USED anniekblake I Can Turn Lights On“Non sum quals eram”

(I am not who I once was.)

–Horace

I

Daddy is a lifelong member of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and books gather month-by-month, year after year, in tall columns around his bed. They stare down at me each night as he hides behind them to battle. For as long as I can remember, Daddy is an insomniac, and I wonder what eats at him. He tries drugs and booze and hypnosis, but nothing works. Books are his tranquilizer and every month they come: Don Quixote, Gorky Park, The Watergate Files. Even Storey’s Guide to Raising Beef Cattle will do. Used up, they form long walls, thick and lopsided, bisecting his room until it is impossible to navigate from door to closet to bathroom. They are his bulwark, and I stand, on the other side.

II

A crisp polyester uniform hangs neatly in Mama’s closet. Her silk support hose are intentional, folded up into white shoes. The worn but still rigid nursing cap, one shelf above, stands erect in its original box. Lining the floor are boxes crammed full of bills, receipts, old pictures and letters, bottles of aspirin and outdated prescriptions, hand-me-downs from each of my four sisters, used up toiletries and half-used cosmetics, broken pencils, crayons and a bag of used erasers.

I stand there for a minute, staring. A nametag pinned over the right breast punctuates Mama’s uniform: “Irene Sexton, Director of Nursing,” and I wonder at this. Who is she then, this mother of mine? Is she the white letters straight and tall spelled out on a black name tag placed over the heart? Or is she the body in the adjacent bedroom, passed out face down on a lumpy stain-covered Posturepedic, out of her mind with cold and with inebriation? I wonder at this, and I wonder too how I might hang in her closet?

III

When new books arrive, Daddy reads two, three, even four titles at a time, until he hardly talks for reading. I figure it is respectable to be well-read, and I am proud of Daddy’s book-reading prowess. But books accumulate like secrets until 1428 Redwood Drive becomes a junkyard of book-column debris. Wreckage is everywhere, pythons of literary rubble. They press in on me; I cannot breathe.

IV

I am five. I fill a Coke bottle with mud, then change my mind, so I bang the bottle hard against the concrete. The bottle breaks and the glass cuts deep and sharp and blood spurts bright red. I am scared, too scared to pull it out, so I run, my right hand held forward, a siren screaming, up the garage stairs into the kitchen.

Mama is there, sitting— her hands folded, resting on the kitchen table. She smiles, not at me, then picks up a cigarette, drawing in long and leisurely. To her right is a tall glass filled to the rim. She reaches for it, deliberately.

I scream. Mama smiles. Why is she smiling? My hand hurts. Mama is a nurse. Nurses are for fixing. Now Mama laughs and it is intentional like she has all the time of day to laugh that way while I stand there, my blood dripping steady now into the cracks in the orange and green linoleum.

V

Summer heat scorches, and still, Daddy reads. Books stack while turmoil propagates in square foot increments. Brodie, the brown-and-white-spotted Brittany Spaniel, bursts into the house late one evening. He barrels his way, ears flying, dodging book-columns through the kitchen, into the living room, then down the hall into my parents’ dull, dingy grey back bedroom.

Jackrabbit-like, he springs on top of daddy’s book-column fortress. The dusty column wobbles, teetering Brodie back and forth until he catapults into the air, the entire edifice crumbling domino-like into a mass of newly homogenized commotion: one column, then the next—Brodie’s ears and legs and tail flailing among the carnage.

Then silence. Daddy next to me, mouth agape, his hand resting on my shoulder—defenses down.

VI

This year Mama doesn’t drink. It’s my Time of Calm. Presents wrapped with bows and chocolate cake on Barbie doll plates with matching cups for my birthday. Cherries and peaches and grapes in Tupperware bowls fresh every Wednesday morning. Clothes folded and matching socks lie in baskets stacked neatly on shelves in the laundry. And Monday mornings, Miss Nix, my third grade teacher, takes my white envelope, smiling: lunch money, exact change— my name in flawless cursive on its cover.

But Mama gets a cold. She drives to Piggly Wiggly. She buys Vick’s Nyquil, the green version, and takes a dose, then another, then the whole bottle. She drinks until she is unconscious, the Nyquil bottle shattered on the kitchen floor, my Time of Calm gone with it.

VII

Brodie’s rampage leaves Daddy without a fortress. For days I watch as first he mopes, then comes alive. Animated, he has big plans. He hires Mr. Cayce, the carpenter, to build new shelves and soon, Daddy promises, he will clear the wreckage.

Directing every part of the operation, Daddy engineers shelves to fit most of the walls in the den and three of our four bedrooms. When Mr. Cayce finishes, Daddy inspects, then carefully stains and lacquers. He asks me how I like them, and I deliberate.

Rough-hewn and utilitarian. they remind me of Daddy. Not caring about impressions, the shelves’ pungent sap-smell is overbearing, like Daddy’s acerbic insensitivity, ripening the room until it is caustic. And instead of a soft golden hue, they are metallic, like the yellow clowns at Barnum and Bailey, tinny makeup masking real emotion. As if this facade could be more than temporary. The shelves are so ugly, they make me want to laugh.

But I hesitate. Looking more closely, their coarse texture, the straight grain, the quality of their fiber, I see the possibility of repair.  “Oh I like them very much!” I say, as I pull bended books out from the rubble.

VIII

It is my turn for First Holy Communion, though Daddy is Presbyterian. I am seven and the youngest of  five daughters. Mama takes me to lunch. We shop for shoes and a dress; they are so pretty! She props me up on the shining barstool at the sandwich shop inside Sears, my legs swinging back and forth to the music—Mama showing me off. I wear a pinafore and shoes that are black patent leather with anklet socks, white and unguarded.

IX

Daddy, silent, puts books into piles, then tells me to wipe them clean, to straighten out their wrinkled pages. Then he shoves a piece of paper at me, INSTRUCTIONS written in bold print at the top, a diagram —Daddy clearing the wreckage.

I stretch on tippy toes to reach the high shelves, but my chair, precarious against the yellow wood, wobbles. Instinctively, I reach for what is closest, pulling heavy books, mostly the ‘S’ authors, down with me – books and girl flying. The weight of Daddy’s job crashing in dull thuds around me.

X

Mama and I fall asleep together once, reading. Her warm chest presses into my shoulders, her skin soft, reassuring. I do not know how long we lie there, rolled up in sheets and pillows and each other—mother and daughter, as if I’d known this feeling forever. Against my face, her breathing is warm, like the sun pouring through the bedroom window.

XI

July 23, 1976: Thirteen years old. I sit on the dock at our lake house, waiting. Nine hours ago Mama drove her sky blue Buick out, and later we were to meet her. She said, “Come early, before noon,” and I swear that’s what we intended. But the car wouldn’t start, and Brodie got loose, and Daddy is awfully slow-moving.

Right away I see something is off: Mama’s white pocketbook and shoes left unattended on the dock. I search the house, the garage, the garden, but Mama is nowhere.

Now shades of daylight shift; blue to purple to grey-orange. The sun is setting; Darkness is encroaching. Daddy restlessly pacing. The water persists, rocking me up and down, up and down, up and down as I sit here, waiting.

XII

In the fall, Mama takes me on the train to her mother’s house in New Jersey. While Mama rests, I crawl into Bapcie’s lap, even though I am nearly eight. Her flesh drooping, loose yet so inviting, feels like a lullaby, familiar and consoling. She tells me stories about Mama, new stories I’ve not heard before: her daughter, my mother, I am her child. My head resting against Bapcie’s soft chest, not knowing where her heartbeat ends and mine begins.

XIII

I skip the eighth grade, not because I am so smart but because Daddy wants to get rid of me. “Boarding school is the best thing,” he says as he pats my head and looks the other way. He doesn’t know about the booze and drugs and sadness. He’s already gone back to his books and promises, yellow clowns charading.

XIV

The glass door slides open. Daddy steps out across the lawn, uncertain. Now onto the deck, he stands for a few minutes—or is it hours? Both hands clutch the rail. He, in perfect stillness, like a lone egret staring out across the lake, glass in the dusk-night. Battered pages, his shoulders slump, his despair so palpable that even cool night-air thickens around him.

My breathing pulses to staccato as I sense Daddy’s intention but will myself not to think it. Turning his body towards me but staring beyond, he moves forward: precise, calculated, even robotic. Now an arm’s length away, Mama’s shoes and purse a thick wall between us.

Daddy’s shirt hits the deck, then his shoes, one rolling onto its side like a fish finally dead. Then cold splashes onto my crossed arms and legs, Daddy’s feet disappearing, and water rippling in every direction.

Then nothing. Fish jump. Children laugh from across the lake. A mosquito lands on my shoulder.

   

XV

Junior year I return home, but Daddy already got remarried. He and Martha travel often. I never go. Sometimes when I come home from school there is a note. “Gone to Europe on business. Back in ten

days. Food in the fridge.”  I have become an empty cavern.

XVI

Daddy strains as he pulls Mama’s bloated, water-logged body onto the dock. An other-worldly sick blue, her skin is wrinkled and rubbery. The scene slices me deep, like the sharp edge of a broken Coke bottle, but I feel no pain. My blood is unmoving.

Daddy and I stare at Mama’s body. Some things cannot be spoken; invisible lines, intangible words. He looks at me, drops his head. I lower mine. The sick sweet smell of decomposition envelopes us, father and daughter, while a whippoorwill calls out his long echo.

XVII

Six high schools later I graduate, hollowness gaping. Two years of college: anxiety; insomnia; 5’7” frame down to 101 pounds. A job in Europe: numb; travel from one disorienting place to another, the world whirling violently. No feelings—just emptiness reverberating.

XIII

For days I smell the sick-sweet stench. Leaning over the silver casket, Mama’s face caked with makeup and propped up against a rose-colored satin pillow, the stench lingers.

At night, the casket now closed, I lay awake remembering, What is this then, the walls, the shelves, the bloodied hand, the drunkenness, the nametag, the Nyquil, the drowning?

XIX

Asleep on the train into Rome, my bags are stolen. All of them. I am 19 years old with eight hundred lire, seventy cents, in my back pocket. I speak broken Italian well enough and find my way to the embassy and call home. Heart thumping, palms sweating, I wait for Daddy to answer. Oh Daddy, please help me. Please bring me home, but instead I mumble about trains and lire and how I need some money. Then, “You got yourself into this situation; you get yourself out,” and Klunk, he’s gone.

XX

Night after night I teach English to endless strangers in a crumbling church building in the seedy part of Rome. There is money enough for the flight back to La Guardia, and I return, wretched and ragged, still not knowing where to go. But I remember Bapcie, her lullabies and her stories.

I arrive at her door, unannounced, dilapidated, and shivering. Pulling me in from the cold, Bapcie quickens her pace, leading me into the kitchen, then ladles out steaming Kielbasa and cabbage, telling me how she’s missed me and when will I come home? I sit there, her grey eyes gentle, peering into me –walls tumbling down.

Bapcie tells me stories until our eyes grow weary, then smiles, showing me into Mama’s room, a museum now—pictures on a bookshelf filling the void: Mama as a young child; Mama in her nursing uniform; Mama as a young wife and mother, smiling, five small children all around.

I watch as Bapcie pulls down the quilted bedspread, fluffing the pillows, smoothing white sheets. Patting the mattress, she motions me to lay down. As though I am her child; she is my mother. The three of us, in Mama’s room—sweet words, the lines of a lullaby.

XXII

Three children call, Mama! and I want to give them words, a lullaby to wrap around them, to smooth wrinkled pages. But I stumble: The nametag, the Nyquil, the drowning, the yellow shelves and clowns charading. Emptiness still echoing to the water she lay in.

Still, like Mama and Daddy before me, I do the best I can. My children are so eager—I hold them close, their skin soft, warm, reassuring. This book my daughter opens, “Start here, Mommy,” her green eyes shining, her voice laughing as small fingers trace a yellow clown dancing across its pages. 


Elizabeth Sexton is the mother of three remarkable children, now young adults, who are the light of her life. She lives in Spanish Fork, Utah and has two white horses, two brown dogs and one grey cat, which she adores, except for the cat. She recently graduated from BYU in political science. “Yellow Clown” came out of her one and only creative writing class. It is a sad story, but it is not her only story, just the first to be written.


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