It did not happen. I became the trash she swept out. With the broom she brushed the straw bristles against my bare legs as if I wasn’t there at all. She motioned with her head to get out. Tilting it toward the door. When I didn’t move, she did it again, and again until I was out the front door and on the porch. The awful pricking sensation of the straw on my skin and the tsk, tsk, tsk sound it made condemned me to a thousand hells. Tsk…tsk…tsk. Shame. Shame. Shame. I was unworthy of love, of words, of anything.
She stopped sweeping and leaned against the broom, while her back held the door open. Her eyes slanted and her candy crush lipstick mouth wrinkled. “Sexpot,” she said in a disgusted tone. I swayed on heavy feet. Pieces of me detaching and drifting away like puzzle parts lost in a windstorm. I stared at my mother’s candy-colored lips. That’s how it started. Lipstick. Cass wanting something she would never have. Kisses for Cass.
My mother swished the broom a few times and slammed the door. I felt destroyed. I didn’t know what the word sexpot meant, but I knew it was bad. Dirty as the dust settling on my skin. I climbed the wondering tree and hid in its chandelier of leaves. Inside the house of seven inside me, I cried. I paced the hushed cemetery with moss trees and demented spirits hanging upside down, swaying with their spirit eyes, taking on my mother’s stare of disapproval. Words and letters ravaged my head. So many I had to give them a place and because I had no voice, I buried them. Dug their graves and one after another crushed them deeply in the dirt. SHAME. DIRTY. BAD. DISGUSTED. UNLOVED. SEXPOT. My last and most utter heartbreaking moment was when I cut a rose stem from a nearby bush with my mother’s pruning shears. I watched the rose form her face, the only one I wanted to retain in my memory, the one who danced with pots and pans and silver spoons amidst sparklers and fireworks, my Mother Moonshine. I plucked a rose for Gabby Collard, an Immortelles, everlastings. I placed it inside a Mason jar. It was done. She was dead to me. I was invisible to her—so I made her invisible to me. It was the most painful moment I can remember. But the Petal People did what they were meant to do. The petals took my grief. Bore my burdens.
My native tongue was silent, a muted mouth unfit for the Seventh Tribe. I fell in and out of delusional states, overwhelming fits of rage, and then sadness. My body became a haven of aches and pains with no cause. I slept a lot and then none at all. My interests in life waned and I’d wander alone a lot. I didn’t want to listen to stories or play with Meg anymore. Since she couldn’t reach me, Meg hung out with her friends more and more. Dad would occasionally call me over from under the hood of a car inside the tinker shop and ask me if I was okay. “Sure,” I’d say without emotion. I could never look at my dad without seeing those magazines. I wondered if he looked at me with black bars like those women in the magazines. It was strange, and unnerving to me.
“Well, your mother thinks you’re going through girl changes, teenage stuff…are you sure you’re okay, Cass? Is it something else you’d like to talk about?”
“No, Dad. I’m fine,” I said, turning away. I was unavailable to everyone, including myself. The shadow interceptors took me. They ripped the locust crown from my head and scraped my mind with tiny sharp swords till I tasted my own blood dripping into the rot of my mouth and leaking inside the decay of the terrible house within me. There were times I enjoyed a sacred refuge, only occasionally during periods of time when the broken knob in my mind stuck, neither off nor on—and my mind ground to a halt. A sense of balance stabilized me, a time to gather my thoughts, and perspective. I longed for this stillness to remain, never end, but those moments were short-lived.
It was the summer after I turned fourteen my life changed. I spent time reading books. Meg had grown accustomed to her rich flamboyant friends, so I barely saw her, except in passing. Books became my sole companions. Huckleberry Finn and Henry David Thoreau, my personal favorite, along with other classics. I was fumbling through an old box of books in Maw Sue’s bedroom. One immediately caught my attention. It sat on top like a smiling demon with a layer of dust. I flipped through the pages and set it aside. Underneath it was a leather book filled with handwritten prayers. The pages were soiled and stained. The writing was cursive and a torment to read. The loops and curves broke my heart. The impact a thousand pains. I absorbed the first few pages like crumbs. The words, the aspirations of its message, the internal conflicts, the afflicted writer, long groping and grasping, riddling with struggles and long on hope. A tear rolled down my cheek. I felt as if I had written it.
But since I was short on hope and prayers went unanswered, I sat the book aside and picked up the demon. I wiped the dust off its hardback cover to read Lady Ledbetter in Love. Darn near every girl at school had a boyfriend except me, so if anyone could use pointers, it was me. I thought Lady Ledbetter might teach me a thing or two. Oh—she taught me things, all right…
I couldn’t stop reading. I devoured the words. I was in the room with lady and her lover so much I felt I might go up in flames. In my mind, sex got love and love got sex. Between the pornographic images burnt in my mind from the early exposure to monsters and the explicit sexual stories of lady and her lover, I came to my own conclusion of love. I began to watch others. I observed my surroundings, couples, adults, their relationships, my parents, teens at school, in movies and on the streets in passing. I mastered seduction at an early age. I was molded and made to attract and seduce a male with cobra eyes and poison in my red Southern blood. The message? If I gave, I would get. I knew no different. There were no sexual discussions in our house, no preparation for the adult perversions of the world, no teaching of man and woman, no sexual definitions. I didn’t learn the art of feminine rituals. Just punishment, black bars, monsters of shame and sexpot.
My body held strange aches, yearnings and desires, a wanting of something yet not knowing what it was, just an ache, raw and desired underneath the pulsating throb of my heart. It surged hot through my veins to other parts of my body. Shame told me it was wrong to think like this—but no matter how much I tried, the thoughts remained.
Silence. Shame. You are unlovable. You are an offering for a man, a slave to his desires, you do not exist. You have no voice. Shut up! You are bad for feeling, thinking, and acting in this terrible way. Black bars, black bars, black bars.
Though I hadn’t seen a girlie magazine in ages, the images were burnt in my memory, never erased, always there to remind me of who I was. When the thoughts wouldn’t go away, the black line mask would rivet itself across my eyes and bind me to the darkness inside myself, while the men in the magazines had their way with me. I’d ask God to forgive me, and every night when I lay underneath my rosebush comforter, I’d feel the thorns ripping away at my skin, clawing at a film of shame covering me, controlling me. In the heavens, between the void, the place between God’s and Adam’s fingertips, I saw myself slipping away. The glare of God’s gaze gave me nightmares. Undeserving—unworthy—shameful girl.
Something had changed inside me. Birthed in me. It was alive and wanted to be fed. A hungry mad dog. Hidden underneath my bed were the light and the dark. Two books I read, alternating one and then the other. The lover and the demon. Both held my affections, my curiosities. I had so many questions. No answers. Just trapped. Marked. Bound. The images of naked bodies burned inside my camera mind and conjured up haunts and monsters I couldn’t kill. Tiny vibrations exploded underneath my skin and little hot eruptions would flame up and down my frame, ripening my loins from within. The explosions set off mass quantities of electrons and protons bouncing around, crackling against my bones, rattling and shaking every hormone I didn’t know existed. It felt good—but shame told me it was bad. Disgusting, shameful. Tsk…tsk…tsk. Sexpot!
The lady and her lover assured me it was okay. The book of prayers told me I had committed the unpardonable sin. I was a prisoner under both spells. A battle waged within me, pulling me in every direction, and away from the locust crown and the little girl who danced behind the pine curtain. Feelings of right, of wrong,
and the forbidden plagued me. My beautiful locust crown of mercy and unfettered grace had been exchanged with black bars. The childlike heart had been isolated, pushed down, denied, stolen, taken advantage of and betrayed by her own cursed hands. I lingered in a misunderstood world. I was lonely. I grew depressed. Disengaged. The more I tried to fit in with everyone else, the more I felt left out. Different. Alone.
In my dreams, Maw Sue was locked up in a clinic again being poked and jabbed and shocked with therapy. Machines and doctors, nurses and carts, pills and liquids. Inside the house within me, inside the everlasting room the Petal People marched and chanted and held Mason jars with petals. The room was lit with a solitary candle while slithering shadows slipped between their stemmed bodies, to and fro. When I finally managed to wake up, I was in a drenched sweat. A violence filled my head. It spilled into my mind as if Michelangelo were painting the Sistine Chapel but not with paint, with blood, and not the Sistine Chapel, but my own inner house of horror, and not Michelangelo. It was Maw Sue, my great- grandmother who had died. She was gone. I knew it before I knew it. The house of seven inside me gave me warning. It rumbled on its crippled foundation and accepted her inside.
“No…No…. No!” I screamed. But it was too late. She had finally joined her Seventh Tribe. Brue and Simon, and the seven sisters, joined May Dell and Big Pops, joined all her little children who died long before they ever lived. She was part of the Petal People now. The Immortelles. The everlastings.
In a daze, I awoke. I sat on the corner of my bed in shock. In a burst of anger, I reached across my nightstand and raked whatever my arm hit off. Everything fell in slow motion, my makeup mirror, my watermelon lip gloss, a few pens, a tiny flip calendar, a book and my Mason jar full of pennies tipped over and spilled out seven pennies on top of the calendar. July 7th, 1977. The House of Seven shook on its foundation. I fell back on the bed in a trance of nothingness. The doom of what I knew overtook me. I’m not sure how long it was between the nothingness and when Dad opened my door to sit beside me.
“Cass, you need to get up. I have to tell you…” Before he could finish, I cut him off.
I said, “I know, I know, Dad.” I rose up from the bed in a rush. I stared at him with an awful, terrible sadness and a touch of anger I feared in myself.
“I know she’s dead, Dad! Maw Sue’s dead.”
“What? No, no she’s not. Cass, what on earth…she’s not dead. She’s in the care clinic. It’s bad this time—they don’t know…”
“No. No. She’s dead,” I screamed, storming across the room, tears invading my eyes. Dad tried to console me, but I was ravaged by intangible ghosts. I was tormented by the grim shadows he could not see. I was lost in angel tears and bright stars, dark of the moon, shine of the sun. A spinning sensation erupted inside me, inside the house inside me. It was one I’d experienced countless times. A terrible moment when I was gripping the edge of the world and my fingers were slipping and I couldn’t hang on any longer, so the world fell off its axis and took me with it. The last image I saw in my vision was the scattered remains of my stability.
In one quick, desecrating moment I slipped away. I became disoriented, displaced and disengaged from the world. I dethroned myself and smashed my Mason jar to bits. Then my lamp. My glass unicorn figurine. The angel statue in the corner. Anything I could reach for, and then…darkness.
19
The Funeral
One does not become enlightened
by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious.
~ C. G. Jung
In and out. Darkness. Voices. Chants. My vision blurred. A high-pitched sound pierced my ears until they bled. A damaging squeal of a pig, an owl or both together, a terrible death squall like winds ripping into insanity. I saw angels, a choir of them, tarnished and fallen, despaired of voice, trying to sing but only screaming. Bodies jerking and squealing a rhapsody of vile contaminations as if possessed by dark shadows. Thrashing bodies, twisted and contorted like snakes expelling moans not of this world. Hearing the dead—I felt it uncurl in my chest. Something horrid, dank and inescapable. It waited for me inside the house, inside the deep crawl space, beneath and below. It had knowledge of all I’d done. It knew my secrets.
The next morning when I came out of my blackened pit, my father confirmed what I knew to be true. “I told you,” I said. My mind blank. My head empty. No emotion. No tears. No nothing. “I want to be alone, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay, Cass. But…but how did you know?”
I stared at him. He was visibly shaken. I could see the worry in his eyes.
“We were connected, Dad, in a special way. I just knew,” I said without emotion.
“We all loved her, but I know y’all had a special bond. I’ll miss her too. You know, she told me stories as a kid too. I still remember some of them. They were so fascinating and magical to hear. She was good at fairy tales for sure. I know you’re going to miss her. We all are, Cass.”
“Umm-hmm.” I turned over in the bed. Hearing this from Dad made me wonder if he ever believed. But he was not chosen for the gift, the bloodline, so, how could he? The wondering tree outside my window seemed droopy and sullen. I heard the door close behind me as my mind slipped into the darkness of what it knew best.
Brother Lester talks and talks. Last words, eulogies, prayers. I fidget on the pew and want to run. Music starts to play. I can’t move. Everyone crawls around me. My mind spins. Get to the porch, Cass. Storytelling or silence. Look for crumbs. Make lovely your losses. Use your gifts. My body moves back and forth in small ticks. It’s here. The time of last looks, final viewing, end snapshot, the last kiss, and the last bitter cold touch. Everything in me refuses to cooperate. I’m hyperventilating. My eyes blink rapidly through the tears. I’m here, but not here. I’m in a place of in-betweens, a realm between this world and the next, the one place I can never explain or understand. Suddenly, without knowing how I got here, I’m standing in front of the casket. It’s like a dream, a nightmare. It doesn’t seem real. Maw Sue’s body lies stiff and lifeless like some wrinkled old porcelain doll. Instead of her normal face, I see her Petal People face, a perfect flower dried and preserved, forever to bear the grief and live inside the petal room, the Immortelles, the everlastings. I see myself there too, as a black rose squished beside her, our wilted leafy arms curled around each other, taken by the shadows, the afflictions, the curse neither of us were able to defend ourselves against. The next thing I know, I’m trying to crawl inside the casket and Dad is pulling me away and I’m screaming.
At the cemetery I stare at the casket morbidly and daydream. I wonder what a tree feels like when it knows it’s been picked to snuggle a human’s dead body under the dirt, in the darkness of the underworld for the rest of its life. Does the tree sap pour out underneath the dirt and surround the human body, covering the wounds of the person it wraps in its bark, like it does when the tree is cut? Does it resist? Can it refuse? Does it say, “No God, please not me, choose another tree, but not me, I simply cannot do what you ask. Let termites eat me instead. Let me rot and decay to dust, but not the casket. Please not the casket.”
“Amazing Grace” plays from the speakers. The musical notes grow muscled fingers and clutch my throat until I break and choke. The last note holds on and on, and on until I am sure every tombstone shall shatter with grief. The sounds bounce off headstones, pewter vases and angelic statues with chubby faces. They split rocks, crack the earth and shake the heavens. I stare into the vast portal of scattered souls laid to rest in different times, decades apart. My vision blurs and goes foggy. I feel removed from everyone around me. I’m held inside a thin strip of space where two worlds intersect, each yearning for the other. The in-betweens. The realm of gaps, of voids, of waiting for wholeness. It’s hard to remember what happened afterwards. The hours and weeping ran together. I did not die. But I did not live either.
Weeks came and went. I gave off a faint odor of decay, t
he scent of the insane, those doomed to mind afflictions and broken knobs, little girls lost and haunted houses. I lost the will to get out of bed, wash my face, brush my teeth or go outside. My bedroom changed like the seasons of time, except it would mimic the landscape and the rooms inside the house within me. Darkness and light. Depression and joy. Rotating each room, each mood. Creepy moss tree damsels hung from my ceiling, eyeing me with their spirit eyes, and Petal People strolled in circles with Mason jars while crumbs fell from the wondering tree. Crushed crackle bugs clung to the walls while the door of seven blazed a hot sizzle and shadows slipped in and out of the cracks. The new Mason jar, which my father had replaced after I broke the other one in a fit of rage, began to spin like a carnival ride as it sat on my nightstand. I had crazy delusions Maw Sue would come back to life. I’d sit at her feet and Meg and I would listen to stories again. It was weeks before I remembered what actually happened at the cemetery.
The ceremony was over. I sat in the back seat while my thighs below my dress stuck to the plastic seat covers. Dad’s lighter flicked and clicked from the front seat. I smelled tobacco mixed with Mother’s strong perfume and hairspray. Meg was sitting beside me, fiddling with clanging bracelets. Dad cranked the engine and the car started to pull away. My tearful red eyes drifted to the casket underneath the awning in the distance. My hands reached up to touch the window. And then I freaked out. I had forgotten to say goodbye. Not the regular-everyone-else’s goodbye, but the ceremonial goodbye. I banged on the glass and started screaming and scrambled to open the door. Dad barely got the car screeched to a halt before I barreled out and dashed for the casket. How could I? I had completely forgot to pluck a rose for Maw Sue, the everlasting Immortelles to represent her in the Mason jar. For the Petal People, for the Seventh Tribe. For my House of Seven. To carry my grief. And I had plenty to carry.
THE HOUSE INSIDE ME Page 21