Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Cobwebs in the attic
My mom wouldn’t take my dad’s word for it.
“Lift Dougie up,” she said. “Let him take a look around.”
Okay, fine. I was game for it. I’d had dreams of a sunlit attic, plush carpet wall-to-wall, toy firetrucks and stuffed bears and a ten-inch-tall girl who had led me up there by playing on her tiny piano. Also, my grandfather claimed he kept a monkey in his attic; maybe we had one, too.
My dad lifted me up on his shoulders so I could look around. No toys, no monkeys, nothing but rafters and cobwebs.
“Look for wires,” said my mother.
No wires.
I told my first grade teacher all about it. My mom thinks there’s wires in the attic. She thinks people are listening to us and watching us.
She asked my parents about it at open house and they denied everything. Just Dougie making up stories. God knows I made up a lot of stories back then, so my teacher never doubted my parent’s version.
Back home, my dad said, “You don’t tell anyone what happens in this house. No one. Do you understand?”
You’re probably wondering why my mom thought people were listening to us and watching us. Sorry. I’m not supposed to tell.
D.
Are you sure our families aren’t related? I’m sorry I keep laughing.
Your family practiced omertà too, eh?
I’m sitting here trying to think of something to say, feeling like I should say something, but not really having a clue what.
That must have been tough.
I don’t remember ever looking for wires, but boy, oh boy, did we know how to “practice omerta.”
To the extent that I don’t ever remember anyone *telling* me not to mention X, Y, or Z. A lot of any individual’s behavior was unmentionable even within the confines of the family.
Now that most everybody’s dead, we’re allowed to begin remembering being locked out of the house, having dollhouses torn apart as means of grade improvement, and the threat of a freezing shower to stop the crying.
(I need to say that none of _those_ things happened to me. No honestly, they didn’t. But the memories of that behavior lurk in various conversations and family photographs.)
Doug, have you ever read The Daughter of the Queen of Sheba by Jackie Lydon? Jackie Lydon’s mother was bipolar, and in one of her manic phases she decided she was the Queen of Sheba, thus the title. The novel has a really interesting construction–the narrator retells the same memory, the same scene, a few times within the book. But every time the reader encounters it, she has more and more information about that scene. So you end up sharing the conflicted emotions and multi-layered memory that the daughter would have of her mother and her mother’s illness.
So far it’s the only book I’ve read about bipolar in the family which completely captures the anger and guilt you feel towards the ill member of the family.
There’s something disturbingly familiar about that story, Doug.
Dean, I know you have your own stories to tell. We all do. Well, except for those weirdos who had normal childhoods.
Suisan, sounds like an interesting book . . . although I sometimes have trouble watching/reading things which hit too close to home. I’ve never been able to sit through Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for example. The constant hateful bickering gets to me.
Shelbi — oh, crap, do you mean I’ve told this story before?
Um, no, it just bears a disturbing resemblance to something happening with my mom.
I’m feeling that ‘omerta’ thing [had to google it, I’m afraid]. Probably because it’s happening right now, and I have no idea how to deal with it.
As yer basic weirdo-with-a-normal-childhood, I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like growing up under a code of silence like you did.
Normal childhoods make for boring adults, and who wants any of these around?
Like my preschool teacher. No humour, no imagination … She sent me home more than once for disturbing the class until my father got at her and told her that if she was incapable of dealing with an intelligent kid, she should not have become a teacher.
Two words, sxKitten: not fun. (BTW, this month’s Cosmo has an article, “Discover your inner sex kitten”!)
Gabriele, sounds like you have a great dad.
I don’t know if I have an inner sex kitten, Doug – I kind of wear mine on my sleeve 🙂
I feel cheated. I want to know why. I should have had paranoid parents, but oddly they were pretty laid back about stuff.
We lived next door to a nursing home, and some of the demetia patients would wander around into our yard. One guy used to rake up little piles of leaves and set fire to them. He broke into our cellar once and set fire to the bag containing all the fluffly gray stuff collected from the tumble dryer’s lint trap. My dad, having an uncanny intuition that made being naughty impossible, had skipped work that day and caught the guy before the fire got out of hand. We didn’t start locking our doors until the 1990’s and that was at my paranoid insistence.
I wonder what your folks were up to that they thought they warranted being spied on.
[…] “I know you have your own stories to tell. We all do. Well, except for those weirdos who had normal childhoods.” Doug Hoffman […]