THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY
PART II
Mary moves in. Insanity ensues. So to speak. Rated PG-13 for a reference to the 7th Heaven episode 'Angel'.
Plot based on a true story
Cold soup.
That was what Mary Camden thought about as she entered the house she once inhabited. The house she grew up in.
The house she had been kicked out of.
Memories hit her, instantly. Some good, some bad.
The house was empty, now.
The house was hers, now. So to speak.
She looked around. She remembered this place. The smell, the sounds, Annie standing in the corner, staring at her...
Mary gasped. She had forgotten that her mother was with her.
Annie had a strange look on her face. It was indecipherable. Mary didn't even want to think of what was in her mother's head. She knew she was playing with fire. Annie was unstable, to say the least. Mary knew this.
Mary experienced this.
Of course, none of that mattered. For what it was worth, she was secure. She and her son, at the very least, had a roof over their heads. And, since Annie had said 'pay rent, only if you can manage it', Mary was cautiously optimistic that she might actually be able to have electricity for an extended period of time.
The money she didn't use for rent could be used for other things. Like, convenience. She and Charles had been living on ready-made canned soup the last several months, since the gas was cut off.
The one time they had anything other than cold soup in recent memory was disastrous. Mary and Carlos had a screaming match. The result? Mary and Charles spent the night with the schizophrenic neighbor. Mary fixed herself and her son a pair of mayonnaise sandwiches. What they didn't know was that the neighbor was in the habit of leaving his condiments out for hours on end and putting them back in the fridge.
His explanation? He was certifiably insane.
Mary and Charles ended up with salmonella poisoning and really bad bouts of nausea. Luckily, nothing worse happened.
Mary very much preferred to think about cold soup rather than bad mayo.
Annie's eyes, much like the mayonnaise sandwiches, made Mary nauseous. They probed, those eyes. They probed and judged and put people down. Mary had forgotten. Now she remembered. Oh, she remembered.
Unpacking, they were. Mary, Annie, Ruthie, Eric, and Carlos were all there. In true Camden tradition, the women stood around while the men did the heavy lifting. Eric threw out his back at one point, but that was easily corrected when Annie told him it didn't hurt that much.
Mary noticed Ruthie. The youngest Camdaughter had several of Annie's genes. Okay, characteristics. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
For instance, the eyes.
Ruthie had learned the look. She either learned it from years of observation, or she had come up with her own individual glare. Regardless, she had it. Those probing eyes. Those judging eyes. Eyes that put you down and made you feel small.
Eyes like that were great assets, especially to people like Ruthie and Annie. People who loved power.
Not that Mary was intimidated by her younger sister. Mary had been there, done that. Mary had dealt with nasty looks and glares in her day.
Charles was there. Sam and David, as well. Like many little children in the Camden universe, they had been briefly forgotten and left to their own devices. The result of this was Sam and Charles both sampling a jar of paste while David looked on, disdainfully.
The twins were briefly scolded by their mother. Annie didn't use her 'look' on Sam. He was too young—his head might have exploded right then and there. David? Was another story. David was special. Ruthie had been training him.
Time flew by. Considering the small amount of things Mary and Carlos had, most of the time was spent standing around, awkwardly. In fact, the idea that Eric would throw out his back carrying any of the small boxes into the house caused brief laughter from his wife.
This was strange, of course, considering that Annie didn't laugh. It became even stranger when Annie exclaimed 'I'm not high!' in response to the strange looks she got.
After this, everyone decided it was time to leave. Eric, Annie and Ruthie gave half-hearted goodbyes to Mary and left. Eric was the only one to actually acknowledge Carlos on the way out.
This irritated Mary. But she had to take her lumps if she wanted to be remotely comfortable.
She wanted to be happy, but something just wasn't clicking for her.
While she and her child were living under a comfortable roof, Mary had—in the process of achieving this—given up her independence.
Independence was very important, especially dealing with people like Annie.
Matt was independent. Lucy was independent (at least, to Mary). Simon, to some degree, was independent. Ruthie, more due to her personality than to her situation, was independent. Even David (due to Ruthie's expert training) was independent.
Mary felt like she was in the same league as her little brother, Sam. The only difference was that she didn't eat paste or still wear diapers.
After all that hard work to get out from under her mother's thumb, she found herself back at square one. Living in her parents' house. Only this time, she would be paying rent (if she could manage it, of course).
She could figure it out. Had she made a good decision? Or a bad one? Time would tell. Time would certainly tell.