Future Home of the Living God(13)
“You got adopted out and grew up rich and think you’re smart as hell, but you’re not even a good Catholic. You had premarital sex! Ooh!” She opens her painted eyes wide and screws up her mouth like a wooden doll’s. I want to slap her. She sees how close she’s come, smells blood.
“You probably fucked a priest and now your baby’s gonna be a monkey. And it won’t get born with a silver spoon in its mouth, it’ll be wearing a little black and white collar like so—” Little Mary jumps up and begins to dance around making hooh-hooh monkey sounds and putting her fingers to her neck. She’s talented. She’s like the dark side, the devil version of her supersmart dad, Eddy.
“You’re possessed,” I tell her, and embarrassingly, my voice squeaks. “Your brain’s all cooked on meth.”
“Oh yeah!” She cocks her fists. “Oh yeah! Let’s go!”
But then she slumps down and in a typical display of sick emotional lability begins to cry. Fat tears swell from her eyes.
“Don’t tell Daddy, don’t tell Mom, okay?”
“I think they know. They live around you. For godsakes, they smell your room. I can smell it from here.”
“Will you help me clean it, huh?”
I look at her, my mouth drops open. She’s just met the sister she didn’t know existed and she wants me to help clean her room? It is so bizarre that I might be charmed, in a weird way, were it not for the room itself. That unnatural disaster. I stand up and follow her to the open door.
Little Mary’s room has the odor of rank socks, dried blood, spoiled cheese, girl sweat, and Secret, a miasma that seeps out of the open door. The room is knee-deep in dirty clothes she’s packed down and walked on—sort of a new conglomerate flooring. Within the stratified layers of clothing I can see potato and corn chip bags, cans of pop she hasn’t even drunk dry. A tiny haze of baby flies circles an old can of orange Sunkist. Stuff is balled up, pasted together with sparkle glue, thrown on the wall, smearing the windows. Spray-can confetti hangs off the fancy fanlight fixture. Bras and thongs, those are every place I look. Pink glitter thongs, black ones, gold lamé, sequined, lace spiderweb and zipper thongs, thongs with little devils on them. Little Mary has undressed by kicking them up onto the blades of the fan. The curtains are balled up around the cockeyed rods and there’s broken glass sifted over one entire corner of clothing-floor.
“It’s your mom’s job to make you clean this,” I say, feebly.
“Yeah, maybe,” says Little Mary. “She read in a parenting magazine that it is best to pick your battles with teenagers and that a teen’s room is her own personal space. But I’m”—her chin trembles and her painted mouth sags—“just don’t know how . . . too much.”
“I can’t face your room,” I tell her now, but I try to be kind. Obviously, she’s suffering from some heritable mental instability—Eddy’s the source, most likely. And it’s all come out in the state of this room—the den of a crazed ferret. Worse. I begin to think apocalyptic thoughts. Little Mary’s room is like an opening to hell, like there’s a crack in it that goes way down into the earth. While I’m thinking this, Little Mary takes a deep, sobbing breath, and edges past me, into that ninth circle. I step away as the door to her room gently closes and I reel backward, sit down on the couch. I move off the warm spot she’s just vacated. After a while, watching the nothingness, I decide that I will leave a note for Sweetie. I get up, lift my bag, take out a pen, and find a scrap of paper on which to compose it. As I am writing the words It was such a pleasure to finally meet you, Sweetie arrives with Eddy, in his pickup. When I hear them drive into the yard, I look out the window. Behind the pickup, I see a Volvo just like Glen and Sera’s drive up and stop. First Eddy and Sweetie emerge from the pickup. Then, I am way past astounded. Because my mom and dad get out of the Volvo. Sera approaches Sweetie like she already knows her. They all start talking. They must have worried about me. They must have always known Sweetie and Eddy. The explanation doesn’t really matter, though, just the fact that Sera and Glen are here.
From the picture window of the house, I can see them in the driveway, all four together now, gesturing and talking, a phantasmagoria of parents—I don’t understand it, but it’s happening. Now they are actually walking toward the house together. I am at the center of some sort of vortex. I can hardly maintain consciousness. I hold the strap of my backpack in one hand, and lift my laptop in the other, and slowly retreat. I walk backward, navigating through the living room, somehow, by subterranean memory, not bumping into anything. I put my hand behind my back and there is a doorknob. I turn it, and I back into the room, Little Mary’s room. I close the door, the reverse side of which is pasted over with hand-drawn green Magic Marker hearts, vintage stuff—a tragic-eyed Siouxsie and the Banshees poster, an Alien Sex Fiend T-shirt, a thong with actual little silver spikes in it, held up by a tack, many German beer coasters, and what-all else. Frills, those too. Bucketloads of frills—lots of candy-pink flounces and bows. I turn around. Little Mary is sitting on the gigantic pile of clothing that is probably her bed. We look at each other. Her eyeliner has run down her face in two tracks like the tears of a tragic clown. She looks operatic now and when she opens her mouth I think that she might scream, or belt out a high C, anything but use a normal voice and speak to me as a normal person for the first time.