1951
Jake Carver had been mean to me, and I was angry, stomping home with my pink bow holding my hair from my eyes and little eight year old chicken legs bringing me home from my humiliating day at school. I sniffed away the angry tears, my shirt torn at the sleeve and skinned knees. He had called my mother a bad word, probably had heard it from his own parents, jerk. I had tackled him on the playground, and straddled the little worm on the cold cement, paddling his pitiful head with my fists. I didn't even know what the word meant, but I did know that whore was a bad word, and that my mother wasn't one. But he had said it, plain as day, and I had to teach him a lesson. Unfortunately, the teacher felt that this lesson was not educational and had sent me home for the rest of the day while Jake got away with his mean comments, sitting in the office nursing his bloody nose with his mommy dearest fussing over her chubby little soap boy while giving me evil looks. I deserved them, according to her, I had hindered her son and I was the daughter of an adulteress, a jezebel. Scorn her from your midst, punish her body to save her soul, that's what the teacher had said in Jane Eyre, and now they were applying the same principle. And they sent me home. It had been November.
I walked home and arrived just as one o'clock sounded and our huge house vibrated with the single dongs of the dozen or so clocks that were situated around the many rooms. I opened the door, hoping to find my mother in the kitchen to clean up my skinned knees and wipe away my angry tears. She was the quintessential 1950s house wife and my god. The world revolved around my beautiful mother, my boring corporate father was merely a facet and my older brother was my joker. Charlie had always been an entertainer.
My shoes clicked on the lonely marble floor as I walked down the front hall toward the kitchen, but found nobody in there. I turned around and walked upstairs toward my parent's room. Everything was eerily clean and spotless, usually my mother kept the house fairly neat, with her army of housemaids. But everything looked perfect, and the white carpet made the dried trail of blood from my knee stand out as I tip toed through the house. I came into my mother's room, everything just as clean and beautiful. Mommy was on the bed, sleeping it seemed. She was dressed in her silk slip and chemise, her legs bare and pale. Her auburn hair was spread out in an amber puddle on the pillow. She was ghostly white, her red nails clutching the bed spread and I approached her quietly. I was so proud of my beautiful mommy. I finally approached her peaceful figure and laid my hand on her shoulder. Her skin was so cold and I jerked my fingers back as if I had been burned. That scared me.
"Mommy?" I whispered, waiting for her eyelashes to flutter, "Mommy? Are you awake?"
She didn't move. I shook her. She still was as stiff as ever. I began to panic and shook her harder, crying quietly, calling her name, then I broke down and started to sob loudly and threw myself beside her and wrapped her frigid arm around my shaking body, crying so hard. Oh my god, no, no this isn't happening. It isn't anything, she's playing with me, and she's okay. Oh god why won't you move!? Oh Jesus! I scream in my dreams shaking the wax woman on her bed of clean white sheets and I don't get anywhere, and I can't go on like this, oh god why?
Daddy found me that way when he got home two hours later; bringing his lawyer to tell his wife they were getting a divorce. Instead, he ended up finding his daughter crying, curled up beside his dead wife. Mother took some bad medicine that made her die because she couldn't live without daddy.
Mother went to heaven eight years ago; she became an angel on my birthday