THE HOUSE INSIDE ME

by Camelia Wheatley

  11

  Black Angels

  Light does not come from light

  but from darkness.

  ~Mircea Eliade

  For the past week, all I’ve done is think of my mother. My past. Our past. I suppose I was selfish in my childish ways because I wanted all of her. I wanted the parts of her I couldn’t find, couldn’t see or comprehend. There were desperate times I wanted to plunge my hand into her heart and pull out all I could find. Show me yourself, Mother! I wanted to cry. Who are you? Show me you! A part of her wanted to give me everything; I could see it and feel it at times, but not always. It came and went like the wind blowing one day, then gone. Every birthday I received a cake and a party. It was a big deal. I felt special. Celebrated. Loved. But when the day passed, the candles were blown out and all the gifts were opened and played with, my mother disappeared into her shell. The wall reconstructed. Her obscurity returned. Her silence resumed. And once again, I yearned for something I’d never get. Sometimes I wondered if it was merely an act for others, just playing a part.

  She was beautiful in my eyes. So beautiful I wanted to show her off. I was eleven years old and in sixth grade. I told my elementary school friends she took two showers a day and wore red lipstick. Why I felt the need to tell them, I don’t know. I mimicked her motions with the lipstick and how she patted her lips on paper and I collected them as paper kisses. When I got home, Mother was coming out of the living room and I told her how popular she was with all my friends. Her face turned bleak. Her Ivory-soap skin crinkled like crushed paper. Her perfect arched eyebrows raised their black flags and her red lipstick turned to a murky scowl. She scolded me with her long-painted fingernail. “Young lady, don’t you ever do that again. Don’t go around telling anyone about me—do you hear me?”

  “I…I…didn’t…mean…,” I stuttered, not knowing what to say. I walked away with a horrible fear I’d done something wrong, yet for the life of me didn’t know what. A few weeks later, I found a picture of her dressed as a Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz for Halloween. I took it to school to show my friends. I forgot it was in my pocket and it fell out in front of her. She went ballistic. “How many times do I have to tell you to quit talking about me to your friends? Did you take this to school?”

  I cowered in fear. My face revealed what my mouth couldn’t utter.

  “Don’t ever, ever take a picture of me out of this house. Do you hear me?” She stormed off to the cabinet holding the photo albums and ripped through it like some mad scientist. She took out every picture of herself and put them in a shoebox. Whenever I look at the photo album and see the blank blocks between the other photos, I am reminded of a mother who didn’t want to exist. There were other incidents afterwards, but I soon learned not to speak of my mother, in words, in beauty, in thoughts, in deeds or in kindness. She didn’t want to exist in my world, and there was nothing I could do about it. Months later, something in my family broke. My parents’ relationship began to unravel, and since my strings of existence were held together only by their cleaving, even as dysfunctional as it was, I lived on the constant verge of snapping—cut loose in the most horrible way—forever lost without an attachment. In my forest, two tall trees were cut down, leaving mere stumps, and I was a tender, fragile sapling at ground level with no shade and no roots, only the intense heat of the sun and all the dangers and exposure to elements. Their distance and unavailability were a knife to my heart. Maybe I was too needy of a child, I’m not sure, but what I wanted the most, I didn’t get.

  I wanted to be every bit the woman my mother was. Pretty dresses, high heels, jewelry. I acquired a vintage shawl from somewhere, I’m not even sure where, I just remember having it. I loved its feminine appeal, the way it draped over my delicate shoulders and showed my bare skin, how the flirty beads clattered along the fringed edges while I spun in circles and danced like those Egyptian girls in the movie The Ten Commandments.

  My mother saw me swirling across the room one day and jerked it off me so swift I thought I’d been hit by a cyclone. She didn’t say a word, but her eyes told me everything I needed to know. Do not be a woman. You are awful. You are bad. Shame on you.

  It was like the picture I took to school. I didn’t know what I did wrong, but whatever it was, it offended my mother to a degree she turned on me. It was evident the summer I wore a bikini. It was a two-piece floral with ruffles on the edges. Meg and I had been playing in the sprinkler and Mother came out with a camera. She was all smiles at first. We posed on our matching beach towels. I laid on my stomach and hiked my knees up, arching my hips, and smiled just like I saw models do in magazines. I heard the click and she lowered the camera and I could see it in her eyes, the disgust on her face for me. Her lips curled like the edges of burnt paper.

  “You think you’re sexy, don’t you?” Her eyes burned my skin like a scorching sunburn. I was confused. My smile turned to shame. A negative image of myself clicked an imprint in my mind. I didn’t actually understand what the word sexy meant. But I could tell enough by my mother’s words to know it was bad. And it was in me. Skin deep. Cass deep. Cluster deep. I wanted to wrap myself in the towel, run, hide, and disappear. This moment and others began to define my core being. The all-encompassing grip would give shape to a lifetime of shame, confusion and a warped sexual identity. I didn’t know it yet, but the worst was yet to come.

  My mother’s words unraveled me for weeks. Months. All I could think of was Maw Sue’s story of Jesus dying because of our sins. I wasn’t clear as to what sins were, but I knew it had to be bad. Therefore, I must be sin. I was bad. Because of this awful, terrible thing inside me, I had somehow summoned without knowledge, from the deepest, darkest thickets of the pine’s underbelly, a monster, and it was going to show me how bad I was.

  This powerful memory of my past unsettles me. I stop writing on the blue line. I get up and pace the room. I feel an overwhelming presence in the room with me, a slow exhale of stale breath marking me, oppressing me. My heart races while the memory pushes its way back in.

  Confront it, feel the pain but don’t let it take you, Cass. Doc’s words drift in. I go where I don’t want to go. I face the page. I grab the blue line. I hold on tight. The memory comes forcefully. Violently.

  I am standing on the front porch of the House of Seven inside me. The wood planks are as uneven as my life, squeaky with the pressure of my feet, and their squeals are things of my nightmares. I stand still as to not hear them and stare into the dull black-and-white vision I’ve always had when I visit this dark hole in me. Behind me the creepy house, large door with the carved sizzling number seven and the broken doorknob. Across the landscape I created was a vision of thick pine trees, a curtain of comfort, along with the hushed cemetery with all my skeletons buried. I can hear them now—when I couldn’t before. It’s like they are talking to me. Something is different but I don’t know what. The tree creatures swinging upside down with glowing wood knot eyes are whispering. It grows louder and louder until it seizes me with terror, like a chorus of locusts invading my mind. They start moving with their tree limbs, legs and arms, knots and moss, yellow eyes. They tangle and intertwine with each other. They mesh and writher in awful provocative positions, seductive like growing vines snaking up a tree. Their moss hair slithers and slinks, curls and bounces and their whispers drive me mad. The next thing I remember is screaming and running inside the House of Seven.

  But I am not alone. Something about it feels different than before. Suddenly, like a ghost, the little girl appears in the foyer where it is dark and shadowy. I am frightened by what I just saw outside and for what is to come. She is the little girl I was, used to be. She raises her hand and curls her forefinger, and without saying a word, she calls me forward. I am fearful, so terrified I can barely shuffle my feet on the creaky floor. Screams claw my throat, unescapable. We walk the long dreadful hallway of shadows leaping and hands reaching. The sounds drive me deeper inside myself. Doorknobs turning, letters shifting and scrambli
ng, and scrapes, doors opening and closing, strange sounds. My hands shake. Sweat beads across my lips. The girl stops in front of a door I don’t recognize. The nameplate is missing. I don’t want to go inside. She pushes me in with only a glance. In a half second, I am forced to watch, see and feel. My mind conjures the memories I have buried. In the Hush cemetery the skeletons claw their way out from the graves and walk the forest of the pines, their clattering bones of words on fire lighting up the blackness and telling me things I don’t want to hear. My memory disengages and out it comes. What I have feared all my life. I am the sin. I am the demon coloring outside the lines, I am the monster.

  It is me.

  I was eating a praline. I had climbed up on the toilet to get to the upper cabinet in the bathroom. I was looking for lipstick to match the paper kisses I collected from my mother’s lip prints. Kisses for Cass. In my mind, I had convinced myself instead of loving me as my mother should, she had left me paper kisses instead. Even when she threw them in the trash, I told myself it was a game and she knew I’d find them, like a treasure hunt. Kisses for Cass. I loved putting on her makeup and face cream and using her cosmetics when she wasn’t looking. I tried to be all grown up in the mirror and mimic her motions. I’d put the lipstick on my mouth and pucker up and make my own paper kisses for my mother. I’d save them because one day, she’d want them, I was sure of it. I had just found Candy Crush Pink, my favorite color, which was also my mother’s favorite. Instead of climbing down, I jumped but didn’t make the landing and hit the bottom flooring of the cabinet. A wooden plank popped up. The sound made me jerk a little. I was just a kid. I didn’t know a demon could leave its mark.

  Something drew my eye underneath the plank. It was a page from magazines or scrap paper. When I got closer, my whole body revolted in tingles and shocks. The pictures pulled me in with their obscene mannerisms, while a bent light drew me inward. I moved the board to see what it was. Immediately my vision took it in. I could see every detail: the sweat from their pores, the naked bodies twisted and contorted, faces in agony and pleasure. The monster swallowed me whole, clawed his mark upon me and took my innocence. The snap inside me broke, the forbidden door swung open, never to be shut. Inside the house, inside me, a room formed. A room I didn’t know was there, hidden in the shadows of the grunts, moans and horrible noises. My ears felt punctured, wounded, bleeding. I tried to close the door—make it close, make it lock, erase it, retreat, go backwards, pretend it didn’t happen—but no matter what I did, it wouldn’t budge. The door hung in its place by a metal hinge, swinging back and forth with a squeal. This squeal would forever become a demon’s whisper in my ears. He manifested himself from the darkest dark and attached himself to me like my second skin. I could not rid myself of him if I tried.

  My eyes burned from what I saw. Piles and piles of naked bodies, page after page, black lines attached to their faces like masks, as if not to be recognized because of the shame. As much as I wanted to run, I could not put the magazine down. It aroused a need in me, a yearning I didn’t know I had. Secret flowers bloomed in me. I became ripe with hunger, and not for food, but for something I couldn’t even describe. Just a physical ache from deep within me. My mind retained the images, almost photographic, even the most disturbing pages. They held a magnetic dark power over me. From the first glance, I knew a monster had me and was never going to let go, and to be honest, I didn’t know if I wanted him to. Everything I could have been was gone the second I saw the mangled bodies, the twisted arches of backs and muscles flexed, toned and V-split legs, writhing arms, private parts of men and large-breasted women exposing all of themselves.

  I finished eating the praline and turned the pages, over and over until my fingers stuck and wouldn’t let go. I ripped pages trying to free myself from the grip of the monster, the sounds wretched and horrible. At the same time, the black bars latched to my face and grew their dark mask on me. The monster had me and it was not letting go. It was visceral, my physical yearnings turned uncontrollable and yet I had no one to tell, no one to ask, no one to share this terrible awful splendid thing with. How can something so bad, feel so good? It was the most confusing moment of my childhood. I did not speak of it. I was sure if anyone knew, I’d be punished. Even God would never look at me the same. This was the monster I feared all my life. I treated the monster as one would treat a feral cat or dog, feeding it, yet maintaining a safe distance. Wild things can turn on you at any second. Underneath all the fur and fluff, a savage, vicious animal is waiting to rip your heart out and eat you alive.

  Weeks later, I watched the movie Old Yeller. I cried when Travis had to shoot his dog to save it from suffering. In my heart of hearts, I knew one day in my future, I’d have to kill something I loved in order to save it from suffering. My fears mounted while the monster had its way with me, black bars tacked on my eyes, masking the pain and hiding its control over me. Worst of all, it confirmed the badness in me—the horrible awfulness my mother had recognized and found unlovable. How could I blame her? How could anyone love a monster? I kept waiting for someone to pull out a gun and shoot me like Old Yeller. Put me out of my misery. Please. It was awful and wonderful at the same time. My tongue held a taste for the forbidden. The monster taught me a woman’s need to be dominated, controlled and ruled over as a sexual object. It taught me the unrealistic and distorted view of sex in our culture and most often it did so through demeaning and violent imagery of women. It taught me to be subservient to men as a slave, an object to be played with. I could never tell anyone, or confess my secret and in my heart, I knew the God I loved had abandoned me because of my terrible sins. The monster whispered and called me back again and again.

  Fear and torment. A desire. A need. A sin. A shame.

  It was a menacing, cavernous depth of willful transgression I could not stop. By the time I was eleven, I possessed a wealth of deviant knowledge no kid should ever know at any age. I observed the gestures, the movements and mannerisms on the pages, while the black-lined bars on the men’s faces told me who I was. Who I should become? My body betrayed me and constantly confused me. I felt out of control and yet controlled by something inside me, something orbited me to the heavens with a tingle of rebirth and then plunged me to the depths of Hell in a shamed afterbirth. I no longer saw the world with childlike eyes. A film of gray had clouded my vision. I was disconnected from the world, void of feelings and place, and basically numb. I kept everything hidden inside the house of my demented dark mind. I created a room for the bad girl with no place. No voice. From thereon, I grew up understanding men wanted what women had—the awful, terrible, splendid playthings on the pages of the magazine. In my young impressionable mind, if women gave men what they wanted, then women would get what they wanted, which for me, was great love. But I was wrong, so very, very wrong.

  12

  A Door Called Death

  They that will not apply new remedies

  must expect new evils.

  ~Francis Bacon

  Memories rush in. Flashes, surges, image bursts, and sounds. At this point my only outlet is the blue line.

  “Black angels to blue line. Get it out. Bleed. Pour. Get it on paper and out of my head.” I say over and over again, as my ink pen scribbles on the blue line. While I’m writing, I’m thinking. For as long as I can remember, there has been a great pain held up inside me, an embodiment captive inside the House of Seven. Yet I can’t see it or tell you what it is or how it got there or why. It sits inside the house under heavily guarded walls. I know the answer is there. I can see the doorframe, the archway, the molding. I rattle the doorknob, trying to gain entry, but my mind refuses to allow it. So I continue writing. Once I’ve gotten a good portion of memories down, I spot it in the corner of my bedroom like an idol of worship. It triggers a mood and a memory. I view the object with fondness and resentment.

  The maple wood hope chest is three feet long, eighteen inches wide and carved with intricate details, metal clasps and doodads. It was a S
weet Sixteen present from my parents. Which was shocking and to say the least, odd, and very awkward for a teen. I’m not entirely sure what transpired between my fifteenth birthday and my sixteenth birthday for my mother to do a complete one-eighty. Birthdays used to be simple, cake, ice cream, presents, a few friends and maybe a party at the skating rink if I was lucky, but when sixteen hit, it was the goddamned apocalypse. My mother, aka housewife extraordinaire, went on and on about how I could fill it with household items for when I got married. Jesus ever-loving kitchen Christ! I was sixteen years old when she presented it to me like the Royal Crown. I thought I was in Betty Crocker hell. Plus she had filled it with grown-up stuff. She yacked about the blender with its state-of-the-art turbo blades for chopping, mixing, and blending. Who the fuck gets their child a blender for their birthday? Gabby Collard, that’s who. I remember standing there in shock, my friends looking on, trying to pretend to be interested. All I could think of was moving to Alaska, checking out of school, running away. My ears burned with her continuous housewife chat mode, weddings anniversaries, cook-outs, recipes and holiday brunches. I felt like I was in a Hitchcock horror movie. I prayed the eight-inch state-of-the-art jagged cook’s knife would rise up and stab me. Put me out of my misery. I summoned the 180-thread-count pearl white bed sheets to unfold like a flying carpet and whisk me away to never-a-housewife land. Surely it existed somewhere.

  “…and this is why they call it a hope chest,” my mother said grinning like a Cheshire cat. I cringed. Dear God, is she ever going to shut up? I was embarrassed to death. For Gabby Collard everything that existed for a woman could only be found inside marriage, inside household goods—inside a freaking hope chest. My mind swirled with thoughts. Where is Mother Moonshine? Where are the wild-eyed slits? What happened to the motor-revving, howling, no-holds-barred Gabby “Lash” Lancaster?