No One Asked for This

by Cazzie David

  I’m aware that the chances of me not finding an intruder are way higher than the chances of me finding one. But regardless of the odds, I’ve never missed a night checking all of the rooms and hallways. I don’t do it in a brave way, though, like the way the first character who dies in the horror movie checks the basement with a flashlight because they heard a noise. I do it like the character who has already watched all of their friends die—running through the house and screaming, knowing the murderer is about to grab me by the shoulders.

  In this process, I lock all the doors and windows. Then I double-check them by shaking the knobs to ensure I did in fact lock them and it isn’t my brain tricking me into a false sense of security. I close the curtains in every room so no one can see into the house, just in case someone is hiding in the backyard. Then I pat down the bottom of all the curtains with my foot to make sure no one is hiding behind them (even though I’m the one who closed them). And last but definitely not least, I put on the alarm code on and pray to God it doesn’t go off and wake my dad up because the wrath of my dad waking up in the middle of the night for anything ESPECIALLY AN ALARM is unlike any wrath you’ve ever witnessed—like a Mob boss who just found out you’re a rat.

  Once I’m done with my search and lockdown, I can get into bed, but because anxious people can’t just go to sleep, I stay up panicking. If I could have any superpower it would be the ability to fall asleep when it is nighttime and when I am tired. Falling asleep is a miracle, a magic trick. Anyone who is able to do it should consider themselves magicians. The act of falling into sleep terrifies me; it’s like there’s no difference between that and going under anesthesia, so there are many things I must do to distract myself from the fact that that is what I’m doing. First, I sit facing the door so I can see and react immediately if someone enters. Then I put on a television show at medium volume, quiet enough for me to hear anyone walking around but loud enough to drown out the air-conditioning noises so I don’t mistake them for paranormal beings. The show must be lighthearted and fun, not so fun that the sounds will keep me up but fun enough that there’s nothing remotely sad or scary in it that could result in a bad thought or dream. My night dreams are even more terrorizing than my daydreams, but I won’t go into them because listening to people’s real-life stories is boring enough; who wants to be subjected to someone’s imaginary night? Everyone thinks they have the scariest dreams, just like everyone thinks that they have the best dog or best therapist. But I do wonder if, when I dream that I’m going through the horror of being kidnapped and initiated into a cult and having to cut off a baby’s head so they wouldn’t kill my family, is my brain essentially going through the trauma of that happening on a minor scale? If I drowned in my dream, then technically, I felt the fear of death as my lungs filled up with ocean water, and I sincerely believed I was drowning . . . Anyways, just something I’m curious about. Like, sure, I’ve had zero hardships, but dream Cazzie has been through the wringer!

  After I’ve forced myself to listen to non-scary TV dialogue for a few minutes, and as my dad is peacefully slumbering in the other room without a care in the world, the usual debate starts in my mind: Do I lock my bedroom door in case the intruder manages to get into the house? But what if my dad has a medical emergency and I can’t hear him because my door is closed? Or what if I can’t hear the intruder enter his room? Do I leave my door ajar? But if my door is open, maybe the intruder will come into my room when he otherwise would not. What’s safer—locked, unlocked, or ajar? Of course, I could just take a sleeping pill, pass out, and avoid these negative ruminations altogether. But my mother sent me an article on the dangers of sleeping pills a while back, one that was too dense to read all the way through, so I can only assume that the dangers are very real and horrifying.

  When I tried to talk to my dad about how unsafe I felt, he made me feel like a true piece of shit. “You think you’re so special that out of everyone on the planet, someone is going to choose to come kill or kidnap you?” Then he gestured to the door code. “And how could this possibly make you feel unsafe?”

  “Someone could easily watch one of us entering the code. It could probably also be hackable—”

  “Oh, SHUT UP, you’re nuts!” he said in the same offended manner he’d had when I said his outlets were displeasing to the eye.

  After many days of getting even fewer hours of sleep than usual because of the door code, I decided I should confront my dad, lovingly and patiently. We were roommates. House decisions should be made together!

  I walked down the stairs, expecting to find him at the kitchen table popping supplements, and heard the door code being entered. Must be my dad coming in from getting the newspaper, I thought. But it wasn’t—it was his yoga teacher! So much for being loving and patient. I went and found my dad.

  “DAD, WHAT THE FUCK?! You gave our front-door code to your YOGA TEACHER?!” I whisper-screamed so she wouldn’t hear me.

  “Yeah, isn’t it amazing? I don’t have to walk over to open the door anymore! I’m telling you, this door code is the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “Do you know what else would be smart? An open-door policy! Let’s just leave the door open!”

  “It’s impossible I could have raised such an idiot.”

  “DAD, who even is she!? She can’t have our front-door code! No one should have it but us!”

  “Of course she can! Stop worrying! Trust me, she’s a very nice person. What do you think, my yoga teacher is going to murder us?!” he said.

  “No . . . but what if she gives it to someone else?! What if someone knows she’s the only one who has the code and then ties her up and tortures her until she gives it to them?!”

  “If someone cares that much about getting into the house, they would just break the fuckin’ window!”

  He had me there. But I still felt it was wrong for someone I didn’t know to have what was the equivalent of a key to our house.

  It didn’t take long before everyone had the door code: his new girlfriend, his friends, his masseuse, the gardener. I wouldn’t be surprised if the mailman had it. Every time I tried to bring up the issue with him, I was met with defiance. The door code was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He literally thought getting into the house via code was magic.

  A few months later, his girlfriend made plans to move in, so I made plans to move out. I was too tired and stressed to keep living there anyway, and it’s not like I was leaving him all alone now. I know I said I would never move out because I needed to spend as much time as possible with my dad before he died, but he wanted me to die! Plus, his girlfriend had a cat, so I couldn’t stay there with my own cat. My cat’s going to die eventually too, so I should also be thinking about spending as much time as I can with her. My cat’s life span and my dad’s are pretty neck and neck at this point, so I guess that meant I love my cat more than my dad? Which is fine, because I know for a fact that if my cat could talk, she’d believe in alarm systems.

  I told my mother I wanted to move out of my dad’s house, and she was thrilled. She was eager for me to leave the nest, perhaps because she was jealous that I was more troubled about my dad’s upcoming death than I was about hers. She just feels more immortal to me, which I was forced to explain to her after she admitted her feelings were hurt about my anxiety over my dad’s death. Telling her she had superhero attributes wasn’t enough, so I mentioned the undeniable fact that she’s ten years my father’s junior, but logic had no part in this conversation.

  “I could drop dead out of nowhere! You don’t know!” she yelled.

  The moving-out project came at a good time; I was happy to have a bonding activity with her, in part to relieve some of my guilt. My mom and I excitedly started sifting through options together. I told her I pictured myself in an extremely safe apartment somewhere central, not too far east or west of LA. She then went on about how renting would be a waste of money, and the financially wise option would probably be to buy a small house a
s an investment. I wondered if I was hearing her right.

  ME?! A HOUSE?! MY OWN HOUSE?! How could this be?! My mother is notorious among my friends and family for paying for scarcely anything of mine. She stopped paying for my eyebrow waxes when I was sixteen, saying waxes were a privilege, not a necessity, although she generously decided to offer one wax a year as a birthday present. My father spent the next seven years reluctantly paying for them. Maybe that’s why I was more worried about his death—because if he died, I’d get a unibrow.

  My mother regards my sister and me as kids or adults depending on what’s convenient for her. It’s always “Because I’m the adult and you’re the kid!” until I need something and then it’s “You’re an adult! Figure it out!” I would never even have mentioned the word house to my mother for fear she would immediately start screaming about my sense of entitlement and how disgusting it was for me to even mention the idea of her buying a twenty-four-year-old kid a home. I tried my best to hold in my utter surprise over her suggestion. If I seemed even slightly happy or shocked by the generosity of it, she would instantly take it back.

  “I think buying a house would probably be the smart thing to do, yes,” I said, teeth clenched.

  After I found out one of my mother’s trusted friends had recently bought her daughter an “appropriate” home because it was a good time to invest, it made slightly more sense. But I think, above all, my mother liked the idea of giving me such a large responsibility. Watching me contend with the challenges of having a house was right up her alley.

  Mom! My house was flooded, and I don’t have flood insurance!

  Well, now you know what goes into owning a home. This is how many people become homeless, and now you’ll know what that is like as well. You’re an adult. This is life. I wish you the best of luck.

  But those tribulations were still far down the line, and my excitement overrode them. My mom set me up with the same real estate agent who’d helped her friend’s daughter and sent me on my way.

  The real estate agent, Melinda, was a character straight out of a Pixar movie. There’s no Pixar movie about a real estate agent, but if there were, she’d be the inspiration. Think a tall, lanky Edna Mode. She only wore striped shirts. Seriously. Every day, a different-colored stripe. The color of the stripes always matched the rest of her outfit—her pants, her shoes, her bag, and her lipstick. She had a jet-black bob with straight bangs that landed right above her eyebrows. Her voice was crackly, and she spoke so slowly I could anticipate the ends of her sentences long before they were over. I couldn’t help but finish all of them for her out loud; I hate wasting time.

  We looked at houses for weeks; I was desperate to find the perfect one and would settle for nothing less. I was spending so much time with Melinda, it was as if I cared about her death. Eventually she got to know me so well that by the time we walked into the hillside Laurel Canyon abode, she knew it was the one before I said a word. We looked at each other with wide eyes, hers sparkling from the upcoming paycheck, mine with visions of me curled up on the couch with my cat in the heavenly cloud of a living room.

  Everything about the house was original, with not a thing I’d want to change. It had all of the aspects I’d dreamed about and more: trees through every window, white brick, exposed wood, fireplaces, high ceilings, and soft light pouring into every room. And the best part of all? A high-tech security system.

  To me, the house now represented the key to happiness, something I’d felt was unachievable as long as the future exists. I knew in this house I wouldn’t be (as) afraid and that my depression couldn’t thrive, as I’d be surrounded by things that were cozy and bright. The house would force me to be productive so maybe I could eventually feel like I deserved to live there. I’d have grown-up dinner parties with friends and sleepovers with boys who would immediately want to date me because I’d have the most special little house they ever saw. The potential of the new-house version of me seemed ­limitless.

  We left the house with pamphlets and plans and met up at the local coffee shop to go over them. Melinda and I ordered almond lattes, and she (slowly and cracklingly) told me about everything that goes into making an offer. I took it all in but impatiently rushed her along so I could tell my mother about the house and because I have the attention span of a goldfish.

  I eagerly called her on the way back home from coffee and prefaced my proclamation with “You’re not going to believe me, but I actually found the house of my dreams.”

  She said no. Sometime during the many weeks I spent looking, she decided it’s absolutely insane to buy a twenty-four-year old a house. Who can blame her?

  Although I did secretly agree, it was embarrassing to have gotten my hopes up. I couldn’t let that part go, that she would have me go through the process of looking for a house for no reason. So once I visited her in the Vineyard, I tried to further understand why she did this. She admitted that in addition to coming to the conclusion that it was completely insane (again, who can blame her?), I was also not responsible enough to own a house.

  I was mostly upset for all the hours I’d wasted with Melinda. My mom told me it was a good thing that I’d spent all that time with her, because I needed to learn what the market was like and how the process worked for when I would be responsible enough to own a house.

  “I DON’T NEED TO LEARN ABOUT THE MARKET! I’M NOT TRYING TO BE A REAL ESTATE AGENT! I spent all day, every day, with that woman for no reason!”

  I didn’t want to be on the Vineyard with my mom who thought I was an irresponsible child, so I planned to go back home. Oddly enough, a few days before my flight, my dad’s house was flooded. And I mean absolutely everything was flooded.

  Luckily, he had flood insurance, but it would take months to restore the house, so he’d have to move into a rental for the time being. Apparently, there was not enough room for me and my cat in the rental with him and his girlfriend, so I sucked up my pride and asked my mother nicely if I could stay in her house in LA until she returned from Martha’s Vineyard in five months. I’d be able to have my own space and at least feel somewhat at home, I reasoned.

  “Nope,” she said abrasively.

  “What do you mean, no? It’s my home too.”

  She denied that and said her home was not also my home, it was hers, and I was much too irresponsible to stay there. So not only was I too irresponsible to own a house, I was now too irresponsible to even live at my own house. I thought it was a mother’s job to make her children feel loved and welcome in their home, but my mother seemed to think she should do the opposite. Actually, she just did the opposite with me; as she proceeded to inform me, Romy was allowed to stay there whenever she wanted, because she was much more responsible.

  At this point, you’re probably thinking my mother must have had proof of me acting nefariously. It’s true that I’ve done many things that people would consider thoughtless. When I was a sophomore in high school I threw the senior class’s two-hundred-person after-prom at my house while my parents were out of town; I lied twice as frequently as I told the truth to my mother about where I was and what I was doing, starting from when I was eight years old and was told I wasn’t allowed to watch Miss Congeniality at a friend’s house and did anyway; when I was sixteen, I toilet-papered this douchebag’s house and he blackmailed me, threatening to show my parents and the police the security tapes if I didn’t get him a thousand dollars by the end of the weekend, so, sure, I sold some of my mother’s belongings to get the money. But she never found out about any of that, so I didn’t really know what her deal was. I should have been a perfect child in her eyes. Nevertheless, the only evidence of irresponsibility my mother needed not to allow me to stay in her house was “Because you leave clothes all over your room, you borrow things without asking and don’t return them, and because you’re a SLOB. You’re a TOTAL SLOB.”

  “Why does it matter if I leave clothes in my room? You won’t even be there to see it!”

  “Because I worked har
d for my house and I didn’t do all of that work for you to go live there and mess it up for no rent or gratitude.”

  “If you were looking for rent, you should have gotten a roommate instead of having kids! It’s my house too.”

  “You have a serious entitlement issue that you think everything I own is yours. Someday you’re going to own things, and just because you own them doesn’t mean your children can use them whenever they feel like it.”

  “Mom. I don’t just feel like it—I have nowhere else to live! It really hurts my feelings.” I felt like she was punishing me for something she knew I’d done in a past life but wouldn’t tell me about.

  “Well, that’s your perspective.” She always said this.

  “No, it isn’t my perspective, they’re my feelings.”

  “Your feelings are your perspective. Take some personal responsibility. You are in charge of how you feel, how you respond, how you react.”

  “How do you live with yourself?!” I screamed, and then she gave me the middle finger.

  “DID YOU JUST GIVE ME THE FINGER?!”

  “NO! I DID NOT, CAZZIE.”

  “YOU CAN’T JUST SAY YOU DIDN’T IF YOU DID! I SAW IT!”

  I went back to Los Angeles on terrible terms with my mother and planned to stay at a friend’s house for a few weeks, while my cat stayed with my old roommate. I was suddenly a drifter with only enough belongings to fill a backpack: contacts, one pair of jeans, a hoodie, two pairs of mismatched socks, some clean underwear, a pair of sweatpants, and my one pair of leggings, which had a hole in the crotch. The backpack contained all the stuff I owned because my house had flooded, and I tend to deprive myself of most things I don’t need. Even if I do need it, I wait until the last possible second to get it. I don’t buy tampons when I’m on my period; I collect them like it’s a game of Pokémon, always asking the next person I’m meeting if they can bring one and grabbing five whenever I find them in a gym bathroom. If something is broken, I won’t say anything about it or get it fixed until it becomes absolutely unmanageable. I went a year wearing my glasses with the left lens completely cracked. Once the light bulb in my room went out, and I lived in the dark for six months. Because I could live in the dark; I was surviving living in the dark. Meanwhile, one of my sister’s cabinet knobs fell off and she had a maintenance person over the next day gluing it back on. A cabinet knob.