Let's Pretend This Never Happened (5 page)

1.
Is “defeatedly” a real word? As in, “She sighed defeatedly as spell-check implied that ‘defeatedly’ isn’t a real word.” Fuck it. It’s going in the book, and I’m pretty sure that
makes
it a real word. Me and Shakespeare.
Making shit up as we go along.

Stanley, the Magical Talking Squirrel

When I tell people that my father is kind of a total lunatic, they laugh and nod knowingly. They assure me that theirs is too, and that he’s just a “typical father.”

And they’re probably right, if the typical father runs a full-time taxidermy business out of the house, and shows up at the local bar with a miniature donkey and a Teddy Roosevelt impersonator, and thinks
other
people are weird for making such a big deal out of it. If the typical father says things like “Happy birthday! Here’s a bathtub of raccoons!” or “We’ll have to take your car. Mine has too much blood in it,” then yeah, he’s
totally
normal. Still, I don’t remember any of the kids from
Charles in Charge
feeling around the deep freeze for the Popsicles and instead pulling out an enormous frozen rattlesnake that Charles had thrown in while it was still alive. Maybe I missed that episode. We didn’t watch a lot of TV.

That’s why whenever people try to tell me how
their
“insane father” would sometimes fall asleep on the toilet, or occasionally catch the house on fire, I put my finger to their lips and whisper, “Hush, little rabbit. Let me give you perspective.”

And then I tell them this story:

It was close to midnight when I heard my father rumbling down the hall,
and then suddenly the light switched on in my bedroom. My mom unsuccessfully tried to convince him to go to bed. “Let the girls sleep,” she mumbled from their bedroom across the hall. My mother had learned that my father could not be dissuaded when a “great thought” hit him, but she went through the motions of arguing with him (mainly to point out what was normal and what was crazy, so that my sister and I would be able to recognize it as we got older).

I was eight, and my sister, Lisa, was six. My father, a giant bohemian man who looked like a dangerous Zach Galifianakis, lumbered into our tiny bedroom. Lisa and I shared a room most of our lives. Our bedroom was so small that there wasn’t much room for anything other than the bed we shared, and a dresser. The closet doors had been removed long ago to give the illusion of more space. The illusion had failed. I’d spent hours trying to create small bastions of privacy. I’d construct forts with old quilts, and beg my mom to let me live in the garage with the chickens. I’d shut myself in the bathroom (the only room with a lock), but with one bathroom for four people, and a father with irritable bowel syndrome, this was not a good long-term solution. Occasionally I would empty my wooden toy box, curl up inside, and shut the lid, preferring the leg cramps and quiet darkness of the pine box to the outside world . . . much like a sensory deprivation chamber, but for orphans. My mom was concerned, but not concerned enough to actually do anything about it. There are few advantages to growing up poor, and not having money for therapy is the biggest.

My father crouched on the edge of our bed, and Lisa and I blinked, our eyes slowly adjusting to the bright light. “Wake up, girls,” my dad boomed, his face flushed with excitement, cold, or hysteria. He was dressed in his usual camouflage hunting clothes, and the scent of deer urine wafted around the room. Hunters often use animal pee to cover their scent, and my father splashed it on like other men used Old Spice. Texas is a state that had once outlawed sodomy and fellatio, but is totally cool with men giving themselves golden showers in the name of deer hunting.

My dad held a Ritz cracker box, which was weird, because we never had
brand-name food in the house, so I was all, “Hell, yeah, this is
totally
worth waking me up for,” but then I realized that there was something alive and moving in the cracker box, which was disturbing; less because my father had brought some live animal in a cracker box into our room, and more because whatever was in there was ruining some perfectly good crackers.

Let me preface this by saying that my dad was always bringing home crazy-ass shit. Rabbit skulls, rocks shaped like vegetables, angry possums, glass eyes, strange drifters he picked up on the road, a live porcupine in a rubber tire. My mother (a patient and stoic lunch lady) seemed secretly convinced that she must’ve committed some terrible act in a former life to deserve this lot in life, and so she forced a smile and set another place for the drifter/junkie at the dinner table with the quiet dignity usually reserved for saints or catatonics.

Daddy leaned toward us and told us rather conspiratorially that this box held our newest pet. This is the same man who once brought home a baby bobcat, let it loose in the house, and forgot to mention it because he “didn’t think it was important,” so for him to be excited I assumed the box had to contain something truly amazing, like a two-headed lizard, or a baby chupacabra. He opened the box and whispered excitedly, “Come out and meet your new owners, Pickle.”

Almost as if on cue, a tiny head poked out of the cracker box. It was a smallish, visibly frightened squirrel, its eyes glazed over from fright. My sister squealed with delight and the squirrel disappeared back into the box. “Hey now, you’ve gotta be quiet or you’ll scare it,” my father warned. And yeah, Lisa’s squeal might have been jarring, but more likely it was just freaked the fuck out by our house. My taxidermist father had decorated practically every spare wall in our home with wide-eyed foxes, leering giant elk, snarling bear heads, and wild boars complete with bloody fangs from eating slow villagers. If I was that squirrel I would have totally shit myself.

Lisa and I were silent, and the tiny squirrel tentatively peeked over the
top of the box. It was cute, as far as squirrels go, but all I could think was, “
Really?
A fucking squirrel?
This
is what you got me out of bed for?” And true, I may not have said “fucking” in my head, because I was eight, but the sentiment was totally there. This is a man who throws his kids in the car to chase after tornadoes for fun, and who once gave me a five-foot-long ball python when he forgot my birthday, so the whole squirrel-in-a-box thing seemed kinda anticlimactic.

My father noticed the nonplussed look on my face and leaned in further, like he was telling us a secret he didn’t want the squirrel to overhear.
“This,”
he whispered, “is no ordinary squirrel.
This
,” he said with a dramatic pause, “is a
magic
squirrel.”

My sister and I stared at each other, thinking the same thing:
“This,”
we thought to ourselves, “is our father clearly thinking we are idiots.” Lisa and I were both well versed in our dad’s storytelling abilities, and we knew that he was not a man to be trusted. Just last week he’d woken us up and asked whether we wanted to go to the movies.
Of course
we wanted to go to the movies. Money was always tight, so seeing a movie was one of those rare glimpses into the lives of the wealthy few who could splurge on such luxuries as matinees and central heating. These people in the audience, I felt sure, were the same people who could afford real winter shoes instead of bread sacks stuffed with newspapers.

Lisa and me in the front yard in our (barely visible) bread-sack shoes.

When Lisa and I were practically bouncing off the walls from the sheer excitement of seeing a movie, he’d send us off to call both movie theaters in the nearby town and have us write down every showing so we could decide what to see. We’d listen to the recording of the movies over and over to get it all down, and after thirty minutes of intense labor we’d compiled the list, and multiple reasons why
The Muppet Movie
was the only logical choice. Then my father would merrily agree and we would all cheer, and he would bend down and say, “So. Do you have any money?” My sister and I looked at each other. Of course we didn’t have any money. We were wearing bread-sack shoes. “Well,” said my father, with a big grin spreading across his face, “I don’t have any money either. But it sure was fun when we
thought
we were going, huh?”

Some people might read this and think that my father was a sadistic asshole, but he was not. He honestly thought that the time that Lisa and I spent planning a movie date that would never happen would be a great break from what we would have been doing had he not brought it up (i.e., hot-wiring the neighbor’s tractor, or playing with the family shovel). I wonder if one day my father will get as much of a kick out of this concept when Lisa and I call to tell him we’re going to pick him up from the retirement home for Christmas, but then never actually show up. “But it sure was exciting when you thought you were coming home, though, right?” we’ll cheerfully ask him on New Year’s Eve. “Seriously, though, we’ll
totally
be there to pick you up tomorrow. No enemas and heart meds for you! We’re going to the circus! It’s gonna be great! You should totally trust us!”
He totally shouldn’t trust us.

These were the very things running through my mind on the night my dad woke us up with the “magical” squirrel. My father seemed to sense I was plotting a nursing-home/circus-related revenge, and his eyebrows knit together as he attempted to gain back our trust. “
Seriously
, this
is
a magic squirrel,” he said. “Look. I’ll prove it to you.” He looked into the box. “Hey, little squirrel. What’s my oldest daughter’s name?” The squirrel looked at my father, then at us . . . and damned if that squirrel didn’t stretch up and whisper right into my father’s ear.

“He said, ‘Jenny,’” my dad stated quite smugly.

It was impressive, but both my sister and I were quick to point out that we didn’t actually
hear
the squirrel say my name, and that it was more likely that the squirrel was just looking for food in my father’s ear hair. My father sighed, clearly disappointed in his cynical children, or the ear hair
comment.
“Fine,”
he said gruffly, giving us a frustrated huff and looking back into the cracker box. “Little squirrel . . . what is two plus three?”

And this amazing, magical, wonderful squirrel raised his squirrely little paw.
Five. Fucking. Times.

Immediately I realized that this magical squirrel would be my ticket out of this tiny West Texas town. I would parlay this squirrel into money, toys, and appearances on
The Tonight Show
. I would call him Stanley, and I would hire a Cuban seamstress named Juanita to make tiny leisure suits for him. Just as I was considering whether Stanley would look more dashing in a fedora or a beret, my father smiled broadly and ripped open the box that was hiding the little squirrel.

Stanley looked . . .
strange
. I dimly realized that his stomach was huge and distended, bowing out like an enormous beer belly. “Juanita will have her work cut out for her,” I thought to myself. And then I realized that Stanley’s tiny back feet were swinging awfully listlessly, and that my father’s hand was STUCK UP INSIDE THE BODY OF THE SQUIRREL.

“Holy fuck, you psychopath!” is what I would have said if I hadn’t been eight years old. Fresh blood was drying on my father’s sleeve, and my mind struggled to piece together what was happening. For a brief moment I thought that Stanley the Magical Squirrel had been alive up until only seconds before, when my father had chosen to give him some sort of bizarre colorectal exam gone horribly wrong. Then I realized that this was, more likely, a squirrel my father had found dead on the road, and that he had sliced it open and decided to use it as some sort of grotesque hand puppet culled from the very bowels of hell.

Lisa giggled and stuck her hand up the ass of the dead squirrel. The strain had been too much for her fragile little mind. At the age of only six, she had snapped. As she shoved the fresh carcass up to her elbow, I made a mental note to start checking out the backs of milk cartons, certain that my real parents, who had most likely misplaced me at a movie theater, must be very worried about me by now. I assured myself that they were probably at a PETA meeting, making large donations in the name of their
long-lost daughter. “Oh, she would have
loved
this,” my real mother would say consolingly to my father (the count) as they worked diligently to spread their successful prairie dog rescue mission to neighboring counties.

Many years later, my sister had a daughter named Gabi. My father (apparently misinterpreting my need to bring up the dead-squirrel story every Christmas for the rest of my life as homage to happier times, rather than the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder) decided he should bless his four-year-old granddaughter with the never-ending therapy that resulted from the talking-magic-carcass-in-a-box. He’d tanned a raccoon body, placed the stiffened corpse in a large cereal box, and had hidden it under the guest bed (apparently waiting for the perfect moment to scar Gabi for life), and then he forgot all about it. Weeks later, Gabi found the mutilated raccoon carcass under the bed and (thinking it to be a very stiff puppet) wandered around the house playing with her new friend and freaking the shit out of the cat. She crept into my father’s room, where he was taking a nap, and quietly laid the dead raccoon on my father’s pillow, like a message from the Godfather. The dead raccoon’s shriveled paw gently grazed my father’s sleeping face as Gabi moved the raccoon closer so it could give her grandfather an Eskimo kiss. “Papaw,” she whispered sweetly, “wake up and say hewwo.”