Chapter One

--April, 1999

Oasis – “Don’t Look Back in Anger”

This would require some stealth. With my mother just downstairs, I’d need to be quiet. I took my shoes off in the hallway, turned the knob, and stepped into her room. When we moved in, I remember her carpet being soft and white, but over the years it had become matted and hardened. Her queen-sized mattress took up the majority of the room, providing the claustrophobia she so craved. In the little space that was left, she stacked her folded clothes along the walls until they nearly reached the ceiling. Same with the books: not classics, but James Patterson’s, self-helps, and summer reads. She was a voracious reader, sometimes staying up all night to finish a book. When she couldn’t sleep, she’d dip into her bedside table stash of sugar-free candies. She liked to mainline them when she was dieting.

As a fourteen-year-old, I could eat anything I wanted and not gain a pound. Recently, I had stopped eating real food, choosing instead to take most of my meals at the gas station two blocks away. But to buy Mountain Dew and pound cake, I needed to scrounge up some cash. That’s what I was doing in my mother’s room, looking for spare change. She famously had a pitcher full of coins that she was convinced were worth more than their cash value ever since seeing a “60 Minutes” segment about a penny that was actually worth a grand. I just couldn’t remember where she hid the pitcher. Her closet was no dice, though I did discover she owned an oddly-shaped back massager. I tried using it, but it kind of smelled, so I tossed it aside and kept searching.

It had been some nine years since that terrible Christmas. No longer was I the adorable, cherubic youth with the chipmunk cheeks. As I entered my teen years it seemed like a cloud had passed over me. I had thick eyebrows and bird’s nest hair. My mother - who I had been calling Janet lately - would often describe me to people as if I were the conductor of a small communist country’s symphony. To her, I was less a teenage boy and more a crotchety old man. But physically, the baby face gave me away. With my darting blue eyes and the delicate bags that hung below them, I was the picture of paranoia. I was the only fourteen-year-old I knew with flop sweat.

If anything, my moody exterior did match our house, the siding of which was not aluminum or brick or stucco, it was simply made of the same layered shingles the roof consisted of, only lighter. It was painted a dreary grey that really popped in the rain. The ivy that covered half the house no longer gave it gravitas, it had now started to eat away at the siding and at certain places, had actually started growing inside. A low stone wall circled the property, penning in a mostly dead garden. The trees and bushes were at once overgrown and in the process of dying, the lawn a mix of dry grass and weeds. Simply put, our house was the one on the block all the neighborhood kids thought was haunted. And yes, it was true the former owner died there, but Mom didn’t tell us that for years. It was probably why we got it so cheap. In all her time as a realtor, she had never seen a deal like this. The house was a work in progress to be sure, but $89,000 was still a steal. So what if it was under major power lines?

Stolen story; please report.

Sometimes I wondered how much longer the house would stand. The whole “fixer-upper” aspect had never really been addressed. It seemed like every room had some half-finished construction project in it. Hell, it was April and our Christmas tree was still up. It became clear that my mother had other things on her mind...

She had always been slightly overweight, but after Jesse was born, she had no reason to keep it together anymore. Instead, she would diet for a week or two, just long enough to get a compliment from someone who had noticed her loss of a pound. Then, with that small validation, she feels she can stop. Sometimes, I think her life is so sad. If eating truly makes her happy and she never gets to eat what she wants, then ergo, she is never happy. Every morning I would hear her go into the bathroom and step on the scale. I never saw the number, but I always heard the sigh. She treated Overeaters Anonymous like it was a religion. She went every Saturday without fail, giving it credence by calling it “her meeting” and canceling plans with people by saying “sorry I can’t, it’s my meeting.”

Lately though, she had been projecting all of her food issues onto Jesse, which was unfair. Sure, the girl was big for her age, but she was still growing. It seemed sometimes that the only thing Mom and Jesse bonded over was their weight. Mom sat next to her at nearly every meal telling her what to eat and, more importantly, what not to eat. It was as if she believed that making her daughter skinny would prevent any heartbreak from coming her way. Mom tried to keep a sense of humor about the whole thing. She even bought a pair of sweatpants with “look out below” stitched on the rear.

But I saw her when the day was done and no one was around. She was miserable after Pete. There were nights she cried over him. She was a single mother with two kids and she was terrified of what the future might hold. And she had cause to worry. Inside, the bills were everywhere. Like her diet, she started and stopped paying them every other week. She’d get halfway through organizing them, then invariably something would come up and those organized piles would need to be moved or sat on because they were on the couch or eaten on because there was only one table and it was dinner time. There’d be stacks going up the stairs, stacks in the kitchen, even stacks on top of boxes of other bills. Because of this, she was always on the phone with Nannie; asking for money, begging for money, being pathetic for money, invoking her two kids and raising them alone, for money.

I crossed to my mother’s bureau. Atop a doily to prevent scratches, I saw framed photos of people I’d never met, yellowed with age and dusty with neglect. As I pulled the creaky drawers open one-by-one, my expectations began to fade. I had just about given up on finding the coins when I came face-to-face with a dark green manila envelope.

It looked evil. It looked illicit.

I let my curiosity get the better of me and picked it up. Inside, I found a stack of typed pages. I knew I was invading Mom’s privacy, but that was the last thing on my mind as I started reading. I quickly realized that they were stories she’d written about her youth. I recognized familiar names on nearly every page.

People tell me how great she was when she was growing up; how much fun she used to be. Why then did I feel like I only got the shitty years? The years when she’d given up and started yelling all the time.

Why was she the way that she was?

I knew precious little about my mother’s teen years. In pictures, she looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor. Her eyes were almost purple. She was constantly being told by her parents how beautiful she was. She used to fidget in class. She couldn’t wait to start her life. There was no end to the things she was going to do and be...

Because she had time.