I'm Glad My Mom Died(7)
Mom calls it the “curse of minimum wage.” Grandpa works as a ticket-taker at Disneyland, Grandma works as a receptionist at a retirement home, Dad makes cardboard cutouts for Hollywood Video and works in the kitchen design department at Home Depot, and Mom went to beauty school but says having babies sidetracked her career—“plus the hair bleaching fumes are toxic”—so she picks up shifts at Target around the holidays but says her main job is ensuring I make it in Hollywood.
Even though the rent payments are often short and almost always late, we’ve never been kicked out. And I feel like if anybody but Dad’s parents owned the house, we probably would have been kicked out by now. Part of me fantasizes about that.
If we got kicked out, that means we’d have to move somewhere else. And if we’d have to move somewhere else, that means we’d have to pack up the stuff we want to take with us into moving boxes. And if we’d have to pack stuff into moving boxes, that means we’d have to sort through all the stuff in this house and get rid of some of it. And that sounds wonderful.
Our home hasn’t always been like this. I’ve seen pictures from before I was born where it actually looked pretty normal—a humble house with a little clutter, nothing out of the ordinary.
My brothers say it began when Mom got sick; that’s when she started not being able to let go of things. That would mean it started when I was two. Since then the problem has only gotten worse.
Our garage is filled floor to ceiling with stuff. Stacks of plastic bins are filled with old papers and receipts and baby clothes and toys and tangled jewelry and journals and Christmas decorations and old candy bar wrappers and expired makeup and empty shampoo bottles and broken mug pieces in Ziploc bags.
The garage has two entrances—the back door and the main garage door. It’s nearly impossible to get through the garage if you enter by the back door because there’s hardly enough space for a walking path, but even on the off chance that you are able to elbow your way through the path, you won’t want to. We have a rat and possum problem, so the only thing you’ll see on your sliver of path is dead rats and possums stuck in the traps Dad places every few weeks. The dead rats and possums stink.
Since you can’t really walk through the garage, our second fridge is placed strategically at the very front of the garage so that we can open the main garage door and access it easily.
Easily is an overstatement.
Our garage door is the only manual one on the block, and so heavy that it broke its own hinges. The door used to make a loud clicking sound once Dad or Marcus—the only two in the household strong enough to lift it—heaved it up high enough. And once that clicking sound happened, the garage door could stay up on its own.
Well, not anymore. A few years back, after the garage door clicked, it came crashing right back down again and it’s never been able to support itself since.
So now going to the garage has become a two-person job. Whoever opens the heavy garage door—typically Marcus—has to hold it up with their entire body to avoid it slamming down on top of them, while the other person—typically me—retrieves whatever needs to be retrieved from the garage.
The times when Marcus and I are asked to retrieve something from the garage are scary. When Marcus holds up the garage door and his face winces underneath the weight of it, and I race to open the overstuffed fridge as quickly as possible and locate the needed food item in the sea of other food items, I feel like I’m Indiana Jones and the boulder is coming and I have to snatch the hidden treasure before the boulder comes crashing down on me.
The bedrooms are bad too. I remember a time when Marcus, Dustin, and Scott slept in their trundle bunk bed and I slept in my nursery, but now our bedrooms are so filled with stuff that you can’t even determine where the beds are let alone sleep in them; we don’t sleep in the bedrooms anymore. Trifold mats were purchased from Costco for us to sleep on in the living room. I’m pretty sure the mats were meant for kids’ gymnastics exercises. I do not like sleeping on mine.
This house is an embarrassment. This house is shameful. I hate this house. I hate how being inside it makes me feel tense and anxious, and all week long I look forward to my three-hour escape into the land of testimonies and pine-scented tile cleaner.
That’s why it’s so upsetting to me that my family can never get out the door on time, no matter how hard I try to make that happen.
“Come on, everybody, move, move, move!” I shout while I buckle my left shoe.
Dustin and Scottie are just now waking up. They rub the crust out of their eyes as Grandpa clumsily steps over their Costco mat “beds.” Grandma and Grandpa sleep on the couch in what used to be my nursery but has since transformed into their bedroom–slash–storage room for more stuff.
“You each have ten minutes to eat breakfast and change and brush your teeth,” I say to Dustin and Scott as they head to the kitchen to haphazardly pour themselves cereal—Lucky Charms for Dustin and Count Chocula for Scott. I can tell by their eye rolls that they think I’m bossing them around, but it doesn’t feel like bossiness to me. It feels like desperation. I want order. I want peace. I want my three-hour reprieve from this place.
“Did you guys hear me?” I ask to no response. Grandpa stands in the corner of the kitchen, buttering his toast, and the amount of butter he’s using stresses me out—a pat that size is costly. Mom always tells me he uses “half a stick of butter every day and we can’t afford it, and his diabetes can’t afford it either.”