Let's Pretend This Never Happened (7 page)

Suddenly the bright, sunny day erupted into a violent hailstorm. We ran toward the porch, covering our heads with the magazine. Grandlibby stepped outside authoritatively, with one eyebrow cocked. “
So.
You see what happens when you look at dirty pictures?” she intoned knowingly. “
It hails.
And do you know where hail comes from?” she asked sweetly.

“Cumulous clouds?” I volunteered. I had recently made a B-plus in science, and I felt moderately sure this was the right answer.

“No
,” Grandlibby replied. “Hail comes from hell. The devil sent it because he’s happy that you’re reading evil garbage.”

Michelle and I looked at each other. It
had
seemed suspicious for a hailstorm to erupt on a perfectly clear day, but we sensed that Grandlibby’s logic was flawed. If the devil was happy, then why would he send hail to distract us from our newfound love of pornography?
“Certainly,”
we thought,
“she must be confused.”
But what
did
worry us was the fact that the hailstorm had occurred only seconds after we’d heard Grandlibby praying in the house. It was disconcerting.
Did
my grandmother have some kind of direct line to God? Had all those years of funneling money to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker finally paid off? We weren’t sure, but felt it was better not to chance it. I placed the
Playboy
back on top of the neighbor’s trash can, feeling that if
we
could no longer partake in its wonder, surely the next dumpster divers would appreciate my generosity and charity, qualities I felt sure God would admire.

Years later I realized that my grandmother had been right all along about the magazine being rubbish, and I happily bypassed the glossy but shallow
Playboy
s for her old, battered copies of
Housewife Confessions
and
True Hollywood Scandals
, which allowed for almost no nudity but a much stronger story line than
Playboy
could ever deliver. “Don’t tell your parents,” Grandlibby said with a sweet grin.

I smiled back. She had nothing to worry about.

Jenkins, You Motherfucker

When I was little my mother used to say that I had “a nervous stomach.” That was what we called “severe untreated anxiety disorder” back in the seventies, when everything was cured with Flintstone vitamins and threats to send me to live with my grandmother if I didn’t stop hiding from people in my toy box.

By age seven I realized that there was something wrong with me, and that most children didn’t hyperventilate and throw up when asked to leave the house. My mother called me “quirky.” My teachers whispered “neurotic.” But deep down I knew there was a better word for what I was.
Doomed.

Doomed because every Christmas I would end up hiding under my aunt’s kitchen table from the sheer panic of being around so many people. Doomed because I couldn’t give a speech in class without breaking into uncontrollable hysterical laughter as the rest of my classmates looked on. Doomed because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that something horrible and nameless was going to happen and that I was helpless to stop it. And not just the normal terrible things that small children worry about, like your father waking you up with a bloody hand puppet. Things like nuclear holocaust. Or carbon monoxide poisoning. Or having to leave the
house and interact with people who weren’t my mother. It was most likely something I was just born with, but I can’t help but suspect that at least some of my social anxiety could be traced back to a single episode.

WHEN I WAS
in the third grade, my father rushed inside one night to tell us all to come out and look at what he had in the back of his pickup. I was young, but still well trained enough to know that nothing good could come of this.

My sister and I shared a wary look as my mother peered guardedly from the kitchen window to see whether anything large was moving in my father’s truck. It was. She gave us a look that my father always seemed to interpret as “How lucky you girls are to have such an adventurous father,” but which I always read as “One of you will probably not survive your father’s enthusiasm. Most likely it will be Lisa, since she’s smaller and can’t run as fast, but she
is
quite good at hiding in small spaces, so really it’s anyone’s game.” More likely, though, it was something like “
Christ
, why won’t someone hurry up and invent Xanax?”

Usually when my father wanted us to come outside to see what was in the bed of his truck, it was only because whatever was in there was either too bloody and/or vicious for him to carry inside, so we all stayed in the relative safety of our house and asked a series of questions designed to indicate the level of danger of whatever Daddy would be exposing us to. We’d learned to interpret his answers accordingly, and had invented what we would later refer to as “The Dangerous Thesaurus of My Father.”

An abridged version:

“You’re really going to like this.” = “I have no idea what children enjoy.”

“Put your dark coat on.” = “You’re probably going to get blood on you.”

“It’s not going to hurt you.” = “I hope you like Bactine.”

“It’s
very
excited.” = “It has rabies.”

“Now, don’t get
too
attached.” = “I got this monkey for free because it has a virus.”

“It likes you!” = “This wild boar is now your responsibility.”

“Now,
this
is really interesting.” = “You’ll still have nightmares about this when you’re thirty.”

“Don’t scream or you’ll scare it.” = “You should really be running now.”

“It just wants to give you a kiss.” = “It’s probably going to eat your face off.”

My father was perpetually disappointed by our lack of trust, but I reminded him that just last week he’d brought his own mother a box he’d filled with an angry live snake that he’d found on the road on the way to her house. He tried to defend himself, but my sister and I had both been there when my father laid the box on the front yard and called his mother out to see “a surprise.” Then he nudged the box open with his foot, the snake jumped out, and my grandmother and I ran inside. Lisa ran in the opposite direction and tried to jump into the bed of the truck, which was incredibly shortsighted, as that was exactly where my father stored the skinned, unidentifiable animals that he planned to boil down in order to study their bone structure. The bed of my father’s pickup truck was like something that would have ended up in Dante’s
Inferno
, if Dante had ever spent any time in rural Texas.

This memory was still vivid in our minds as my father pushed us all outside into the cold darkness to show us whatever horrifying booty he’d managed to capture, shoot, or run over. My sister and I hung back nervously as my mother braced herself with a deep breath and leaned forward uneasily to stare into the eyes of a dozen grim live birds, who looked as if they’d been driven through hell. A few squawked indignantly, but most huddled numbly in the corner, no doubt shell-shocked from the windblown journey, coupled with being forced to share the pickup bed with several
animal carcasses my father had probably picked up for taxidermy work. To the birds, I assume it must’ve been very much like accepting a ride from a stranger, only to get in the back of the van to find several murdered hikers who were being made into lamp shades.

My father explained that the birds were well-behaved Wisconsin jumbo quail, and my mother countered that the birds were, in fact, rowdy
turkeys
. He explained that he’d gotten them in trade for the rusty crossbow he’d brought home a few months ago, and technically the birds seemed the lesser of the two evils, so she shook her head and went back to cleaning. My mother was a woman who knew how to pick her battles, and she probably realized that the
quails-that-were-actually-turkeys
would be less dangerous to all of us.

Those birds loved my father with a white-hot passion. They followed him around, reverently, in what I can only imagine was some sort of Patty Hearst Stockholm syndrome, no doubt strengthened by the sight of him carrying dead animals into the house every few days. My father was the only person they seemed to tolerate. As the months wore on, the turkeys grew bigger and louder and more obnoxious, and would roost on low tree branches, screaming at my mother every time she left the house. My father insisted that the quails were just eccentric, and that we were misinterpreting the loud, angry gobbling, which he maintained was simply the birds singing with joy. He implied that our response to the quail was probably just an indication of our own guilty consciences, and my mother implied that he probably needed to be stabbed repeatedly with a fork in the thigh, but she said it more with her eyes than with her mouth, and my father seldom paid enough attention to either.

As the birds grew larger and meaner, I thanked God that we had no neighbors near enough to witness the turkey’s behavior. I was already plagued with insecurity and shyness, and the embarrassing angry turkey attacks were doing nothing for my already low self-confidence. My sister and I tried to ignore the whole situation, which was difficult, because my father insisted on naming the turkeys and treating them like pets. Pets who
would angrily run at you in a full-out attack, nipping at your tiny ankles as you ran in circles around the yard, screaming for someone to open the door to the house and let you in.

Lisa tried to convince my father that the birds (led by an unpredictable turkey named Jenkins, for some reason) wanted to eat us, but my father assured us that “quail don’t even
have
teeth, so even if they
did
manage to kill you,
they certainly wouldn’t be able to eat you
.” I suppose he thought that was comforting.

“Do
turkeys
have teeth?” my sister asked him archly.

My father tried to lecture her on respecting your elders, but he got distracted trying to calm down Jenkins, who had lodged himself on the mailman’s hood and was violently attacking at the windshield wiper, while gobbling accusingly at the baffled postman.

We lived on a rural route, so our mailman was fairly used to being besieged by stray dogs, but he’d been utterly unprepared for an angry turkey attack and indignantly yelled,
“You need to lock those damn turkeys up if you can’t control them.”

My father lifted the large bird off the hood, with more than a little exertion, and tucked him under his arm, saying (with a surprising amount of dignity for a man with a turkey under his arm), “Sir, this bird is a
quail
. And his name is Jenkins.” I was surprised at my father’s elegance and poise at that moment, especially in light of the fact that Jenkins was snorting furiously at the mailman while shaking the limp rubber part of the windshield wiper blade in his beak like a whip. I was
not
surprised when we found a note in our mailbox the following day, informing us that we would no longer be allowed to tape a quarter to our letters in lieu of a stamp, and that all further packages would be left by the mailbox rather than being delivered to the door. This was upsetting to my mother, both because she hated to have to drive into town to buy stamps, and also because the mailman’s idea of leaving packages at the mailbox was more like him flinging our mail in the general direction of the house without braking. The turkeys adapted to this by quickly gathering up the mail in the yard, which would have been
helpful if they’d brought it to the house like a dog, but instead they’d carry the letters around proudly, as if they were important turkey documents that my mother was attempting to steal from them. She’d try to convince my sister and me that it would be a fun game to try to get the mail from the turkeys each day, but we declined, pointing out that a good game of keep-away shouldn’t end with bloody ankles and the threat of bird flu.

It was far safer for our social standing and physical well-being to avoid the turkeys altogether, so my sister and I began putting together a defensive strategy to protect us from bird assault.
Flashdance
had just come out, and I tried to convince my mom to buy me leg warmers (both to help me fit in with the cool kids at school, and also to protect my legs from turkey attacks), but she refused, saying that wearing leg warmers in the Texas summer was a total waste of money. Instead I ended up just enviously staring at everyone
else’s
leg warmers, who I suspected probably didn’t even
have
turkeys. Lisa and I attempted to fashion ankle armor out of empty soup cans that we’d opened on both sides, but my feet were too big to fit into them, and Lisa’s feet were so little that when she ran, the tin cans would clink loudly together and simply attract the attention of the vicious herd. She was basically like a tiny, pigtailed dinner bell. I considered telling her that the ankle armor wasn’t helping, but that was tantamount to telling a fellow zebra that he’s covered in steak sauce right before you both have to cross a parking lot full of lions. Self-preservation is a narcissistic bedfellow, and I wasn’t proud of my actions, but I comforted myself in the knowledge that if Lisa did fall prey to the vicious birds I would wait a week—out of respect—before claiming her toys for my own.

Lisa had heard that turkeys were so stupid that if it rained, they would look up to see what was falling on them and drown from the rain falling into their noses, so we began to pray for rain, which was promptly answered by a full-on drought. Probably because you’re not supposed to ask God to murder your pets. We often talked about spraying the water hose on them in order to weed out the stupider ones, but we could never bring ourselves to do it, both because it seemed too cruel (even in self-defense)
and also because our father would probably find it suspicious if all his turkeys died in a freak rainstorm that had apparently broken out only next to the garden hose.