I ran across this prose that I wrote a few years ago when Rick and I were still living together...
Memories are such strange phenomenon. Sometimes one will sneak up on me. A quick tidbit that floats through my mind and brings a smile to my face because I caught a hint of a mint leaves floating in the air, or I saw a Johnny Jump-up in early spring, or I pass a toy railroad display at a local street festival. Sometimes though, for no apparent reason at all, they come flooding back to me in a random array, as if I’m walking slowly through an art gallery with still shots of my life on display. They string together from one to the next with no clear connections or methodology. And always the same.
I’m sitting on the rusted metal fold-out step of a ramshackle trailer with a hard-boiled egg in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. I’m not allowed to eat inside for fear that I might dirty up the gleaming linoleum floors. I sat and watched my neighbors as I happily munched away at my egg. Children I did not know kicking a ball and stirring up dust on the dirt road through the park of tiny trailers. I finish my egg and go inside to ask for another. I find my mom and future step-dad in a warm embrace in the kitchen. Mom says I can have just one more.
“You don’t want to give yourself a tummy ache,” she says. It was always “tummy.” “Pigs and horses have bellies,” She would say. “People have tummies.”
I remember that tiny little trailer only vaguely. My mother told me later that we only lived there a few months, when I was very young. She was surprised that I remembered it at all. I remember it being so clean. The floor mopped, the belongings put away, the table wiped clean. Nothing like my home. The table only gets wiped down for special occasions, or when it’s so grimy that even the kids start complaining. The floors get mopped only when I can’t bear to walk across them barefoot for one more second. There is an endless stream of papers from the mail, and the occasional tidbit that finds it way home with me from work, and all of the kids school assignments and flyers and artwork, which all seems to congregate on any available hard, flat surface in the house. Laundry and dishes seem always to be piled up, no matter how hard Rick and I try to stay on top of them.
But that’s how it is with so many people in a home I guess. Chaos. And we don’t even manage organized chaos. Maybe semi-organized chaos. Tayler learned to be a pack-rat from her father, who learned it from his father, and I’m determined to break them both of it, although one of us will surely perish in the struggle. To her credit, she has made great strides since the great bedroom clean out when I packed up everything in her room, right down to the very last stuffed animal.
The boys though, they are a completely different story. Tayler collected stuff. She purposefully accumulated stuff, and arranged it all in neat little presentations all over her room until you couldn’t walk across the floor, or set down a glass on the dresser top, for fear of knocking over some unknown precious knick-knack. But the boys. Where does all that stuff come from!? They’re just plain messy. Clothes get flung on the floor, no matter how many times I tell them to just fling them out in the hall for me to pick up later. They manage to keep their toys confined to the two rubber-maid tubs relegated to them both for that purpose. But the shoes, and comic books, and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, juice boxes and stray snack wrappers, threaten to take over the room on a daily basis. And the thought of having to clean up that mess so completely overwhelms them, and me, that it just remains, ignored, until it reaches critical mass and I swoop in to rescue them from the piles of teeter-tottering junk looming all around the room.
In one of the apartments we lived in when I was growing up, Eddie and I had a playroom. When we moved in, I thought that was the greatest thing in the world…my very own toyroom. I quickly found out that it was really just a dumping ground for all of the stuff Edwin and I needed to get out of our way so that we could get to the things we really wanted to play with. It got so bad at one point that one of my playmates from the apartment complex came over and cleaned the whole thing for us. My mother was amazed. She invited Jessica to spend the night anytime she liked.
Those were the apartments in Arden, Arden Town Villas. I was in the second grade when we moved to Arden. Before that we lived in Weaverville and I attended Weaverville Primary School. And before that were Flat Creek, Jacksonville, Horse Shoe, West Terrace Apartments, and Montford Avenue, among others. I don’t remember moving ever being terribly stressful. It was more like an accepted method of cleaning out all of our crap every couple of years; a time to purge and move on. I feel a need for that bi-annual purge in my current home. The accumulation of material goods is staggering, and I feel like it will cave in and smother me if I don’t get it out of here, quick! A stark contrast to Rick, who lived his entire life in the same familial home, and can still, on any given day, walk into the basement and locate the T-Ball uniform from the year he was 6, or the microwave that he stuffed in there after his divorce, or some Steelers football relic that he now desires to prominently display on my living room wall. Perhaps a few childhood moves would have done him good.
I think that of all the moves that I remember, the move to Weaverville was by far my favorite. I remember it being a happy time, and a home that felt safe and cozy. Kind of like that country song that twangs on about love growing best in small houses. The house had only a living room, kitchen, two tiny bedrooms, and a bathroom. There was a big heater grate in the center of the hallway between the bedrooms and I loved to run out of my room when it turned on in the winter and stand over it and let it fill my nightgown like a hot-air balloon, making sure to shuffle my feet around constantly so they didn’t get burned on the metal grate. The house was part of a duplex on a little cul-de-sac, and there were two other little girls in the neighborhood. It never occurred to me that we were poor, or that I was lacking anything at all, although we clearly were. I remember being blissfully happy in that little house.
One day, while I was outside playing I heard Conley call me from the front porch. It was the dreaded call. The one that included my middle name with a slight lowering of the voice with each syllable and the beginnings of each name sharply pronounced. Anna Virginia Stearns! I ran to the house and Daddy took me inside. He pulled me up onto his lap with the most serious look on his face. He sat there for a moment, letting the look bore down on me. Finally he said, “We got a call today from your teacher at school.” He torturously let that hang another few moments before continuing. I couldn’t imagine what my teacher could possibly have called about. I began running through the last day or so in my head. No, nothing. I hadn’t done anything to be in trouble for. How could Miss Star betray me this way? “She says you’ve been drinking wine and cuttin’ a shine” he said, drawling out the “I” in wine and shine with his usually comforting twang.
“I have not!” I protested indignantly. “I promise. I haven’t!”
He furrowed his eyebrows even more as he said, “Now, you better not lie to me. She called and said that you’d been cutting quite a shine.” And before I could respond with more reassurances that I had been perfectly angelic, he burst out in laughter, tickling me in rhythm with his laughter. I squirmed and giggled and slapped his arm.
“Daddy! That’s not funny!” I said.
“I know. I’m sorry,” he said. “Anna, I was wondering how’d you like for your last name to be the same as mine. You’d be Anna Virginia Davis. What’d you think about that?”
I looked at my mother hesitantly as my little 5-year old brain tried to process what he was asking of me.
“It’s okay with me honey,” she said. “But it’s up to you.”
“But I like my name just fine. What’s wrong with my name?” I asked.
“Nothing. Nothing. I just thought you might like your name to be the same as mine, and your mom’s now that we’re married.” he said.
“No. I like my name. I don’t want to change it.”
And that was the end of the discussion. I ran off to play and we were done. It wasn’t until years later, in early adulthood that I understood what they had been asking of such a small child. He was ready to adopt me. How different my life could have played out if I had said, “yes.” And not necessarily for the better.
It wasn’t terribly long into their marriage when things began to unravel. Partying and drugs and alcohol can only take you so far before burning out one partner in the relationship. I remember several very unpleasant arguments. But the one that sticks out the most happened at Christmas time. How poetically tragic.
My mom and I sat at the kitchen table stringing popcorn to hang on the tree. It was the only time I remember ever actually stringing popcorn for the tree. We were having such a good time. Edwin was sleeping and I had my Mommy all to myself. And then the door opened. Conley walked into the kitchen. He may have staggered, but if he did I was too young to notice. I was so busy stringing my popcorn that I didn’t pay much attention to the conversation, until I heard the anger in my mother’s voice.
“I don’t want him here. I told you not to bring him back into this house!”
“But he’s my brother. He can’t drive home. He’s just going to come in and go to sleep.”
“No! He can’t stay here.”
And then my memory gets a little fuzzy. I’m not sure when the conversation descended to violence. They went into the hallway and I heard a loud THUMP against the wall. My mother yelled out to me to call 9-1-1. Beginning to panic, I picked up the phone and began to dial. I hurriedly pushed all three buttons, but before I could tell the operator what my emergency was a hand appeared from around the corner of the wall and grabbed the phone on the table. The receiver was ripped from my hand, and the cord from the wall, as the phone went flying across the room. And then my mother and I were in my bedroom. She locked the hook & eye latch on the inside of the door and told me to stand back as she pushed my dresser across the room to barricade the door. I started to cry. I didn’t understand what was happening. Why was she so scared? And why was he trying to hurt her? And would he try to hurt me if she got hurt and couldn’t protect me. And what if they woke up Edwin?
And then, we’re sitting in the living room. I’m sitting on the couch with my mother. Conley is standing across the room in the doorway. And a police officer is sitting on the ottoman that I used to use to push Edwin around the living room when everyone was smiling and happy. He’s asking my mother if we have somewhere we can go stay. There’s a commotion outside and the radio on the officer’s waist begins to speak. He stands up and walks over to the screen door. The police outside are trying to coax my drunken uncle off the roof where he is ripping off the rain gutter and screaming, jumping up and down like a caveman. They get him down, hand-cuff him and put him in the back of a squad car. I can see the lights flashing through the blinds in the living room. The next time I was in that living room, it was to gather our stuff for the move to Arden Town Villas. My mother and step-father were officially separating.
