chapter three

I sit on my bed to put on my jellies. What’s the use of even making the bed when you just mess it up again every night? It’s the biggest waste of time. I’m sick of her being so bossy. I decide that I’ll do my own hair, because I am not making this bed.

It’s not even really my bed because I share it with my sisters. Why don’t they get their asses in here and make the bed? It isn’t even really a bed. It’s just a soft mattress on the top of a hard mattress lying right on the floor. The worst part about sharing a bed besides just the sharing part is that my baby sister pees in the bed. You can make her go pee a million times before she goes to bed and she still pees. She is too lazy to wake up is the problem. My mom put a plastic sheet under the regular sheet but it doesn’t stop the peeing¾it just protects the mattress not me. Luckily I came up with a great trick. When my sisters fall asleep I push them close together on one side of the bed and then I go all the way to the other side. When I wake up, I can even see the edge of where the pee ends, sometimes only an inch or two away from me. Since I started my trick there was only one time it didn’t work. I woke up all wet and started screaming. Then I got in trouble for waking the whole house up. Everyone always says it’s not her fault, but she’s the one peeing, not me! I’m the only one in this house who doesn’t get away with murder.

I hear the front door open again. My dad must be home. I run out to make sure he really isn’t mad anymore.

“Hey sugar.” He is smiling which is good, but he smells like beer which is bad.

“Is your mom here?” For a second I think about lying and telling him he needs to go pick her up at Aunt Lisa’s but instead I just say yeah.

He starts to go towards their room. I’m not sure I should let him go because he drank beer.

“Hey dad… I have an idea. We should come up with a joke to play on Ronnie, so we can get back at him for the time he pretended he hammered a nail through his finger.”

“Sounds fun honey. Why don’t you think of something while I go talk to your mom?”

“Well, they’ll be here soon.”

“You start without me.” He starts to walk away again.

“Dad, I forgot to ask you something.” He turns back towards me but I don’t really have a question planned so I just say the truth.

“Are you still mad at Mom?”

“It’s okay, honey. I’m not mad at your momma. We’re just gonna talk some things out, that’s all.” He rubs my head and then he pushes it gently. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.” As he walks away he says, “Now I’m countin’ on ya to come up with a real good joke.” I hear him go into the bedroom and shut the door.

I can hear my dad speaking softly. He is trying to make up with my mom. He’s saying he’s sorry. Maybe he did calm down. “You smell like fucking beer,” I hear my mom say. Damn, she noticed. He said he’s sorry, I wanna yell. Usually if she knows people are coming over she’ll just give in and let my dad win the fight and then tell me later that she didn’t mean it. “Fuck you, Gary.” Great, she really isn’t trying to make up. I thought she said she was gonna make up? Saying fuck you is not how you accept an apology.

I decide I can’t trust my mom to be smart about it. It’s one thing if she wants to fight all day like she’s on some soap opera, but kids have rights too. And I go to school all week and make straight A’s and everything. One of my favorite days is when Ronnie and Keith come over, and I don’t want them to leave. I don’t want them to say that my dad’s old lady is a pain in the ass. Cause they’ve said it before and then they don’t come around for a long time.

I make a plan to stop her before she makes the fight get bigger. I will make my room perfect, not half-ass. I will even make the bed, and then I will go get her to help me fix my hair like she promised. I run as fast as I can to get the broom and dustpan from the kitchen and run back to my room and start sweeping the floor.

They’ve been fighting a lot since she started working as a cocktail waitress. She’s making a lot of friends there and my dad doesn’t like it. She doesn’t care what my dad likes, rubs it in his face and then they get in a huge fight. My mom always does bad things that make my dad mad and sometimes it seems like she doesn’t even care if he finds out.

I do bad things too, but at least I try to keep them secret. Mostly I am mean to my sisters. The worst thing I did was the time I pushed one off the bed while she was taking a nap. The worst part was that she was just a baby! I stared at her while she was sleeping. I wanted her gone so I pushed her off. She started crying and I hid when the adults ran in. I watched them, and then I ran over and pretended to be surprised too. Another bad thing I did was the time I wanted to make one of my sisters sneeze, so I blew black pepper in her face. It always works in cartoons but in real life it made her eyes burn and she cried of course. That time I got spanked, because I should know better.

The reason I should know better is because I’m the oldest. My mom reminds me of this a lot, even when I am minding her and doing my chores. It is my responsibility to look after my sisters because I’m older than them and they look up to me because I’m their big sister. I should also know better than blowing pepper into someone’s face because I am in the gifted program at school. You can’t make too many mistakes when you’re gifted. “She could read at four but she can’t make popcorn without starting a fire and turning the whole ceiling black!” she always tells people. My mom loves that story about the time I tried to make popcorn when I was babysitting my sisters.

The room is finally spic and span. It is so clean you can eat off the floor, which is how my mom says she likes it. I run to their bedroom door and I knock. “Mom, I finished cleaning my room…” She just says, “Thanks Punkin’” That’s it? I think.

“But remember you said…” She cuts me off. “Mommy and Daddy are talking right now sweetie…Go on and play.” Go and play? Is she kidding me?

“But you promised…”

She cuts me off again. “Just give it up. Not now!”

I wanna scream, “Why don’t you just give it up,” but it wouldn’t even matter. She thinks she’s so smart cause she smelled the beer, but she can’t smell the white powder he sniffed and that’s even worse than beer. So she doesn’t know everything. I’m sick of her treating me like I’m a baby that she can just lie to whenever she feels like it. She thinks I don’t remember things but I remember everything.

I go to the bathroom in the hallway, climb up on the toilet and sit on the sink so I can see in the mirror. If my Nana was here she could put hot rollers in my hair and make banana curls, like she used to do when we went to Sunday school, but my mom had to move us to the other side of the country and I don’t get to see Nana or church anymore. I only know how to do one boring hairstyle. I open the medicine cabinet and put a Goody pink bow barrette on both sides of my bangs and then I brush my hair one hundred strokes, which I learned from Mary Ingalls on Little House.

I am more like my Nana than my mom. We both love church and pink and lotion that smells like roses. Another thing we both like is French Provincial furniture, which is cream with gold on the edges. My Nana already has her whole house decorated with French Provencial, in complete matching sets. I picked out a French provincial bedroom set with a canopy bed in the Spiegel catalog to show my mom, but she thinks Spiegel is over-priced. She always tries to convince me to be more unique, which is another word for different. She likes things one of a kind, but I would buy everything I could from Spiegel catalog.  One of my favorite things to do is to circle all of the things in the Spiegel catalog that I plan on buying when I get a job one day. My mom always says when I turn eighteen I can do whatever I want. I can’t wait.

When I finish brushing my hair, I have to close my eyes to try to stop them from stinging. They are stinging cause I’m so mad right now. I open them and look in the mirror. My Nana said I have beautiful features and that one day when I am older I am going to appreciate my fair skin. I can hear them whisper talking.

I close my eyes again and say, “give it up, give it up” over and over trying to make her do it. Instead she starts saying in her not sweetest voice that he fuckin’ humiliated her at work and that she’s had it up to here with his shit. He keeps trying to say he’s sorry but she won’t accept his apology.

“Don’t walk away from me, Candy” I hear my dad say. She says she’s through talking about it. “Let’s just drop it,” she says. This is kind of good. Then I hear the door open and then slam closed again right away. It sounds like my mom keeps trying to open it but my dad is holding it shut. This is kind of bad. She calls my dad an asshole and then she screams that she needs to feed the fucking kids. I was gonna say, “I already made toast,” but I know she’s just saying that so she can get out. My dad not letting her out is kind of really bad.

They keep fighting even though the doorbell rings.