Remember before, how I said I didn’t trust that new happiness we all seemed to be experiencing last winter? I know it was a relief when Mom and Dad split up, but then for awhile it was like we were pretending, or waiting, or holding on to some shred of hope.
Gradually I felt it fade, but I don’t exactly know how or when . . . I just noticed that I started becoming very excited to get out of the house and to work on Saturdays at the pet shop. And gradually I found myself wanting to hang out more and more with Myname (not Miranda, but that’s another story. I see her occasionally at Bible study; she’s getting more pious while I’m getting more wicked).
Now, every time I leave the house I breathe a sigh of relief. I feel a sense of freedom and ease whenever Mom isn’t home.
You know how much I hate Charlie, so I’m not defending him. But I think he reminds Mom of Dad so much that she hates him, too. Maybe she needed someone to hate, and now that Dad’s gone she has to unleash it somehow. Over the past few months, at dinner time, we all sit down together and then she starts talking about how bad Charlie is.
He does look a lot like Dad. When he’s putting food into his mouth, Mom starts going on about how fat Charlie is and how he doesn’t have any self-control. Sometimes Charlie stops eating and sometimes he continues, or he chews a little more slowly. Meanwhile Mom says, “You are just a chip off the old block, Charlie. Just like your father. He didn’t have any self-control, either. Your father would sit there eating, as long as food was in front of him. He even hoarded food from you kids and me. And look at how you help yourself, without even asking whether anyone else wants another serving.”
Finally Charlie stops chewing, but won’t look at her. He does bear a striking resemblance to Dad. “Are you pitying yourself now, Charlie? Do you feel sorry for yourself that I’m confronting you about your behaviour? Poor Charlie. Why don’t you just keep eating, so that you don’t have to feel anything? Your father always ate so that he wouldn’t have to admit to any of his feelings. Go ahead, Charlie, keep eating. It doesn’t matter whether anyone else is hungry . . .”
And it goes on like that for the entire mealtime. She is so nasty and angry, and clever too. It’s the worst combination. I am definitely happy she isn’t saying those kinds of things to me. I feel sorry for Charlie, but also I do hate him. It’s that kind of leftover boiled hatred that doesn’t even taste good anymore but is worked in so well that it’s inescapable.
Charlie stays pretty quiet throughout these rants, which makes Mom even angrier and pretty soon she’s hollering at him. She screams at him about how he never takes a shower and is a slob. “All you care about is yourself! You’re just as selfish as your father!” She always says, your father, like she didn’t have anything to do with Dad ever. Like she didn’t make babies with him.
The weird thing is, even when you don’t think this lecturing is going to happen – even when dinner is going easy and everything has started out fine, and nothing could possibly go wrong . . . Then Charlie spills a little soup on his big baggy sweatshirt, or his curly hair hangs in his eyes, and you can see this slow volcano erupting inside my mother. When you think of a volcano, you think of a big explosion, but actually a lot of volcanoes happen very gradually, smouldering until smoke and lava start belching out and rolling down, obliterating everything in their path. That’s the way Mom’s volcano works. The lava is always inside, waiting to roll over the edge in this bulging, sinister river of fiery accusation.
I think that’s what I knew was underneath the so-called happiness. In the first while after the separation, I bet she was relieved and happy that she didn’t have Dad to fight with. But the need to fight was still there. All the happiness in the world can’t mask the need to fight, that seething anger.
Mom’s anger has always been around, underneath her tight face and her flat blue eyes. It’s like a tsunami wave far out at sea. You can’t see it, you can only feel the ocean sucking back and flattening out, and you know this wall of black water will come. (I’ve been reading about tsunamis and they are the most fascinating thing. In Japan, they have tsunamis all the time. We only have frozen lakes and blizzards here.) She is so angry about every single thing that’s ever happened to her since she was a child. But she goes further than being angry, she gets a hate-on for all the people she’s supposed to love. I guess Dad couldn’t have done anything right even if he had been able to do something right.
But anyway, it turns out Mom might have been right about Charlie’s “character”. That’s the word she uses on him at dinnertime – character. He’s got a bad character. That means you have no morals and you always act like a jerk.
(Girl #1 has a very bad character.)
I would like to agree with her because he snuck around trying to see and touch my naked private parts for however long. And just as he betrayed me, he ended up betraying his boss at the gas station where he works. Correction: worked. He worked at the gas station for a long time, until yesterday when the police went to the gas station and charged Charlie with theft. Cigarettes, money, lottery tickets, whatever . . . I don’t know where he was spending the money in a little town like this. It’s not like we have a mall to go shopping, or anything to do. I bet he was buying porno magazines, since there’s no way he can look at me anymore (even though I know he’s probably looking at me all the time with his dirty sneaky eyes and imagining the things he saw me do when I was twelve). He probably spent 5000 bucks on porno magazines and cigarettes.
Now that Mom knows he smokes, he sits there out back, smoking all the time. His fingers are yellow. He stinks worse than I ever could have imagined, and he still never showers either. He leaves a terrible smell when he walks by, and I gag and hate him all the more.
Did you see how Mom freaked out? This time it was a real volcanic explosion, but combined with the tsunami! A huge, black wave of cold fiery hatred. She repeated everything about Charlie being just like Dad, and then she expanded on those ideas for another couple hours. I felt myself shrinking down into my seat, hoping I could disappear. I was really glad it wasn’t me. Finally she let the rest of us kids go to our rooms and kept on lecturing him. He just sat there reflecting her blackness, not answering. I thought he would turn to a pile of lumpy black ash.
You’ve got to wonder, what is love? when you see that kind of thing in a family. But still, I couldn’t exactly feel sorry for Charlie . . . I only wished she had gotten that mad at him when he spent several years trying to rape me while everyone was asleep in their beds! I think he deserves every rotten comment he gets, if only because he deserves to feel as bad as I did during that moment when I had to “forgive” him.
Everything I said and felt at that moment comes back to haunt me. Maybe I shouldn’t hate him so much and be so unforgiving, come to think of it. That will come back to me, too. Ah, you always get me with your big old spiritual paradoxes, you do!
It’s funny with Mom. All my life I have seen her wishing for something bigger, better, more deserving, something more loving. She expected to have kids that didn’t lie or steal. I guess she trusted you to make that happen. Did you fail, or did she? I can’t figure out that question.
Maybe she’s all the more disappointed because Charlie was always the sweet one. He could do no wrong. He had those big lovey eyes and such a gentle spirit, she never worried about him going rotten. Me, at least my badness is right out there in your face, I’ve always been pretty loudmouthed and everyone knows all my thoughts. I can be a total dick.
Wait, when I think about it, Mom is always going on about how I’m a loudmouth. Mawmouth, she calls me. But actually, a lot of my life is hidden from her right now. She doesn’t know that I am french-kissing Amos at all the school dances and even once I let him squeeze my boob when we were over at Pammy’s in the basement. She doesn’t know I kissed Myname on the mouth a few weeks ago.
So maybe I am more like Charlie than anyone thinks; all my lies and secrets and badness are covered up with whatever is thought of as “good”. Only you can see my sins, and only you can see my sadness. I wish I could be truly, really good. But I know that no matter how much I sin, you will still love me, which is more than I can say for my mother.