Caca Dolce

by Chelsea Martin

  “What does ‘lost in the supermarket’ mean?” I asked, referring to the chorus of the song.

  “I think of it as the feeling of being somewhere very commonplace that you think should feel comfortable and easy, and feeling lost and scared there.”

  I was put in charge of vacuuming the offices while my mom wiped surfaces and emptied garbage bins. There was rarely anything to suck up from the cheap, flat carpet, so it was mostly a matter of moving the vacuum around and snooping through desk drawers and cabinets until my mom was done. I considered stealing from the supply cabinets, as I had come to fetishize Post-it notes and binder clips and other office paraphernalia, but I didn’t want my mom to get in trouble and lose the job.

  When we were finished, my mom would let me buy pumpkin pie from the vending machine in the hospital lobby, and I would eat it as we drove back through Butts Canyon.

  With so much time on his hands, Seth became obsessed with get-rich-quick schemes. He bought into a tea tree oil product line, which was like Avon for people who wanted tea tree oil in every cleaning and skin product they owned, as well as in toothpaste, dog food, and vitamins. The setup was that you had to sell a certain number of products each month to maintain seller status. But because he couldn’t find any customers, Seth purchased the products himself, hoping to sell them later when he found clients. The shampoos and detergents piled up under the kitchen sink and in the bathroom and on the shelves in the garage, and ultimately my mom had to cancel her credit card to prevent the company from charging us for any more products.

  The other get-rich-quick idea that Seth got caught up in was website banner ads. Banner ads were the long, skinny advertisements that you would see on the bottoms or tops of web pages, and they were pretty big in the nineties. Many companies offered to pay a fraction of a penny for each time someone clicked their banner ad on your website, or maybe a few pennies if a purchase was ultimately made. If you had a hugely successful website with lots of traffic, you could potentially make a few dollars here and there. The websites Seth made were 100 percent banner ads, rows and rows of banner ads to scroll through and nothing else.

  “Why would anyone ever visit your website?” I asked Seth. “I’m not even trying to be mean. I’m just honestly wondering who in his right mind would ever visit a website as stupid and pointless as yours, let alone click on one of your stupid idiotic banner ads enough times to make it worth it for you to have set the stupid page up in the first place.”

  “Shut up, go away,” Seth said. “I’ll have you know I got twenty hits yesterday.”

  “Yeah, probably from you refreshing your browser twenty times,” I said.

  I knew a thing or two about the web. I had, for the last couple of years, been obsessively making websites about Hanson and Jamiroquai and New Radicals. I’d collect information and photos about the bands from other websites and put it all back together in what I thought was a more cohesive way. Then I’d add GIFs and maybe a poll about which Hanson brother you would most like to share a bagel with or what you thought Jamiroquai’s “Cosmic Girl” was really about. Though I preferred web rings, which connected sites to other sites that had similar content, I had done a little research about the potential profitability of banner ads, and basically had found that they were mostly a pointless endeavor, especially for a small site that nobody went to, and especially for a site that had no content other than advertising.

  Seth spent hours per day clicking on his own banner ads, and sometimes purchasing the items the banner ads were advertising. As far as I know, he never saw any payment for his efforts.

  “You need content,” I said. “Why don’t you make a website about something that interests you? Or that might interest someone, any human being in the entire world. And then place banner ads that have something to do with the content of your website?”

  “Like what?” he said.

  “I don’t know. How about a website about all the shitty song lyrics you write when you’re stoned?”

  My cousin Jenna and I had found pages and pages of his song lyrics with dozens of misspellings written in his childlike scrawl and stuffed into one of my Hello Kitty folders. The lyrics were shockingly horrible. Jenna and I memorized some of the particularly horrible lines, like luckary lady, soft and shady and I wanna touch your caress and thinking of you thinking of me thinking of you thinking of me, and sang them to each other randomly to make each other laugh.

  “By the way, I could do spell-check on them, if you want,” I said.

  “You are a fucking asshole.”

  “No, I really liked ‘Luckary Lady,’” I said, laughing, enunciating his misspelling. “I think it could be a hit.”

  Seth and my mom fought a lot. Yelling and stomping around, mostly, but sometimes the fights became physically aggressive, and they would throw things or grab each other or make physical threats. When this happened I would take River and my new baby sister, Kylie, into my bedroom and read books to them or dress them up in my clothes and take photographs. We would hear things crashing around, glass breaking, furniture moving, one of them yelling through a locked door. I’d turn up my stereo to drown out the noise, and the three of us would dance around in my room.

  Other times when my mom and Seth fought, I called my nana from the phone in my bedroom and explained to her that if my mom was ever murdered I wanted to live with her, but that I couldn’t live with her without River and Kylie, so could she ensure that we would all live with her and that River and Kylie wouldn’t have to live with Seth? Even though Seth was their dad? Was that possible, legally? Could she promise me that we would run from the law if we

  needed to?

  When the fighting went on for hours, Nana and Papa, and Aunt Lynn and Alana, who lived with them, would make the forty-five-minute drive over to our house to check on us and, if it was a weekend or vacation from school, pick the three of us up and take us back to their house.

  “I’m sick of you calling your nanny all the time,” Seth said, ripping my phone cord out of the wall after I told him and my mom that Nana was coming over to rescue us.

  “Don’t break her phone cord,” my mom said in a weary voice. “You’re both being unreasonable.”

  I was frustrated by her lack of emotion with regard to my phone, my only connection to the outside world when they were tearing the house apart. I was frustrated that she would equate my desire to ask for help when I felt scared and alone with someone breaking my only means to get that help. I was frustrated that she had never made more of an effort to get Seth and me to like each other and, when it became clear that we never would, that she decided it would be fine if her daughter spent her entire childhood living with someone who hated her. And I was frustrated that there wasn’t even a good reason for any of this to happen, because their relationship was a complete failure, by her own admission.

  I began blaming my mom for every fight I had with Seth, every fight they had with each other, every bad day made worse by his mocking my feelings, every moment my siblings were stuck in my bedroom listening to “MMMBop” at full volume when they didn’t want to be, every Teen Beat magazine I had to live without because Seth was spending our family’s money on pyramid schemes.

  I pretty much knew that Seth wouldn’t kill my mom, but I started wishing for there to be a close call, something that would prove to my mom how heartless and pathetic and mean he was, something that would force her to leave him for good. I hated him, and he hated me too. I knew this because we were pretty open about it.

  “I hate you, Seth,” I would say frequently.

  “I hate you, too,” he would say. “I really do.”

  “I wish you would die.”

  “I wish you would go live with your nana.”

  “I’d be much happier living with Nana, but I’d rather continue making you miserable.”

  “You’re such a fucking punk.”

  “You’
re the punk,” I said. “You have it written on your ugly arm.”

  Seth had a tattoo on his forearm of a rudimentary and weirdly one-dimensional snake/dragon, whose flat, colored body covered a semi-visible, older, possibly stick-and-poke tattoo that read punks not dead in uppercase letters. The snake/dragon tattoo, which existed solely to cover up punks not dead, had been a measure taken to present himself as an employable adult, as well as a somewhat embarrassing and un-punk admission that, despite his previously held opinion on the subject, punk was, in fact, really dead.

  The phrase “punks not dead” seemed to imply an argument with an unheard voice that insisted punk was dead. A voice, I guessed, that

  originated inside Seth himself, a small but persistent part of him

  that was trying to make him feel bad about punk being dead, a voice that Seth tried to drown out with a shitty tattoo.

  Now the snake tattoo that covered punks not dead was an admission that even his own beliefs were not worth holding on to. It was a sign of his weakness and self-doubt that something he once thought important enough to permanently display on his body could be later renounced.

  I signed up for an internet chat service called ICQ. I had used chat rooms before, but ICQ was superior in that it saved your contacts in a buddy list and you could therefore talk to the same people all the time. My cousin Jenna was on my buddy list, and we would chat occasionally, but mostly I talked to strangers.

  “A/S/L?” I’d ask, and the stranger would give either a real or made-up age, sex, and location. Then I would give a real or made-up age, sex, and location. The conversation would be steered by this initiating information, though neither party would ever know if it was real or imaginary. In chat rooms, where anonymity was enforced by the sheer unlikelihood that you would ever talk to the same people ever again, I tended to be more creative in my A/S/L descriptions. But on ICQ I found that I was a lot more honest about my A/S/L.

  “12/Female/California,” I’d say. I found that most people would stay and chat regardless of what I said.

  I talked to an Australian boy my age who asked for my mailing address and sent me photographs of himself playing “football,” with notes on the back that seemed to be written by his mother: Here is Johnny playing football with his classmate, Brent.

  I talked to an old woman about astrology.

  I talked to a Spice Girl, whose identity had to be kept secret and who was only authorized to confirm that she was “one of the Spice Girls.”

  “Why did you marry Seth?” I asked my mom as we drove to the hospital one night.

  “He was a lot different when we were younger,” she said. “He was very gentle and shy and quiet.”

  “Sometimes I wish it was just me and you still,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  “I hate Seth, Mom,” I said.

  “I know, Chelsea,” she said.

  “He’s really rude and mean. And Mom? You know he doesn’t like me. Why do you want to be with someone who doesn’t like me?”

  “He had a really hard childhood. His stepdad beat him up all the time, and when he was little his mom became a Jehovah’s Witness and they stopped celebrating his birthday or any other holiday. People at school always picked on him and beat him up because he was scrawny and weird. He’s been through a lot.”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  I’d met Seth’s mom once, years before. I tried to imagine her letting someone beat up her children. I tried to imagine how Seth felt then—not just the feeling of being beaten up, but the feeling of knowing that his mom was allowing that, or at least wasn’t stopping it or leaving the man responsible for it. I tried to imagine what might have happened to her in her childhood that caused her to be so weak and indifferent. Seth’s family tree splayed in my head, each parent worse than the one before, each the spawn of some greater evil, probably originating from some hellish demon. From this perspective, Seth didn’t seem so horrible. He was not as horrible as his parents, who were not as horrible as their parents, which was something like progress.

  I thought of a tiny, child-size Seth, anticipating a birthday party the year his mom decided to stop celebrating it, waiting for a gift or dessert that wouldn’t come.

  “They really didn’t do anything for his birthday?” I said.

  “I think his mom usually gave him a pomegranate,” my mom said.

  “Just a pomegranate?”

  “Sad, huh?” she said, and turned up the music.

  I wondered how I fit into the larger picture of Seth’s life. Was I the next victim in the generations of neglect and abuse? Or was I inadvertently turning into yet another bully whose senseless torture Seth had to overcome?

  It was difficult to remember where our hatred of each other had started. I was seven when he married my mom, too young to hate someone with no reason. I had been excited at their wedding and eager to learn what having a stepdad would be like. If he had done or said something to initiate our long-standing mutual dislike and mistrust, I couldn’t remember. It may have been his disinterest in me as a child, or jealousy toward me for being the recipient of so much of my mom’s attention. But was it my job as a seven-year-old to interpret that behavior as the once-necessary self-preserving defensiveness of a misunderstood man still wounded from his childhood? Or was it okay to hate someone who has chosen to be unkind to you, whatever the psychological reasoning? Maybe not. Maybe I owed it to him, or to my mom, or to myself, to try harder to like Seth. Could it be part of my personal journey to figure out how to love someone who didn’t love me and who consistently made life harder for me and the people I loved? Or was that being a weak, spineless pushover? However I framed the question, the answer seemed more elusive.

  One night after my mom and I got home from the hospital, I went to the computer to play a fish-tank simulation game that I was into. On the screen I saw an e-receipt for an ad on some kind of music-promotion website, obviously something Seth had bought to fuel his inevitable success as a performer. I knew that my mom would be upset if she knew about Seth’s purchase, and that it would likely start a huge fight if I said anything.

  I closed the window for the e-receipt and opened my fish game, saving my knowledge for some future unrelated fight between them, when the information might be used to overwhelm my mom into leaving her husband for good.

  “I was using the computer,” Seth said.

  Seth and I fought over the computer like siblings. The unspoken house rule was that you could use the computer for as long as you wanted, but that if you got up to use the bathroom or make a snack, and someone else grabbed the computer while you were away, you lost out. Whether you were hand-coding a form poll about which Hanson song is the most emotional or researching new and inventive ways to waste the family’s money, you lost out.

  “Too bad,” I said.

  I fed my electronic fish over and over until they got sick and died.

  •

  I told my cousin Alana to download ICQ so I could chat with her. Then her mother, my aunt Lynn, started using ICQ as well, and then my mom, and then Seth.

  For some reason my aunt Lynn garnered many dick pics from ICQ users, which she showed Alana and me. I covered my face, mortified that something like that would happen on a service I’d suggested to her.

  “Here’s another one,” she said, laughing.

  “You must be using ICQ wrong,” I said.

  “This is just how men are, Chelsea. Someday you’ll understand.”

  My mom formed more intense relationships with people on ICQ. She talked to the same people on a daily basis. She sent these people boxes full of stuff she had purchased at Walmart.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s his son’s birthday,” she said.

  “So?” I said. “It’s a lot of people’s birthdays. You don’t normally send packages to random people for their birthday.”
r />   “I just want to, okay? It’s none of your business. I’m my own person.”

  Maybe you should throw in some tea tree oil cleaners, I thought. And leave the Crayolas here for me.

  One night I walked out of my bedroom to see my mom with her ear against the door to the garage. I looked at her inquisitively.

  “Shh,” she said.

  I pressed my own ear against the door, and heard Seth’s muffled voice. He was on the phone, speaking more gently and clearly than he usually did.

  “I can’t wait to meet you,” I heard him say.

  My mom whipped open the door and started screaming at Seth. Their fight moved around the house and into the driveway for all our neighbors to witness.

  I gathered, from the things they were yelling at each other, that Seth had been speaking to a woman named Cherry, who he had begun chatting with on ICQ a few weeks before.

  I didn’t feel angry with Seth for being disloyal to my mom. I didn’t consider my mom’s feelings about the situation at all. I momentarily felt sorry for the woman named Cherry for being tricked into believing that Seth was someone worth talking to before realizing that she could be the one to set us free from him forever. She was a wedge in their marriage with real potential.

  I considered bringing up my mom’s foray into infidelity in the form of boxes of markers to a strange man’s child. But even though the stakes were so high and the rewards for driving them apart so great, I didn’t want to betray my mom.

  “Maybe now is a good time to mention the receipt I saw on the computer last week for the ad you bought,” I said.

  “You little bitch,” Seth said.

  “Don’t call her that,” my mom said. She sounded noncommittally irritated, perhaps a little relieved that the fight had been directed away from her.

  “Why?” he said. “She’s a fucking little bitch. What were you doing? Spying on me like a little fucking creep?”

  “What ad?” my mom said pathetically, pointlessly.

  I went to my room and picked up a large cup of flat soda I had been neglecting to take to the kitchen sink for the last few days, carried it to the dining room, and threw the contents, as well as the cup itself, onto Seth.