I barely slept a wink that night. Morning came and I leapt from my bed. My ears anticipated the sound of metal. My eyes grew wild while my heart waited to cut loose at dusk when the moon rose up from the pine curtain. But just like the moon, parts of my mother were hidden away. Darkened. Shadowed and silent as if she never existed. I would never see this mother moonshine, dancing, wild-slit, cut-loose side of her again. She was gone.
Sometimes, I thought I dreamt it. It seemed unreal, imagined. Only when I heard fireworks, or the sharp clings of metal did my mind wander back and grieve. Without answers, I pondered what happened to her. Where did she go? Was she coming back, and when? Did I do something? Was it me? When she didn’t return, I’d get angry. I wished I’d never seen the side of her touched by fire, shined by starlights, swept away by the moon and hidden by the shadows. I’d curse the darkness hiding my carefree moonstruck mother who was captive under coiffed hair, perfect makeup, colorful lipstick and brand-name pantsuits.
Anytime I saw fireworks, my blood would surge and my throat would lock up. I’d look up into the star-studded night and be struck with incredible sadness. I’d see my mother in the sparks, tiny glimpses blowing up the sky and cutting loose. My arms reached upwards to touch her strange burst of colors. With each thunderous boom and crack, my heart broke. In vain I’d try to catch the disintegrated sparkles falling to earth, in hopes that I’d reignite what I believed to be my mother in the wild flames. Out from the ashes mother moonshine would rise. But she never did. That night, the House of Seven received another occupant trying to right the wrongs, fix the problems, mend the messes, grieve the losses.
Cass, age seven, entered in.
5
Making beds, living lies
A dreamer is one who can only find his
way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
~Oscar Wilde
It was three-thirty when I glanced at the bank clock in the lobby. I had just finished up with a customer when the flashes hit me. Bursts, fire, dripping blood, child screaming, dark abyss. Same ‘ole, same.
“No, no, not here. Not here,” I whispered out loud to no one and held my head somehow thinking I could detain them. I rushed to close my office door before anyone noticed my catatonic meltdown. I tried to stop it, will it away, but my dreadful past doesn’t care. It stores up memories in the vault of my messed-up mind like a game of hide and seek, and hither they come. Tag! You’re it, they say. It transfixes me to my desk and with a fervor the memory overpowers me.
It was six months into our marriage. It was bad from the start, sure, I knew that, but the fixer in me said I could love him more and make it different. It never worked. Not with my parents and not with my husband. I had lost my mind with Sam’s cheating, lying, and manipulative bullshit. But I could not let go. It’s ALL I had even though it was in shambles. I barely had a life. I pushed away all my friends trying to control and maintain what was left of the pitiful marriage bed, so I had no one to talk to. I felt alienated and alone, desperate and needy. In some weird way—I was merely a child in an adult body crying out in pain. My warped mind routed to her. I dialed the number in a dispirited, dismantling, coming-apart-at-the-soul sort of crumbling. In fear, after the second ring, I almost hung up until I heard her spirited voice. In my head I heard mother moonshine, but it was not to be. That was my imagination playing tricks on me.
“Hello,” My mother answered in her usual fists-up tone. It’s as if she expected an overly zealous salesman to be on the other end trying to sell her a carton of Ajax. I put the phone back to my ear as my mind scrambled with thoughts.
Cass, now look at what you have done now. No salt of the earth here. The whole goddamned world must be coming to an end for you to call your mother, of all people. You have done it now. Go ahead and accept the punishment, young lady, because you know it’s coming.
But something was different with me now. My desperation made me vulnerable and the cork exploded off my never-talk-to-my-mother bottle.
“Mother,” I whimpered, “I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I can be married. Something’s missing—I think I’m missing…yeah, me. I’m not here, or something. I don’t feel like myself. I’m not sure I ever have…” My voice was fast and frantic. My body shook in spastic ticks while I sat on the edge of the waterbed. The inside of my knees held my body steady against the sideboards while the rest of my upper body bobbled like I was in the ocean. I hated this bed like I hated this marriage. Both left me exhausted. In truth I hated every piece of furniture in this house. All Sam’s. I might as well be the goddamned maid. Nothing in this house said, Cass lives here. Besides, modern contemporary is so stuck-up. I’m early American, bare-foot-on-the-lawn kind of style and for god’s sake, give me real wood, not this laminated bullshit. And the worst, half of the house was a trophy room for dead animals, wall-to-wall, eyes peering, skulls, horns, deer skins, tusks, snakeskins, pelts and more dreadful atrocities I could barely look at. His expensive exotic hunting trips made him feel like a macho man. Look what I killed, he’d say. In my head, I wanted to speak up and say, “You know what else you’re killing? My heart. You’re killing my heart.”
Of course, that never happened and even so, it wouldn’t have mattered none. The kitchen was the only area Sam let me choose whatever I wanted, in a barefoot and pregnant kind of way. The rest of the house was all Sam, the brown and beige rugs, the icky yellow stripes and the horrible paintings on the wall, weird splotches and designs as if someone dropped a canvas on the sidewalk and let birds shit on it. I held the banana-yellow phone receiver to my ear and wrapped the coiled cord between my fingers while my disjointed mind came undone. My anger for the man I married had reached a boiling point.
“Now don’t make something out of nothing, Cass, you…”
“I’m not YOU!” I snapped, cutting my mother off. Something angry and hissing came out of me. “And it’s not nothing. It’s everything! Don’t make this about you, Mother. I’m not like you at all. I—can’t—just—sit—back—and—take—it!” My voice went up an octave with each word until I was shouting.
“I can’t. And I won’t.” I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince at this point, her or myself. My voice felt fractured, tempered with a spark of madness which scared me, as if I temporarily left my body, a mandatory evacuation of sorts, and I had no control. On the other end of the phone, my mother remained silent. Battle lines were being drawn. As a child, I watched my mother use silence as a weapon of war, strategically and without mercy. Questions soared in my head. Could six months of marriage make someone feel completely helpless? Had I reached a point of no return? Why else would I have called my mother? Not my younger sister, Meg, who might have had words of wisdom, but my condescending mother. I weaved and bobbed on the waterbed till I got motion sickness. I was exhausted emotionally and physically. I got up and paced the floor, coiling the yellow phone cord around my hand till it was as tangled up as my life. My mother and I have never, ever been able to talk. Yet, here it is, the one-sided conversation about marriage. God forbid. What the hell is wrong with me? Deep inside I believed in a forever marriage, the death till we part kind, the happily ever after kind and for better or worse kind. I was a fool.
“Mother, I should have left the first day. Six months ago, I should have left. I should have left the first time I caught him in a lie. Or the first time he cheated or when I found a stack of porn and videos. I SHOULD HAVE LEFT. I mean, why am I still here? Honest to God, what in the hell is keeping me here? I want to leave, I do. But it seems like death to me. Is that weird or what? Why would I feel like that? That’s not normal, it can’t be…can it?” I paused a long time, then rambled on again.
“It’s like there is this control, this force, this unknown power over me and I can’t even explain it. Hell, I can’t describe it to know what it is. It’s just there.”
I had a few gasps in between rambles and then…it hit me. I froze momentarily
stunned as if I had put this thought deep, deep inside only to resurface and hit me like an electric shock. I remembered now why I married Sam. Memory after memory of our first few months together.
“Oh. God.” I laughed a crazy, deep, disturbed mental laugh, the kind that comes only when something inside you has cracked, broke, and disengaged from its central core. “Oh. My. Gawwd.” I paused again, half-tormented by the reality. The revelation was bigger than I could work out in my head. Make sense of.
“I would have never married him if it wasn’t for you.”
“Meeee?” My mother replied in ice cubes. I could almost see her coral lipstick coated with a chilling frost.
“Yes, you. Remember, Mother? Sam and I were living together only a few months with no plans of marriage. You reminded me over and over, we were living in sin and needed to make it right, make it legal. Binding and under God. I was fine like we were. I had no idea what I was doing anyway. We had just met. I damn sure didn’t want to live with you and Dad. SO WHAT if we were living together. It wasn’t 1960. But no matter what I did you made me feel like shit. Day and night, you were in my head. Babbling and chatter. I had to do something. You were never going to let up, so I gave in. I convinced Sam to marry me. Hell, I barely liked him. That’s what so damned fucked up about this. We fought all the time. He drank all the time and I knew…I knew deep down he was cheating, even then. But why, why did I listen to you? It’s puzzling to me. I don’t get it mother. Why does your opinion matter to me so much? Huh? I mean, why is it all I could hear was your voice in my ears? Your voice drowning out my own. Why is it, Mother? Why?”
I sat dizzy and disturbed. Anger rose up in me, burning hot, and my skin was flushed.
Silence.
“Of course. I know this game. You’re not going to answer. Obey. Follow the rules. Live like Gabby Collard, right Mother? Shove shit under the rug. Shush. Don’t say anything. Deny, deny. Live like nothing happened. WELL…mother, I hope you’re happy that I’m not living in sin. Congratulations on great advice. NOW I’m living in sin AND hell!”
“You listen here, young lady.” Mother snapped back in a low monotone, a deep pitted voice. I could tell from the background noise she was in the kitchen, and fed up with me. With each word she spoke I could hear the knife trim the fat off the piece of meat on the cutting board. “I don’t know why you’re telling me this Cassidy. I. Have. Nothing. To. Do. With. This.”
I snapped in a rage of tears. “You have EVERYTHING to do with this! Don’t you see it?” But I got no response. Just knife cuts, slicing and dicing between the edges of the weapon she used best. Silence. Disturbing, brutal, condemning silence. A war without words. This was the mother I knew. This was the mother I grew up with. This was the war of familiarity. A war I couldn’t win. My broken spirt began to sob uncontrollably, though I fought it desperately.
“Mother?” I sobbed. Crying around my mother showed weakness and weakness could be used against me, but the neediness in me overpowered the rebel in me. “Motherrr?” I waited in vain. In the seconds following, a sequence of events took place. The room spun slightly out of kilter. My tears dried up. I felt numb, disengaged and lost in myself. My voice went mute. Then, as if summoned from deep within, they came. One after another they appeared in front of me, little girls, of many ages and eras.
For the love of God. NO. Talking to my mother had resurrected the bedfellows of my childhood. The House of Seven rumbled on its unsteady and crumbled foundation, the soil around it cracked and the bricks tumbled. The Hush cemetery surrounding it was no longer a hush. The dead had risen and every little girl had one upon their backs, skeletons, word bones of the past, the unforgiven, the unredeemed, the unresolved. The skeletons were singed in black lettering, just as I remembered, word after word ablaze with collected words. Skull bone to thigh bone, to the feet, all etched words, paragraphs, letters, all scribbled, carved, painted, cursive and printed or tattooed. I blinked to wash it away, daydreaming perhaps, the stress of talking to my mother, but each time I opened my eyes, another girl appeared, a different age, a different era of time. Different ages, different outfits and hairstyles and time periods, but I was certain every single one of them was me. This startling revelation rattled me. One minute I’m talking to my mother and the next minute I’m losing my mind and seeing ghosts and skeletons. But it got worse. Now I could hear them. And not only the little girls speaking but the skeletons who were speaking the words written on them, over and over. It was a few seconds before I understood what the girls were saying. My mind refused to hear it at first.
“Shall we bury them?” they said one after another with tears in their eyes and sorrow on their faces till the whole room was swallowed up by little girls’ voices.
“Shall we bury them?” A six year old pleaded.
“Shall we bury them?” An eight year old sternly asked. One-after-another in repetition they followed suit. The girls voices caused the skeletons on their backs to clatter and whisper as if speaking the words written on their bones, kept them alive. With every whisper, the carved, etched, painted and tattooed words on the chalk bones gave off a burnt amber glow of being awakened, and the energy they emitted surged foreign molecules inside me to ping and pong until I felt I might explode. Somehow we were all connected in darkness and in light but I didn’t know how.
“Shall we bury them?” A ten year old girl asked eagerly, further on edge, uneasy. Frenzied, I had no idea if this was real or a delusional hallucination from breaking tradition and phoning my mother, whom I NEVER call. The onslaught of words filled the room until my mind spun out of balance. I couldn’t talk back to my mother. I couldn’t hang up and I couldn’t answer the little girls’ pleas. I gripped the phone, my throat swelled with knots and my ears gave off a strange humming.
“YES! For the love of God. Bury them!” I shouted. My eyes zipped from girl to girl. My mother spoke but I heard no words. I was too preoccupied with being absolutely fucking crazy. As if commanded by my voice, one by one, the little girl ghosts with the skeletons on their backs walked away, disappearing into the walls like a dense fog. It was the disturbing sounds of skeletons clacking and rattling as an aftereffect that affected me the most. As if the etched words were whispers rising and haunting my ears with hidden meanings, sinking deeply into me, shrouded like a mystery, each word on their bones a clue to seek and find answers. My mind’s eye followed the girls in a dream state, me right behind them, their feet swiftly trampling through the pine straw of the forest behind my parents’ house, down the pig trails until they arrived at the place of my terror and my safety. The Hush cemetery sat behind the House of Seven, surrounded by large oaks with hanging moss. The little girls dug holes and buried the word bones, covering them in the perpetual darkness of the soil. When they were finished, they went inside the House of Seven. I stared at the front door with a large seven carved into it that glowed like a thousand roaring fires. I grabbed my hand and rubbed the scar on my palm, the one in the shape of a seven exactly like the door. I felt it pulsate and my blood ran hot. The vision faded and I found myself in the bedroom where I started, still holding the phone, and a mountain of air churning from the other end. I had no idea how much time has passed.
“Cass…” the graveled voice said. “CASS! Can you hear me? Bury who? What are you talking about? Who died? Are you there?”
“No one died Mother, no one. I’m sorry I called,” I said in a serene voice. At this point, I was done talking. I was just about to hang up when she finished me off.
“Cassidy Cleopatra Collard. You are about to do me in. This is nonsense.”
“Likewise” I said nonchalant.
“You made your bed—now you lie in it,” she said with a fury and spite that was classic Gabby. Old school Gabby. The one I remember all to well. And then she hung up. Her words were like raw spittle and fluid damnation. I gulped what felt like a large, jagged and menacing stone down my throat. Her voice held not one hint of affirmation. No sympathy, no advice of motherl
y wisdom, no consoling hope of tomorrows. No pulling me back from the cliff I was hanging on by a thread. NO. Not my mother. Not Gabby Collard. Just “make your bed, Cassidy Cleo Collard. Lie in the mess you made. Beds and lies.”
What the hell was I thinking calling her in the first place? What did I expect to get? What is this controlling power she has over me? Why do I want something she will never give? Shit! What am I doing? You just set yourself up, Cassidy. Nothing has changed. It’s always been this way. Why did you think you’d get anything different?
Disturbed. Pissed. Undone. Rattled by visions and hallucinations, I felt broken without anyone to understand. I sat on the bed I made, unable to move, listening to the many accusations in my head going off like tiny bombs. I was vulnerable exposing myself to my mother in the first place. I should have known better.
There is no hope. No hope for you, Cass.
Now go make your bed. Lie in the mess you made.
My distracted mind drifted. Sure, as a child, I was keenly aware I was a tad bit more vocal and chatty, a little overwhelming at times, for others. I was the X in extra. A force of magic and childhood imagination. A voice to be heard, acknowledged, validated and accepted. I was fire and energy. Flames, atoms and protons. I was more. I was much. I was a mountain. But I had a weakness. The tender seed of neediness and approval would be my downfall. Before I ever got a chance to bloom, sink into the soil, root outwards, the seed was squashed, abandoned, trampled upon, isolated and left to adapt and thrive on my own. Thank God for Maw Sue’s stories, especially that of the Loblolly pine and how it grows in disturbed soil that everything else dies in. THAT little girl, that eXtra child is still there—somewhere. She did not die off. I know it. She is somewhere and I shall find her. I will figure out what happened.
THE HOUSE INSIDE ME Page 6