CASTLES
A Fictional Memoir of a Girl with Scissors
by
Benjamin X. Wretlind
Castles: A Fictional Memoir of a Girl with Scissors
Copyright © 2011 by Benjamin X. Wretlind
ISBN 978-1-4524-6464-0
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author.
For Jesse
As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more: but the righteous is an everlasting foundation. —Proverbs 10:25
THE STORM
1
Grandma told me the wind could talk. I never heard the voices when I was young, but then again, I never listened. I remember when she would sit outside the trailer and watch storms brew in the distance. The desert air was harsh on those days, just as it is now. There was always the faintest hint of rain on the breeze. I don't remember the rain much, but the wind and dust covered everything.
When I was six, I hid in the corner of the kitchen, under the sink where the Comet and Windex were kept. Knees pulled to my chest, eyes closed, I rode out the first storm of the season by thinking of fluffy bunny rabbits or cute little ducks. The trailer shook, rocked first by the initial punch of the storm and then by the violent eddies. Later in school, I'd relate the trailer to a rock in a stream beat down by rapids. At that age, however, I had no concept of rapids or dust storms. Stuff just scared me.
When the dishes in the sink crashed against each other and a picture or two fell from the shelves, I screamed. During that first storm, a window shattered—glass, dust and sand rained onto the kitchen floor. It was always my job since I could first remember to clean up messes, whether Mama's boyfriends left them or I made them myself. I thought of the glass outside the cupboard and how I wished—just once—Mama would sweep it up for me.
Mama was drunk, laid out on the couch, her stained shirt matching the orange and green faded fabric of her sometimes bed. I peeked out from the cupboard as the trailer shook yet again. Her bottle of cheap wine was tipped over. Red tentacles crawled on the carpet.
The glass covered the kitchen table and floor. Dust and sand blew in from the gaping hole in the wall. I was glad I wore socks that day. I'd been cut before and never liked it much when Grandma cleaned the wound with alcohol.
In retrospect, I suppose it shocked me more that Mama was even home. She'd taken a new boyfriend and rarely spent her nights in the trailer.
The winds died down after the sun set. The power must have been knocked out, or maybe Mama didn't pay her bill on time. I pushed open the cupboard door fully and stared at the glass on the floor in the fading light of day.
"Get out and get a broom," Mama said, her voice slurred and slow, each word an effort to push out. She always hated that I hid under the sink, but Grandma allowed it.
"Kids get scared, Doris," she'd say. "Let her be."
"Little shit needs to grow up and get out."
I screamed as a shard of glass slipped through my sock and lodged itself between two of my toes. Mama stirred on the couch as Grandma burst in through the door. She looked at me as I clutched my bloodied foot with both hands. I tried not to cry, not to give Mama another reason to yell at me. I was told never to wake her up or do anything that would disrupt her much needed rest. I tried not to cry. I tried, but failed.
"Quit your crying and get the broom," Mama said.
"Keep your mouth shut." Grandma's wavering voice was a comfort. "Maggie's hurt and you don't care. I should cut your foot and make you feel her pain sometime."
I always wondered why Grandma was so hard on Mama, but I never brought it up. Thinking back, I guess I needed that emotional crutch Grandma had always been. She cared enough for me to clean my wounds, dress me for school, feed me something other than cereal or Pop-Tarts for dinner. Mama was kind enough, but never really there. As much as I felt the strong bond between her and myself, I think it was more a matter of relation than relationship.
I choked back my cries as Grandma knelt over me. Just the smell of her perfume or hair spray or the laundry detergent in her dress was enough to calm my nerves, set me down on a pillow of calm and ride out whatever storm beat down my life. The blood had nearly soaked my sock, the pink now a deep maroon. My hands were bloodied as well, but all I could think about was the glass on the floor—the mess which needed a broom.
"Is she okay?" I think Mama was sitting on the edge of the couch. If she was, she was undoubtedly rubbing her temples. She did that a lot.
"Don't act like you care, Doris." Grandma scooped me up in her arms and set me on the counter. I could hear the glass crunch under her feet. I hoped she wore slippers.
"You'll be fine, Maggie," she said. A smile crept along the lines on her face and indeed, I did feel fine. I just hoped she wasn't going to get the alcohol again.
"Grandma?" I whispered, not wanting Mama to hear. "Can you help me sweep?"
2
It was that night when I learned about the storms, what they were and why I shouldn't be afraid of them. As for the fear, I never fully got over it. I hid until I was nine, but at least I could understand a little more about what went on outside.
I remember asking Mama one day when I was maybe four or five just what the storms were.
"God is mad at you," she'd said to me back then. "You must have something to hide."
She was wrong, of course. Grandma told me the truth: storms are God's way of sweeping up the messes people leave. Oh, we may never see the messes for ourselves, but under every storm, no matter how big or small, someone is learning a lesson. A divine broom sweeps through their hearts and cleans out whatever is bad. No storm could really clean up every mess made, but that didn't mean God doesn't try. He is always aware of what people do, what they leave behind for others to step on. Storms are His way of making sure the messes don't hurt anyone else.
"Of course, Maggie, sometimes people need more than one storm to clean up their messes." Grandma sat on the edge of my bed and patted my knee. Her white hair glowed that night, lit up I'm sure by my Barbie nightlight. She smiled and leaned closer. "I think God was trying to work on your mother, tonight."
"Is Mama mad at me?" I honestly never knew when I was that age whether Mama was sick, upset about something, or simply mad at whatever I did or didn't do. I relied on Grandma to let me know. "She didn't say anything to me."
"No, Maggie. Mama's not mad. She's upset today. Joe—you remember Joe?"
I nodded, not sure if I remembered the name or the most recent man to come in our house.
"Well, Joe hasn't been seen in a few days and Mama's worried about him. She hasn't been sleeping good."
"Where is he?"
Grandma patted my knee once more and stood up. "I don't think he'll be coming back here."
"Good." Joe—or whoever the last man to come in our house was—had hit Mama pretty hard a few weeks before that storm. I didn't like him and wished he'd never come back.
Sometimes you get what you wish for without ever really knowing what the wish was.
Grandma didn't say anything else that night. She turned and walked out, letting me fall asleep comforted by the three things a little girl of six could take from the situation: Grandma is love, Joe is gone, and storms are like brooms.
3
The storm when I was six, the morning after, the days that followed my Grandma's exp
lanation of nature—all of these things are snapshots of history. They each tell a story.
When the sun came up in the morning, Mama stood over me with a wooden spoon in one hand, blood running down the edge of it. I remember squinting in the bright light, sure of the blood and the look on Mama's face.
"You little shit," she said, her teeth clenched together. "I told you to clean up the glass in the kitchen."
I sat up in bed, wide-eyed and fearful of that wooden spoon. I know I'd cleaned up the mess. Grandma helped me while Mama went back to sleep on the couch. We covered every inch of the kitchen floor, making sure no one would get hurt. When it was all cleaned up—or when I apparently thought it was all cleaned up—we took some cardboard from the trash bin outside and taped the window shut. I did what I was told.
Mama swatted me across my arm. "I'm bleeding because of you!" She swatted again. "All I ask is for you to clean up your messes, right?"
I grabbed my arm and screamed.
"Right?" She swatted again, hitting my hand instead.
I screamed again and pushed back against the wall. The look in Mama's eyes was one I'd seen before, but I don't remember it directed at me that many times. Her nostrils flared out, her bloodied hand clenched the spoon harder. She clenched her teeth so tight I could see the muscles in her cheek twitch. Mama was mad.
"Answer me, you little shit!"
"Yes, Mama!" I screamed. "I thought . . . thought . . ."
"You thought you got it all? Is that it?" The spoon lowered beside her waist. "I guess that's why I'm bleeding, isn't it? Because of your carelessness."
"The storm, Mama! It was the storm that broke the window."
Mama pulled back her hand again, prepared to hit me. My arm throbbed and burned at the same time. I pushed back with my feet, knowing I couldn't back up any further, wishing the wall would break and I could get away. My eyes followed the arc of the spoon, the fluid motion of Mama's swing as it started out.
Grandma grabbed the spoon from Mama's hands before it ever got to me. I guess I never saw her come in the room. I certainly never heard her.
Mama turned to Grandma. "What are you doing?"
"Did you look at Maggie's toes, Doris?" Grandma's voice soothed like a tight hug, and I felt the tension in my arms and legs give way just a little.
Mama turned back to me and pulled the sheet off the bed. Grandma had wrapped my toes in four or five Sesame Street bandages, making sure to cover the cut in between my toes and giving the blood a place to soak. There was still some blood on the sheets by this time in the morning, and if Grandma hadn't stood right there, right then, I'm sure Mama would have been mad at me for yet another mess.
It wasn't the silence I remember so much that morning or the way Mama seemed to relax, the spoon dropping out of her hand. It wasn't the smell of the room, the color of the sheets or even the events that happened.
I remember the tear the most.
When you're a child, tears flow free from even the smallest tragedy. Lord knows, I cried enough that morning and for years after. I cried over spilled milk, as they say, boyfriends who didn't like me anymore, people who used me and left me for dead. I cried over missing toys, broken dolls, noises in the closet at night.
Tears in the eyes of an adult—someone you look up to, maybe not as a role model or an authority figure, but as a stronger person than you—are magical, if not confusing. They speak volumes in languages children can't understand. They shred a child's image of adults as invincible.
I watched the tear in Mama's eye. I watched it roll down slowly across her cheek, past her nose to hang for a moment over her lips before it fell onto the bed. It was something I hadn't seen before, or at least something I hadn't remembered so much. I don't know why she cried that morning. Was it for me? Was it for herself?
I think about Mama's tear quite a lot.
4
You might think I grew up in an abusive home, one of those you see on the television set where love is a four-letter word and everyone is yelling all the time. It wasn't really like that. Mama wasn't always around and I can't say she never yelled at me, but there was definitely love in the house. It came from Grandma, and I learned a lot during the short time I got to spend with her. I learned more about my future and how to get there than I ever could have learned in ninety years.
When the storms came, Grandma sat outside rocking in her cedar chair, an afghan thrown around her for protection. She wanted to hear the voices again, she said, to listen to what the wind had to say, to let God speak to her through the onslaught of violent atmospheric motions.
Grandma was touched, I think, but she made me feel better after a storm. She'd sit outside, while I'd hide inside. When it was all over, I'd hear her cry or laugh on the porch, still clutching her afghan. She'd call my name and I'd run, hopeful. Maybe she'd tell me it was all over. Maybe she'd tell me everything was all right and whatever happened, she'd be there to protect me. I didn't expect that from Mama. Still, maybe Grandma would tell me Joe or Mike or Alphonse or that biker guy with the tattoo of Satan would come by and offer to help Mama clean the house and take care of me.
Maybe everything would be okay after all.
Grandma never told me these things. She'd tell me instead she heard the voices in the wind, and they spoke to her of great wonders, of castles in the sky and that the world would end soon and people needed to die. Doom was always in the wind. It was okay, though: the castles in the sky were built for little girls. We could go together if we wanted, or we could just wait and be together when I was ready. She told me there was a rocking chair and afghan waiting for me in my castle in the sky.
I remember asking her one evening if I really had a castle.
"Of course, you do. Maggie, the castles are built for little girls just like you. On the day you're born, the first brick is laid out."
"How big will it be?"
"As big as you want it to be, or at least as big as you let it." Grandma smiled and rocked back in her chair. "The storms come and the wind speaks. Do you ever hear the wind talk to you?"
"No." It took years for me to actually hear the wind. Hiding under a cupboard, the only sound I ever heard when I was little was glass breaking or dishes rattling in the cupboards. The rush of the wind across the trailer's roof was more like the scream of something I'd expect under my bed. I certainly didn't want to listen to what it had to say.
"Listen sometime, Maggie. The wind will tell you things you should know."
"Good things?"
"Sometimes. Sometimes the words we hear, though, may sound bad at first. Listen closer. The wind can't tell us something bad."
"Why not? If the wind can talk, why can't it talk of bad things?"
Grandma's smile widened. "Because there is nothing bad, just stuff that needs to be looked at differently."
I didn't understand that until I was much older. There are moments in my life that stick to my memory. I suppose it's the same for everyone—snippets of life pasted in a scrapbook for you to look over every once in a while. You look back sometimes and relive an event, a smell or a sight. You catalog these things in your head and never really look at the whole. I think you miss something grand when you don't step back and examine everything together.
You might wonder why I remember so much of my early years. I've had a lot of time to think since I was little, and a lot of time to myself. I've grown as a woman. Maybe not exactly how Grandma wanted me to, but close. I dreamed about monumental moments, as I suppose every person does at some point. Even if those dreams come at the edge of death, the life we see is the life that created who we've become at that very moment.
Grandma was touched, but she was touched by God and given a gift I've only recently come to understand.
The wind talks if you listen.
THE BUS AND THE BODY
1
Past the fence of the trailer park, just in view from my patio porch, sat a 1967 Volkswagen Bus with thirteen of its twenty-one windows still intact
. It grew of out the desert like a rusted cactus, as much a part of the environment as the ocotillo or the saguaro. Its yellow paint was nothing more than a faded memory of that showroom shine it must have once possessed. Why it took so long for someone to remove the beast from its final resting place, I'll never know.
During moments of reflection, Grandma would tell me of her adventures on the road with her friends. It may not have been in a road warrior like the one that rotted in the desert, but she would always make it sound like that. It was years before I realized she was too old to have spent her teenage years inside a Bus.
I'd hear tales of crossing the great Kansas wilderness, driving up to the cold beaches of Oregon or climbing the Rockies just to head back down the other side. Her life was rich with adventure, and I couldn't wait until I had grown up enough to experience some of the same.
Maybe one day, I used to tell myself.
I don't think that way anymore. My life is here in the desert, living with the storms that blow in to clean up messes.
The land beyond the fence was and is a place of mystery. Our park was the last stop on a dead-end gravel road, visited by a handful of people. I suppose the city was happy to let us live in our seclusion at the end of the world. The desert stretched for miles toward the horizon. A few mountains stab their defiant rocky fists toward the sky. There was never doubt in anyone's mind that the land beyond the fence would be ours forever. The city folk who moved to the outskirts of town to escape the traffic and noise were probably a little too unsure of themselves to experience life as we knew it—life isolated from normalcy, yet normal to us.
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