This story is on the ceiling, it is tired of being told. It glares at me and kicks me in the back if I mention its name, snarls and closes its swollen eyes. If I could I would eat this dark story: Sit down at the kitchen table. I would fold this story neatly into the center of my plate. I would slice it up into a hundreds of oily little pieces. I would put every little morsel into my mouth. I would bite through this story's patchwork wings. I would gnaw on its inky heart. I would even chew its long fingernails. This is no supplement.
I have worked most of my life to get to know my parents. This fruitless battle for truth has turned me into wishing I had never known them at all. I have searched, and struggled and fought and waited, and I have come up with ways of thinking about them that may not be factually true. My time with Rob Nauman on Cloverleaf Drive is still groping for the truth.
How strange it is to dream of childhood and wake up an adult, to realize that the names populate our consciousness now—including our own –will one day be names from the past.
I used to get night terrors when I was little. I lived in the highest bedroom in a homemade house. My mother had just re married a 56 year old who loved gold plated fixtures, silence, and fly-fishing. He looked flushed and nervous constantly, giant bug glasses that never looked my way. I had a bad bob haircut then, and Rob, that was his name, made me painful aware of my re semblance to my younger brother. There are some things I will never even in adulthood understand. He never tried to talk to me, but he knew that I could reach up, grab his hair and ears and tell him that I knew. I always knew. I saw their faces in the wall. I saw their scraggly hair and singed eyelashes. Eye sockets filled with lint and cigarette ash.
He built the house in the ground alone. Alone with his pink skin the mud; he never intended to share the house with anyone. It had three levels, ski lodge looking wood work, mismatched paint colors, walls unfinished in places. Maybe the women ripped the paint off the walls and doors off of their hinges at night.
My terrors started in this house, Rob were in the basement all the time, he moved with slime down the stairs. I knew nothing about this man I only knew that he must have done something wrong in that house. The dust in the corners the hallow noises in the basement. I knew they were there. Even when I was awake I got the terrors, the walls would pulse and fear would stick its ribbon like tongue into my thoughts and dreams. Rob’s hair would find its way into my food and his fingernails would claw into my legs in the middle of the night. They got married by a lake in the mountains, I cried in my bob that day even as a kid I could understand that Rob would be a character in the dream of my life and he could not be removed or changed. I have virtually no memories of him whatsoever but this day on the lake when he looked over his glasses I could see his every wickedness.
He covered the rest of my family’s days in dust.
My mother and me have always been strangers—I am convinced she was driving across the desert on a cloudy day and saw me staggering across the road. She rolled down her window and I awkwardly sat in the passenger seat. We had nothing but our hauntings in common. She locked the doors and I haven’t been able to get out of the car since. I keep watching the gas gauge waiting for her to stop. We have been running on EMPTY for so long. I could really go for some Corn Nuts. She tells me to dig DEEP.
We moved into the house on the hill after they got married on the lake. I know my mother would never hold my hands when I felt like I was going blind. She was always lost to never self, in her quest to settle her days she terrorized my years.
I would lie under the covers sometimes after taking half a bottle of Nyquil and pray for sleep, pray for it to bring me out of the rattling room and into the palm of my father. My mom would have never believed me if I told her what I was afraid of in the house. I could not try and tell her that the walls did have the noise of decades. There where no conversations or prayers in the walls. These walls held nothing and she would never understand. These walls held their faces and our fate. I could never tell her that. The women would look back at me in the basement sucking air in the sheet rock. Vacant eyes of good intention gone wrong. They told me they had loved Rob. Nubs for arms- slits for mouths. Broken down dolls under the eggshell paint. I swore I saw them. They touched me in my sleep. They pushed the windows out and in again. The glass hugged me. They touched my fingers ,the space between my eyes. They clawed into the kitchen and gummed the butter sticks. They looked right at me while they tore every page out of every book in the house.
When my mom had met Rob he gave her two rubies in a dirty handkerchief. My mom was living in a small house on the outside of town. She had just left a poor contractor. She hated him because he was so cheap. He gave her a banana hammock for her birthday. When my mother saw the rubies she was convinced she had found the man that could really love her to her bones. He had a baby face and long nails. He barely spoke when she dove into the handkerchief after the stones. They were her supplement. I am left sitting upstairs waiting for her to slowly walk up the stairs in a sleepy haze.
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