Coming Clean: A Memoir (7 page)

Whether I liked it or not, we were going to have a new house. A big house, far bigger than our family of three needed. I was determined to look on the bright side. The only redeeming value I could assign the house was its sheer magnitude. I was sure there was no way my dad would be able to find enough paper to fill it all up.

We moved in a couple of weeks later and paid cash for the house, thanks to the payout from the insurance company. Our first night at the house, I unwrapped the new broom and mop that my parents had bought that day, and, true to my promise, I started on chores. They were pretty easy, seeing as how there
was no furniture yet. I swept and mopped our newly acquired kitchen while my parents brought in the few belongings we’d had at Grandma’s and those we’d been stockpiling in our hotel rooms.

“Daddy, you’re not going to make this house messy, right?”

“I’ll try, kiddo.” My dad didn’t like to make promises he couldn’t keep.

I
BELIEVED THAT I COULD
rewrite everything about myself after the fire. Third grade started shortly after we moved in, and everything in my life was new: I had new clothes, new shoes, new dolls, a new book bag, and a new house to have friends over to—all I needed was new friends.

I had the fresh start I always wanted, but I was still me. Still shy and barely audible in the presence of anyone my own age, still hyper and gregarious around anyone over thirty. When school started, I was teased for being shy and for being new, and for anything else I dared to be. Being awkward wasn’t new to me, but being teased for it was. When I would come home crying after school, my parents implored me to defend myself. My father taught me the correct way to throw a punch, but told me never to hit anyone unless I thought they were going to hit me first.

“You just need to put one bully in their place, and the rest will stop,” my mom said. But being a kid wasn’t quite as cut-and-dried as she thought. When I tried to stand up for myself, I was teased more, and so I stayed quiet.

I dreaded gym class. I wasn’t particularly athletic, but that wasn’t the reason I hated this quasi-free period. During our
other classes, everyone had to be quiet, and so I had a reprieve from teasing. But in gym, the kids could talk, so they were free to make fun of me. When our gym teacher lined us up against the wall and told us to run the length of the gym while he threw a football our way to catch, I prayed that I might actually catch it.

I’d never played football. I’d never seen a football. I had no idea how to catch a football, but miraculously the first one sent my way found its way into my hands.

Despite my uncharacteristic athletic prowess, there was no amnesty from teasing by the boys in my class. I still said nothing.

“I would shut up, John, she’s doing better than you are,” the girl next to me said when I got back in line. Her name was Carolynn, and she’d never even glanced in my direction before. I smiled. That was as much of a thanks as I could muster, but she stood with me in line as we walked back to class.

“Do you play soccer?” she asked.

“I’ve played a few times,” I lied. I’d never played soccer, but that was just a technicality.

“My dad coaches the Knight Copiers, you should join the team.”

I told my parents that night over dinner that I loved soccer and wanted to join Carolynn’s team. They looked at me like an alien life form that had invaded their avoid-other-children-at-all-costs daughter, but the next day my mom made the appropriate phone calls. By the following weekend, I had a purple and black uniform, shin guards, and cleats, and my parents had a bag full of sliced oranges to bring to my first-ever soccer game. I was immediately assigned my position as a left forward, but having no idea what that meant, I just ran up and down the soccer field, staying parallel to the ball as Carolynn’s father had told me to.
I hoped that if perchance the ball ever got anywhere near me, someone else would come and kick it before I had to. I didn’t know which goal belonged to my team.

A soccer phenom I was not, but thanks to weekly practices and games, I was becoming better and better friends with Carolynn. After going to her house for playdates a few times, I did something I had never done before—I reciprocated.

We didn’t have much yet—a couch, a recliner, beds, a dining room table. I didn’t care if we ever got more furniture; I loved living in a big empty house. Well, almost empty. In the front foyer there was a closet with brown accordion-style doors, and inside my father had started hiding bags of papers. Free local papers that he picked up each time we went to the grocery store, flyers from local discount stores, and real estate brochures he had collected during our house-hunt but wasn’t quite ready to let go of. On the shelves lining the walls of the closet, he kept tools and extra portable radios so that he could carry the news with him wherever he went.

The day before Carolynn came over, I made plans for things we could do together. I brushed all my dolls’ hair and lined them up on my daybed. My big white orangutan, Sugar, was on one side, with the rest of my dolls arranged in a lineup that progressed size-wise from Melissa my Magic Nursery Baby and eventually to my nameless Barbies.

My father had grown progressively more distant since we moved in. While living in a big clean house enlivened my mother and me, it seemed to have the exact opposite effect on my father. He still wasn’t working, but he wasn’t lying in bed with migraines anymore either. Mostly he sat in the car or his room listening to the radio and reading whatever newspaper or book
he had hidden from my mother’s sight. I woke up for school on my own, thanks to an alarm clock, and he came out from hiding in time to pick my mother up at the train station each night. We still had dinner together at night, at a clear table, and sometimes he could be coerced to be himself for a few minutes and forget that everything he loved had been taken from him.

He was expectedly absent when Carolynn arrived for our play date. She had only been over a few minutes and I was still giving her the tour of our house when my dad stormed into the living room.

His face was purple and he was yelling at me. I couldn’t understand what he was saying—the words were jumbled as he spat them at me. He was calling me a brat, I understood that much.

“All I want is to listen to the news,” he said.

Then there was some more yelling about a broken radio, and I figured it out. He thought I had broken his radio, but I didn’t know which radio he was talking about—there were radios strategically placed all over the house so that a moment of NPR would never be missed. His tirade included the word “closet,” and so I guessed that a radio must have fallen off a shelf and broken. I hadn’t broken it. I tried to tell him that, but he just kept yelling. I thought about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” My mom used to tell me that story all the time during my lying phase, and it seemed that I was in my own version; he wasn’t hearing any of my pleas of innocence. He wasn’t looking at me. He didn’t appear to be looking anywhere at all, completely unfocused in his rage.

When he taught me how to make a fist to fight off bullies, he had said, “Make sure your thumb is outside, so that you don’t
break it.” And just like he had instructed me, he made a fist, and he punched me in the face. And then, with that same unfocused look in his eyes, he walked out of the room.

I wasn’t going to hit him first.

My face was throbbing, but I was too shocked by what had happened to cry.

“I think I want to go home now,” Carolynn said. “I’m scared of your dad.”

I was torn between telling her that my dad wasn’t usually like this, that my parents never hit me, or acting like this sort of thing was no big deal and happened all the time. Instead, I walked her to the kitchen phone where she called her mom to come pick her up. When she was done, we waited outside in the driveway. We didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.

By then I knew that I didn’t have to talk about everything that was true, especially if it meant someone was going to get in trouble, so I didn’t tell my mom about what had happened in front of Carolynn. My father would get in trouble, and he’d been in a lot of trouble lately.

By the time we’d been in the new house for almost a year, the bags of papers that my father had been hiding in closets, cabinets, drawers, and the garage started to make their way into the open. Hiding their existence made them easier to ignore. I didn’t want to admit that my dad was doing the same thing here that he’d done to our old house, and I don’t think that my mother did either.

This was her dream home. I still couldn’t see why and still hated this house, but my mother assured me that she wanted to change all the things about it that I disliked anyway. One day, she promised, this house would be beautiful. There were constant
talks of taking down the tacky green and silver wallpaper in the bathroom, painting rooms and changing carpets, but none of that ever happened, and so we were stuck with rusty-orange carpets and black art deco furniture, a theme that made our downstairs resemble a constant ode to Halloween.

By the time the school year ended, my parents were fighting like they had in the old house, more so because this time there was something at stake: our chance to be normal. The worst fight of all happened in July. We didn’t have air-conditioners yet, and my uniform around the house consisted of white cotton undershirts and underpants. I was in my room when the yelling started, playing with the new stereo system my parents had bought me at a yard sale. I couldn’t raise the volume enough to drown out my mother’s voice.

She was screaming, “I’m not going to let you do this to another house.” She had found his stash, bags and bags of things, when they came tumbling out of the hall closet. And he had already filled most of the two-car garage.

I thought about the homeless man when my parents fought. As broken as my father was, he was still my responsibility to protect. I left the confines of my room and ran down the stairs to interject.

By the time I got downstairs it was too late—he was gone. He never responded to my mother’s arguments with more than a stream of mumbles, but he could slam the door so that the whole house shook. The car was still in the driveway, which meant wherever he was he was on foot, and so I started screaming.

I wanted him to hear me and come back.

My mother didn’t ask me to stop screaming. My allegiance was with my father, I had proven that fight after fight, and so she left me to scream myself out at the foot of the stairs. I screamed for an hour, maybe more. Wherever my father was at this point, he probably couldn’t hear me, but I kept going even though my face and throat ached.

Echoes of “Daddy” carried down the street until a neighbor’s boyfriend knocked on our door and asked my mother if he could come inside. The neighbors thought I was being beaten and had elected him to find out. He told my mother he would call the police if she didn’t allow him to confirm my safety.

The intrusion to my hysterics finally quieted me. My mother, far more collected than she had been when screaming at my father, assured him that I was only having a tantrum, but eventually acquiesced and allowed this stranger to inspect my body for lesions.

In my undershirt and underpants, I looked at her nervously when the neighbor asked for me to lift the back of my shirt so that he could look me over for marks. My mother just nodded her head at me, as if to say,
Don’t look at me, you did this to yourself.

“I just had to check,” he told my mother as he left.

“Are you embarrassed?” She asked as she shut the door behind him.

I nodded my head yes.

“So am I.” It was clear that my father was not the only one that she was angry at. I had humiliated her just like my father did.

I wasn’t afraid of my parents divorcing. I was afraid of what would happen to my father without my mother. He needed her—probably more than I did. I was afraid that without her to anchor him to a normal life he would be just as content to live in boxes or subway stations… to live without me.

Wherever my father was that night, he stayed there until after I had gone to bed. I had left the door to my bedroom open, hoping I’d wake up when he climbed up the stairs, but all the screaming had worn me out and I slept right through his middle-of-the-night homecoming. When I woke up the next morning, he was home and sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed, as if nothing had ever happened.

Shortly after we moved into the new house, my parents stopped sharing a bedroom. My father took over the guest room, where he slept on a trundle bed. Because of his piles of paper, the trundle bed could only half extend. He slept on that lower bed, with papers on the floor piled to upper-mattress level and surrounding him on all sides. The upper mattress became a desk of sorts, with its own stash of newspapers, catalogs, and documents preserved above the tides of trash.

My mother stayed in the master bedroom, and checking in with her was my first stop each morning.

“Morning, honey. Come sit down,” my mom said. She seemed far more upbeat than was normal for a postfight morning.

“Your father is going away for awhile,” she said, indicating that it was my father’s job to deliver this news.

I looked at him, thinking of all the possible places he might be going—back to the hotel, Grandma’s apartment, wherever he had been the night before. None seemed like a likely choice.

“Where?”

He looked down at his clasped hands, rubbing his thumbs together. “I’m going to the funny farm.” He reached over to tickle me, not being one for tense moments. “Should be funny,” he said, and I laughed, because I couldn’t help it, but I knew it wasn’t funny.

When he stopped, I jumped to my feet. “Hold on,” I said, and ran to my room to grab my school picture.

“Will you keep this in your room?” I said, holding out the picture as I ran back to him.

He looked at it and smiled, and looked over at my mother. “Why, of course. I’ll be the envy of all the other crazy daddies.”

A
FTER MY FATHER LEFT
for the mental hospital, I moved into my mother’s room. I set up shop on the side of the bed that was once intended to be my father’s.