chapter two

Today I am going to wear the dress I wore when I was the flower girl in my aunt’s weddingthe princess dress. It is white with huge pink roses all over it and the skirt has a bunch of nets underneath to make it puff out. I have an umbrella I use with the dress but it’s not for rain it’s to twirl over your shoulder. My sisters just wear halters and shorts on the weekends but I like to dress fancy whenever I can. When I grow up I want to be a queen and a teacher. My mom thinks this dress is too tacky to even be a hand-me-down which is good cause I would never let my sisters have it anyways. She keeps threatening to give the dress to goodwill, cause she says it’s two sizes too small and I look ridiculous in it which is bad. Whenever I wear it she asks me where the flood is because the dress is kind of like high-water pants. But I can still make it fit and high waters aren’t as obvious when it’s a dress. I don’t know what her problem is with the dress. I think it’s because my Nana bought it for me and she hates old lady ways of doing things. Who even cares if it’s too small? I’ve seen her lie on the bed and squeeze into small pants plenty of times. One time when she was showing me and my sisters how to dance sexy, her jeans were so tight, not only did the zipper split open but they split right up her butt too. She was doing the move where you twist your butt and slowly bend your knees until your almost sitting on the ground. I said to her as a joke, “Get down!” which is what we say when someone is dancing really sexy, which made my mom say, “Screw you” to me, which made us all start dying laughing because she was trying to be mad and her whole butt was hanging out. It was sad though because the jeans were Jordache, which is an expensive French designer. My zipper splitting isn’t the problem I’m having right now though, because the zipper on the dress isn’t even going up today. “Shit!” You can cuss as long as no adults are around. Then I remember one of my mom’s tricks. I suck in my ribs as hard as I can and finally get the zipper up the back of the dress. I can’t raise my arms or take a deep breath, but other than that it still fit. I open up my underwear drawer. I have a whole collectionHolly Hobbie, Under-roos. The best ones have funny sayings like TGIF. Today I’m gonna wear the ones that say, “Just face it, I’m cute!” The front door opens. “Kids!” I hear my mom yell. As she walks down the hallway, I can see that she is still wearing her uniform, which is a tight baseball kind of shirt that has Lloyd’s written on the front and a ruffled mini-skirt. My mom normally looks exactly like the girl on the cover of a record my cousin Heather hasRio by Duran Duran. But right now she looks like one of the people in a movie I saw called The Day After about when a nuclear bomb goes off. “You look like hell,” I say to her. I’ve heard her say it before about herself, when she wasn’t even that bad. “Very funny,” she says. “And who do you think you look likePrincess Di?” She plops her purse on the floor and then she bends over to take her shoes off, rubbing her feet after each shoe falls. “Where are your sisters?” “They’re outside.” I don’t think I look like Princess Di but one time an old lady at Denny’s said I looked like Amy Carter, who is the daughter of a president. “Where’s Dad?” I ask. “That cocksucker can be rotting in hell for all I care.” She looks at me and then she adds, “Excuse my French.” “Excuse me for asking.” She picks up her shoes and hands them to me. “Put these away for momma. I need to get something in my stomach before I pass out,” she says as she walks toward the kitchen. Great, she must be on the Scarsdale diet again, which means you can only eat diet soda, grapefruits and cabbage soup. Whenever she’s on a diet my dad always asks if she’s on the rag, which must mean something about being mean when you’re hungry. I go to her closet and throw her shoes in the pile on the floor of her closet. She wears heels when she waitresses but flat shoes when she’s not because her and my dad are the same height and he doesn’t like her to be taller than him. She has a lot of good shoes that she wears to work, but her best ones are the black sparkly heels that she calls her KISS shoes, like the band. I pretend that these are my shoes and I put them into nice and neat pairs. One day I hope she will give them to me, so I better start taking care of them now. My worst collection is shoes. I only have one pair of ratty sneakers, one pair of jelly shoes that give me blisters and one pair of pink flip-flops, that have dirt footprints on them. My mom buys all my shoes at the grocery store because otherwise you pay twice as much just to have a stupid label. It wouldn’t be so bad if they had the shoes I really wanted shiny black Mary Janes with taps. These are the ones Annie gets when she is adopted by Daddy Warbucks. My cousin Heather has these shoes and she’s a real snob about letting me borrow them because they are custom-made, which means not from the grocery store. If I ever say to my mom, how come Heather gets to have something and not me, first my mom will call me an ungrateful brat and then she will say it’s because my Aunt’s in real estate. I wish my mom was in real estate instead of waitressing. When you’re in real estate you wear all name brand clothes like Liz Claibornethat’s all my Aunt Elaine ever wears. We would have money for me to take all the lessons I want to take tap, singing and jazz dancing. You also get better at finding a bigger house, so I wouldn’t have to share a room with my sisters. Of course Heather has her own room, which is pink and even has a theme Strawberry Shortcake. She gets everything she wants. My mom says she’s a spoiled brat but I’d rather be a spoiled brat than an ungrateful brat. The best thing she has is a velvet dress by Gunne Sax, that she said she might give to me when it gets too small for her. Sometimes I really wanna punch her but I don’t cause I want that dress. After I put her shoes in order, I go back to my room. I hear my mom saying hi to my sisters and telling them not to hug her because they’re soaking wet. Then she comes into my room drinking a non-diet soda. It’s only a store brand called cola, but still. She never let’s us have soda because she says it’s full of sugar. But I know it’s really because she doesn’t like to waste money on kids. “Where’d you get that soda?” I ask. “I brought it from Aunt Lisa’s, not that it’s any of your business.” “I thought it rots your teeth out.” “When you’re an adult you can rot your teeth all you want.” “It’s not fair!” I know better than saying this but it was too late. “You know what’s not fair?” Here she goes again. She always says the same things. She had me when she was seventeen. She never had a childhood. While people her age are out having fun, she’s stuck raising us kids. The next thing she always says is that she doesn’t regret having us, but that she still wants us to know all the things she had to give up. I don’t even listen anymore because it’s always the same and I heard it a million times before. I didn’t even ask to be born, did she ever think of that? I open my ears again. “I work all night…” She’s still going on. I know this part too. She works her fingers to the bone to put food on the table, clothes on our back and so that we can have a roof over our head and then she has to come home to a pigsty cause nobody helps out. But I always help out. Now it’s my turn to say something. “I’m babysitting for you, ain’t I”? But I’m not finished. “Where were you all night anyway? You’re supposed to be home by two.” She looks at me for a long time after that one. I step back. “I don’t need you keeping track of me young lady. You’re not my mother.” “I know I’m not your mother and I wouldn’t even wanna be.” Good one! I think and then I throw myself on the bed before I say, “Well, I just wanna tell you that dad’s looking for you and he’s pretty mad.” She comes over to me and sits on the bed next to me. “Look at me.” She says in her sweetest voice. “Are you upset cause momma and daddy are in a fight?” “No I’m upset because of the soda.” “Come give momma a hug.” I don’t look at her and I don’t give her a hug. “Come on. Give momma a hug.” “Fine” I say. I don’t really hug her but I let her hug me. “I just stayed over at Aunt Lisa’s last night to give your dad some time to cool down. It’s no big deal. Dad won’t be mad anymore cause I’m home.” “Does Dad know he’s not mad anymore?” She smiles. “I’m sorry Daddy and me got into a fight. Okay?” I say “yeah.” But she didn’t really answer the question. She kisses me on the head and then she gets up and walks towards the door. “I’m gonna try and take a little nap so keep an eye on your sisters, I don’t want them coming into the house soaking wet.” “’kay” “And if you really wanna help momma, you could straighten up your room before your dad gets back. Do you hear me?” “Okay!” I really wanna say that if Dad is still mad when he comes home it’s because of what you did not because my stupid room is a mess. I don’t even see what the big deal about having a clean room is anyway. My room looks just as bad clean as it does when it’s a pigsty. It has no theme or decorations, unless you count toys. My dad keeps saying he’s going to paint a mural on the wall. I had the idea to paint the train filled with characters that are on the back of my Little Golden Books. He said it was a good idea and he started penciling it in, but he never finished. So now we have a white wall with scribbles all over it. You can never keep this room clean with two bratty sisters who never help. I finally gave up cleaning the main room and now I only clean my fort. A few weeks ago I turned my bedroom closet into a fort. It’s kind of like my own room but it’s too small to sleep in. Inside the fort I have a chair, a flashlight and a little shelf where I keep my books and kitty figurine collection. Everything is nice and neat in my fort and I wanna keep it that way, so my sisters are not allowed in. Since all the important things are in my fort, I just throw everything that’s on the floor into the Raggedy Ann toy box and I don’t even care if anything breaks. My mom calls this kind of cleaning half-ass, but I don’t really care what my mom thinks today because she is on my last nerve. When I am finished half-ass cleaning, I go into my mom’s room. Her uniform is off and she is wearing a towel. I can hear the water running in the bathtub. I need to ask her to help me do a fancy hairstyle before she takes a nap. “What are you getting so dressed up for today anyway?” she says when I ask her. Before I can answer she says “Oh…I forgot. Ronnie’s coming over today.” She thinks it’s funny to pretend that I wanna marry Ronnie. “Will you help me or not?” My dad’s not the only one who, as he puts it, gets fed up with her bullshit, excuse my French. “Did you finish straightening your room?” “Yes” “Did you make the bed too?” I just groan and stomp off to go make my bed. “Finish making your bed and I’ll help you,” she yells after me. Sometimes I wish she would just help me without so many things I need to do first.