Teen Dream July
alive in the nineties
Dear Gatherers,
In July 1997 I was homeless. My parents house wasn't too far away but I didn't want to be there. They were drunk. My stepdad made fun of me. My mom would sometimes get me on the floor. She’d straddle my torso, her face twitching and animalistic, and put her hands flat on the floor, right next to my neck. Her animal face hovered above mine as she screamed at me. My stepdad often stood off to the side where I could see him, watching. It was something they had done since they had married when I was 13. To get together and support each other in making sure I was good. Manageable. Appreciative of everything they gave me out of the goodness of their hearts. My mom and stepdad made me feel so small so that I would be who they wanted me to be but they didn't know who they wanted me to be and I didn't know who I was. The most important thing was that I listened to what they told me to do. That was something I wasn’t good at.
I spent that July lounging on the dry grass at Sylvester park in the middle of town, across from the teriyaki place and the Hilton and the corner store that sold cigarettes without checking ID’s. I was always watching for cops because the Olympia cops were always looking for me, to take me home, so I could run away again. Running away was the only power I had in my house. Nothing else I did made an impact. I could scream. I could threaten to kill myself. I could hurt myself. I could throw up everything I ate. Everything I did produced the same results. I was bad. There was something wrong with me. I was dramatic. My words were meaningless. I had learned this before my mom met my stepdad, the first and second time CPS came to our house, and after, when they arrived after I’d confessed that my stepdad molested me to a camp counselor. When the CPS people came, my mom and stepdad called me to the front door and said I was a liar. You can’t believe anything she says, which was true, because I made up stories about myself, too. I did lie. But not about that.
The CPS people always left after speaking to my mom and stepdad. They were so charming. My stepdad with his huge glasses and college degree. My mom with her charm. They would tell CPS how this had happened before— I had said something, but I was always lying. We don’t know why she’s like this, they’d say, and the CPS people would comfort them, telling them it’s a phase. I’d recant, always confronted with my mom siding with my stepdad, the pain of seeing her stand next to him, her arm interlocked with his. The understanding that I was completely on my own, in my own world of truth and lies, after over a decade of loyalty, letting her do whatever she wanted with me. I imagine this is what a low level mobster feels like. To dedicate one’s life to a person only to realize that you were a means to an end, superfluous.
My stepdad treated me like he treated my mom, which is to say he acted like my expressions of emotion and feelings were overblown. I was not allowed to have contrary opinions. If I was contrary, I was a brat. A little bitch. I was to go to my room and leave them in peace.
I hated the band Chicago. That seems superficial I know, but one day while we were in the car I told my stepdad to please turn the music down. It was Chicago. He knew I hated Chicago so he turn the music up, louder. I got upset. Not because the music was louder but because he had turned it up simply because I had asked him to turn it down. I had to pretend I didn't care if I was to get anything I wanted. Pretend to love Chicago and he won't play it anymore. I refused to pretend.
We were in my mom’s Jeep Cherokee, a gift from him. The nicest car she’d ever had. They were rich now because of him, all his Texas money perfect for a start up. My stepdad didn't like it when I was upset and instructed my mom to pull over the car. When she did he told me to get out. The music was so loud he was at first inaudible over the incessant trumpets and horns. I got out. They drove away and I waited for a few minutes to see if they would come back, but they didn't. It took me a long time to walk home.
When I was at home I was invisible. A little ghost intruding into various rooms. Mom and stepdad went to dinner without me, and I would raid the refrigerator and pantry, inhaling foods I didn’t even like and them vomiting them back up, repeating the process as many times as I could before they got home, hiding all the wrappers at the bottom of the garbage can.
When I ran away I was seen. Made visible. I existed only outside of my parents house. Inside, if I was to be safe, I watched them for signals. A specific eyebrow raise, a certain kind of frown, and I was quiet, or friendly, or jovial; fawning. I learned that’s what it’s called— fawning. Whatever it was I thought they wanted, I would give. I had learned this long before my stepdad met my mother. It was the only way I knew how to be. To watch how others were, and surmise who they needed me to be. I was that.
At Sylvester park I laid my head on laps of men and friends. One weekend I went to the river with two men and another girl. We slept with our men on the sun baked riverbank in the tall grass with the blue sky above us, watching. When we were done we swam in the cool river and splashed each other. We walked to one of their houses, silly with all the forties we’d emptied. It was more like a shack in the woods. The man I hadn’t slept with made macaroni and cheese with water. Both of the men were alcoholics in their twenties, but I’d chosen the gentle one. The girl was who I would've been had my mom not married my stepdad; she had a black eye. I didn't know it then but my stepdad’s money changed my entire life trajectory.
When the cops got to be too much I could no longer sleep at my friend Taz’s house. It was a hippie house, but they didn’t want the Fuzz. They all spoke like it was the sixties and we were hippies in the midst of a revolution. They called me Wildflower. I secreted the saddest parts of myself away and hoped for something better, but when they kicked me out a kid named Lucky took me on a trail into a forest backlit in translucent green and shadows from the leaves and wind. In a small circle of dirt, where a fawn may rest, I sat, and he said he’d be back in a little bit. I smoked the three cigarettes he’d left me and dark descended, metering out gray in exchange for green. The crickets ate at the night and I shivered in the dark, too paralyzed with fear and helplessness to stand up and walk down the trail. Still, I could have gone home, to my bed and bedroom, with all its amenities, and I chose to remain crouched in the dirt, in the claustrophobic dark night, breathing, alone.
When Lucky showed up the next morning, I ran up to him and hugged his legs. He was taken aback. He didn’t know how good I was at fawning.
My hand is on my mouth, as I have paused. Sometimes my hand goes to my mouth, as a forty year-old adult trying to figure out how parents can alienate their children so wholeheartedly that their children would rather plod forward into danger than turn back and go home. And how those same parents can wonder why their child has chosen to do that. As if it is an action taken outside of their existence, one that was borne wholly from their child’s insides, and not something that exists inside their fine house, and the within the people who are meant to care for the children.
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