Interiors, exteriors

EXT. – DAY

When my twin cousins Pami and Paula still lived across the street, I used to sleep over a lot. Especially after my father died and they often fed me. Early one Sunday morning, we were surprised when we looked out the window at my house to see my mother’s black Cadillac was not in the driveway. It couldn’t have been later than 8 a.m., so we thought it was odd that my mother, who seldom rose before 10, would have gone anywhere that early.

So before I went back home we called. My mother answered the phone like nothing was unusual and we said, “oh, you’re home.” She said of course she was, and we told her that her car wasn’t in the driveway. She said “yes, it is,” and when we insisted that it wasn’t, it slowly dawned on all of us that someone had stolen it.

I don’t remember ever having trouble with that Cadillac, but I remember not being wild about the dark blue Plymouth Volare my mother bought to replace it. It was boxy, without style and warmed to a choking 110 degrees during steamy Rhode Island summers. Our claustrophobic dog, Bebop, didn’t seem to care for it, either. If left in the car for even five or 10 minutes (even if I was in the car with her), she’d bark and jump around and rip the vinyl interior padding to shreds, through the yellow foam and down to the navy metal. It was startling how much damage that dog could do to upholstery in mere minutes.

We never recovered our stolen Cadillac. And the feeling of comfort that I had had as a small child, that I was safe in my house and on my property, was gone too. The creepy feeling I experienced that morning, of knowing that someone could take something that was mine and would never have to give it back or be punished for it, wouldn’t be the last time I’d feel that way.

INT. – NIGHT

I don’t remember teenagers doing this in the ’80s in the years before I moved from small-town North Kingstown to Providence, RI, but in the ’70s, young scumbags in my hometown used to enjoy slowly rolling their cars down the dirt road between my backyard fence and the woods behind our house late at night during the summer. Sometimes with the lights off, sometimes on, they’d slowly creep 50 feet or so in, park and get out, laughing, the cherries of their cigarettes glowing orange while I spied on them from my bedroom window. I rested my chin on the cool sill with thick chipped paint, nose discreetly poking between my Holly Hobbie curtains, eyes straining to make out any risque behavior in the darkness.

There were never any shootings or fights or anything. Mostly pot smoking and beer drinking, coarse laughter, the shrill tittering of drunk girls, the occasional soft woosh of a beer bottle landing in a bed of pine needles and dirt. AC/DC or Led Zeppelin would waft over the fence and into my room but I could rarely hear actual conversation. I imagined that someday when I was older, I’d understand the appeal of gathering in the dark woods behind family homes, but I never would. In the early to mid-’80s, social interaction seemed more centered on the house party. Or in the mall, where we’d buy Rob Lowe and sarcastic “Poverty Sucks” posters even though we were practically living it.

INT. – DAY

The morning the police came to our door to tell my mother that my father was dead was impossibly beautiful. I remember the bright, early-morning sunshine streaming through our front screen door. Crickets were still chirping. It would be at least a couple hours before the heat really set in — that damp, wooly-blanket heat of New England in August — and the neighborhood kids screamed and careened on their bikes and the teenagers impatiently honked their horns and peeled out at stop signs to show off.

The cops took their hats off as they glided up the few stairs to our door, just like they do on TV. They even called my mother ma’am. As soon as she saw them, my mother’s hands fluttered to her heart and she gasped, “oh my god!” before they had a chance to say anything. I think she later told me that she had worried that that would happen. That she was always half expecting to hear that my dad was dead. Although she had figured on a car or motorcycle accident, not suicide.

When they said that my father was dead, she immediately started bawling and didn’t reach for me. She closed her eyes, put her palm on the wood paneling on the wall at the bottom of our stairs and rested her forehead against it. I ran upstairs just as fast and cried lying horizontally across my bed, my little feet banging against the wall. I don’t know anything about kids, but I dimly recall reading or seeing stuff on tv that indicates that children sometimes don’t “get” death and need to have it explained to them. I don’t know when the average kid is supposed to be able to grasp what it means when a parent is dead, but I immediately understood what the cops had told my mother; no one had to explain it to me.

My mother came into my room later, still crying, and sat down on my bed to talk to me about it. I don’t remember anything she said though.

I have more weird memories about my father’s death. And some that I don’t remember but my mother told me, like how my grandparents were embarrassed and complained to my mother when they were taking care of me that I’d taken to announcing to people brashly, “Guess what? My father died.” And I guess the people would say sympathetically, “I know, honey,” or something like that, but my grandparents were very annoyed by my pitiful little announcements and tried to get my mother to put a stop to it. She said she told them “she’s just a little girl; she needs to talk about it.” But my grandparents found me, at 5, to be very embarrassing.

They also didn’t approve when my mother insisted that I not attend his funeral. She didn’t want my last memory of my father to be in a casket, and I always agreed with her decision. They thought I wouldn’t be facing reality if I didn’t go. And I did sometimes fantasize as a child that he was alive somewhere, even though I didn’t like the idea that that implied he had wanted to leave us. Even though that was more or less the case anyway.

But deep inside, I understood. I understood that things could be taken from me and there were things that I would have to accept even if I could never understand them.

Coming up!

Adorable Mexican feral kitten photos from my trip to Baja and thrilling recap of Sunday’s episode of “I Love Money.” And is anyone else disturbed that friggin National Enquirer reporters are featured guests on NPR? That John Edwards has a love child? Has the world gone mad??