyone. If it came down to DNA, I’m pretty sure that I was screwed.
Audrey had been apologetic during the trip, saying sorry this and sorry that; she didn’t need to be sorry. This was not the first time I’d been put into a car with my garbage bag full of clothes and taken to a new place of residence, but I knew with everything in me that this would be the last time. I’d been in and out of the foster care system for years before Audrey found out about my existence and came to save me.
I was going to be eighteen in nine months, and I was sure, like most foster kids on their eighteenth birthday, that I’d be told in an ever-so-gentle way—that’s it kid, you’re on your own. Audrey didn’t owe me anything, and we both knew it. I could pick up on her uneasiness over taking on a seventeen-year-old transient as her fingers fumbled across the ancient radio controls. We were both strangers, and I didn’t expect her to be anything else.
My mother first went to jail when I was six years old. She and her boyfriend of the moment opened an account u
sing a fake ID, and in her words, “we got a bunch of checks.” They wrote them all over town. They bought a television, stereo, a new refrigerator, and then they cashed the rest around town at local bank branches and grocery stores. It didn’t take long for them to get caught. I was a kid, and I knew they were going to get caught. You didn’t need to be especially bright to see that one coming. A— was never known for being especially bright.
My mother had been in jail for about six months before she was released for good behavior. I guess they didn’t have check books in jail. During that time I was placed with my first family of strangers. According to A—, we had no relatives that wanted to take me.
It was a long four years before she was sent to jail for the final time. No six-month stint for her, nooo, she and her new boyfriend Chuck, along with his friend Larry, were arrested for drug possession with the intent to sell. That embedded the motto into my head that no good can come from anyone named Chuck and Larry.
Chuck and Larry were drug dealers, more Pineapple Express than Scarface. Those two seemed to go hand in hand with stupidity—not evil, just stupid. I’d always imagined news stories describing the plethora of dimwitted activities that guys like Chuck and Larry were engaged in—for instance, Chuck and Larry shot their big toes off while target shooting, or Chuck and Larry blew their fingers off while lighting fireworks. I decided that no good could come from socializing with the Chucks and Larrys of the world.
So there it was. A— had been sent to jail for ten years. They had mandatory sentences for drug possession, and with the intent to sell, well, that was the final nail in her coffin. That’s when I was placed, yet again, into the system.
Ten foster homes and seven years later, here I was on my way to Charlevoix, Michigan—located at what seemed to be the top of the world. The towns we passed in Michigan looked to be in a constant state of hibernation—waiting for something extraordinary to happen. From the looks of the abandoned stores and decaying houses, it seemed that fortune had not smiled upon these towns in quite some time. Audrey told me that most of the autoworkers in the Midwest had lost their jobs because of the increase in foreign car sales. I’d heard that Charlevoix and its surrounding areas once had been thriving tourist hot spots, and now the citizens were trying to restore their town to its former glory. I wondered if they’d succeeded.
As we sputtered through Southern Michigan in the unsteady Chevy, which by now I was absolutely sure had only been refurbished cosmetically, I looked out of the window as the flat brown lifeless land peeked through the stained ivory snow. It reminded me of one of those frosted oatmeal cookies. My stomach began to growl at the thought of food. It felt strange to see this crystallized sheath covering the ground, and I thought as we bounced along the pothole-infested roads that I was not entirely opposed to the idea of a cold spring. It seemed to make everything look a little cleaner, as it covered the flat valleys and collapsing houses we’d passed along the way. We drove silently, barely taking notice of each other through the soybean, sugar beet, and wild flower fields. I thought as we sat in the quietness that this move wouldn’t be the worst thing that had ever happened to me. In fact, it might not be a bad thing at all—well, no worse than I had already experienced.
We passed a sugar processing plant on the outskirts of Bay City, and I suddenly felt nauseated. There was an awful smell that filled my nostrils and turned my stomach. It smelled like someone had burned a thousand oily rags in a vat of sugar.
“What’s that smell?” I said as I leaned down to retrieve my garbage bag, and looked impatiently for my book to cover my nose with it. I preferred the musty smell of the pages to the stink that loomed outside and permeated the truck.
“That’s a sugar plant. They grow sugar beets around here, and that’s where they process them,” she said, pointing towards where the foul smell originated. “Does that garbage bag have all of your stuff?”
I looked quizzically at her, and while I had an endless supply of smartass remarks to make, I merely replied, “Ya.”
I quickly found my book and opened it to the place where my bookmark rested. I enjoyed reading. It was something I was good at, it relaxed me, and made me feel better when things were awkward—and things were definitely awkward. I inhaled deeply and savored the slightly sweet aroma of the mildewed pages.
Ironically, being a good reader had not necessarily made me a good student. I rarely went to school, as I didn’t see the point. In school they told kids what to read and what to think. That hardly seemed fair. The best part about reading was the ability to choose your own stories, and then the freedom to interpret it however you wanted to. I didn’t think it was necessary to write book reports to prove to other people that that I had a deeper understanding of the book.
High school wasn’t for me anyway; it was filled with posers and derelicts. Most kids were either working toward college or a twelve-step program. I wasn’t working toward either anymore. I’d found that it was much easier to simply not show up to school. In the past, I really hadn’t had to do too much work because most of the time I’d been placed in a different foster home every six months or so—that meant a new school and new teachers. By the time the teachers had finally received my test results (which were good) it didn’t take them long to figure out that I wasn’t living up to my potential, but by then it was usually too late. Poof...I was gone. I figured what was the point of school. I knew I was going to end up like my mother anyway.
I bounced around in the rickety truck and stared aimlessly out of the window. We’d been on the road since six in the morning, and I was starting to feel the boredom mixed with the fatigue of riding all day with few breaks. Audrey finally pulled into the driveway of a house that looked like a shoebox. It was long and rectangular with one window on either side of the door. I looked down and checked my watch—it read eight-thirty in the evening.
“Get your stuff Astrid, I have a room ready for you,” she insisted.
I shook my head to get myself out of my self-induced mind fog, grasped my black garbage bag, and dusted the dirt from the floor of the truck off of it. I unraveled my body like a ball of string, as I stepped out of the car.
“I hope you didn’t go to a lot of trouble to fix up a room for me, I might not be here that long,” I said. Audrey purposely ignored that comment, and started inside the house.
The house, or the shoebox as I liked to call it, was decorated with white paint that had seriously chipped along the sides. The peaks of the house were adorned with old brown slabs of wood that made the house, in Audrey’s words, German. I thought it was just unattractive. There were no bushes around the front of the house, but there were tall, overgrown, and slightly worrisome-looking oak trees all over the yard. They worried me because they looked as if they could fall onto the house at any given moment.
As I entered the house, the smell of mildew filled my nostrils. The single room I walked through was tidy, with lace curtains hanging from what looked to be the original windows. The windows were positioned along the right side of the house in a singular line of glass and wood that held slight cracks that let the cold air waft across my face. The main living room (which basically was the main room) was punctuated with a small kitchen-like nook at the back of the house. The kitchen looked like it hadn’t been changed since the fifties. The walls were mint green and it had an ice box—not a refrigerator, but an old fashioned ice box—the kind that people would have spent a lot of money on nowadays at an antique store. It didn’t seem to look trendy in Audrey’s house, just old and used.
There were three bedrooms situated along the left side of the house directly off of the main living room. The layout of this particular house was devoid of any hallways. One room led directly into the next room without any transitions. One of those rooms was only a bedroom in theory because it lacked a closet. Of course, that was my room—the fluffy pink comforter gave it away. The other two rooms were very small, and my room was even smaller. In my new room, the paneled walls had just been
painted white. The fresh clean smell of enamel gave the new paint job away. My room looked as though it was added on very cheaply at a later date in the life of the house. It seemed more like the size of a jail cell, and of course it was right next to the bathroom. Look at me, I was getting closer to my mother’s fate every day! I had my very own fluffy pink jail cell.
Audrey followed behind me. “This is your room,” she said.
I could feel that this was an uneasy moment for both of us. Audrey hadn’t known of my existence outside of a few months ago. She also told me that she hadn’t spoken to A—in fifteen years. I wasn’t sure why they hadn’t spoken. A— had never really mentioned Audrey, except for once, I must have been around five, maybe six years old when I’d found a picture in the back of my mother’s closet. When I’d asked who the girl was beside her in the picture, she simply said, “It’s my ex-sister.”
I put down my garbage bag, and said, “Thanks.” I looked at the twin-sized bed that was covered with the oversized pink comforter, and thought good God, how old did she think I was? The room looked as though it was decorated for a six-year-old, not a seventeen-year-old.
“The lady at the store picked out this pink, I hope its okay,” she said.
“It’s fine.” I was lying through my teeth. The only thing missing were posters of Justin Bieber. I guess just because she’d been a teenager at one time, didn’t mean that she knew what a seventeen-year-old would like now.
I carefully untied my bag, and lifted out my most precious belongings, of which I had very few. The first was my favorite book. I didn’t think I was a nerd, but I loved the book “Return of the Native,” by Thomas Hardy. Eustacia Vye had always affected me. She was such a heartbreaking character. I guess she reminded me of A— in a tragic sort of way; she was always looking for something better, but in a totally self-destructive way. I placed the book carefully along the makeshift wooden board that was meant to be a shelf, and stood back to survey my surroundings. I looked behind me, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the plain brown paper bag I’d packed. It contained a black leather belt, an empty box of Marlboro Reds, and an old tattered scarf. I scooped up the bag, and quickly threw it in one of the open drawers, and then turned my attention to the rest of my things in my garbage bag.
The Idyllic Chaos of My So-Called Life Page 1
