A Bad Moment

I used to clean a lot when I was a kid, because the cleaner the house was, the calmer my mom would be.

It was impossible to ever get it really clean though.

The house looked different depending on what year we’re talking about. So let’s talk about the year I was nine, just to have a year to focus on.

My stepdad still lived us with us then. That was the last year he lived with us. Before my mom started sleeping with the guy who owned the sex toy shop she managed, the store that other people remember as the place with the manic panic and the Doc Martins, but I remember as the place with the candy machine where the gummies always came out dusty-looking and they tasted funny, and whenever I’d ask, Mom would insist the strange long cylinders I was counting were “back massagers” and the owner once let me pick out a nightie to put on a blow up doll with a round O of a mouth and set it up between the coffin-shaped dressing rooms.

When I was 9, Jose still lived with us and he and Carly still spent lots of time playing the Super Nintendo. He had a lot of friends that would come over to drink beer and sit outside with him. Some of them were very rowdy and would crack jokes at me in a funny uncle sort of way, but they always made me nervous and I’d hide in my room when they came over. I didn’t like a lot of attention on me back then. I was a little different than I am now, I guess.

Jose and Mom ran a ceramics company. The kiln was in the kitchen. The name of their company was Necroworks and their tagline was “Home of the shit your mother will hate.” They made a lot of skulls. Some glazed. Some intricately painted. They also made many gargoyles. For those they had this special textured stone paint that made them look all bumpy, like they were really made of stone. Dragons. Lots and lots of dragons. The biggest one Mom ever painted (because for all of the very detailed painting-she did that part. She was the artist-paintings of unicorns and dragons and Egyptian queens all of the house) was almost as tall as me. It had to be around four feet. The dragon was positioned on a huge rocky cliff, resting, with its tail hanging over the side. She painted the dragon two different colors of purple.

She’d look at a finished piece of bisque (a fired ceramic ready for painting is called bisque)and know exactly which of the hundreds of paint colors she wanted to use.

“Jen, get me the mint green with the Lynn’s label.” “Jen, I need mocha mayhem. It’s a glittery brown. Big bottle.”

And I’d open the door of the closet, the one that Carly had stuck Lisa Frank panda stickers all over and they never came off and Mom dragged her across the house by the hair and slammed her into every wall when she did it, I’d open that door, get on my knees and sort through the piles of plastic bottles.

She painted with the TV on, usually watching John Wayne movies or Spaghetti Westerns.

Life was best when she was sitting still, with her eyes glued to the screen.

Bad things happened when she got up and moved around. It was impossible to tell what would set her off.

Once out of nowhere (I think I was 8 or 9), she brought up how in Kindergarten, the school had been concerned I was being molested, because I kept masterbaiting in class. A lot of things happened to me as a kid, but I wasn’t molested. I was just always really horny I guess.

I think she screamed at me for what must have been hours. She got my younger sister involved in making fun of me. And I don’t blame Carly for going along with it, because she had to, I know she did.

Mom didn’t hit me that time.

I just stared at her, so angry and red-faced, wondering what I was supposed to do to make it better. I couldn’t change what five-year-old me had done. I didn’t know what she wanted from me.

Something else she’d do a lot was decide she needed a specific item right that moment. With as messy as our house was, it wasn’t an easy task to go into her cluttered bedroom and find the exact necklace, perfume, or knick-knack she wanted. Then she’d become violent.

I became interested in Christianity around the time I was 9. I think, only because it was so different than the spiritual stuff in our house (Wicca).

There were a lot of times, I scrambled around on the floor of her room, throwing around shoes, purses, stuffed animals, boas, desperately trying to find some item or other. She’d start screaming that awful scream of hers from the other side of the house, telling me to hurry up.

I’d panic and cry and pray. Every time that I prayed and DID find whatever item it was, it strengthened my belief that God was up there helping me.

Every time that I prayed and didn’t find the item, I believed that God had stopped loving me. Because I was awful and there was no reason for him to help me.

I don’t know, readers of mine, if you’ve ever been dragged by your hair. That’s what she did to us the most.

I have more memories of being dragged across the house by my hair than any other singular event in my childhood.

First of all, it hurts a lot.

She’d grab a fistful of hair and yank me down to the floor from wherever I was standing. The floor would shoot up to hit me, BAM!

My entire scalp would scream in pain as she pulled me over the rug. It was a thin, gray scratchy rug. Many times it gave me such bad rugburns from being dragged over it, that tiny little pinpricks of blood would rise to the surface of the rashy red patches on my arms or knees. While she dragged me, she threw me into things along the way, flinging me into her record cabinet, her weight bench, the massive 1980s TV.

Our house was filthy. Bugs, mold, animal feces everywhere. Mom never had enough room for her junk, but she kept on getting more.

Dust from all the greenware (unfired clay) and the finished ceramics coated every surface. The linoleum in the kitchen was covered with a layer of caked on gray dust that I’d sometimes sit and carve into the top layer with my fingernails. I wrote myself messages or little prayers to God, and then I’d watch them as they faded and vanished over the course of the following days.

Cleaning was my own boulder up a neverending mountain, but it made me feel safer. If I was cleaning, I stood the best chance of keeping her calm.

So I cleaned a lot. She would tell me to clean a lot, but I cleaned even when she didn’t ask me.

I really liked cleaning to be honest. I was invisible when I was doing it. It gave me something to focus on. It was…sort of soothing.

When I was nine, I spent an entire Saturday cleaning. It was raining. Who the fuck knows why I remember that.

I had cleaned the entire kitchen up so nicely. Usually I never even managed to make a dent in the filth. As much as I tried, Mom, Jose, and all of their freinds who were always over, were just too good at making a mess. It was a miracle if I ever made it through the dishes, which perpetually spilled out from the loaded sick and covered the entire four feet of counter space, sticky and coagulating as ants coated them in swarms.

That day though, I made a dent.

The kitchen was beautiful. All the dishes done, the counter wiped clean. Inside of the fridge and cabinets wiped out. Table wiped free of gray dest. Shelves of greenware and ceramics organized. Stove cleaned inside and out. I was so proud of myself. The kitchen looked so nice. Mom would tell me she was so happy with how the kitchen looked.

Except.

I tripped. I tripped over the metal transition separating the linoleum from the carpet. There was a shelving unit in that space between the kitchen and living room, right next to the place I tripped. On the floor next to the shelf, there was a large ceramic troll..or gnome. Some kind of fantasy creature. When I tripped, I fell into him, and he teetered over to the linoleum side of the transition and smashed.

Her screaming was awful.

Horrible.

I can still hear it.

Both hands in my hair. Screaming. Shaking. The fuck is wrong with you. I hate you. You idiot. You dumb little bitch. You fucking moron.

Rug scraping like a cheesegrater over bare arms. Firey little needles of pain in my scalp.

And her screaming. Hysterical and ear-splitting.

She dragged me to my room. She threw me on the bed.

She looked down at me with such disgust. So much hate in her face, with her thin lip quivering, and it made me hate myself too. I felt for a moment like I was watching someone else and I hated her too.

“Stay there,” she said in a very scary, very low voice.

She went to my closet and started looking through it. I didn’t know what she was looking for, but I knew it would be bad.

It was. It was the worst act of violence I ever lived through.

I looked at the ceiling and there were thin wisps of spiderwebs up there. A moth fluttered around the dome light fixture.

I said to myself: This is a bad moment. It’s okay though, because you made it through other bad moments. This bad moment will end, because bad moments always end. they always do.

I kept on thinking that even after I was bleeding.

She told me she wouldn’t stop if I couldn’t lay still. It was so so hard to lay still. My body fought against me, trying to curl in on itself, trying to flinch, to jerk away, to escape.

I finally managed it. I tried to get my brain out of my body, so that I could be still and stop making her angry, because then, maybe, it would stop.

I thought things like: Bad moments always end. Then there are good moments. Good moments like dance class, like getting frozen yogurt like Nan, like practicing with Miss Drall for chorus solos, like playing Detective with Alex, like getting a new Babysitter’s Club book. I thought about every single thing in life that I liked, that brought me joy, that might happen again in the near future, because they happened with regularity.

The pain didn’t stop, but it became like a background noise.

She stopped eventually.

She left me on the bed.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with myself, because I’d never been injured like that before.

The majority of the wounds were on my arms, where I still have faint white scars in clusters of criss-crosses to this day.

My arms felt very hot. Like heat radiating off them in pulsating little throbs.

I took a book and went into my closet. I sat behind all the coats and capes that my mom stored in there and I read The Babysitter’s Club #100. Kristy’s Worst Idea.

I couldn’t focus on the book. Instead I thought about how pretty the silver cover was and wondered if people would think I was horrible and gross when they saw the cuts on my arms.