Wildwood

My birthday is in October. I don’t know what it’s like now, but when I was a child, October birthdays were taboo or something. It really messed up the school year. I remember it so well. One day, Sherwood Elementary, I was sitting in 3rd grade, and they came and got me and put me right back in the 2nd grade. I went home and told my mother, and she just shrugged. My mother was a drug addict. She forged prescriptions and had doctors all over town writing prescriptions for little blue pills with OP printed on them. I remember her also eating green capsules with little white beads in them. The green capsules were so pretty. I learned later that the pills were speed, but my mother never got out of bed. I helped her from time to time by lighting cigarettes for her on the gas stove. I puffed on them sometimes when I walked back down the hall but never inhaled. Salem’s.

One day I walked home from school. My mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so I went to open the door, and it was locked. I peered through the front window and the house was empty. Everything was gone except for the ironing board. It was in the kitchenette. I remember the sun shining into the house from the back windows, everything looked yellow. The ironing board looked so lonely. I remember feeling so horrible about the ironing board. The fact that my parents and sisters were gone didn’t occur to me. Why did they leave the ironing board? That did not make sense! My dad used that ironing board all the time!

The best I remember is I walked next door to Aunt Miriam’s. Aunt Miriam wasn’t related to us. But she had a niece and nephew who she kept all the time, Chris and Sheryl. We were friends. She also had a monkey named Percy. Percy was also our friend. Aunt Miriam’s house was always dark and smelled of animal urine and cigarette smoke. I spent the night there one night and everyone woke up in the middle of the night because Jewel Dawn was home and Aunt Miriam was making fried squash. Jewel Dawn was Chris and Sheryl’s mom. She was an overnight telephone operator. It gets kind of blurry, but I am sure that Miriam found my dad and he picked me up.

The day I came home to an empty house, our mother was gone.

 And so it was just my dad, my sisters and me. Seemingly overnight, we had a new house, a new school and a new life. I remember missing my mother because I thought I was supposed to, but the truth is that I didn’t. I woke up one morning in our new home to the sound of my dad unfolding the ironing board. Seals and Crofts were playing on the stereo. Summer Breeze. I was home.