The You I've Never Known(14)
Maybe if Cecilia had just accepted Dad being a lazy ass, we would’ve stayed longer.
She’d recently lost her job, and while unemployment might have been enough
to provide for a single woman, it stretched awfully thin for two hard-drinking adults and one kid—even one who ate like a bird.
I’m not sure about Dad’s criteria when it came to working or not, but at Cecilia’s he heaped one excuse on top of another for not finding a job. Finally, she decided enough was enough, and as was often
the case, everything came to a head
after a night out at a local tavern.
They’d left me alone and I was asleep
when they bungled in, already immersed in a heated argument loud enough to yank me out of an indigo ocean of dreams.
. . . do you think you are, you goddamn leech? I’m sick of buying your beer.
Come on, pretty baby, Dad soothed.
You know you never had it so good.
Besides, you want to be independent.
It’s not good for a woman to rely on a man. Independence! That’s what you want. Celebrate your freedom.
She Celebrated
By kicking us out
a few weeks later.
When it became clear that’s where things were headed, I begged her for enough time to finish the school year.
Kindly, she agreed, but tension hung like a static curtain in that little house. Summer was heating up, and along with it tempers, and I was very glad the day Dad and I piled into his car and took off.
We spent June and July mostly camping out, and by the time school started in the fall, we’d shifted states again, from Idaho to Oregon.
I celebrated my thirteenth birthday in a Corvallis trailer park, with a whole new woman attached to Dad’s hip.
Maya
School blows, man. The first quarter is almost over and I shudder to think what my report card will look like, though Mom probably won’t even ask to see it. She’s so blinded by her “church” work she barely remembers I’m here. Bad for her. Good for me, except when she tries to draw me into that insanity. All I’ve got to say about that is hell no, at least behind her back.
Mom got lured into Scientology by one of the women she works with at the credit union. Bethany convinced Mom that L. Ron Hubbard’s brand of pseudoscience could fix her “ruin,” which at the time was marriage to an uncommunicative husband. Of course, Mom never mentioned that the reason Dad didn’t talk much was because she never shut up long enough to give him the chance. Just bitch, bitch, bitch. I learned to tune her out around kindergarten.
Dad chose gin as his way to cope, and as he relied more and more on that habit, Mom retreated further and further into the belly of her cult, and that is exactly what Scientology is. She paid for their books. Paid for their courses and seminars. Moved from member to counselor to auditor and hopes to climb even higher in the organization. Whatever turns her on.
Personally, the whole thing turns me off. I was ten when she first fell prey to the hype, but Dad managed to buffer me for two years, and I listened to his warnings about the bizarre nature of the “not-religion,” as he called it. “They say they want to clear you of negative thoughts and events,” he told me. “But all they do is baffle you with their bullshit and keep banking your money.”
After Dad left, Mom coerced me into a couple of auditing sessions, where strangers tried to erase a few of my personal negatives by asking questions designed to induce guilt in children. The first was, “Do you have a secret?”
What kid doesn’t? I already knew that saying no wouldn’t cut it, but I also realized whatever I said would probably get back to my mom. So I answered, “I said a bad word.” When pressed, I admitted that word was “damn.” At twelve, I’d been practicing cussing for a while, and “damn” was not the worst of it, but that was all I was copping to.
The guy made me tell him where I said it (school), when I said it (at lunch), to whom I said it (a girl who bullied me). He was older, and tufts of gray hair poked out of his ears, so when he insisted I repeat the story, I wondered if he had trouble hearing. But when he asked me to tell it yet again, he wanted me to add stuff—what did I have for lunch that day, who was with the girl, what were the two of them wearing? Each detail was supposed to lighten the burden of carrying the memory around. Maybe it did. Who knows?
But, as I suspected, Mom scrubbed my mouth with soap on a nail brush. I guess it could’ve been worse, which is why I chose that secret to share. The one about letting our next-door teenage neighbor touch my boobs for a dollar? Yeah, not so much. I quit going anywhere near Mom’s “church” after I was stupid enough to admit shoplifting a pack of gum. Details. Juicy Fruit. The guy in line ahead of me was a large man, easily big enough to hide me from the cashier while I stuffed the gum in the front of my pants. Jeans.
When Mom found out, I couldn’t wear jeans for days. They irritated the welts. So now, when she’s busy training or auditing or whatever she’s doing, I use the unsupervised time to enjoy things I’ll never confess to her or her minions. Especially not in Los Angeles. Uh-uh. I’m not going anywhere. I’ve done a little research. Lots of horror stories out there about freaking Sea Org. It swallows people whole, and those who somehow find their way out are stalked. Harassed. Billed beaucoup dollars for supposed training. No sir, not me. I’m still working on a solid getaway scheme.