I didn’t have a bad childhood or anything. It was okay, though I don’t remember much. I remember I ate plant food once because it was out by the sink. It was in this white plastic tub like the kind margarine comes in, and it had these little white balls like cake sprinkles that I thought might mean it was something sweet. My mom caught me putting a handful in my mouth and started yelling, but being scared just made me swallow. She grabbed my hand and slapped at it over the sink to make me drop the rest of it that was clenched in my fist. My dad was laughing as he walked in behind her. “Now you’re gonna have a little plant growing inside your stomach. What are you gonna name it?” he said as he snapped the lid back on. I think I started bawling. I’ve always been a bit of a coward. And the thought of having a plant growing inside of me was terrifying.
My dad had a big German shepherd for a little while. We weren’t very close. He was an outside dog and sometimes we played, but my dad warned me never to pet him if his tail wasn’t wagging. We ended up having to give him away after he bit the kid of one of my dad’s friend’s on the shoulder, but I don’t think anyone was sad. My mom was too busy to get to know him and I think my dad got tired of him. That dog never really seemed that excited about living with us anyway, more like he put up with us. Maybe he felt like he landed with the wrong family, a group of complete incompatibles with his personality type, the way adopted kids sometimes do.
The only interesting thing that I can remember was this one neighborhood kid, Jamie. He was maybe a couple of years older than me, about 8, and his parents were never home. He had Duck Hunt on Nintendo so I always wanted to go to his house to play. The game was in their guest room, so we would sit on the edge of the bed, a proximity that allowed me to hold the gun up and be only inches away from the screen for extra accuracy. The thing I loved about it was that he would let me shoot at those animated ducks for hours and he was content to just sit next to me and watch, never wanting to take turns. That’s something I always hated. The waiting part of taking turns.
I was at his house one day playing Duck Hunt when I looked over, and Jamie was staring at the screen, his face kind of zoned out. I looked down to see that he had zipped his pants open, and the tiny head of his penis was poking out, and he was twisting it idly with his fingers as he stared at the screen. I think he noticed that a lot of ducks were going by without me firing any shots, so he looked over and saw that I was staring at his hand.
“What are you doing?” I asked, confused with a tinge of panic.
“Watching you play,” he said, his voice flat.
“Don’t do that,” I said, jumping off the bed.
He got this evil little grin, the one that boys get when they’re running around with a spider or a snake outstretched in their hands, sending us girls into screaming hysterics.
He jumped off the bed and waved his little bitty thing at me, up and down, up and down, flop, flop, flop, laughing gleefully at me.
I stared at him, frozen, overwhelmed by how to proceed. Then…I was gone. I ran out the door, down his stairs and out his front door, ran….my legs pounding me all the way home.
He lived across the street then four houses down, and I ran the whole way with him in pursuit. I don’t think he let go of his penis the entire time. Our automatic garage door was open so I ran in, then hit the button to close it, but the thing was so damn slow that he slipped in underneath. He was cackling with excitement, something that scared me more as something primal inside was telling me to be terrified of what might happen if I let him catch me. He chased me into my own house, up our stairs, all the way to my room but I was able to slam the door and lock it just in time. He pounded on it for a while, laughing with a joy that I’ve since identified as simply a mental state of — “not okay.” He begged me, cajoled me, told me he was only kidding. That he’d put it away so it was safe for me to come out. But I wouldn’t answer him, my back pressed against the door with my feet grinding into the carpet in case he managed to figure out how to unlock the door (any ballpoint pen inserted in the hole under the handle would have done the trick). His pounding got more persistent, more aggressive. “Open the door!” he yelled. He seemed furious now. Personally offended. He got down and tried to wiggle his fingers under the door as I curled away in terror, but thankfully, the thick carpet of my room only let him get the tips in which quickly frustrated him more. After what seemed like a lifetime of assaulting my fragile panic room, he gave the door a last cowering kick and yelled, “You’re no fun!” followed by footsteps stomping down our hall.
I stayed on the floor in front of my door until the sun went down, until my room slowly turned into shadows, until I could hear night sounds fill the dark expanse outside my window. Finally, I heard my mom pull up in the driveway and into our garage.
I didn’t come out until she tried my door and found it locked. She paused, then knocked tentatively.
“Honey? Are you in there?”
I opened the door, looking around furtively behind her. I wasn’t convinced Jamie wasn’t hiding somewhere in the house, still waiting to catch me alone.
“Yeah,” I said, probably looking at her like I would disintegrate if she let me out of her sight.
She looked at me, then at my darkened room with a mother’s concern. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah,” I said.
I reached for her hand, and together, we went downstairs to the kitchen, and as I sat in one of the high kitchen stools in front of the counter, I watched her transfer vegetables and packages from the refrigerator to the sink to prepare dinner. She cut the vegetables carefully and with great concentration, then put them in a rinsed bowl as she washed the slime off the chicken pieces. She told me to open a window as she dropped the chunks of meat into heated oil, which I did obediently. A thick cloud of white smoke rose above the pan instantly as the room filled with sizzling. I could smell the cool fall air through the wire mesh of the screen as the warm aroma of garlic and cooking meat wafted by me, mingling, and I realized I’d been holding all the air in my chest the entire time, only taking shallow breaths.
“You have a good day?” she asked, her spatula scraping the pan at random intervals.
“Yeah,” I said, my face pressed into the screen, taking slow breaths, in and out, filling myself with these familiar smells. Because everything that was bad was now safely tucked in the past. And everything in the right now was finally okay.