by Karen Reis
Yes, I told myself, turning away from the view of my apartment to face my car that was parked right behind me. After a while, things would settle and Nancy would forgive me, and life would go back to normal, at least until I managed to find myself a boyfriend. I just had to wait her out, but in the mean time, I refused to give in.
I unlocked the trunk of my car. It was full of boxes of books, my one true weakness, while the inside of my car was filled to bursting with three suitcases of clothes, a sleeping bag, a couple of boxes filled with things like my alarm clock, an umbrella, shoes, knickknacks and other things that generally go in a bedroom, and another box of full of random household items that I had managed to pick up at garage sales over the last two weekends living at Judy’s. I had nothing else, no furniture, no pots or dishes or silverware, no towels and no groceries to cook for my supper that night. I hadn’t taken anything with me from my parent’s house but the things that I had paid for myself, and that hadn’t applied to the rickety old bed my parents had bought for me in high school, or the set of ugly yellow dresser drawers that had passed from both of my sisters to me. I didn’t want Nancy to accuse me of stealing from her, which I honestly wouldn’t put past her, especially since she’d done it to me before.
I carried all my clothes upstairs first, set my suitcases down along one wall of my empty studio and looked around. The carpet was brown and cheap, the walls had been painted so many times you could hardly see the texture anymore, and the kitchen appliances looked like they were on their last legs. It was clean though, and there was a decent sized back patio where I immediately planned to start a potted vegetable garden. I knew that to most people it didn’t look like much, but to me, the apartment was perfect and it was mine, and it contained no bitter memories.
I went downstairs, planning to unload my car and then go on a shopping spree to Target for a few necessities, but a sight in the parking lot stopped me in my tracks. There was Judy, her silver Buick parked next to my Chevy, and there was her son Greg backing his truck up to the curb, his wife Tiffany sitting next to him in the cab. Judy came up to me with a big grin on her face as I stared in confusion.
“What’s going on?” I asked as Judy hugged me hello.
I hugged her back. There was a time not so long ago that I had hated hugging and other types of physical contact. Judy had helped break my aversion to affectionate gestures with a little bit of kindness and a lot of love.
“I went shopping,” Judy said brightly as Greg and Tiffany got out and let the tailgate of the truck down. In its bed was a brand new twin mattress and box spring, along with a simple bed frame. There were a few boxes stacked up next to it.
“What do you mean you went shopping?” I asked suspiciously. When I had first moved out of my parent’s home, Judy had offered to help me buy the things I would need to get started, like a bed and dishes, but I had refused her. She was on a fixed income, I told her, and I didn’t want her spending money on me. Truthfully, though, the real reason I didn’t want her help was because I had something to prove. Nancy was convinced that I would fail and come crawling back in need of shelter and money.
I was going to prove her wrong. I was going to do it on my own, I was going to make it work, and I was never going back, on my knees or otherwise.
Judy beamed happily as Greg and Tiffany, after saying hello to me, began carrying the twin mattress and box spring upstairs. “There was a sale down at Mattress World, so I bought you a bed – they threw in a pair of sheets for free – and the boxes are full of some dishes and other kitchen things. It’s mostly all used things, donated by Tiffany and some of your other friends. We got you new pots though and even some towels so you can take a proper shower tonight and not worry about a thing. Oh, and I’ve got a few bags of groceries in my car too.”
I watched Greg and Tiffany enter my apartment and come back out empty handed. I shook my head in disbelief. “But-”
Judy cut off my protestations. “Now, don’t even think about sending us packing, Carrie. And shame on you for sneaking out of the house and not letting us help you at all. You need these things, and you deserve them.”
“But-”
She touched my arm, which shut me up. “You’re like a daughter to me, Carrie, and right now you need some family to make sure you have what you need to get started.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but my throat was tight with emotion. “I’ll pay you back,” I whispered.
Judy shook her head. “Not necessary, Carrie, and you know it. This is a gift.”
“You shouldn’t have done this,” I said forcefully, trying to hold back tears of gratitude. I hated crying in front of people. “Nancy’s going to find out and-”
“And I don’t give a damn, Carrie,” Judy said just as forcefully. “Whether you believe it or not, you are not on your own. Everybody needs help once and a while. Let me do this for you, and then I promise I’ll let you sink or swim on your own. But it’s alright to accept help.” She embraced me in a mother’s hug, warm and caring, and my throat tightened up even more, making it impossible for me to speak.
“It’s alright to be a little vulnerable,” she said. “You don’t have anything to prove to me, Carrie. I’m proud of you just the way you are.”
I fought back my tears and nodded. She was right. I did need a little help, and I was grateful for it. To show my thanks, I began to swiftly help Greg and Tiffany carry boxes full of treasure up to my new home.
Dear Dad,
How could you ever think that it was okay for Nancy to scream at us, to tell us that we were “worthless little shits”, ugly, lazy, fat, stupid bitches? Did you think that just because Nancy didn’t beat us that we weren’t being abused? I don’t remember Nancy ever hitting Lindsay and Vanessa; they were older, in high school, and I’m sure they would have spoken up about that, but there were times when Nancy did come very close to crossing the line with me, a little girl. Do you remember how, when you were dating her, that I called her mommy right away? I was only four and I wanted a mommy so badly. It had pleased Nancy that I called her that, but sometime after you married her, everything stopped pleasing Nancy. Nothing we did was right, and everything was wrong, and I feared her.
I remember telling her that too, after one particular outburst of temper. She was yelling at me, and asked me why I was just standing there stupidly. I told her that I was afraid of her, that we, my sisters and I, were all afraid of her. That just made her angrier, and she exploded at me, but you just sat by and did nothing.
When I was in high school, I stopped fearing Nancy and instead she became afraid of me. Do you remember all that wood I used to chop for camping trips? I didn’t chop wood just because I enjoyed the physical release it gave for my own temper against Nancy’s unreasonableness, but because it made me strong. I dug all those holes and lugged all that dirt to fill up that goddamn, ugly, eyesore of a pool in our backyard for the same reason, to become physically strong, stronger than Nancy, so that on the off chance she did one day blow a gasket and attack me, I would be able to take her out. Nancy knew it too. She could see it in my eyes, and she told me that if I ever did attack her she’d call the cops on me.
I was pretty proud of the fact that she was afraid of me back then, that the tables had been partially flipped, but now, looking back, I just think that’s sad. A home is supposed to be a haven, not the place where your wife and daughter prepare themselves for possible violence from each other. I lay responsibility for this on your shoulders. You were the head of our household, and you are my father. What the hell was going on in your head when I told Nancy that I was afraid of her? What the hell went on in your head when she screamed obscenities at us, your daughters, when she belittled us, threw things, controlled us, and tried to take away anything that we, your flesh and blood, loved?
Why did you never stop her?
With much confusion,
Your Daughter
Chapter 2
I mentioned earlier that I’ve always been somethi
ng of a loner. I like to observe and listen. I now know that it was something of a survival skill which allowed me to escape from Nancy’s wrath from time to time, but it is also a handy trait to have under normal circumstances too. I was shy about communicating with my neighbors on either side of me, but I did learn quite a bit about them from just observing them over my first few weeks living there. I learned that the neighbor on my left was a homosexual biker by the name of Charles. He had a boyfriend named Glen who looked like the guy who played Wedge Antilles in the Star Wars movies, which I thought was very cool because Wedge was my own personal hero.
Charles did his laundry every Monday morning at 9 am sharp, which I thought was very odd and rather OCD of him, and he and his boyfriend went grocery shopping for the week together on Sundays in this old 1950’s Ford truck he was fixing up himself, and he always bought lots and lots of brown eggs. He liked to grill their dinners on a little hibachi out on his patio, and he always played mix CD’s with interesting band combinations while he cooked. Imagine a CD with Green Day, Beethoven, Toto and Brooks and Dunn on it, and you would have imagined Charles’s favorite CD. He had a pretty good singing voice, too, and I liked to open my own patio door and listen in; interestingly enough, we liked a lot of the same music.
The neighbor on my other side was a single heterosexual man who kept mostly to himself and rarely had company over. He was a good neighbor; not loud or obnoxious. He was some sort of mechanic, and he liked to spend time on some weekends tinkering under the hood of his truck, a 1970-something navy-blue Chevy Bonanza. Every once in a while, I would see him with Charles under the Ford’s hood, and vice versa, with Charles under the Bonanza’s hood, but that seemed to be the extent of their neighborly relationship.
I saw my heterosexual neighbor from time to time, but I never did more than nod politely and murmur a hello when we happened to pass by each other. You see, he wasn’t the sort of man I would normally start a conversation with. He had colorful tattoos on both forearms and his head was shaved bald. Two black plugs were drilled into the lobes of his ears and he was very tall, very muscular, and when I saw him, he was almost always dirty and smelled of gasoline and sweat.
To say the least, he was scary looking and he intimidated me. When he frowned, he looked like the sort of man who killed puppies and kicked cats and bullied children in his spare time.
On my very first day off from work after I’d moved into my new home, I went to at the local thrift store and bought a used Crock-pot and some other essential kitchen stuff that they happened to have. Judy and my friends had done a wonderful job with the basics, something for which I am still grateful for down to this day, but there were still a lot of useful things that I didn’t have like ice cube trays, cookie sheets and cake pans. My income was tight, and I budgeted like a Nazi, so even though I needed a lot of things, I had to be patient and wait to buy them. I went on several limited shopping sprees over the months.
The first time I actually met my bald neighbor, and by meet, I mean more than simply eyeballing him suspiciously from across the parking lot, was after one such shopping spree to the thrift store; I had also gone to Target to pick up a few feminine necessities. At the thrift store I found a nice set of eight water glasses with clear daisies etched onto their surfaces, along with some lightly used bake-ware and some Pyrex mixing bowls. I had even hit the jackpot and found a small microwave in decent condition. It was the end of the day though, and I was tired and hungry, which always makes me crabby, and I decided to get as much as I could upstairs in as few trips as possible. I lugged the heavy microwave upstairs first, my bake-ware balanced precariously on top, and on my second and final trip, I slung my Target bags over both arms and balanced my two boxes of used glassware in my hands. I was halfway up the stairs when one of my shopping bags caught on a bit of protruding metal from the handrail and broke open, spilling its contents down the concrete steps.
“Dang it!” I exclaimed in dismay, and watched as a box of Tampons, some black nylons, and a package of new underwear with multicolored hearts and squiggles on them tumbled down, down, down the stairs in beautifully choreographed somersaults, and finally came to a rest against a pair of battered black boots that belonged to my scary neighbor, who I privately called Baldy. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs in his stained mechanic’s coverall. Apparently, he’d just come home from work.
I don’t think I’d ever been more embarrassed as I looked him in the eye from above. I was blushing furiously and trying to speak in something more dignified than a choked squawk. You have to understand that I felt uncomfortable putting Tampon boxes on the conveyor belt at the checkout station if my checker was a man – because God forbid he should discover that I was capable of bearing children – so I was absolutely mortified that my Tampons had actually rolled up on my scary neighbor’s feet.
I stared at Baldy for a moment with my mouth hanging open, and then literally ran down the stairs, boxes of glass still in my hands, all the while apologizing profusely as I tried not to look him in the eye anymore. I set the boxes down on the stairs and tried to gather my things back up into my ripped bag, but my underwear and then the Tampons kept falling out as the man watched me in what must have been shock or horror or amusement, and I finally exclaimed in frustration, “Well, Jesus Christ on a piece of toast!”
I grabbed my purse, which I had slung over one shoulder, and began stuffing what I could in there.
My outburst seemed to wake Baldy up, because he actually blinked and then laughed at me. He’d probably never in his life heard anyone curse like I did. Some might think that it’s wrong to take the Lord’s name in vain, but I think that doing that is a lot better than throwing around the four letter words. It’s also much more creative.
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Baldy said, his voice warm with laughter as he tried to reassure me. “Accidents happen.”
I quickly snatched up the box of Tampons that he’d just started to bend down and pick up, and hid them behind my back. “This isn’t an accident,” I said to him fiercely, my cheeks on fire. “It is a horrific catastrophe.”
He smothered his laugh, though a smile still tugged at his lips. “Like I said, don’t worry.” He gestured to my boxes. “You need some help?”
I stopped moving like a maniac and really looked at him. I was standing a step above him so that basically we were of a height. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, showing off his muscled forearms and his tattoos; it was obvious that he worked out. He had a deep voice and broad shoulders. I swallowed. He looked like he’d just come from prison.
“No,” I shook my head quickly. “No, no. I can handle it, really.”
I picked up the boxes, put my Tampons on top and raced back up the stairs, my now bulging purse bouncing on my back. I looked back once while I was pushing my front door open, and Baldy was watching me from the bottom of the stairs with what I could have sworn was a wistful expression on his face. That by itself confused me, but seeing him standing and watching me like that gave me the creeps, so I rushed inside, and locked the door behind me.
That was the last time I talked to him for months, even though I saw him regularly. He stayed away from me, and I stayed far away from him.
“My dad called me last night,” I said as I put down the knife I’d been using to smash and dice garlic. I paused and looked over my shoulder at my friend, Genny, short for Genève, and waited for her reaction.
I had known Genny, an accountant, for four years. We met in church, the same church where I had met Judy at actually, though I’d stopped going there soon after I moved out because I couldn’t stand having Nancy stare daggers at me from across the auditorium. Anyhow, I remember thinking the first time I spoke with Genny that she was frightening. She’s tall, at least 5’ 10”, and bossy. She’s also twenty years older than me, even though then she looked like she was in her mid to late twenties. I have sighed over that fact many times. I shield my face, and other body parts, from the sun in order to keep
my lightly pigmented skin as wrinkle-free and cancer free for as long as possible, and here Genny, a beautiful black woman with a killer body, was wrinkle free by the blessings of DNA and her dark pigmentation.
Sometimes I could spit with jealousy.
Genny looked back at me and frowned. She knew all about my family. She thought Nancy was bipolar and had told her that to her face. Needless to say, Nancy didn’t like Genny or her family by extension.
“What did he want?” Genny asked as she stood waiting in front of her humming microwave.
Nancy still hadn’t said one word to me, even though it had been more than six months since I moved out. I think the fact that I’d renewed my rental agreement had pissed her off, because it reinforced the fact that I really was never coming home. I still saw my sisters though, and they hung out from time to time at my place for a girl’s night of popcorn, chocolate, and a movie. I’d occasionally seen my dad the couple of times I’d dropped by the house in my pitiful attempts to be a dutiful daughter and keep the lines of communication open, but Nancy always went into hiding when I came, so not only had I not talked to her, I hadn’t even seen her in almost eight months.
Apparently though, she spoke about me plenty when I wasn’t there.
“Dad said that his and Nancy’s feelings are really hurt because I haven’t been including them in my life since I moved out,” I said, giving Genny my can-you-believe-them look.
“What?” she exclaimed loudly, then shook her head. “Oh, no. You did not let him get away with that kind of manipulation. Nancy’s probably been crying and whining, and instead of telling her to get over herself, he makes you out to be the bad guy. Please tell me you told him off, honey.”
I shook my head sadly. “I didn’t. I thought about that after the fact, but honestly, I was just so flabbergasted that I didn’t know what to say. I mean, come on. She disowned me; she labeled me the traitor, not the other way around. I was honestly speechless. Dad told me that I should be a more dutiful daughter, and then he hung up.”
