The House

Season's Greetings

October, 1993

It had been the same day after day for the past fourteen years. The creaky floor whenever you stepped on a certain floor board. The dalmatian dog cookie jar in the kitchen that no one knew why or even how it got there. The chipped paint spot on the side of her brother's bedroom door.  Phoebe Lawrence could walk around this entire home with her eyes closed, and still be able to to touch and tell where everything was. All of her life, she has been living in the same childhood home with the same family and nothing seems to change.

Phoebe could still remember the smell of sugar cookies and peppermint from the dinning room drifting throughout the house every Christmas. Everything went like this:

Her mother, Carol Lawrence, would be calling names of different foods that needed to be on the table, and would be hastily cooking something on the stove or rolling out cookie dough on the counter. Robert Lawrence, Phoebe's father, would be setting the table and letting all of the fellow family members inside the house.

Andrew Lawrence, Phoebe's eight-year-old mischievous little brother, would be secretly picking all of the vegetables from the dinner plates and feed them to do the dog.

Phoebe would be wearing one of those stiff, scratchy holiday dresses that her mom would make her wear every year, and her black hair would be slightly curled with a small jeweled hairpin pinned up to the side of her head. She would be hanging ornaments on the tree, and would put one of her family's Christmas records on the record player.

Year after year, Christmas would go on like this. She couldn't even begin to explain how much she loathed her family members when they would come over for Christmas dinner.

The entire house would be filled with adults laughing and gesturing around with glasses of wine, and the kids would be constantly bugging Phoebe with their loud, silly games. She comes from a pretty big family, so there were at least seven other kids there every year.

Right before Phoebe would think that she had some time to have a breath of fresh air, her Aunt Agatha and Uncle Gerald from New York would catch up to her.

"Fifi, is that you? My God, you have gotten so much bigger from the last time your uncle and I saw you!" Aunt Agatha would say as she reached out to squish her cheeks.

Phoebe always thought she reeked of old moth balls or kinda like something that's gone bad in the fridge.

Uncle Gerald would then adjust his glasses and take a step back. "Well I'll be darned! You were just a tiny little girl and look at you now!"

Then the both of them would start talking about their crazy flights to Maine and all the weird things they would encounter at the airport. Like the one time Uncle Gerald told a story about how he met Bill Murray while waiting for a flight and they both talked about car shows.

The Lawrence family liked everything the way it was, and that didn't sit well with Phoebe. Sometimes she wished she could just burst out of her bedroom with a packed bag and say,

"Mom, dad, I'm moving to Canada. Don't call or write to me because I'm not gonna answer back."

She wanted to live in a world where things changed often and she could make things entirely her own.

A place where Andrew wasn't storming into her room with some gross concoction he had just stirred up in the backyard. A place where her mother didn't boss her around and make her clean her room twenty-four-seven. A place where her dad didn't make her watch Wheel of Fortune with him for the hundredth time when she wanted to go talk to her friends on the phone. A place she could make her own decisions and be free to who she really was.

"Phoebe," Carol started as she spooned some pasta onto her plate. "Lift your head up. Your dinner is getting cold."

Phoebe sighed as she lifted her head off of the table, and took a forkful of salad. Robert and his wife were always seated at the heads of the table while Phoebe was seated the closest to her father, and Andrew to his mother. They were all staring at her like she was the next person to say something, and Phoebe almost swore she saw a look of tiredness in their eyes.

Almost as if they were tired of the same old thing just as she was.

Just a glint.