The Girl's Guide to Homelessness

by Brianna Karp

  Ingrid was a major unexpected windfall for me. I named her for Ingrid Bergman because Casablanca was one of my favorite classics. Immediately upon bringing her home, I had her tuned and painstakingly set about trying to reteach myself piano. My brain was no longer quite so much of a sponge as it had been when I was little, and I struggled to make my fingers obey my mind, even having trouble with simpler pieces that I could play easily as a child. To this day, I play very, very badly and rudimentarily. It sounds like I’m playing by numbers—extremely plonky and deliberate. I’ll never be a good pianist or even a decent one; that chance has passed me by. But I still take a great deal of pleasure in playing privately, as long as nobody is listening. It has a calming effect on me and gives me something to aspire to, something to improve.

  And now Ingrid was being shuttled off to storage. No playing at my mom’s house.

  I lovingly swept the hardwood floors free of any lingering dog hair and mopped them until they glistened. I scraped the ashes from the fireplace and scrubbed the counters and kitchen tiles until they were snowy-white.

  I made sure to be the last to leave my cottage, spending an hour inside sitting on the floors and working up the will to leave and turn in the keys. Having said goodbye to so many things that I loved in such a short span of time, it was all beginning to feel like just more of the same. I was nearly numb; only the faintest drooping inside my chest betrayed the ache of giving up my home and my privacy.

  I was resigned. I was moving back in with my parents.

  Chapter Five

  I probably shouldn’t have been shocked to learn that Mom had been stealing money from me. Her sense of self-entitlement occasionally reared itself when she coveted something I owned. For instance, an eBay package mistakenly delivered to her house after I had moved out was opened without regard to pesky little details such as federal postal laws or statutes dealing with mail fraud. When she discovered the soft vintage Italian scarf inside, she confiscated it, refusing to return it even when confronted.

  “I spent twelve agonizing hours forcing your fat head out of my vagina. I fed you for years, cared for you, loved you, and now you won’t even give me something! Selfish, selfish girl. I deserve this.”

  Or she would wheedle.

  “I remember you liking that brooch/skirt/necklace/barrette of mine. If you let me keep this scarf, I’ll give you that instead.”

  Most of the time, it wasn’t worth the inevitable argument, fallout, screaming and crocodile tears, so I would just give up, throw my hands in the air and concede the desired item. History may not have proven appeasement to be a particularly effective strategy in the long run, but, so help me, I just didn’t want to deal with it. I chose my battles, for all the good that did.

  My parents had also been having money problems for, well, ever. Mom often threw hapless Joe out of the house, thus shooting herself in the foot as far as financial support went for the weeks, months or years he was gone. Even when Joe was there, however, money from Hill & Canyon Aquatics was scarce. His head swam with visions of his own successful empire, but Joe lost many of his clients in the recession of 2008–2009, and had never been particularly good at managing his money anyway. The little that he made he was forever investing and losing in some farfetched proposal or another—stocks, commodities, pyramid schemes, you name it. I had moved back in with my parents only to be conscripted into driving my dad around from midnight to 5:00 a.m., so that he could nail signs to telephone poles, signs promising a Tidal Wave of Wealth. He tried to explain how the business model was not a pyramid scheme, but it sounded exactly like one to me.

  “Dad, how long have you been putting up these signs?”

  “About a year.”

  “Mmm. And have you received any results in that year?”

  Almost indignant, he retorted, “I’ve gotten ten phone calls inquiring about it.”

  “I see. Did any of these ten phone calls come to fruition? Did they lead to you making any money whatsoever?”

  He looked at me blankly. “Well, no, not yet. But they will. These things take some time to yield results.”

  “Come on, Dad. How much money did you spend having these signs made?”

  “Dunno. A few hundred, maybe.”

  He didn’t get it. He just couldn’t seem to make the connection that he had spent hundreds of dollars and spent countless hours lugging his butt all over town for an entire year, with nothing to show for it. Zero. Zilch. A goose egg. Not even a goose egg. A negative amount of capital.

  “Your mom won’t work, either,” he went on accusingly. “She keeps saying that Jehovah won’t help her get a job because she hasn’t been a very good Witness lately; she hasn’t spent much time in service or going to the Kingdom Hall meetings the way she should.”

  I dryly pointed out that billions of people the world over managed to obtain and hold down jobs without being Jehovah’s Witnesses, so surely there was hope. He sighed.

  “Yes, I tried to tell her that, too. It was no use. It’s so freaking frustrating.” You knew the situation was dire when Joe used an expletive substitute as strong as “freaking.” “We’re going to lose the house within sixty days if she doesn’t get a job. I’ve tried telling her, but it’s no use. She won’t listen to me.”

  “Maybe this is a silly question, Dad, but why don’t you go out and look for a job? I’m looking too right now. I’ll check out some good stuff for you, too, and mail out some résumés if you need me to. It can’t hurt. Clearly, you guys are struggling. And you haven’t had any Hill & Canyon jobs in ages.”

  I wasn’t used to seeing anger in my dad’s eyes, but there was a hint of it now, although he remained nearly as mellow as ever, raising his voice only slightly.

  “You don’t understand what I’ve always known, Brianna. Once you take a job working for someone else, for a boss, you’re screwed. You no longer belong to yourself. You work for the man, and you’ll never do as well or make as much money as you will being your own boss.”

  It made me sad to think that Joe might, in his quest not to lose himself, lose everything else instead. For himself and for my mom. It also made me frustrated. It was, as with many conversations I’ve had with Jehovah’s Witnesses, like clobbering my brains out against the Great Wall of China.

  And then the roof caved in. The morning after a tempestuous (for southern California, anyway) rainstorm, I arrived home to a shaft of light beaming down on the living room couch. I looked up and saw clear blue sky through the hole. My mother was in hysterics, arms full of lumpy, spackled cottage-cheese ceiling. The ceilings in other rooms were soaking through, turning a mildew yellow and threatening to collapse as well. I spent hours helping my parents shovel sand into sandbags and hoist them up a ladder to the roof to hold down great black tarps. My mother cried and insisted that a new roof would cost at least $25,000, and where would they get it?! Joe said nothing.

  My mother had allowed me two rent-free months staying with her, but March and onward were to cost me $500 a month in rent, which motivated me to find work and an apartment ASAP. Things were already tense in the house. I found myself relapsing into the pretransformative Cinderella role that I had become so accustomed to in childhood, and I didn’t like it. I had already broken up with Dennis and was in therapy dealing with my grief and anxiety, as well as the trauma of sexual abuse, rape, dealing with Bob’s suicide, various childhood scars and feelings of deep self-loathing and inadequacy. My mother begrudged me my weekly therapy session, harping to Joe incessantly, “I don’t understand why she needs therapy. What the hell does she have to complain about? You’d think that she’s had a crappy life, the way she’s always in therapy. She probably goes to whine and lie about what a terrible mother I was. You know that’s what she thinks. She’s always had such a twisted, warped view of me. She doesn’t know what real pain is.”

  My mother didn’t like therapists. Joe had coaxed her to take me to one when I was nine, the first year their marriage was on the rocks, and I, in fourth grad
e at the time, had watched the young, beautiful mommy that all my classmates envied slip away. My grades had plummeted from straight As to Cs and Ds, and I withdrew into myself and into books. My teachers were concerned, to say the least.

  I wasn’t quite sure why I was sitting in the nice psychologist lady’s office. She gave me some toys to play with, and then started asking me questions. I can’t remember what they were or what the answers were; I only remember that it all seemed like pretty innocuous stuff.

  Then the lady spoke to my parents. Most of it seemed to be along the lines of how I was a relatively normal kid, how they might have possibly had a hand in my rapid decline and how, perchance, to improve things. My mother listened quietly, a look of pseudo-concern frozen onto her face. She nodded and smiled, Yes, of course, and promised that they would work with me some more and be proactive in their relationship with their child, yada yada yada.

  Then she took me home and whaled the ever-loving shit out of me. I, being nine, blamed the mean old psychologist lady. She had clearly told my parents that I was bad or something. I hated her. Luckily, we never went back. It was very hard for me to admit that I needed therapy, and voluntarily reenter it at the ripe old age of twenty-three.

  While I felt sympathy for my parents’ financial woes, and pangs of guilt that I couldn’t help out more, I also knew that I couldn’t stay and drown with them. If I did, I would never escape. I needed to put every bit of money I accrued toward moving out on my own again, and once I started paying my mother rent, I knew that would be far more difficult, if not impossible—the vast majority of my money was slated to go to her anyway.

  My mother, I should probably explain, also had an annoying habit of buying me “presents” on her manic spending sprees and then insisting that she be paid back for them. “You’ll be needing this,” she would say, tossing a blender or a comforter or a set of dish towels or a crystal decanter into a shopping cart. If I was present, I would often try to refuse, knowing full well what would be coming next.

  “No, this is too adorable. Don’t worry, you can just pay me back later.”

  Half the time, though, I wouldn’t be out shopping with her in the first place. Then, she would show up at home with anywhere from one to a dozen items for me, sing-songing, “I’ll just put it on your tab!”

  My “tab” was a sheet of paper, a legally binding contract on which each item was faithfully noted in order and signed by me. My mother, no dummy when it came to legal matters, was scrupulously neat and organized about noting each item down, complete with date of purchase. Frustrated, I watched my “tab” grow as I paid off meager amounts from my unemployment checks.

  On February 21, 2009, I cashed my latest unemployment check of $900 and used part of it to pay bills before returning home. My mother was in a foul mood, and had been for some days. I don’t remember exactly why or whether it was directly related to me, per se. Joe had pulled Molly and me aside nearly a year earlier and told us that medical doctors, therapists, friends, family—all had pointed him to the unmistakable symptoms of bipolar disorder. I can’t accurately speculate on just how correct his purely armchair diagnosis was, but it was obvious that my mother’s behavior was increasingly abnormal and unhealthy. She refused to admit that she had a problem, however, and nobody ever intervened to get her the help she clearly and desperately required. In these moods, she was indiscriminate in her loathing and contempt.

  I had barely walked into the house when my mother accosted me. “I want you to pay your tab. All of it. Today!”

  “Sure.” I pulled out my wallet, counted out just over $600 and placed it in her hand.

  She started shrieking, demanding “the rest.” I gaped at her in shock. “What are you talking about, Mom? That’s it. That’s everything.”

  She darted up the stairs, screaming for Joe, who eventually came downstairs. Clearly, she had told him another story.

  Here’s what happened next. My mother insisted that I owed her more than the actual contract stated. I showed Joe the amount I had given her. When she insisted that it wasn’t the full amount, I printed out bank statements proving the direct deposits I had previously made into her own bank account as payments on my “tab.”

  Caught in a lie, she paused for about half a second before insisting that those payments were on a second contract, not the one she was now holding. Shaking and trying to remain collected over cake layers of tears, I asked her to produce the contract, knowing full well that there was no such contract. She left the room for about two minutes and then returned. There was no change to the twisted, snarling look on her face.

  “I can’t find it. But it exists. And she will pay for it now.” She implored Joe to make me give her my remaining money, a little over $100, and come up with another few hundred, which she claimed that I also owed.

  I then found out that Alfie, our family friend and mechanic, who had been kind enough to replace the brake pads on my car and do some other tune-up work, had approached Joe and claimed that he had never been paid.

  I flashed back to two weeks prior, when I had received another unemployment check, cashed it, arrived home and asked my mom for Alfie’s address so that I could swing by his house and pay him the $250 for the work.

  “Oh, I already paid him by credit card,” she declared (too hastily, upon reflection). “So now you just owe me the cash.”

  It didn’t occur to me that it might have been a lie. Clearly, that would be too brazen, even for my mother. She would have known that she was certain to get caught out on it, when Alfie showed up looking for his money, so why bother lying? I gave her the money.

  Now Joe looked uncertain as to whom to believe. I related the date I gave my mother the money, the time, the amount, the clothes I was wearing at the time, the specific conversation verbatim. My mother looked me straight in the eye and denied it all.

  She was screaming louder and louder, bursting into ugly crying hollers, her face purple-red and pinched, distorted, perverse. There was not a hint of anybody I had ever loved in the monster before me. Overcome, I finally let loose, rupturing into great jagged, hard-breathing sobs.

  “You see that, Joe? Look at her—stupid, sniveling little liar that she is!” She rounded on me. “You’re not fooling anybody! You’re not crying because you’re sorry. You’ve always been the same revolting, selfish little brat and you always will be! Get out of this house!”

  This was not new. It was not the first time I had been thrown out of the house—once at fifteen, once at seventeen—but it was the first time I had no idea where to go. My friends were no longer as capable of taking me in as they had been in our teens. Most now lived with roommates or significant others, and had no room for me. Or for Fezzik.

  I sucked in my breath and tried to speak calmly.

  “That’s fine, I’ll leave. However, you should be aware that, by law, you need to give me thirty days’ notice.”

  “I don’t have to give you anything, you fucking cunt! Get out of my house!”

  “If I’ve resided here for over a month, I am legally a tenant, whether I pay rent or not. You have to give me thirty days.”

  Working for a lawyer had served me well.

  “You can call the police and check it yourself, Mom.” She pulled out her cell phone and stormed out of the room, talking too loud as she did so.

  “Hello? Fullerton Police Department?”

  I politely requested that she make the call in the same room, but she refused. She slammed her bedroom door shut. Joe and I waited, not speaking. I was sickened that he wouldn’t stand up for me. She returned to the room, insisting that she had spoken with the police.

  “Nope, they said it’s my house, you’re not a tenant and I can put you on the fucking sidewalk if I like. You’ll take that damn dog with you, too! If Fezzik isn’t gone with you tonight, I’ll have him in the pound tomorrow! I’ll make sure they put him to sleep myself. I’ll watch them do it and I’ll laugh!”

  Quaking inwardly and outraged on behalf
of my beloved dog, I reached for my purse, pulling out my cell phone. “OK, I’ll call the police to verify that myself.”

  My mother’s frivolous police calls were infamous in the precinct. A few years earlier, she had beaten me around the face in a fit of sadism. I held my arms up to shield my head and stepped out of the doorway I had been standing in. Her momentum carried her through and she landed on the floor. She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and called 911, telling them that her violent daughter was standing above her, threatening her, about to bash her brains in. My sister huddled in a corner, howling in terror like a frightened puppy and begging my mother to stop. The police arrived to find me sobbing on the curb. After entering the house and trying to get an answer out of my sister (who wouldn’t say a word, torn between the truth and self-preservation), they came out, patted me on the shoulder and told me not to worry. They knew I had never touched her. I grasped the hand of one of the officers and covered the poor man in snot and tears, insisting that I wouldn’t, didn’t hit her, that she had attacked me and I only wanted to get away.

  “We know,” they said.

  At my suggestion that I call the police myself, Mom lunged at me, knocking the phone from my hand.

  “You sick little bitch! You sick, sorry, disgusting little fucker! You know how it will all end, don’t you? You’re truly your father’s daughter! You’re exactly like Bob, and you’ll end up the same way! It’s inevitable. Exact same DNA. One of these days you’ll stick a shotgun down your throat, too. You should just do it and get it over with. You’re beyond help and beyond love!”

  I was used to being slapped in the face, but this was the final straw. I bolted from the house in a frenzy, drove to a local park and curled up under a tree on the grass by the lake, rocking back and forth and whimpering with pain and fear until it grew dark.