Everything I Never Wanted to Be

by Dina Kucera

  I lay flat on my bed with my hand on my stomach waiting for some activity. Some movement. The scent of lemons. Something.

  Weeks went by and there were no indications of any foliage growing in my stomach. But for months, any stomach ache was clearly from the lemon tree.

  The rest of the second grade, I avoided the girl who informed me of the lemon tree in my belly. I felt she knew something the others didn’t. Some sort of voodoo.

  By the third grade, I began to believe I had food poisoning from dented cans. And off I went from there. Fear of flying. Fear of driving. Fear of all sorts of things. But it all started with the lemon tree.

  Today, my favorite drink in the world is the Lemon Lime Slush from Sonic. I drink one every day, and most days I swallow a few seeds. I feel no fear. I only enjoy the deliciousness of my beautiful drink. Until it dawns on me that one of the workers could be disgruntled and may have put poison in my slush. Or my car could suddenly ignite into flames. Or I could be carjacked. Which could lead to chest pains.

  I decided in the ninth grade that I had enough of an education to live out my life. But the law was that I had to complete ninth grade before I could quit school and start my great life.

  So I had to pass each class with at least a D. In five classes, I had D’s. But in biology, I had an F. I talked to my teacher and he said, “You’ll never graduate anyway.” Then he gave me a project that would give me the D. I had to collect fifty bugs, put them on a poster board and name each bug. So I waited until the day before to start the project, of course. I called friends over, and we walked all the fields and dirt roads and ditches until we found fifty bugs. We pinned each bug to the board and named them, sometimes making up names. I got on the bus that morning with my giant poster board with bugs pinned on it. Some people on the bus noticed that one of the bugs was still alive and spinning on the pin in circles.

  I got to the school excited about getting the D. I remembered what my teacher had said about me never being able to graduate. It was graduation day for the seniors, so I borrowed a cap and gown from a friend.

  I walked into the science room with my cap and gown, smiling, and handed the teacher my bug collection.

  He looked at it and smiled and said, “Okay. I’ll give you the D.”

  I smiled and said, “So I graduated after all.”

  He said, “If that’s the way you want it.”

  I smiled and walked out, returned the cap and gown, and walked off the school campus with all my ninth grade knowledge. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  During my last year of school, I skipped lunch simply because of the trauma of the lunch process.

  I think I was popular in school. I hung out with the popular people, went to the popular people’s homes, and did things that only popular people did—like have the popular people pick me up for school in their pretty Mustangs. We’d get in the parking lot and turn the stereo up really loud just to show how fantastic we were. Of course it wasn’t my sweet car, but who gives a shit? I’m riding shotgun.

  There was a difference between me and them. They lived in big houses. I lived in a trailer. I was poor, but I was funny and had feathered hair like Farrah Fawcett, and that was just enough to get me in.

  At lunch, there were three lunch lines. I seriously still can’t believe this was their process. They had the “full-pay” line. This line was for the kids whose parents could afford to pay full price for the kid’s lunch. Then there was the “reduced” line. These kids paid a reduced price for lunch. Then there was the “free” lunch line. That’s the line I stood in. This was the line for kids who had parents who couldn’t afford the forty cent hit for lunch—or the kids who were being raised by wolves.

  We would walk into the cafeteria, being very popular, and then my entire group would break off from me and go to the full price line. I would walk over to the free lunch line.

  Trying to maintain my popularity in the free lunch line was challenging. I had to make my group, the full-pay people, laugh from all the way across the cafeteria. It was my way of letting the people in the free lunch line know that I was actually with the popular full-pay people.

  Sometimes I’d get my tray and sit down and the full-pay line was longer. So I’d sit by myself and push my food around and act like it didn’t bother me sitting alone. My people would show up about the time I’d finish my lunch. It was worse when the free line moved slower than the full-pay. Then I’d get to the table and they would be already standing up to leave as I sat down. I would make some hysterical joke and walk out with them, dumping my food in the garbage. We’d walk around the school grounds just being cool and popular, but the blood would drain from my face because I was completely malnourished. Not Africa malnourished, but trailer-park malnourished.

  Later, I decided to smoke cigarettes during lunch. I was still popular but not as much because I found the full-pay girls actually had sticks up their asses. So I found some better friends more suitable to my reality. My best friend’s dad was in prison. She didn’t have a car so we walked everywhere.

  We would stand in front of the liquor store and give Indians money to buy us Boone’s Farm wine. Staggering down the dirt road drunk, smoking cigarettes. Smoking, coughing, and laughing. Those were the days.

  The highlight of the summer was going to the public pool. Back then, nobody had pools in their backyards. So the poor, rich and everyone in-between spent the weekends at the public pool. We looked forward to it all week.

  It was the same process every public pool visit: find out who’s there—hopefully the boy you are in love with—and look as sexy as you can even though you are thirteen. When you got there, you took off your outer clothing, thus unveiling the Greatest Show on Earth. Your one-piece suit that was too short for your long body, so it violently jammed up your money maker, reminding you not to dive into the pool because if you lifted your arms, hello paramedics.

  That wasn’t even the worst part of the greatest day of the week. The worst was the rubber swimming cap. This was invented by someone who hated girls. You took this tight—I mean tight—rubber cap and tried to get every strand of hair in the thing. As you did this, your eyes were watering because of the pain. When you finally got your hair in the cap and couldn’t look more like an idiot, there were actual flaps that covered your ears. So if your friend said something to you, you had to lift your flap to hear her.

  The cap was so tight that your eyes were stretched back into slits, and your mouth was also stretched, so it looked like you were smiling this serial killer grin that wasn’t really a smile at all, but what could you do? Your hair couldn’t be in the water because of the health code.

  One summer I was able to get the “good” cap. The one with brightly colored rubber flowers that covered the entire surface of my round head. The ear flaps were giant rubber flowers. When I put this sweet cap on, with my one piece, I could feel the envy penetrating through the rubber. I would walk out of the shower room, cap on, five foot six, seventy pounds, and every boy at the pool fell madly in love with me. I’d be walking with my friend saying, “Is he looking over here?”

  Then I’d lift my flap to hear her answer. Then flap back down on the ear. I was sure just the sight of me, gliding down that hot concrete with my flowered cap, was a treat for everybody.

  It’s been so many years since I stood in the free lunch line and wore that fabulous swim cap. Now I think about those days and it makes me happy. Riding in that yellow Mustang with the windows down. Listening to Earth, Wind and Fire, the wind blowing through my feathered hair creating that “hair shield” from the hairspray. Applying my lip gloss. The kind that made your lips look wet so when the wind blew, your hair stuck to your lips. I had it all going on. I was a pretty big deal. Then I quit school and got pregnant. That’s what happens when you have Farrah Fawcett hair and lips like glass.

  I was pregnant. We had a bunch of chickens in the backyard. My father had gone to some sort of religious conference, and a wild dog got in the c
hicken coop and almost killed the chickens. So we got ahold of my dad and he said we had to butcher the chickens. The point of the chickens was to grow them up so we could kill them and eat them. We couldn’t waste the chickens. So Dad told me, my mom, my sister, and my brother how to do it. First, you boil a pot of water on a fire in the backyard. Then you hammer two nails into a tree stump. Then you get an axe, lay the chicken’s head in between the nails, look away and chop off the chicken’s head. After that, you hold the chicken by the feet while it violently flaps around without its head, and then you dunk it in the boiling water, which makes all the chicken’s feathers come off. Then you do a lot of cutting and scooping and gross crap and there you have it. Dinner.

  I swear to God to this day, it’s really stressful to eat chicken. My mom can hardly eat it at all, but the chickens had to be used. For food. I did not eat the chickens we murdered and I puked for days.

  My grandmother died when she was 101. Her thing was Xanax. I was a teenager, and I didn’t know how awesome and great Xanax was.

  Grandma lived with us, and a couple of times a day she would scream in her angry voice, “Bring me my Xanax!!” Someone would quickly take it to her, and she would throw it in her mouth without water and just swallow it. Then she’d roll her wheelchair to the window and stare out for about ten minutes.

  All it took was ten minutes, then she’d yell in a nice voice, “Dina! Come in here!” I’d go in her room and she’d say, “I’d like to sing you a song.” She put her little Casio keyboard on her lap and started playing: “Take me out to the ballgame, take me out to the crowd, buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks, I don’t care... (pause) Take me out to the ballgame...”

  She knew one song and she only knew the beginning of it. I heard this song from Grandma a thousand times.

  Something about the Xanax made her lipstick drip. Each morning she would dress up in these fantastic outfits—bright colors, matching perfectly, cheap jewelry everywhere and then red lipstick. Toward the late afternoon, after her second or third dose, she looked like a drunk clown.

  She also acted like a drunk clown. One time she called me in, sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” again, and then she put the keyboard down and told me to come closer. She held my hands and said, “You know, your dad did get a little carried away with the liquor, but honey, you were a difficult child to raise.” Then she picked up the keyboard: “Take me out to the ballgame...”

  According to Grandma I was the reason my dad was drinking himself to death. She said, “But I love you anyway, Honey.” Thanks, Grandma. I was a very powerful twelve-year-old. The interesting part is that I hadn’t even begun to utilize my evil powers. I had only scratched the surface of ways to cause my father’s constant drinking. Too bad my grandma died before she could see me burn the city down with the lasers that shot fire out of my eyes.

  Grandma was in a wheelchair but it confused me. She didn’t use the foot rests. I thought wheelchairs were for people who had limited movement in their legs. She would barrel through the house using her feet to push the chair forward. Like the Flintstones. She could move at a powerful pace. Her legs had giant muscles on them and she’d fly out of her room at about fifty miles an hour, completely wasted on Xanax and scream, “Is someone gonna make my biscuits?”

  My grandma didn’t walk an easy road. She came home from first grade one day, and her father had shot her mother and then shot himself. All of her siblings were shipped off to various places, but no one could take her because she was too young. So she was raised by nuns. She also outlived all three of her children. One, her only daughter, died at the age of sixteen.

  So Grandma took shitloads of Xanax. Can you imagine being so old that you can take anything you want?! I can’t wait for the day that I can scream, “Bring me my Xanax!”

  “But Mom, you just had one.”

  “Go to hell! Bring me another one! My program is about to start!”

  My mom’s parents went to a Pentecostal church, and they were very strict. There was a lot of screaming in the church, and we were forced to sit through it if we stayed at their house. My grandfather was one of the main screamers.

  They raised six children in a three-bedroom, six-hundred-square-foot house and lived there until they died. Literally. They died in the house.

  When my siblings, our cousins and I slept at our grandparents’ house, my grandfather said a long prayer at meal times. We kids did everything in our power to stifle our laughter. But we sat on a wooden bench, and we could feel the bench moving and know with our eyes closed that someone was laughing, which caused every child on the bench to laugh.

  The last thing we wanted to do was laugh during the prayer because Grandpa punished us right there at the table. My grandfather was six foot four. When he walked in the house, he ducked through the door. If you were going to piss someone off, don’t let it be him. And all it took was one slight giggle during the prayer.

  We could feel it coming, and every person at the table was paralyzed with fear. Everything became slow motion. Grandpa raised his hand. His arm was long enough to reach a child sitting at the other end of the table. My grandmother put her fork down and crossed her hands and bowed her head. I’m pretty sure I remember hearing the Jaws soundtrack playing in the background. His hand, the size of a garbage can lid, would make its way across the table to the child who was not giggling anymore. Grandpa made an “O” with his middle finger and his thumb. His finger was the size of a giant bratwurst. Then he thumped the child on the head with that middle finger.

  The unlucky recipient of the child abuse would have a headache for days. The pain was like your skull had been shattered. You could shake your head and hear loose things knocking around in there.

  After the thumping everyone at the table sat in complete silence. Then Grandpa pointed his giant sausage finger in our faces and said, “You better get right with God.” Despite our concussions, we’d mumble, “Okay.” But then the very next time we sat down to eat, out of nerves, someone started laughing. Every single time. I think that’s how we all ended up with brain damage.

  My grandfather sat in his recliner every day for twenty years and fell asleep watching “As The World Turns.” One day he fell asleep watching this show and never woke up. I bet that if he could have chosen how to die, that would have been the way. Quietly watching his show. That’s how I want to go. I want people to say, “She was watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians. And that was it.”

  My parents made all of us go to church when I was a teenager. My family sat at the front of the Catholic church we attended because we were the choir and house band. My father, sister, two brothers, and I played the guitar and sang all the songs. We were like the Partridge Family except sometimes our dad was still drunk from the night before.

  When my grandmother came to church, she would sing at the top of her lungs. It didn’t matter where she was sitting, you could hear her over the entire congregation. I would be dying of embarrassment, but she felt like Dad was a celebrity sitting in the front of the church with his guitar. She wanted to show she was the lead singer’s mother, and also show where he got his powerful vocal abilities from. She was with the band. I cringed when Grandma came to church because I knew I would be teased by my friends. “I sat in front of your grandmother. She popped my ear drum.”

  In this church I was crowned the troublemaker. My friends and I laughed during church. But the only person they could see laughing was me because I was sitting facing the entire congregation.

  One time, we got caught stealing hosts—the little round wafers that Catholics served for communion. We went behind the school next door with an entire bag. They were delicious. We would say to each other, “The Body of Christ.” And open our mouths for each other and then die laughing. Then we started shoving ten or twelve at a time in the other person’s mouth, and we were choking and laughing rolling around on the concrete. We had almost eaten the whole bag when the priest came around the corner. Our parents were notified, and
we were lectured about snacking on the Body of Christ.

  There was also a white lace cloth at the church. It was a sacred cloth that went around to every Catholic church in the country. Each place had the sacred cloth for a week or so. It was sort of as if the white lace cloth was on tour.

  My friend’s parents were responsible for shipping it to the next location, so it was in a special box in the back seat of my friend’s car. The box intrigued us, so we opened it and somehow the sacred cloth got ripped. We all thought we would be struck dead and sent immediately to hell because we ripped the sacred cloth that was expected in one piece at Sea World in San Diego. After telling our parents, we wished we had gone directly to hell. It was horrible. We had to confess our crime to the same priest who caught us savagely eating the Body of Christ just days earlier.

  Around this time is when I met my first husband. He was trouble. Big trouble. The priest knew of him and cautioned my parents about our “relationship.”

  I go to confession, and it’s the same priest with the hosts and the sacred cloth and the relationship advice.

  The priest says, “Dina?”

  I say, “Yes.”

  He tells me to come out of the booth. He tells me that he’s been in the confessional all afternoon and it’s hot in there, so he will hear my confession in the back room.

  We get in the back room and he has a whole setup. A chair and a sheet hanging down, and then a chair on the other side. So he says, “Much better.”

  So I start my confession. I start with all the generic sins... taking the Lord’s name in vain, lying to my parents, eating the body of Christ. Then I confessed being one of the savages who tore the sacred cloth.

  The sheet is thin. I can clearly see his outline behind it. He says, “Uh-huh. Okay. Anything else?”

  I say, “No.”