Ames Progressive

As I drove by in my mother’s 1970 mustard yellow Gremlin, I saw the six boys that I could always hear from my bedroom window. As the sun shown down bright like summer promised, the boys would toil in the driveway next to mine fixing up their cars. They were all bronze, not from any concentrated effort, but from being out in the sun with their life-size toys every day.

Each boy owned a car that had the potential for being a real muscle car with a couple hundred more hours of work. Work that seemed to require no shirt or shoes but a lot of grease. All of the boys had on shorts that touched just below their belly buttons and reached to the middle of their thighs, but each wore a different color. Every pair looked so similar that I thought they may have all bought them together, or at least the same place, which was likely to happen since they lived within two blocks of each other and their mothers all shopped at the same discount department store.

I could hear the Bee Gees playing out of their garage and I wished the radio in our car worked. I moved my eyes away from the boys before any of them could see my face. I couldn’t look at any boy separately; they all merged together as a collective whole. They were a part of life I wasn’t in touch with anymore, a blur of reality. Billy had taught me how to drive a manual and Craig was my first kiss; but I couldn’t tell either apart from Tommy, Dan, Mike, or Paul. They were boys; and I was not only a girl but the girl who had floated out to a distant island where boys and girls no longer communicated or smiled at each other. As the invisible body of water grew with each passing month, the boys now saw me as I had come to see them: foreign.

Sometimes all six of the boys would sit and lean on one of their cars and watch the traffic pass. I was the current traffic but they seemed to only see a haze as I went by. The boys erupted in laughter and I turned my head back to the road. I knew the laughter wasn’t about me but I still hid my face as I pulled into my driveway. My pale yellow hair wasn’t long enough to do much shielding so I looked the other way slightly. I prayed as I got out of the car they wouldn’t watch, or maybe that they would. I wasn’t sure. They made me nervous. When I thought of those boys I imagined their dark, greasy hands doing something bad to me. Strangling me, holding me down, covering my mouth. But the boys’ hands were too busy with their wrenches and carburetors, too busy wiping the sweat from their foreheads. I shook the feeling off as I walked into the house; I couldn’t get the images of Halloween out of my head, the dead bodies were still haunting me from when I saw it in theaters last year.

My mother greeted me with a soft hello as I walked in. My mother was a natural beauty gone ragged. She was an average woman all around except for in the face. She had dark eyebrows which accented her dark brown eyes and her defined cheek bones. My mother used to stun men without even looking them in the eye, a trait I had once possessed. But now my mother needed her morning gin, her afternoon gin, and her evening gin. By the way my mother was acting I was sure that even though it was only 3:00 p.m. my mother had already had her designated night cap.

I forced a smile and briefed my mom about my Wednesday. My mother wasn’t really listening, but we both went through the motions. I helped with dinner so my mother wouldn’t accidentally start a fire or burn the chicken. We sat across from each other at the table made for four. I picked at the bland meat while I watched my mother drink more than she ate. Once the fork fell, accidentally, from my mother’s hand I grabbed the plates, took them to the kitchen, and went to my room to pass the time alone. I stood in front of my door that reads “Annette” in pink glitter and listened to hear movement from the other room, but there was none. The plates sat cold in the sink all night. Once it got to this stage my mother liked to take the opportunity to tell me why it was she was drinking so much, which is when I would go to my room and hide. I would rather fall asleep to the sounds of the boys laughing and goofing off than angry at my disengaged mother.

I hit the snooze three times before actually waking up. I slide up in bed and lean against my wall in an awkward way since my pillows are still sideways from the rough sleep. I close my eyes and sigh. Babysitting Sarah and Sam, the kids down the street, will be no fun on a rainy day. Noticing that it is unexpectedly cold in my room, I pull the covers up as high as they will go without introducing my feet to the chill. My nose feels icy from being exposed to the cold for so long. My mother’s nose is like that too. I hate it, that we are alike I mean; I clasp a hand over the cold similarity.

Glaring at the cold rainy day that is just beyond the glass makes me shiver. The clouds are moving in a swift manner; they are lower and faster than usual. I lean over and grab my pack of cigarettes and a pack of matches off of my night stand. The strike of the match sounds louder than it actually is in the cold room and I can hear the hiss of the tobacco and paper catching on fire. Before the match can burn out I take a quick deep drag and immediately light the vanilla candle on the nightstand intended to mask the smell. Though my mom once smoked she can’t stand the smell anymore so I bought a candle. I don’t actually care if it works or not. My mom is still passed out at this hour. I blow the smoke at the window and then blow out the candle. Vanilla and cigarettes smell terrible, worse than cigarettes alone in my opinion. I wave my hand over the candle as the wave of smoke continues to rise. I didn’t hear the laughter so I knew the boys weren’t out this morning. I tap the ashes on the floor and slide back down into bed.

My thoughts drift for a while and when I come to I realize my cigarette is out so I light another. Looking around my room, I notice that I really don’t like any of the things that have accumulated on the walls; it looks tacky and ruins the look I had been going for. I don’t know what look I had been going for, maybe something more grown up. In any case I hadn’t accomplished it; I had actually just put up some magazine clippings from when the Tiger Beat Magazine printed pictures of Scott Baio. I wish I could just grow up.

I wake back up about an hour later with a terrible headache. Ever since my dad left I have terrible headaches which keep me from leaving my bed. I shake my head in an attempt to shake off the headache but it doesn’t work. I pull one of the pillows over my face. My father’s face surfaces underneath my eyelids. All of the memories are now tainted with his disgusting thirst. I don’t see my father as a human being anymore. He was a lustful monster.

I found my father on the floor of the bathroom. He had shot a hole in his head. I remember looking down and seeing the blood under my shoes. I leaned against the linen closet door opposite of his cold, dead, unforgiving stare. I slid down the door and stopped just before I sat in the red chaos. There were no tears, no screams, just silence. I lost track of time staring at the clean brown tiles on the floor. The sun had fallen below the horizon once I realized my pants were wet from peeing sometime hours before. My legs burned so bad from crouching for so long they felt ice cold. I remember leaving footprints on the carpet as I walked unsteadily back out the front door.

When I came back it was pitch black, and the moon was covered by clouds, but my house was surrounded by lights and people. Things blurred together, cops’ faces, my mother’s sobs, the neighbors on the street. I found out later from a social worker that my father had been having sex with young girls. My mother had come home to find my father with one of them a few weeks prior. I guess my father couldn’t handle the consequences of people finding out.

Naturally the siblings of the young girls and most of the students in my high school rejected me with a profound hate. When they saw me they thought of my sick father. Who could blame them? So did I. While I became depressed my mother started to drink. My mother sent me to a psychologist. It was more for her benefit than for mine, so she could drink in solitude for a little longer without the last big problem in her life staring her in the face.

The doctors diagnosed me with something complicated and said a lot of things neither my mother nor I could seem to grasp onto: family scapegoat; double message; falsely empowered; sex addict; substance abuse; disassociation.

My headache is only getting worse. I pull the pillow off my face and light another cigarette. All of the options of medication sit staring at me from my nightstand. None will cure the pain, any of it. None of it will make those six bronze boys want to take me to the movies again, kiss me again. I am now a ghost of my old self. I look the same as I used to except my hair is less shiny and it no longer smells of lavender. My skin is pale, I don’t have the summer glow I should like all of my classmates who graduated a few months ago. I don’t wear makeup or take the time to pick out an outfit. I usually pick clothes off of the floor when I need something to wear.

I put my cigarette out on the lid to one of my medications. I roll over away from the window and decide to let Sarah and Sam fend for themselves for a day. It’s not that hard.