by Marie Simas
6. Speaking of laundry, American washing machines suck. They’re only good for washing cumbersome things, like sheets or cloth diapers. You should really wash all of your clothes by hand, and then hang them up. The dryer destroys everything and eats socks. Plus, it costs too much to run. The sun is free. But make sure you turn the jeans inside out, because the sun will bleach the blue from the blue jeans.
7. Hang underwear in the garage so nobody will see it on the clothesline. The same for bras and slips, too.
8. Respectable women wear slips under their dresses; it’s okay if a few inches peeks out at the bottom of your dress, as long as you’re wearing one. Knee-high nylons are okay to wear with knee-length skirts. No one will notice if you pull the knee-highs up high enough. The best nylons are the ones that come in the plastic egg at the supermarket. Then save the plastic egg for Easter.
9. Miniskirts are for whores. The only girls who should wear short skirts are still wearing Pampers.
10. The best cure for stomach problems is 7-Up.
Grandmother Moves In
1990, WINTER. AGE 17
Mother never really got any better. In the end, she got her wish. When we returned to the United States, she deteriorated slowly. After two years, she could no longer walk and her memory failed. The last year she was alive, she couldn’t speak or eat on her own.
The insurance paid for a hospital bed and a nurse. The nurse only lasted a week. She was appalled by the way my mother was being treated. I think the big point of contention was that my father wasn’t giving my mother any painkillers. The nurse said she would go to the police. Father threatened her, and a nurse never came to the house again.
One horrible night, my father raped her in the hospital bed. She screamed for help. My brother and I, awakened from our sleep, pounded on the door, which was locked. My father came out and yelled at us. The screaming stopped.
After that night, my mother begged her mother Amalia to stay with her at night and protect her from my father. Grandmother announced that she would now be sleeping over to help take care of us. My father didn’t protest. Considering my grandmother’s upbringing, I’m sure she felt it the best protection she could offer my mother.
Grandmother took over my parent’s bedroom and my father slept in the spare bedroom on a pullout sofa. The sexual assault was never discussed.
The rapes stopped, but there still weren’t any painkillers. My father had health insurance, which would have paid the full cost for the prescriptions. I never understood why he decided to withhold them.
Mother wore diapers and I helped my grandmother change her a few times. It was awful. She weighed less than ninety pounds—a withered skeleton.
Mother finally died at home when I was seventeen. My brother ran to get me from the living room. Grandmother was standing over my mother, and she put a candle in my mother’s hand.
“Marie, Marie... hold your mother’s hand. Say your goodbyes. It’s happening, it’s happening.” My grandmother said.
I didn’t speak. I was numb.
The funeral director was our former neighbor, Mr. Grant. He came over in the middle of the night and wrapped my mother in a white sheet, rolling her up like a mummy. My little brother Johnny stood in the doorway. His face was white. He was thirteen. I don’t think I saw my brother smile again for ten years.
That night, we didn’t speak. My brother and I sat mutely at the dinner table, staring into space. The house was completely silent.
My father came into the kitchen and sat down facing us. A single bulb hung over the table, casting shadows on my father’s contorted face. Father sat very still for a minute, then pounded his fist on the table. BAM! Then again, BAM!
“If you ever... EVER disrespect your mother in front of me, I’ll KILL YOU!” Father screamed.
My brother and I jumped, startled. What was he going to do to us? Was he going crazy? Would he beat us? He was on the edge of madness.
Then he put his head down on the table for a second, sobbing quietly. It was the first time I ever saw my father cry. Then he got up and left the house. I heard the garage door open and he left us there, alone. Those words were the only consolation he had for us. That was it.
My brother’s eyes brimmed with tears. He said, “I don’t even remember what it was like when Mom wasn’t sick.”
“I know. I’m sorry, Johnny. I don’t know what else to say.”
We sat there in silence for a little while longer and then I went to bed. There was a wake and a rosary the next day. The funeral was planned for the following day.
On the day of my mother’s funeral, my father caught me applying my makeup and became enraged.
‘What are you doing? I don’t want any whores at my wife’s funeral! Take that shit off!”
I left the makeup on. What more could he do to me? All of his threats were empty.
At the funeral, my father took pictures of the body. My mother’s family was greatly distressed by this. Mother had requested a closed casket and they felt my father was deliberately disobeying her final wishes, which of course he was. But nobody ever said anything to him. He just kept snapping away. The “casket pictures” occupy the last few pages of our family photo album.
Father never hugged us, even at the funeral.
A few days later, we visited my mother’s grave. It was the middle of the day, but a thick fog hung in the air. It was early November. All the trees were stripped of their leaves, off on the horizon like gray skeletons.
There was another Portuguese woman at the cemetery, a widow who had lost her husband a few years earlier. She was there with her two children, who were also teenagers, but a few years younger than us. She walked over to us to offer her condolences. My father hit on her in front of me. I could tell that the woman was shocked at this appalling breach of cemetery etiquette and she looked at me. I stared at her like she was stupid. What did she expect me to do?
That Christmas was our last Christmas together. We spent it alone at our house. My father didn’t buy us any presents and we didn’t have a tree. There was a poinsettia on the TV, which my father had stolen from the teachers’ lounge at school.
Best Artist in High School
SPRING. AGE 17
In high school, I was a good artist. I won three art scholarships, in addition to being named “Best Female Artist” by our graduating class.
The yearbook club gave me a full spread just for my art. I was obsessed with comic book art at the time, so my picture was a very nice rip-off of one of my favorite Marvel characters, the Scarlet Witch, I think. I really can’t remember. The boy who won “Best Male Artist” was a Mexican kid named Luis. He had some real talent for murals, Diego Rivera style. Luis was especially fond of drawing Aztec figures with exaggerated genitals.
Instead of spending my mother’s final hours with her, I spent my time drawing. Sometimes I would stay at my drawing table for eight hours straight, working into the early morning. I would go right into my room after school and would only come out to eat and pee.
I had to have the lights out by 10:30, so I often pretended to be asleep. I would wait until I thought my father had fallen asleep, then close my door quietly and start drawing again. I drew thousands and thousands of line drawings and completed comic books. I even drew nudes. I had an old art reference book, The Human Figure by Erik Ruby. The book is an artist’s photographic reference and it’s full of nude models. My father thought it was okay because it was scholarly. The female model has armpit hair and a giant bush.
I took four years of art in high school. The last two were independent study. I loved my art teacher, Ms. Minkle. But I didn’t know she was a lesbian. I was totally clueless. She invited me to her house for a dinner party with real adults. Everyone made a toast at the dinner table. Her partner was there. And they certainly looked like lesbians—short crew-cuts, lots of cats, cactus collection on the front porch (why do lesbians like cactus so much?) But like I said, I was socially retarded.
After the toast, I said lou
dly, “So, hey, when are you going to get a boyfriend, Ms. Minkle?”
Everyone froze. I kept going. “You can only stay single for so long, right?”
Nobody said anything. They were all just staring at me. Ms. Minkle took me outside and told me.
“Marie... I’m a lesbian.”
“What? You’re a... what?” I was incredulous. I didn’t say much for the rest of the party. I felt so dumb. I went back to class the next day and I never mentioned the dinner party again. I wasn’t invited back.
My art skills kept getting better and better. I started requesting catalogs for different art schools. My first choice was the Pasadena College of Fine Arts in Southern California. I knew my father could afford it and I really wanted to go. I started saving money, too. By the end of my senior year, I had saved $4,000.
Then, right after I took my SATs, my father said, “You need to go to State. I’m not paying for you to go down to Southern California and act like a whore down there. Plus, you should find something useful to do. All you do is dirty paper all day.”
Of all the shitty things he said to me during my childhood, this might be the phrase that changed the course of my life the most. Even now, when I hear parents discouraging their children from something they love in order to pursue something more “practical,” it makes my skin crawl. I want to punch their front teeth out.
Why wouldn’t you want your kids to succeed at something that they love? Why? Seriously? We are only on this planet for a nanosecond and if your son wants to be a professional snowboarder, then fucking let him. Maybe he’ll surprise you. Most parents want their kids to be as miserable as they are.
Yes, that’s it—become a fucking billing analyst. You won’t regret that on your deathbed or, better yet, wind up hitting the crack pipe at forty-eight because you woke up and realized that half of your life is over and you spent it inventorying urinal cakes and cardboard boxes.
Even so, I thought it would be okay. I accepted the fact that I would attend State and that I could study fine art there, instead. I ordered a catalog and starting poring over the requirements for the major.
Then everything changed.
One night, I was working on a drawing. It was perfect— one of the best I’d ever done. I’d spent two days on the penciling and now I was doing the inking, very meticulously, dot-by-dot, with a fine fountain pen.
Like usual, I waited until my father was asleep and then I crawled out of bed and turned on my little desk lamp and started working. It was past midnight when my father swung the door open.
“What are you DOING?!” He was enraged.
“Sorry! Sorry! I’ll go to sleep.” I quickly snapped off the desk lamp and jumped into bed, but he had already turned on the bedroom light and was walking toward me menacingly.
“What are you DOING?” he repeated.
I flinched and looked away, expecting him to punch me.
He didn’t hit me. Instead, he grabbed the drawing and crumpled it in his right hand while staring at me. He stared at me—not the crumpled paper. I stared at the paper and he threw it at my face.
I gasped. I could feel the tears coming. It was the first time he had destroyed a piece of my artwork.
I put my hands over my face and started crying.
“It would have been better if you’d hit me, Dad! Why didn’t you just hit me? Why did you have to destroy my art?” I cried.
I was wailing—I couldn’t stop. I cried and cried, lying there in the dark. My father could hear me and came storming back into my room.
“Shut up! Shut the fuck up, you little bitch!” He raised his fist and shook it, but he didn’t hit me.
I bit my lip to stop the crying. I sobbed quietly for a few more hours and finally drifted off to sleep. The next day was Saturday, so I waited until my father left the house and then I got out the ironing board and tried to iron the picture out. It wouldn’t flatten all the way, so I walked down to the local library and tried to photocopy it. The photocopies were fifteen cents each. I stole the coins from my father’s nightstand.
But the library copier was old and shitty. The image turned out grainy. I went home and tried to start over, tracing the picture by taping it to the window. But it just wasn’t the same. My father had stolen the magic out of the picture.
And out of me.
That week, I put all my drawings, my supplies, and my T-Square and triangle in the closet. I stopped drawing. I just sat in my room and read comics.
My father was actually surprised, but he didn’t say anything right away.
“Why do you do things to the extreme, Marie?” he asked me about a week later. He was referring to the fact that I had put all my art supplies away, some of which he had actually purchased for me.
I shrugged and didn’t say anything. He never mentioned the incident again and neither did I.
I ended up going to San Francisco State. I took one art class my first semester. Beginning Drawing, I think. I hated the teacher and I was bored. All we did was draw fruit bowls. I got a B. I never took another art class again.
I ended up studying medieval literature, which I enjoyed. My classes were fun and I liked all my professors. I’m friends with a few of them to this day. These days, I work as a technical writer, so at least I’m doing something creative. But I still feel like writing is forced—like a painter who takes up sculpture because he can no longer see well enough to paint.
Words were never meant to be my medium. I’m not being dramatic or feeling sorry for myself. My life is good now.
But something died inside me that day and I’ve never been able to get it back. Believe me, I’ve tried. My husband bought me a light table and some drawing tools last April as a surprise, but they’re still sitting in the closet, unopened. At least once a year, I go to the local art store and stare at the paint and canvasses. Sometimes I buy supplies, and sometimes I don’t.
I never end up using them.
Maybe one day, when I’m eighty, I’ll pick up a paintbrush and it will all come back.
They say it’s just like riding a bike.
Summer Lovin’
1991, SUMMER. AGE 17
When I was seventeen, I went to the Azores with my father and my brother for the last time. My mother had died a few months before and my father was trolling for a new wife. I went along for the ride. We were there for three months.
I certainly had fun! I succeeded in embarrassing my father and I fucked the hottest guy in the village.
I had been taking birth control pills for years and I decided to bring them with me on the trip. Of course, my parents never knew and I’d become quite good at hiding them. Thank goodness for Planned Parenthood; I got my first pap smear and my first supply of birth control pills at fifteen. I paid ten dollars for my first gynecological visit. I used a false name and refused to give them my telephone number.
I was afraid that somehow the foil packets would set off the metal detectors at the airport, so I punched all the pills out of their foil blister packs and transferred them to a Tylenol bottle. There was Tylenol in there, too, just in case. I put the birth control pills at the bottom, then a layer of cotton, then the Tylenol, and then another layer of cotton. I got through security, no problem. I took my pills every day because I was hell-bent on getting laid while I was on vacation.
When we arrived on the island, we went straight to our old cabin, which had exactly three pieces of furniture—a bench, a table, and a little gas stove. That’s it. No beds, no plates, no nothing. But it had a bathroom with a working toilet, which was a luxury. No hot water, but still it was a comfort to have a bathtub with running water and a flushing toilet. The only sink was in the bathroom.
The water from the faucet was slightly brackish, so it was unpleasant to drink. When I was thirsty, I went to the basement and got water from the old cement tank that collected rainwater. I scooped it out with a little metal bucket tied to a string. There was a mesh filter on the pipe to prevent lizards from falling into the tank.
We found mattresses in the basement. They were hillbilly style, meaning that the stuffing was actually dried corn husks rather than traditional mattress filling. There were two bedrooms. My father and brother slept in one, and I in the other. We laid the mattresses on the floor and slept under old quilts. The quilts were moldy and made my allergies flare up.
There was a nineteen-year-old boy in the village named Paulo that I instantly fell for. We met the last time I had visited the Azores, but I was too young on our last visit, so nothing happened.
He was six feet tall and had dark brown hair, green eyes, and a cleft chin. He had nice teeth, too—which was rare on the island. Usually people were missing one or two by the time they got to their twenties. Paulo was gorgeous.
We met up immediately in the town square and started flirting. Paulo was smitten, and so was I. The relationship escalated quickly.
Summer lovin’.
We spent the remainder of my trip trying to find private places to fuck. We fucked everywhere we could—in his old truck, at the dances—we would sneak out and go into the bushes. We even broke into a few houses and fucked there. I really liked him.
All I did was screw around, have fun, and get drunk for three whole months! What a vacation! Ninety days of bliss.
Father got wind of my whorish escapades because Paulo bragged to some of his buddies. Why can’t men keep their mouths shut? The rumors got around, and one of my cousins finally told my dad, who confronted me late one night.
“I know what you’re doing with Paulo!”
“So?” I said. “What are you going to do about it?”
He bit his tongue and raised his fist at me. I didn’t flinch. I stared him down.
“Well? Are you going to punch me? Do it. I’ll scream. I don’t give a shit what you think. I’m having fun.” I folded my arms in front of my chest. He was an old man, and he simply didn’t scare me anymore.
Father lowered his hand slowly. He put his nose really close to my face. Then he shook his fist at me. It was a weird show of strength, like apes in the jungle. I silently wondered if he would start hooting and scratching his armpit. I stared at his face. He looked angrier and angrier, but my stare never wavered. My heart pounded in my chest. I wasn’t going to back down... not this time.
