THE HOUSE INSIDE ME

by Camelia Wheatley

  “Light and dark, remember? Nothing to fear,” she’d say to reassure me. It didn’t help much. Day and night, candles and prayers, light or dark, moon or sun, still the inner workings of my mind haunted me, shackled me and tried to shut me up, push me down, make me go insane. It was as if my mind didn’t want me to exist at all. I could feel the entanglement of things hidden, their resistance against me. I couldn’t see them, but their presence was there, prickling my skin and hedging my back.

  Somewhere in my fragile mind I thought my mother would understand the stories Maw Sue told us, but in reality, it was just another way for me to hopelessly connect to her, gain her love and approval, some way, somehow. I mentioned the Petal People speak for the dead and Maw Sue taught Meg and me how to converse with those passed on. I told her I had been talking to Big Pops for a while now. It turns out my mother didn’t pay attention to me at all. Instead, she glared at me fish-eyed, then cocked her head sideways like a dog. After a few eye twitches she replied, “Great, alrighty then. Have fun.” She went back to licking green stamps in square booklets and placed them in a cardboard box. On the side in big black marker was the word KITCHEN. It should have been DENIAL.

  Maw Sue said trusting our gift often means standing alone. And so, it was with me. Alone. Being by myself drove me crazy with overthinking and thoughts flitted in and out of my head like wild birds. I headed to Maw Sue’s. She was the only one who halfway understood me. I wandered for hours, dilly-dallying around the knick-knacks of her old bedrooms filled with stuff decades old. I liked to pick things up and think about their past life, their owners, and their journey. I figured everything had a story connection in some form or fashion. I got bored and ended up on the porch, dreading my future with its house of seven, shadows and secrets. I stared out into the distance and noticed it hanging on the post. One lone crackle. It hit me all of a sudden. Meg and I had never found a group of cicada crackle shells, always one, by itself, alone. I plucked it off the perch and introduced the lone crackle to the shoebox troops and commenced to create a world of magic. According to Maw Sue’s philosophy, mayhem always follows magic. I sat the lone crackle on the railing and stared into its empty vessel. In the background, the sun set and dropped midway into the pine trees, and rays of light glistened into the distance. I fell into a trance. I drifted inside myself to the House of Seven.

  The landscape is mute of color, dreary and drab like a morning fog at dawn, barely light. I am standing on a gray lawn a few feet from the house I created. Whimsical, magical, all mine. Tree creatures are my favorite and my most feared. A product of my imagination, they came right out of the trees, as if they grew from the branches. The wood creatures have long mossy hair and their bodies are bark and green moss, but most strangely they are all hanging upside down, their knees locked onto the bark of the tree, dangling like bats from spindly branches with glowing spirit eyes seeing inside wandering souls. My sister Meg and I used to pretend we were these creatures made from the trees, while we hung upside down on the branches, our hair loosely flowing while we swung and laughed and made faces. As I walk past them, I turn to look at the house. It’s the first time I take it all in. It’s angular, forming odd shapes, and yet it towers to the dark sky as if the roof reached the heavens. The house has no windows. There are cobblestone steps leading to the porch and a large wooden door, with a number seven carved into it, an entranceway, a hollow opening that pulled you in with a glowing bright amber like the light of a thousand fires, and a constant tendril of smoke sizzling off the edges. I feel a pressure in my head and hear a knob click. I walk up the crumbling steps till I’m standing inches from the door. The knob is plain, ordinary and broken. It clings limp and dangling. I reach out to turn it. It moves and seizes my hands like a snake. A rack of chills be-bops up my spine. I feel a power over me I cannot endure. A loud click rings out. The pressure releases my hand and the door opens, making an awful creepy noise. The room opens up to a half-moon shape and scattered across the rickety floor are old chairs, cobwebs strewn one end to another, old moss growing up from the cracked floor, and a large bulb of light streaming in from a ripped ceiling, giving the room a charismatic glow. Even the dust flows about the room like fairies. I am a shadow that moves here. I walk to the center of the room. Under my feet is a drawing of the number seven, the same as on the front door. The second my feet walk upon it; the whole room is lit up by the moonlight streaming in from an open roof. It illuminates an assortment of tunnels, dimly lit passageways, channels and cubbyholes spread out as far as I can see. I travel down a long hallway of rooms, door after door, as long as my vision can reach, a walled pathway with doorways on both sides with lighted entrances.

  I stop in front of a door. The letters on the nameplate scramble until it says, WONDERING TREE. My hand turns the knob. The door opens. I walk into the pine forest of my dreams. Most striking is a grand replica of the huge Chinese tallow tree outside my bedroom window, the one I climb and ponder life. Bee’s buzz and soothe my sorrows and afflictions. Inside the wondering tree, I wonder about this…wonder about that. I ponder life and love and family. I ponder my future. I ponder death and its invasion into my mind and the things it whispers when I am unaware. I sort and sift through the inner dialogues, the many voices in my head, the influx of a thousand voices, all talking and telling me things, overkill of information accumulating without my consent.

  The house is part of me, who I am, who I was, and who I am to become. It is a place to build or tear down, to live in, to learn and grow, to see and deny, to make each room whatever I want it to be. It is the lessons, regrets, joys and pains, fears and terrors of my true self. It is here my Seeker gift is activated—intensified inside the house. My ears grow alert and my vision sharper, more intense.

  I leave the wondering tree room and walk the hallways. I stop in front of another door. The nameplate scrambles until the word reads CRACKLE. I hear the buzzing cicadas through the doorway, the Southern sounds alive and passionate. Entering inside is like walking inside the shell of a cicada, brittle walls like crackled skin. The emptiness of the shell saddens me.

  Suddenly I see her through the see-through walls. She is on the other side of the shell in the outer world. She looks lost. She is frantic and wandering. Her eyes are vacant. It’s me. It’s me as a grown-up. A montage of feelings erupts. Her calamity is my own. I panic. My skin ripples as if a volcanic eruption is underneath. It’s a premonition, I’m certain of it. The house is warning me. If I grow up it will be tragic. I run across the scratchy floor of the crackle room. I beat on the transparent walls of my cursed plantation. I poke at the amber see-through skin to warn her, but it is too late. I did not get to choose. My namesake did what it was born to do. I see my life pass in a vision right before me, child to adult, adult to child, in a flash. I can’t bear the thought of being doomed to adulthood. I start to scream. I scream until I feel my bones crushing. The whimsical house spits me out.

  Vomited out of the House of Seven, I woke up to find I was flat on my back, staring at the square panels of the ceiling stained with abandoned wasp nests and a weave of spider webs on Maw Sue’s porch. I squirmed and heard an awful crunching like bones breaking. I jerked up quickly and turned around. The shoebox army was flat as a pancake and pulverized to fragments.

  “Well, aren’t you the lucky one,” I said, glancing at the lone crackle survivor sitting on the rail. “Lucky you were by yourself. To not die. Well, I mean you’re already dead, so never mind.” I pondered things for a second, then ran inside. I whizzed past Maw Sue, who was a haze of pastel flowers and smoke. I collapsed at the three-tiered bookcase in the dark corner of the living room. I could hear the slipping gurgles of things unseen. I was sure parts of Maw Sue’s old house had emerged somehow within my own “inner” house.

  I grabbed the books I wanted and ran to the center of the room where the light was the brightest and the shadowy figures lurking in the dark corners couldn’t bother me. More confusing, though, is Maw Sue once said darkness
wasn’t to be feared in us—it’s the brightest light in us that is more terrifying than any shadow, demon or dark pitch of night. She said the light is the one who casts the shadows of self—the one we know—and the one we don’t. And that, she said, is something to fear. Of course, I was scared of everything, so it didn’t matter.

  I spent the next hour pouring over encyclopedias and National Geographic magazines, page after page and skipping really fast past the naked tribal people. I searched for explicit information about this cicada, aka crackle. I had to know its habitat, its purpose, its journey. To my amazement and disappointment, I discovered crackles don’t have much of a life at all. The thing is—they don’t get a choice. Crackles, aka cicadas, live the life they were given. A crackle doesn’t try to be a beetle or a bird; they just are what they are. I also discovered the reason Meg and I found gazillions of them. They have the life span of a lightning strike. One day here. Next day—gone. The only remnant of their existence is a tragic shell clinging to tree bark. Just think if humans went out like that? One day you’re talking to your neighbor George, and the next day his dead carcass is clinging to an old garden post. Talk about creepy death rituals. Ugh. Something in my heart had to live for a purpose, a calling, a deep-seated human need, and I certainly didn’t want to go out as a shell of nothing. However, through my research into bugs, I did discover one amazing factoid which made me green with envy. A crackle spends the majority of its life as a kid. A bug-child! What could be better?

  Crackles stay underground, digging out tunnels, playing in dirt and sucking tree roots. But then…oh, no. The ending is horrible, epic bad news. Crackles eventually have to molt, which is just a polite way of saying grow up, sucker. Then, they, uhhhh…I can barely say it. They, they, they, they…okay, FINE! They have sex and DIE! A bile plug of something lurched inside my throat. I hurled it across the porch into the grass, which in my childish opinion is a better ending than molting and sex. I bet the bug farewell ceremony is an all-out blubber fest. The trembling crackles dig their last tunnel, pack their bags and eat their last root supper. They pray in the garden like Jesus hoping for a last-dish attempt at getting out of it.

  “God, please let this cup pass from me. Not thy will, but yours.” God answers and says, “No. Be gone, you bug peasant. Go forth and be who I made you to be. Have sex and multiply.”

  They cry big bug tears and wave goodbye to family. They dig, and dig, and dig to emerge from the world of dirt tunnels into the light of this bitter, frightening world. Once their eyes adjust to the disturbing reality, they sling off the dirt, wash their tiny claws, indulge in one last cruel, crying Southern hissy fit, let out a loud sigh and then reluctantly search for a mate. Then…you know, sex thing.

  Needless to say, I had a meltdown in the living room. I counted on my fingers. I figured I had a good ten years before I molted into a legal full-fledged, crazed adult like the rest of the population. Shit! My life was over as I knew it. I threw the book back on the shelf, streaked past Maw Sue, hit the door wide open and plucked the lone crackle off the ledge. After hyperventilating, I had an epiphany, an effigy of fate—inside the house, inside me. Maw Sue informed us the heart was a source of great wealth and richness. The spirit of faith was a reckless and strange entity only known to the heart by surrender and only found in abandonment. A wispy spirit was blowing through my house right now. “Make a vow. A solemn vow. Do it now,” they said. I followed the path of the universe. I vowed to never grow up. I would remain a child at heart.

  Afterwards, we celebrated. Me and the crackle played outside long after the sun had dropped beneath the slender pines and the lanky shadows of the lesser light moved across the yard. I glanced up every few seconds while the hair on my neck stood up. Nothing to fear, Cass, nothing to fear. We hit every patch of dirt, sand and mud puddle we could find on this vast forty acres. I was a dirt ball with hair, teeth and eyes, a constellation of earth-infused madness. We were in mud puddle thirteen when I hear my mother’s fourth and final yell warp into a code I didn’t recognize, which was warning I’d better skedaddle to the house.

  My mother opposed soil conservation. I came to this conclusion when I sat on the floor to take in some TV. Chunks of conservation fell on her precious rope rug she bought with green stamps. Her eyes expanded like two blue moons at harvest time. She went teetotal ballistic. She waylaid me with the damp dishrag, then dragged me outside and sprayed me with a water hose like a common house dog. If that wasn’t bad enough, she dragged me into the bathroom, handed me a bar of soap and threatened to beat every speck of dirt off me and then some. My face twitched and my mouth drew up in snarls. My solemn vow gave me the wherewithal to stand firm and not back down to tyrants like Gabby Collard. Moms who don’t understand. Adults who don’t get it.

  “Act like a lady, will you?” she graveled in a tone high and mighty. Plus, her screaming was unnecessary. I was only two feet away, for God’s sake!

  “You are eight years old. Act like it.”

  Well, hell’s bells. I thought I WAS acting like an eight-year-old, but evidently it wasn’t like Gabby Collard’s idea of an eight-year-old. She wiped the sweat from her brow.

  “Grow up, Cass,” she wailed. “Just grow up!”

  HELL. TO. THE. NAW. After my day? My ears burned. The house inside me rumbled, quaked, jerked. The moss tree damsels swung like demented bats. A fever flamed within me, rising from my chest to my ears. In the South, when your ears catch fire, you are not responsible for your actions.

  “Don’t tell me to grow up.” I fumed, spit and spat and sat on the floor like a protestor refusing to budge. I heard somewhere it was my constitutional right to do so. “I like dirt. I’m not growing up. And for yourrrrrr information”, I said fuming mad and with glaring glazed-over eyeballs popping out of my head, “I don’t have to.” Apparently, Gabby, my unconstitutional mother wasn't scared of protestors.

  “Who are you now, Peter Pan? Not going to grow up, huh?”

  “If I want to be.” I replied with sass and sap. And then, this little constitutional protestors’ world spun out of focus. A dull thud rang out when she swatted me with the Johnson and Johnson shampoo bottle.

  “Is that all you got?” I laughed in rebellion. “A wimpy shampoo bottle ain’t got nothing on the paint stick at Maw Sue’s house. Hell, you might as well slap me with a feather!” Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say. Sensing she was not gaining ground, Gabby went code 10 on me, which is repetitious Bible belt methodology—Jesus, Joseph and Mary shit. When it came to codes, this was the limit, the mother lode of mothers.

  She jerked my arm, kicked off her black flats, and leapt over the tub like a graceful gazelle. All at the same time, which I kind of admired, but only slightly. She pulled me in and stripped me down like a banana and poured in a half bottle of bubble bath. I screamed and tried to escape, but she sprouted octopuses’ arms and shifty tentacles. A brigade of soap plumes rose up like militant cleaning soldiers. I went into a Martin Luther King rally cry. Defender of dirt, minister of mud, crackle crusader.

  “Suck root forever!” I screamed. I marched. “Dirt rules! Ban soap! Mud. Mud. Mud,” I chanted and fist pumped my arms like the Moon Wanderers did. It so happens when they left our town, and traveled across country, I saw them on TV in Washington state protesting the war. “Rule the kingdom. Take your life back. Moon Wanderers forever! Demand what’s yours. Take your place, people. NEVER grow up! Never!”

  “Be still,” she said, fighting my emancipation. She wrestled me every which way but loose. “Stop it. What has gotten into you? Is Maw Sue filling your head again?” Her wet washcloth dodged and darted.

  I was in revolt. “Never grow up. I am a Seeker by God! Fulfill the namesake!”

  “A what?” my mother spat. “Oh, my Lord.” She leaned against the wall in exhaustion, her hair all fluffed and distorted, and she was soaked from head to toe. Air bubbles flew about the room like tiny bombs awaiting my orders.

  “What the hell is going on?” Dad sa
id, poking his head in the door.

  “Never grow up, Dad!” I railed and raised my hands to the sky.

  “It’s your Seeker daughter starting a revolution…or something.”

  I was counting on Dad for full support of my revolt, but the octopus intercepted with the bent eyebrow. The South refers to the bent eyebrow move as an act of aggression, and men steer clear when women use it. My father was no exception. Once the eyebrow arched, it was over. Dad skedaddled and left me with a crazed octopus hell-bent on pulling up my rebellious roots and squashing them. But she would have hell doing it. I was naked. I was fearless.

  “No retreat! Rule the kingdom. Take your life back. Demand what’s yours. Take your place, people. Be Ye Seekers of the calling!” I yelled and yelled some more. My mother attempted one last scrub down. The room escalated into effervescent madness. The generational sins of James Dean and pretty much all of Dad’s heroes fell off me in scabs until I was raw and squeaky. I threatened to go outside and roll in the dirt like a dog. The octopus counter-measured my defense by threatening to dust me in old lady powder and make me go to school in patchwork shorts. The bent eyebrow told me she meant it. I snorted in protest and marched to my room. I slammed the door. Opened it, and slammed it again. It was the best I could do to make my point.

  Hours later, I peeked out of my room. The octopus was sprawled out on the couch, drinking a glass of wine with soap bubbles on her bangs. Dad gave me a sympathetic glance. I slammed the door in protest and felt the piercing stare of my mother’s steely eyes through the walls. I smirked in satisfaction, then I went to my dresser and took out the fabric pouch. Maw Sue showed me how to use medicinal herbs to be one with the earth when all hell broke loose on earth, which was pretty regular in this family. I crushed the rosemary leaves and lemongrass into my hands and rubbed myself down. The fragrance gave me a sense of aliveness, of calm. When I could no longer smell soap, I put them back in the bag and tucked them neatly in my dresser.