When the World Tips Over, page 32
Her new credo is Transcendent Living, which came to her in a vision. Remember how when I was younger, I thought of my mother in pieces? I do again in this period. She’s a freaking kaleidoscope, Wynton. It’s like having a hundred RV-mates. More. I never know who I’m going to get either. There’s the mother who sways on top of Purple Rain talking to the planet Jupiter, the one who tells me she loves me a hundred times in an hour, the one who sobs so loud in the bathroom, I have to reassure the people in neighboring RVs that everything’s okay. Then there’s the mother who keeps touching my face saying that I’m glittering, the one who breaks all the dishes because Dave abandoned us, and her mother and father abandoned us, and everyone on earth abandoned us. There’s the one who says she can reverse time and see the dead, the one who sits in a daze staring out a window all night long, the one who hosts a steady stream of Dave look-alikes (The only men who interest me now are the ones who are setting fire to the status quo.) who stay with us for days at a time and call me kiddo.
And most reliably, there’s the mother who retreats to The Silent World for weeks at a time.
So very many moms.
I have a sense that she no longer writes her In the Time of Forever stories because she’s living inside one of them now. Maybe all of them at once, I don’t know. “Drugs have always been used by indigenous cultures to open the brain’s pathways, Cassidy. You can meditate or you can take E or peyote or acid or have sex or so many things. You can’t let society dictate where you take your consciousness or how you get there. There are so many paths to transcendence.”
“Yes, Marigold,” I say all day long. She’s decided I should call her by her name instead of Mom because the parent/child dynamic is oppressive and limiting to both of us.
“Why bridle our relationship is all I’m saying. Let’s explore all the possibilities. Let’s bust through boundaries. Let’s be authentic and make our own rules. Let’s—”
“Yes, Marigold.”
So much of the time, I don’t feel like I’m there.
I learn you can be sitting next to someone and be in different time zones.
I learn you can unknow someone.
And you can unknow yourself too.
I do school by myself. I read novels, no, not read, I tear them open and crawl inside them and hide in between the words. I read the dictionary still, methodically, devotionally, like a Bible.
I start to run and I’m fast because I need to get away from Marigold, then even faster because I need to get back to her. “Oh, there you are, Cass. Greg’s going to be staying with us, just for tonight. He’s a shaman and thinks I’m a reincarnation of a goddess. Maybe you could make that pasta dish, the one with all that cheese. Don’t be put off by this, but he always keeps his eyes closed, I mean always, so we’re going to have to help him eat and get around and stuff.”
“Yes, Marigold.”
“Honey, this is Dylan.”
“Yes, Marigold.”
Honey, this is Michael. Honey, this is Doug. Honey, these are the twins Calvin and Lester.
“Yes, Marigold.”
I go quiet, so quiet that she starts again with “I can’t hear you!” and “Oh there you are!” and “Stop sneaking up on me, Cassidy!” But I have nothing to say to her. I feel like a ghost, like a candle that’s been snuffed out, a kid that’s been thrown off a carousel.
Like I’ve been sold for parts.
This is when I start finding the really good words like Desiderium, n. an ardent desire for something lost.
From Marigold’s Bag of Words Under Cassidy’s Mattress:
In the time of forever, a woman couldn’t get out of a burning house. She got used to a bed that was on fire. She learned to sleep with her back to the flames.
Fuck the time of forever.
I forgot where I put my life. (Retrace all the places you’ve been since you last had it, Marigold.) I wish I were Keith Richards. Or Joan Didion. Or anyone anywhere. I can’t get out of this. I gnash my teeth. I teeth my gnash. Watch me climb out of a window into a different sky. Sky out of a climb into a different window.
The despair walks on two legs.
The despair has its own set of keys.
Cassidy
Some RV parks have computers for public use and when they do, I spend hours futilely searching pictures of “mothers,” picking out ones I’d rather have, and “thirteen-year-old girls” so I can pick all the girls I’d rather be. I also search “What’s going to happen to me?” and “Please help me!” and “How do thirteen-year-olds act?” (I still avoid the other kids at RV parks, mostly now because: How to explain Marigold?) The rest of my computer time is spent watching videos of animals being rescued: goats from under a bridge, a dog from an uninhabited island, a cow stuck in a fence, a baby elephant trapped in a well. I watch for hours and hours weeping in the final moments where the cow/elephant/dog/goat is freed and able to live happily ever after.
Other times, I get practical and search for help for Marigold: treatments for alcoholism and drug abuse, treatments for depression, grief, trauma, but nothing ever goes anywhere because she says she won’t take medication or go to AA or NA or talk to a therapist. “I’m fine, Cass! Why are you so bleak? Why are you such a worrywart? Why are you so, well, I hate to say it, but I will: boring, yes, you’ve gotten dull. You used to be so much more fun before you became this sad sack, this judge of me, this moral arbiter. I just need some life in my existence! So do you! We’re in the civilization stage of The Great Adventure, that’s all. Life is about change. Life is about experimentation. Life is about finding magic by any means necessary, Cassidy.”
When she says things like this, I get confused and think that maybe she’s right and this is all normal and it’s me who’s changed, that I am a boring dull sad sack now. I try to be upbeat then, try to jump on her Transcendent Living train, but the train always ends up derailing with her too high to talk or too drunk to walk, or worse. I get confused too because sometimes everything feels okay and it’s us again and we do our old things like go to used bookstores or thrift stores or the doctor, and I think I imagined there was a problem because what does it matter if she parties a little and why am I such a stick in the mud?
All I know is I never feel okay anymore except when I imagine I’m in the meadow with you, Wynton, which I do all the time.
All the time.
The most right I ever felt was with you and I don’t know why.
I hear your violin too. Maybe like you hear your father’s trumpet. Calling on me to come find it. Find you.
Sometimes I think about college even though it’s years away and then feel guilty because what will Mom do without me? It’s me who makes sure she eats. It’s me who’s there when she comes out of The Silent World. It’s me who waits up for her, who empties Purple Rain of derelicts in the morning, who listens to her constant proselytizing, who is the emergency driver (yes at thirteen!) when she’s too wasted. It’s me who worries, who loves her, who’s afraid to leave her side, because if I do, I know something really bad will happen to her.
The problem is no one’s worried about something bad happening to me.
And then it does.
Usually, I’m the only kid at the parties we go to and I develop a routine. It consists of this: Watch over Mom so she doesn’t die until she inevitably goes off with some Dave look-alike, and then I find the room where the coats are all piled on a bed and wait under the mound of them until Marigold’s ready to leave.
I like the weight of all of the coats on me at once. It feels safe.
It isn’t.
A month before my fourteenth birthday, we go to a party at a farmhouse in the foothills of the Sierras. The people that live there are part of an intentional community called Soul on Fire (these are kind of like modern communes). Mom met some of the members at a music festival the weekend before where she jumped onstage with her Hula-Hoop. Two security guards escorted her to safety in a trailer with medics. Matt and Emily were in the medical trailer with us (they took bad peyote) and they bonded with Mom while I read Crime and Punishment.
That’s when they invited us to this party.
Per usual, I find the room with the coats and lie down and pile the coats over me and sigh with relief to be hidden, disappeared. (Why I thought this was a better idea than hiding in a closet I have no idea.) I fall asleep because I’m exhausted from sleeping (or not sleeping) under Purple Rain for so many nights while Mom entertained.
When I wake up, there is someone on the bed, pressing into me from behind.
Two arms are wrapped around me, and hands are pushing up my shirt, then are inside my shirt, touching my bare stomach, then squeezing my breasts. I gasp, twisting and turning to get away from the rank breath, the insistent grip, trying to find purchase with the coats, the bedclothes, but can’t. I can’t get away. When I yell out, a hand finds my mouth and clamps over it. I try to bite it, to scream, but the door’s closed and the music’s loud and he’s shushing me and pushing rhythmically into my back, slurring that it’s okay because I have my clothes on, and he isn’t going to go inside me and because all people have one communal soul. I go limp then, drowning in his body stench and fish breath, drowning in the pounding into my back with his groin, his hand on my mouth, the weight of him burying me in the bed, clenching the coats in my hands as his moaning, shaking, gasping goes on and on and on.
After, I watch him stumble away, barely able to walk, one hand in his greasy stringy hair, the other ahead of him as if he’s bushwhacking, a wet stain on his khaki pants. He thanks me on his way out, which is just so disgusting. I throw up once, again, then panic about the vomit on the coats and frantically flip the whole pile so the soiled ones are hidden on the bottom, all the while thinking how he’d said it was all okay because he kept his pants on and didn’t enter me, like I was a house. I still have doodles in one of my school notebooks that I drew after this happened. They’re of me with doors in different places on my body. All barricaded.
I don’t tell my mother. The shame makes it hard for me to speak at all. She doesn’t notice. She doesn’t notice how many times a day I bathe or how raw and red my skin is from scrubbing. She doesn’t notice the weeping at night.
Like always, well, since we left The Town, the only thing that makes me feel better, Wynton, is thinking how you let me cry that day in the meadow and didn’t ask why, just softly pressed your back into mine, letting me know you were there.
A month after this happens, the night before my fourteenth birthday, I’m coming back at dusk from a computer session where I watched little ducklings getting rescued from a sewage pipe when I see my mother behind the mini-mart with a Grizzly Man in a jean jacket. He’s pressing her against a wall, and at first, I think she’s being pinned against her will, like what happened to me. I start sprinting toward them, except as I get closer, I realize, unlike me, she’s an enthusiastic participant. I see way too much.
When she stumbles into Purple Rain hours later, I watch her in the ghostly glow of the night-light staggering around wasted, getting a glass of water, missing her mouth with it, then practically falling up the ladder to my bed. I retreat to the far corner of the bunk, not sure if she wants to sleep with me or if she went up the wrong ladder. She smells exactly like The Man in the Coats, the same sour stench and fish breath. “I don’t want you in my bed,” I say.
“Okay,” she whispers weakly, and climbs down the ladder. “I don’t blame you.”
“Well, I blame you!” I scream.
She doesn’t reply.
When dusk rolls around on my birthday and she’s still not awake, I do something out of character. I leave to find some kids.
The lights at the RV park have just turned on and I follow the path I’ve seen young people traipse down day and night for the three weeks we’ve been here until I spot the group of teenagers, as I knew I would, in the dunes. They’re sitting around a bonfire drinking beers and smoking weed, the scent wafting in my direction. I watch them from a safe distance, my heart racing.
Do I dare?
All their heads turn as I shuffle up to them. My sweaty hands are fisted in my hoodie pocket. I realize I’m biting the inside of my mouth. “Hey,” one of the boys says. He’s cute, with white-blond surfer hair. “How long you guys here for?”
“Don’t know,” I say, the words sounding scratchy and rough. I’d been talking so little. “A week, more maybe.”
“Whoa, deep voice,” the surfer boy says. I start to flush, and he must notice my embarrassment, because he quickly says, “Us too. You full-timers?”
I nod and one of the girls says, “Your mom homeschools you?” I nod again, astonished how easy this is. “Us too,” she says. “I’m Lucy and this is my brother Mark and sister Cali, we’re triplets. We’re outa here tomorrow. Going to Colorado. These other idiots are Max and Sam, they’re brothers. And dimples there who greeted you is Surfer Ollie. He’s been talking about you nonstop for days” – she rolls her eyes – “but was way too shy to knock on your door.”
I don’t know who’s blushing more, me or Surfer Ollie. He throws a handful of sand at Lucy. “Don’t listen to her. She’s high.” He takes a hit off a vape pen and passes it to me. Despite all the parties I’ve been to and access to drugs I’ve had, I’ve never smoked or vaped weed or drank any alcohol except for a sip or two of beer. I bring the pen to my lips and inhale, sucking the vapor deep into my lungs like I’ve seen others do. It burns my throat and I start coughing and choking – it’s awful! – and everyone laughs but not in a mean way. I hand the pen to Cali, who motions for me to sit between her and Surfer Ollie. Cali tells me she’s in love with our rig. “It’s purple! So cool!” I tell her its name is Purple Rain and then everyone jumps in saying the names of their rigs: Waldo, Blue Moon, Sweet Potato.
Ollie reaches into a cooler and offers me a beer. I look over at Purple Rain, still dark with Mom passed out inside and think: Just following in your footsteps, Marigold, and take the beer. It’s so cold, I have to pull my sleeve over my fingers to hold it, the first beer of my life.
I’d been avoiding so many groups of kids at the RV parks, worried I’d have to explain why my mother was howling at the moon or having sex with someone’s dad, but this conversation is all about where we’ve been and where we’re going next. I find it easy to chime in, having been so many places. I open a second beer, start laughing at jokes, even make a couple, remembering what it was like with Dave, who’d said I have the gift of gab. Not like it is with Marigold, who lectures me, makes declarations, never asking me anything, because she’s not interested in me, the sad sack, the moral arbiter. Is that why I’ve gotten so quiet?
Soon my head’s woozy, my body’s relaxed, and out of nowhere a feeling of delight comes over me, a field-of-daisies kind of delight, like everything’s going to be okay, and I’m thinking why am I so worried all the time? I look around the circle at all the friendly faces. It’s my birthday and I have friends! No wonder my mother drinks and smokes weed, I think, my head swimming, the girl next to me telling me how annoying her mother is. “Not nearly as annoying as mine, I bet,” I say, rolling my eyes like she did, and feeling some combination of wicked and ecstatic at this betrayal, loving this freedom, this camaraderie, this hour free of worry. I realize I’m having fun! You see, Marigold, I am fun, I think. I’m only a sad sack because of you.
And because of…
I try not to let The Man in the Coats break into my mind. Though he’s banging on the barricaded door. Rattling the doorknob. I place my hand on Ollie’s leg defiantly because I somehow think it will help keep The Man in the Coats out, and I watch as the surprise on Surfer Ollie’s face turns into a joy so raw, it both scares and thrills me. I can’t believe I made his face do that by touching him.
“Let’s go down to the water,” I say to Ollie, getting up. The others say things like: “Uh-huh. There they go.” Ollie casually rises, following my command, then is loping after me like a happy mutt. It’s like I’m all-powerful, I think. The opposite of the way it felt in the coats. As we stumble down the path together, he takes my hand in his. It’s warm and a little sticky. I’ve never held a boy’s hand before. “You’re really pretty,” Ollie says.
Groan, I think, remembering then all the cool things you had to say, Wynton, about your father’s music and about my voice coming out of a tree and my stomach being in B flat and how you asked me to marry you. I don’t know then that it will always be this way, that you’ll always be somewhere in my mind when I’m with other guys.
“It’s my birthday,” I tell him.
“Whoa. How old?”
“Sixteen,” I lie.
“I’m seventeen,” he says, believing me. How easy it is to lie, I think, to pretend to be someone different, someone new. Like Dave did with us.
We sit on the shore and look out at the waves. The sand’s cold but the air’s still sultry and the sky’s a glory of post-sunset violet and orange puffs.
“Happy birthday,” he says, then leans toward me like he’s going to kiss me. “Can I?”
Suddenly I don’t want to. “No,” I say, pushing him back.
His eyes widen. “Oh, okay. I thought – okay. Sorry.”
“Let’s just—”
“Yeah. Fine.” And I can tell it is fine with him. I nod, filling with relief. I take a breath and we watch the waves some more. “I like your name,” he says after a while.
“Yours too,” I say.
“After Oliver Twist,” he says. “My mom’s favorite book. She used to be an English teacher. What’s your favorite book?” Maybe he’s not such a dope after all.
“I can only pick one?”
“Okay, pick three or—”
I notice a shadow coming at us, one I realize is turning into my mother. Oh no. And then a moment later, she’s pulling me up by my hoodie and saying to Ollie, “She’s thirteen. You hear me? Thirteen. What’s wrong with you?”
