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Long time lurker, first time poster!
I wrote this story for a memoir class and I want to work on it some more, but I need some advice.
Grasping at Perfection
The entire house was silent, save for the sound of the television coming from her room. She was locked away in the small cave that she called a room, the smell of cigarette smoke wafting through the air. No matter how much my sister and I tried to block it in the past, the smoke always managed to spread throughout the entire house. It bombarded me as soon as I walked through the door.
I slammed the front door shut as I went to put my bag down on the kitchen table. I placed my keys on the counter in the same place that I put them every time I went into the house. I don’t know what I expected to find here. I almost always avoided going home at all costs, except maybe when I knew my mother wasn’t going to be there. But my dad wanted to hang out and go to the movies; I could never turn down a good movie or some quality time with my father.
My mother called out from her bedroom, asking who was there.
“It’s me, Mom,” I yelled back at her, though I knew it would be hard for her to hear me through the walls and over her television.
“Ari?” she asked as she called out my sister’s name, obviously confused as to who was coming into the house at such an odd hour. It was not a surprise that she called out my sister’s name instead of mine; she was always confusing the two of us, even on the phone. She never got anyone’s name right the first time she said it. Whenever she talked to my sister and me, she called us a myriad of names that included her own sisters' as well.
“No, Mom. It’s me, your other daughter,” I said as I made my way down the small hallway to my mother’s door. The paint on the white walls of the hallway was stained a slight yellow and the paint had begun to peel away around the edges. I paused in front of the door to her room and took a deep breath. The smoke scratched at my throat as I choked back a cough. I heard scratching at the door as I opened it and out ran the family dog, Diego. Diego was a small Chihuahua that we had got the summer before, after our old dog had to be put to sleep because of old age. He was a big for a Chihuahua because my mother pampered him and refused to stop feeding him from the table. The veterinarian that we went to said that he needed to stop eating people food so that he could lose some weight.
I always described Diego as a little Mexican jumping bean because he was always running and jumping around at our feet as he tried to get us to pay attention to him. He ran around my feet, excited to have someone to play with; even though my mother kept him in the room with her when no one else was home, she hardly ever played with him. He was always anxious for some affection when one of us got home and I was more than happy to play with him.
A sudden cough brought my attention back to my mother as she tried to suppress her hacking with a sip of water. She was lying on her bed, on her side, in a position that was very familiar to her. She was always in one of two positions in her room: on her side, or on her side, smoking. She reached over for the remote to mute the volume. “What are you doing home?” she asked as she swung her body up in order to sit and face me.
She told me once that she used to be really skinny when she was younger, but then she had children. Well, more specifically, me. After she had my sister, she bounced right back to her previous weight, but after she had me, she couldn’t get rid of it. She had brown curly hair that she wore short and naturally big brown eyes that were always squinting because she needed glasses but refused to get them.
“I just felt like coming home for the day and I’m hanging out with Dad later.” I bent down to pick up the dog and he immediately climbed up my body to lick my face and nuzzle my neck.
She finally got a good look at me and paused as she took in my appearance. I hadn’t seen any of my family since I had moved to school a couple of weeks before. “What did you do to your hair?” she asked incredulously, like changing my hair was something I had never done before.
My hair and style was something that was forever changing. It started in sixth grade when I dyed my hair purple and I haven’t seen its real color ever since. I had yet to find a hair style and color or clothes that could please my mother. No matter what I did, she managed to find something wrong with me, even when I gave into her whims. I gave up a long time ago and now I just did what made me happy.
“I dyed it and I gave myself bangs. Do you like it?” I asked as I reached up with one hand to play with my hair as the other held on to my squirming dog. I ruffled my bangs up a bit and scrunched up the rest of my hair to maintain that messy look.
She made a guttural sound and grimaced as she started to shake her head. This motion lasted about thirty seconds. It was also a motion with which I was very familiar. I braced myself for the lecture that I knew was to follow.
“Why can’t you just go back to black and cut your hair into a bob like you know I like? You can’t even see your face with your hair in the way like that.”
“Because it’s not your hair and I like it this way,” I pushed out automatically. I could carry out this conversation in my sleep if I needed to, but I restrained myself from starting a fight. There were a lot of things that I could have said, but I was hoping that we could maintain some sort of civility towards each other.
“But you were so much cuter when you were little and you had your hair in that cute little bob. Why can’t you just go back to that?”
“You dressed me when I was little and I didn’t have a say in it.”
“I know and it was so much easier then. Let me play with him,” she demanded as she reached out to grab the dog away from me.
“But I just got home and I haven’t seen him in weeks!” I complained, though I was already reaching out to hand him over. This was a fight I didn’t mind giving in to since I knew that the dog would come back to me. As much as my mother loved him, he had taking quite a liking to me and especially to my sister. When my mom realized that the dog liked my sister more than her, she complained like a child that Ari had stolen him away from her and that she wanted a new dog.
She grabbed the dog as he struggled to escape her grasp. After a minute’s struggle, he jumped to the floor and scuttled away.
I followed Diego down the short hallway, his nails clicking against the hard wood floor, and back into the living room and kitchen area. I could hear the thump thump sound my mother made as she hobbled down the hallway after us.
“How’s your knee?” I asked. I leaned against the arm of our beige colored couch, arms crossed against my front.
“The doctor said I have arthritis in my left knee and that the bones are rubbing together. He gave me some medication for the pain. It doesn’t really hurt anymore,” she gasped out as she she walked over, clearly she still in pain.
“Then why are you limping?”
She shrugged then grabbed her cigarettes and lit one up. She took a seat on the couch, right next to the arm that I was leaning against. Her fingers moved through her short hair as she tried to get control of her unruly curls, her cigarette still hanging from her lips. I could tell that she hadn’t blow dried her hair that day so she must’ve really not been feeling well. She usually tried so hard to get her hair straight when she blow dried it. She would play with it for as long as it took. Her hair was burned so bad that it was brittle to the touch.
“So, how’s school going?” she asked while she took another long drag from her cigarette.
I pushed myself off the arm of the couch and moved around her to sit on the opposite side from her. “Fine,” I said. “I got a 100% on my Anthropology quiz.”
“You did? Good, keep it up. You can’t afford to get any more bad grades.” She was referring to my first year at college when I got horrible grades and lost my scholarship. I still haven’t heard the end of that.
“Yes, Mother. I know,” I snidely remarked. I called her ‘Mother’ because I knew she hated it, but she came to terms with it after I started calling her Mommie Dearest in homage to Joan Crawford’s character that beat her children with a wire hanger. She didn’t have as much of a problem with my calling her Mother after that. Even though it was only a small battle, I felt better knowing that I could get under her skin as well as she could get under mine.
“How are your English classes going?”
“Um, good. Some better than others, but I’m doing okay in them.” I tucked my legs underneath me and leaned back against the arm of the chair as I turned to face my mother. I went on to talk more about my classes but she had leaned down to play with the dog again.
“You should write a book,” she said suddenly, in the middle of my spiel.
“What?” I was so shocked by her comment that seemed to come out of nowhere. “Have you even been listening to me?”
“Yes, Ridgie, I have. I’m just saying that you should write a book so that you can get rich like that woman who wrote Harry Potter.”
I stared at her in total disbelief. I looked around the room for a minute, hoping that someone else would appear to share in my total confusion. Did she really think that what I did was that easy? She described writing like it was a magical process and didn’t take any work at all. I was still so shocked, I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to her.
She looked at me after a couple of minutes of complete silence. “You need to get off your ass and start working. You can do it; you’re just too lazy to do anything. What, does it take a month or so to write a book?”
I was now convinced that my mother lived in a fantasy world, where everything was done with a snap of the fingers and nothing required any skill or talent at all. I replied with, “Yes, Mother. You’re absolutely right. I spend my whole day just lying around in bed. I don’t have two jobs, an internship, classes and clubs that I’m involved in. I just sit around doing nothing.” The sarcasm from my voice reeked as bad as her cigarette smoke. I couldn’t keep the anger from creeping into my voice as I struggled to keep my breathing even.
“Don’t be a smart ass,” she muttered while she got up to head back to her room. “And what am I supposed to think? If you didn’t sit around on your ass all day, you wouldn’t be so fat.” Her door closed and her television blared loudly again as she settled back into her routine.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said softly to myself. That was also a fight that we had more often than not. “Missed you, too.” Diego jumped into my lap and tried to lick and bite my fingers. “At least you missed me, right, Diego?” I petted him and let my head fall back onto the cushion behind me.
Over the years, I had gotten used to her overly blunt manner and criticism. Her barbs and cuts at me hurt like they always did, but I tried to seem impervious to her actions. I figured that if she couldn’t tell that I got upset whenever she commented on my appearance, that eventually she would give up. It was like a game I used to play with my sister when we were younger. She poked me relentlessly and I pretended not to notice until she got tired of it. My mother never got tired.
Still, I couldn’t help but wish that I had a mother that I got along with. There were times when I was little when I would see my friends with their mothers that I would wish my mother was like that, loving, nurturing and completely supportive to her children. She’d never been supportive, though. She never once told me that I could do anything I wanted to do; instead she often called me dumb and idiotic. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t need her, that what she said didn’t hurt my feelings. But she was my mother, and I just wanted her to love me. I didn’t think that was too much to ask.
After about thirty minutes of playing with Diego and trying not to think about my mother, I trudged up the stairs towards my room. I glanced to the right of the hallway, which led straight into my sister’s room. Her room was spotlessly clean and still held the vestiges from our childhood. She had saved every stuffed animal she ever had and kept them in immaculate condition, all neatly piled one on top of the other on a desk in the corner. Her floors were wooden like the rest of the house and covered on a cute little light pink rug. The walls were a light purple, or what she called lilac. Covering the walls were pictures of her in her band uniform with all of her bandie friends and several awards she had won throughout her high school career. Next to her bed were stacks of CDs which were a reflection of her somewhat limited taste in music. If I listened carefully enough, I swore I could still hear the Backstreet Boys leftover from her days as a teeny-bopper. Peeking out from underneath her bed were a couple of her old school books that she hadn’t touched in years, which had probably been forgotten about completely.
I turned left to enter my room. Everything about my room was the exact opposite from my sister’s flowery girlishness. My floor still held that 70s appeal of green shag carpeting. My walls were still wooden panels of a beige-like color that doesn’t exist in nature. On my walls were posters of old movies like The Clockwork Orange and Carrie, each poster creepy in its own right. I had one lone stuffed animal, a koala to be exact, that I’d had since birth. He didn’t have a name. My bed spread was a single black comforter that looked horrible next to my rug; the dark drab colors didn’t seem to mesh too well. Instead of being immaculately spotless, the floor was littered with clothes, books and anything else that couldn’t fit in my bookcase. But even in all of its imperfection and odd style, it was my room and I loved it like that.
I flopped onto my bed and bounced slightly, then settled comfortably with a sigh. I stared at the fake glow-in-the-dark stars that, although they didn’t glow anymore, still adorned my ceiling and some of my walls. I had stuck them there after a fight with my mother when I was thirteen years old. We were fighting about redoing my room like we had done for my sister. Before my parents had butchered it, her room looked a lot like mine. The paneling was different, but the idea was the same. About a year after they finished her room, my mother told me it was my turn.
We fought intensely for months about the status of my room. She wanted to change it to something cute and girly and I loved my room just the way it was. After one particularly long argument, she thought that she had won the fight because she technically had the last word. She underestimated my willingness to go behind her back. But with a little stubbornness on my part, and a lot of help from my father, my room was still intact. It was still every bit a part of me and all the different facets of my personality.
I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew, the bed shifted as someone else lay down beside me. I cracked an eye open and glanced to the left to see that my sister was staring at me. She had a slight grin on her face with cute little dimples that made her look younger than she was, but then again, she just had a way about her that made her seem young. Everyone had always thought that I was the older sister. Physically, she was everything that I was not. She had long blond hair, blue eyes and was skinnier than I ever hoped to be. We used to joke that we came from different families because we looked so different. But whenever someone was in the same room as us, they could tell that we were sisters. There were a lot of characteristics that we shared. We had the same laugh and the same facial expressions, but she was a little nicer than me.
“Hey,” she said and then rearranged herself so that she wasn’t lying on her hair.
“Hey,” I replied in turn, turning my head back so that I was once again staring at the ceiling.
“Mom’s in a foul mood, what did you do?”
“I breathed. My bad,” I joked and tried to make light of the situation. We both knew that our mom had a quick temper and that I was always ready to fire it up. My sister used to say that my mother and I were the same person and that’s why we always butted heads; we were both stubborn, bitchy and a little self-centered. But my mother also had a long history of wanting me to be something I wasn’t. Part of me thought that she berated me so that I would become everything she was never able to be. I suspected that she tried to fix her mistakes through me and that made me feel bad for her.
“You know,” my sister started, “Mom’s mother used to be just like her…”
“Which is why she’s like that with me, I know Ari. That doesn’t excuse her behavior,” I shot back at her.
“Maybe not, but I don’t piss her off all the time, and we get along fine. You should take that as a hint.” The smile had left her face and she was just staring at me from her side of the bed.
“You don’t piss her off, because you’re her favorite. You can do nothing wrong in her eyes.”
“Now you’re being retarded. You never listen; you’re just like Mom.” She got off the bed abruptly and stormed out of my room. The old wooden stairs creaked as she went down them.
I saw my mother as this unfeeling, cold thing; she wasn’t even a person to me. I didn’t want to be like her, but I did want her to care about me, even if I didn’t want to care about her. It was like trying to win the favor of a person that hated you; no matter how mean they were to you, you still craved their approval.
I got out of bed and walked over the full length mirror that was leaning against my closet door. I looked at my hair that my mother hated, the new rusty color slowly fading from what it had been when I first dyed it. My bangs were brushing the top of my glasses and falling into the space between my eyes and the frames. I curled my normally straight hair all the time so that it fell messily around my face, barely touching my shoulders. I only let my hair dry straight about once a month.
I looked into the mirror and tried to see what my mother saw when she looked at me. I changed my appearance so much that I never looked one way for too long. I got restless and bored with myself so I felt the need to change things around and create a whole new personality for myself, but I usually liked what I ended up with, at least at the beginning. I was overweight but I never thought of myself as ugly or that it as a reason why people didn’t like me. I tried not to let myself listen to what my mother had to say, but maybe there was some credit in it. I just didn’t understand what was so wrong with me that my mother felt like she had to fix me.
The sounds of footsteps came from the other side of the door as I heard, “Ridgie!” My father was home.
“Papi?” I flung open the door to my room and threw myself into a hug with him. I called him Papi because when I was little he used to speak Spanish to me all the time and the name just stuck, even though I can’t speak Spanish now. I was a daddy’s girl though and through. We got caught in an awkward half hug, since one of his arms was caught in the sleeve of his jacket as he had been in the process of taking it off when I wrapped my arms around him.
He laughed slightly as he hugged me back. It had been about three weeks since I last saw him and in that moment, I was happy to be home.
One thing about my dad that I was grateful for was that he acted as the buffer between my mother and me. Whenever we would get into a fight, he always took my side and shut her up. Granted, it wasn’t good for their marriage that they were always fighting about me, but I loved him for sticking up for me.
After we separated from our hug, he looked around my room and gave me his ‘disappointed face’, which was nothing more than him frowning and shaking his head.
“I thought I told you to clean your room the last time you were here,” he said so fast in his Spanish accent that I almost didn’t understand what he was saying.
“I know. I’ll do it next time,” I promised him. We heard Diego start barking downstairs. He left to go down there to play with him and I followed behind him.
When we got back downstairs, I noticed that my mother was on the phone. She was using her ‘phone voice.’ It was a softer tone that I only heard her use on the phone or when she was talking to someone we didn’t know. Ari was sitting on the couch text messaging someone on her phone as my dad played with Diego next to her. I looked around the house at my family, each one of them caught up in their own little world, not paying attention the others.
My mother was laughing into the phone and talking animatedly. I had never seen her so alive and happy than I had in that moment. She didn’t have many friends and she didn’t get along with her sisters so I guessed that she was talking to her friend Pam from work. She never laughed that way with any of us and I hated her friend for getting along with my mother when I never could.
My dad asked if I was ready to leave and we grabbed our coats and headed out the front door. We decided to take my car because his was so old it could only go to the train station up the street and back and even then, it could break down at any moment. I walked around the car to the driver’s side and got mud all over my shoes because I had had to park half in the driveway and half on the yard; we had too many cars for our small driveway. My dad got in and immediately started playing with the radio that he had bought me when I first got my car. I backed out of the driveway and we headed off to the movies.
It was a short ride to the movie theatre where we had to sit through what seemed like a very long, painfully bad movie. We had seen a B rated horror movie, the kind that we both secretly loved even though they were horrible. It wasn’t until the drive back that we started talking about my mother.
“You know you can’t let her get to you,” my dad said, seemingly out of nowhere.
I didn’t turn my head to look at him; instead my hands tightened on the steering wheel and I focused on the winding highway. “I know,” I responded, “but she makes me so mad. I can’t help but push her buttons when she pushes mine. I don’t understand why she’s so mean to me.”
“She doesn’t mean to be. She thinks she’s helping when she’s hurting. I’ve talked to her about it, but she doesn’t listen to me either. Just don’t listen to her.”
“But that just makes her angrier and then she starts yelling more. It’s a vicious cycle,” I complained as I pulled into our driveway and turned the car off. We just sat in there, not ready to go back in.
“Well then, maybe you should pick your battles. You can be a little stubborn when it comes to her, too, and that's what makes her angrier.” He opened the car door and started to get out. He was halfway out the door when he turned his head back to me to ask, “Are you coming in?”
“I’ll be in, in a minute.” I glanced up to my rearview mirror and looked at my bangs that were still hanging in my face. I didn’t want to be my mother. I didn’t want to end up in a family that couldn’t stand each other, with a daughter I was never happy with. I reached into my bag that was sitting on the floor on the passenger’s side of the car. I found the headband that I kept in there in case I had to pull my hair back because of rain. I slid it into place, neatly and with my hair out of my eyes, and went inside to see my mother.
I wrote this story for a memoir class and I want to work on it some more, but I need some advice.
Grasping at Perfection
The entire house was silent, save for the sound of the television coming from her room. She was locked away in the small cave that she called a room, the smell of cigarette smoke wafting through the air. No matter how much my sister and I tried to block it in the past, the smoke always managed to spread throughout the entire house. It bombarded me as soon as I walked through the door.
I slammed the front door shut as I went to put my bag down on the kitchen table. I placed my keys on the counter in the same place that I put them every time I went into the house. I don’t know what I expected to find here. I almost always avoided going home at all costs, except maybe when I knew my mother wasn’t going to be there. But my dad wanted to hang out and go to the movies; I could never turn down a good movie or some quality time with my father.
My mother called out from her bedroom, asking who was there.
“It’s me, Mom,” I yelled back at her, though I knew it would be hard for her to hear me through the walls and over her television.
“Ari?” she asked as she called out my sister’s name, obviously confused as to who was coming into the house at such an odd hour. It was not a surprise that she called out my sister’s name instead of mine; she was always confusing the two of us, even on the phone. She never got anyone’s name right the first time she said it. Whenever she talked to my sister and me, she called us a myriad of names that included her own sisters' as well.
“No, Mom. It’s me, your other daughter,” I said as I made my way down the small hallway to my mother’s door. The paint on the white walls of the hallway was stained a slight yellow and the paint had begun to peel away around the edges. I paused in front of the door to her room and took a deep breath. The smoke scratched at my throat as I choked back a cough. I heard scratching at the door as I opened it and out ran the family dog, Diego. Diego was a small Chihuahua that we had got the summer before, after our old dog had to be put to sleep because of old age. He was a big for a Chihuahua because my mother pampered him and refused to stop feeding him from the table. The veterinarian that we went to said that he needed to stop eating people food so that he could lose some weight.
I always described Diego as a little Mexican jumping bean because he was always running and jumping around at our feet as he tried to get us to pay attention to him. He ran around my feet, excited to have someone to play with; even though my mother kept him in the room with her when no one else was home, she hardly ever played with him. He was always anxious for some affection when one of us got home and I was more than happy to play with him.
A sudden cough brought my attention back to my mother as she tried to suppress her hacking with a sip of water. She was lying on her bed, on her side, in a position that was very familiar to her. She was always in one of two positions in her room: on her side, or on her side, smoking. She reached over for the remote to mute the volume. “What are you doing home?” she asked as she swung her body up in order to sit and face me.
She told me once that she used to be really skinny when she was younger, but then she had children. Well, more specifically, me. After she had my sister, she bounced right back to her previous weight, but after she had me, she couldn’t get rid of it. She had brown curly hair that she wore short and naturally big brown eyes that were always squinting because she needed glasses but refused to get them.
“I just felt like coming home for the day and I’m hanging out with Dad later.” I bent down to pick up the dog and he immediately climbed up my body to lick my face and nuzzle my neck.
She finally got a good look at me and paused as she took in my appearance. I hadn’t seen any of my family since I had moved to school a couple of weeks before. “What did you do to your hair?” she asked incredulously, like changing my hair was something I had never done before.
My hair and style was something that was forever changing. It started in sixth grade when I dyed my hair purple and I haven’t seen its real color ever since. I had yet to find a hair style and color or clothes that could please my mother. No matter what I did, she managed to find something wrong with me, even when I gave into her whims. I gave up a long time ago and now I just did what made me happy.
“I dyed it and I gave myself bangs. Do you like it?” I asked as I reached up with one hand to play with my hair as the other held on to my squirming dog. I ruffled my bangs up a bit and scrunched up the rest of my hair to maintain that messy look.
She made a guttural sound and grimaced as she started to shake her head. This motion lasted about thirty seconds. It was also a motion with which I was very familiar. I braced myself for the lecture that I knew was to follow.
“Why can’t you just go back to black and cut your hair into a bob like you know I like? You can’t even see your face with your hair in the way like that.”
“Because it’s not your hair and I like it this way,” I pushed out automatically. I could carry out this conversation in my sleep if I needed to, but I restrained myself from starting a fight. There were a lot of things that I could have said, but I was hoping that we could maintain some sort of civility towards each other.
“But you were so much cuter when you were little and you had your hair in that cute little bob. Why can’t you just go back to that?”
“You dressed me when I was little and I didn’t have a say in it.”
“I know and it was so much easier then. Let me play with him,” she demanded as she reached out to grab the dog away from me.
“But I just got home and I haven’t seen him in weeks!” I complained, though I was already reaching out to hand him over. This was a fight I didn’t mind giving in to since I knew that the dog would come back to me. As much as my mother loved him, he had taking quite a liking to me and especially to my sister. When my mom realized that the dog liked my sister more than her, she complained like a child that Ari had stolen him away from her and that she wanted a new dog.
She grabbed the dog as he struggled to escape her grasp. After a minute’s struggle, he jumped to the floor and scuttled away.
I followed Diego down the short hallway, his nails clicking against the hard wood floor, and back into the living room and kitchen area. I could hear the thump thump sound my mother made as she hobbled down the hallway after us.
“How’s your knee?” I asked. I leaned against the arm of our beige colored couch, arms crossed against my front.
“The doctor said I have arthritis in my left knee and that the bones are rubbing together. He gave me some medication for the pain. It doesn’t really hurt anymore,” she gasped out as she she walked over, clearly she still in pain.
“Then why are you limping?”
She shrugged then grabbed her cigarettes and lit one up. She took a seat on the couch, right next to the arm that I was leaning against. Her fingers moved through her short hair as she tried to get control of her unruly curls, her cigarette still hanging from her lips. I could tell that she hadn’t blow dried her hair that day so she must’ve really not been feeling well. She usually tried so hard to get her hair straight when she blow dried it. She would play with it for as long as it took. Her hair was burned so bad that it was brittle to the touch.
“So, how’s school going?” she asked while she took another long drag from her cigarette.
I pushed myself off the arm of the couch and moved around her to sit on the opposite side from her. “Fine,” I said. “I got a 100% on my Anthropology quiz.”
“You did? Good, keep it up. You can’t afford to get any more bad grades.” She was referring to my first year at college when I got horrible grades and lost my scholarship. I still haven’t heard the end of that.
“Yes, Mother. I know,” I snidely remarked. I called her ‘Mother’ because I knew she hated it, but she came to terms with it after I started calling her Mommie Dearest in homage to Joan Crawford’s character that beat her children with a wire hanger. She didn’t have as much of a problem with my calling her Mother after that. Even though it was only a small battle, I felt better knowing that I could get under her skin as well as she could get under mine.
“How are your English classes going?”
“Um, good. Some better than others, but I’m doing okay in them.” I tucked my legs underneath me and leaned back against the arm of the chair as I turned to face my mother. I went on to talk more about my classes but she had leaned down to play with the dog again.
“You should write a book,” she said suddenly, in the middle of my spiel.
“What?” I was so shocked by her comment that seemed to come out of nowhere. “Have you even been listening to me?”
“Yes, Ridgie, I have. I’m just saying that you should write a book so that you can get rich like that woman who wrote Harry Potter.”
I stared at her in total disbelief. I looked around the room for a minute, hoping that someone else would appear to share in my total confusion. Did she really think that what I did was that easy? She described writing like it was a magical process and didn’t take any work at all. I was still so shocked, I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to her.
She looked at me after a couple of minutes of complete silence. “You need to get off your ass and start working. You can do it; you’re just too lazy to do anything. What, does it take a month or so to write a book?”
I was now convinced that my mother lived in a fantasy world, where everything was done with a snap of the fingers and nothing required any skill or talent at all. I replied with, “Yes, Mother. You’re absolutely right. I spend my whole day just lying around in bed. I don’t have two jobs, an internship, classes and clubs that I’m involved in. I just sit around doing nothing.” The sarcasm from my voice reeked as bad as her cigarette smoke. I couldn’t keep the anger from creeping into my voice as I struggled to keep my breathing even.
“Don’t be a smart ass,” she muttered while she got up to head back to her room. “And what am I supposed to think? If you didn’t sit around on your ass all day, you wouldn’t be so fat.” Her door closed and her television blared loudly again as she settled back into her routine.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said softly to myself. That was also a fight that we had more often than not. “Missed you, too.” Diego jumped into my lap and tried to lick and bite my fingers. “At least you missed me, right, Diego?” I petted him and let my head fall back onto the cushion behind me.
Over the years, I had gotten used to her overly blunt manner and criticism. Her barbs and cuts at me hurt like they always did, but I tried to seem impervious to her actions. I figured that if she couldn’t tell that I got upset whenever she commented on my appearance, that eventually she would give up. It was like a game I used to play with my sister when we were younger. She poked me relentlessly and I pretended not to notice until she got tired of it. My mother never got tired.
Still, I couldn’t help but wish that I had a mother that I got along with. There were times when I was little when I would see my friends with their mothers that I would wish my mother was like that, loving, nurturing and completely supportive to her children. She’d never been supportive, though. She never once told me that I could do anything I wanted to do; instead she often called me dumb and idiotic. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t need her, that what she said didn’t hurt my feelings. But she was my mother, and I just wanted her to love me. I didn’t think that was too much to ask.
After about thirty minutes of playing with Diego and trying not to think about my mother, I trudged up the stairs towards my room. I glanced to the right of the hallway, which led straight into my sister’s room. Her room was spotlessly clean and still held the vestiges from our childhood. She had saved every stuffed animal she ever had and kept them in immaculate condition, all neatly piled one on top of the other on a desk in the corner. Her floors were wooden like the rest of the house and covered on a cute little light pink rug. The walls were a light purple, or what she called lilac. Covering the walls were pictures of her in her band uniform with all of her bandie friends and several awards she had won throughout her high school career. Next to her bed were stacks of CDs which were a reflection of her somewhat limited taste in music. If I listened carefully enough, I swore I could still hear the Backstreet Boys leftover from her days as a teeny-bopper. Peeking out from underneath her bed were a couple of her old school books that she hadn’t touched in years, which had probably been forgotten about completely.
I turned left to enter my room. Everything about my room was the exact opposite from my sister’s flowery girlishness. My floor still held that 70s appeal of green shag carpeting. My walls were still wooden panels of a beige-like color that doesn’t exist in nature. On my walls were posters of old movies like The Clockwork Orange and Carrie, each poster creepy in its own right. I had one lone stuffed animal, a koala to be exact, that I’d had since birth. He didn’t have a name. My bed spread was a single black comforter that looked horrible next to my rug; the dark drab colors didn’t seem to mesh too well. Instead of being immaculately spotless, the floor was littered with clothes, books and anything else that couldn’t fit in my bookcase. But even in all of its imperfection and odd style, it was my room and I loved it like that.
I flopped onto my bed and bounced slightly, then settled comfortably with a sigh. I stared at the fake glow-in-the-dark stars that, although they didn’t glow anymore, still adorned my ceiling and some of my walls. I had stuck them there after a fight with my mother when I was thirteen years old. We were fighting about redoing my room like we had done for my sister. Before my parents had butchered it, her room looked a lot like mine. The paneling was different, but the idea was the same. About a year after they finished her room, my mother told me it was my turn.
We fought intensely for months about the status of my room. She wanted to change it to something cute and girly and I loved my room just the way it was. After one particularly long argument, she thought that she had won the fight because she technically had the last word. She underestimated my willingness to go behind her back. But with a little stubbornness on my part, and a lot of help from my father, my room was still intact. It was still every bit a part of me and all the different facets of my personality.
I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew, the bed shifted as someone else lay down beside me. I cracked an eye open and glanced to the left to see that my sister was staring at me. She had a slight grin on her face with cute little dimples that made her look younger than she was, but then again, she just had a way about her that made her seem young. Everyone had always thought that I was the older sister. Physically, she was everything that I was not. She had long blond hair, blue eyes and was skinnier than I ever hoped to be. We used to joke that we came from different families because we looked so different. But whenever someone was in the same room as us, they could tell that we were sisters. There were a lot of characteristics that we shared. We had the same laugh and the same facial expressions, but she was a little nicer than me.
“Hey,” she said and then rearranged herself so that she wasn’t lying on her hair.
“Hey,” I replied in turn, turning my head back so that I was once again staring at the ceiling.
“Mom’s in a foul mood, what did you do?”
“I breathed. My bad,” I joked and tried to make light of the situation. We both knew that our mom had a quick temper and that I was always ready to fire it up. My sister used to say that my mother and I were the same person and that’s why we always butted heads; we were both stubborn, bitchy and a little self-centered. But my mother also had a long history of wanting me to be something I wasn’t. Part of me thought that she berated me so that I would become everything she was never able to be. I suspected that she tried to fix her mistakes through me and that made me feel bad for her.
“You know,” my sister started, “Mom’s mother used to be just like her…”
“Which is why she’s like that with me, I know Ari. That doesn’t excuse her behavior,” I shot back at her.
“Maybe not, but I don’t piss her off all the time, and we get along fine. You should take that as a hint.” The smile had left her face and she was just staring at me from her side of the bed.
“You don’t piss her off, because you’re her favorite. You can do nothing wrong in her eyes.”
“Now you’re being retarded. You never listen; you’re just like Mom.” She got off the bed abruptly and stormed out of my room. The old wooden stairs creaked as she went down them.
I saw my mother as this unfeeling, cold thing; she wasn’t even a person to me. I didn’t want to be like her, but I did want her to care about me, even if I didn’t want to care about her. It was like trying to win the favor of a person that hated you; no matter how mean they were to you, you still craved their approval.
I got out of bed and walked over the full length mirror that was leaning against my closet door. I looked at my hair that my mother hated, the new rusty color slowly fading from what it had been when I first dyed it. My bangs were brushing the top of my glasses and falling into the space between my eyes and the frames. I curled my normally straight hair all the time so that it fell messily around my face, barely touching my shoulders. I only let my hair dry straight about once a month.
I looked into the mirror and tried to see what my mother saw when she looked at me. I changed my appearance so much that I never looked one way for too long. I got restless and bored with myself so I felt the need to change things around and create a whole new personality for myself, but I usually liked what I ended up with, at least at the beginning. I was overweight but I never thought of myself as ugly or that it as a reason why people didn’t like me. I tried not to let myself listen to what my mother had to say, but maybe there was some credit in it. I just didn’t understand what was so wrong with me that my mother felt like she had to fix me.
The sounds of footsteps came from the other side of the door as I heard, “Ridgie!” My father was home.
“Papi?” I flung open the door to my room and threw myself into a hug with him. I called him Papi because when I was little he used to speak Spanish to me all the time and the name just stuck, even though I can’t speak Spanish now. I was a daddy’s girl though and through. We got caught in an awkward half hug, since one of his arms was caught in the sleeve of his jacket as he had been in the process of taking it off when I wrapped my arms around him.
He laughed slightly as he hugged me back. It had been about three weeks since I last saw him and in that moment, I was happy to be home.
One thing about my dad that I was grateful for was that he acted as the buffer between my mother and me. Whenever we would get into a fight, he always took my side and shut her up. Granted, it wasn’t good for their marriage that they were always fighting about me, but I loved him for sticking up for me.
After we separated from our hug, he looked around my room and gave me his ‘disappointed face’, which was nothing more than him frowning and shaking his head.
“I thought I told you to clean your room the last time you were here,” he said so fast in his Spanish accent that I almost didn’t understand what he was saying.
“I know. I’ll do it next time,” I promised him. We heard Diego start barking downstairs. He left to go down there to play with him and I followed behind him.
When we got back downstairs, I noticed that my mother was on the phone. She was using her ‘phone voice.’ It was a softer tone that I only heard her use on the phone or when she was talking to someone we didn’t know. Ari was sitting on the couch text messaging someone on her phone as my dad played with Diego next to her. I looked around the house at my family, each one of them caught up in their own little world, not paying attention the others.
My mother was laughing into the phone and talking animatedly. I had never seen her so alive and happy than I had in that moment. She didn’t have many friends and she didn’t get along with her sisters so I guessed that she was talking to her friend Pam from work. She never laughed that way with any of us and I hated her friend for getting along with my mother when I never could.
My dad asked if I was ready to leave and we grabbed our coats and headed out the front door. We decided to take my car because his was so old it could only go to the train station up the street and back and even then, it could break down at any moment. I walked around the car to the driver’s side and got mud all over my shoes because I had had to park half in the driveway and half on the yard; we had too many cars for our small driveway. My dad got in and immediately started playing with the radio that he had bought me when I first got my car. I backed out of the driveway and we headed off to the movies.
It was a short ride to the movie theatre where we had to sit through what seemed like a very long, painfully bad movie. We had seen a B rated horror movie, the kind that we both secretly loved even though they were horrible. It wasn’t until the drive back that we started talking about my mother.
“You know you can’t let her get to you,” my dad said, seemingly out of nowhere.
I didn’t turn my head to look at him; instead my hands tightened on the steering wheel and I focused on the winding highway. “I know,” I responded, “but she makes me so mad. I can’t help but push her buttons when she pushes mine. I don’t understand why she’s so mean to me.”
“She doesn’t mean to be. She thinks she’s helping when she’s hurting. I’ve talked to her about it, but she doesn’t listen to me either. Just don’t listen to her.”
“But that just makes her angrier and then she starts yelling more. It’s a vicious cycle,” I complained as I pulled into our driveway and turned the car off. We just sat in there, not ready to go back in.
“Well then, maybe you should pick your battles. You can be a little stubborn when it comes to her, too, and that's what makes her angrier.” He opened the car door and started to get out. He was halfway out the door when he turned his head back to me to ask, “Are you coming in?”
“I’ll be in, in a minute.” I glanced up to my rearview mirror and looked at my bangs that were still hanging in my face. I didn’t want to be my mother. I didn’t want to end up in a family that couldn’t stand each other, with a daughter I was never happy with. I reached into my bag that was sitting on the floor on the passenger’s side of the car. I found the headband that I kept in there in case I had to pull my hair back because of rain. I slid it into place, neatly and with my hair out of my eyes, and went inside to see my mother.