Bed of Lies (ON HOLD)

X

April 2003

15 YEARS AGO

I shivered throughout my classes today. But like yesterday, even if I felt the urge to, there was no chance I'd make the mistake of telling Ma of it. She'd flip and yell and hate me; none of which were things I wanted.

She did seem to be doing that a lot more recently—in the morning when I was about leaving for school, at noon on days she couldn't find work to do, and most especially at night when she downed glass after glass of cheap wine—which made me wonder whether she in those miserable times wished I were dead like she once blurted out in her sour drunkenness. Thankfully, after today I would not have to wonder again.

The thin grey sweater I still had on was way too thin for Mrs. Garry's woebegone house that was never, ever heated in the winter—not to talk of in April, a month which was supposed to be fully spring but had since been stuck in an unseasonably cold, irregular pattern—and had resulted in consequent grumblings which of course engendered hurried, half-baked excuses on the host's part.

At first, she'd claimed her heating had been cut off and expected us to show respectful understanding. When however it was clear we'd not quit our complaining, she'd made a second attempt to hush us by spouting out nonsense that cancelled out to the unfulfilling excuse that her house was not of the type suited for heaters. Using the obviously needed warmers apparently therefore could lead to a blowout which would ultimately, if employed, cause her a fire.

She did not stop tossing her unreasonable reasons for the privation at us afterwards. On the spot, I could not remember the rest of her excuses as I'd stopped paying attention and committing them to memory after a while, but I did know she had plenty of them. Plenty enough to flood the whole of New York City.

To say 'I hated it' would be an understatement were I to describe how I felt about having to study at Mrs. Garry's house with seven other students who were like me; poor, needy and on the verge of falling wretched. I loathed and greatly despised having to sit in a circle on hard chairs and around a huge woman who could not pronounce my name rightly. It made me want to kill myself.

I did not belong there in her dark room with those teenagers my age who I never wanted to talk to. In fact I did not belong anywhere. Not at home or in New York as a whole. Ma had made this fact clear, straight from the beginning. That I was a growing burden on her.

The memory of that day was still freshly etched in my head like it was yesterday even though six ugly years had crawled by since then. It was easy to remember Ma's stricken face when she stumbled into the hotel room, interrupting my colouring of trees with crayons and my older sibling's reading of our then completely jejune storybooks. Her eyes had regarded us with such agony and anguish before she must have let herself be reminded of her goal. Leaving.

While packing, she did not bother with the troublesome task of reigning in her emotions as she'd cried with reckless abandon. Her tears rushing down were unrestrained, unrestricted, unshackled. There was nothing that could hold back those wicked sobs that shook her tiny shoulders as she stuffed random clothes in random boxes with nonrandom intents.

I could not understand why she needed to leave. That bit was too complicated for my eight year old mind. All I could clearly see was she was overly and way beyond upset. Until that moment, I had never seen her as distressed and bitter as she was. Those unsightly pieces of her had been buried and cleverly hidden from her children. Until then.