Flesh Wounds (excerpt)
For my mother, the news that her ex-husband’s house was being condemned arrived as if from the veritable mouths of angels...
Today is my mother’s deathaversary. She’s been dead five years now. My biological father is also dead. To mark the occasion, I thought I’d share this excerpt from the work in progress, which is very much about both of them, as well as being about me.
My father’s house was condemned by the city in 2015. The glee in my mother’s voice when she told me was audible, just this side of a cackle. Hypervigilant housekeeping standards were part and parcel of her sense of self-worth and always had been. Long-term kidney disease and the aftermath of a transplant had only cemented her belief in the moral power of bleach and Lysol, hot water and a stiff scrub brush and someone, preferably her daughter, on her hands and knees getting into the corners and cracks and crevices. For my mother, the news that her ex-husband’s house was being condemned arrived as if from the veritable mouths of angels, singing loudly that she’d been right all along.
She had, obviously. It was in the paper, a little public announcement no more than a hundred words long. Over a decade of housing department complaints had gone unanswered, property taxes also apparently long unpaid. The city’s report called it a blight, a nuisance, a health and safety hazard. Across my back and down my arms my skin tightened and prickled, my stomach knotted. As if I were afraid someone would meet my gaze, my eyes unfocused, my head tilted down and away.
The official report held no details of the squalor. It didn’t need to. Unasked-for details supplied themselves from memory. I hadn’t been in the house in twenty years. The dog shit, dried and crumbling on the wall-to-wall carpet in what had once been my brother’s bedroom, had shocked me then. The dog had been dead some time. Mosquito larvae wriggled in the water of the unflushed toilet in the bathroom at the top of the stairs.
On the stairwell wall between the second floor and attic a long cascade of brown stain was mummified in plaster and paint. It had come from the leak in the sewage pipe that descended from the tiny garish red-and-black attic bathroom that had been mine until the leak made itself obvious. My father, informed that a leak was showing through the wall, marched upstairs and turned off the water to the bathroom. Problem solved. I tried my best to avoid the murky darkness of the master bathroom shower, where the grout gradually blackened and the water swirled up around my ankles bringing clots of something horrid up from the drain along with it, keeping me tense and terrified that another one would yet again brush against my foot. No one else in the house seemed to notice. Perhaps they just didn’t mind. I knew better than to complain. It would only get me compared to my mother.
I did not complain about the grease in the sink, the crusted backsplash, the pantry in which potatoes rotted and mice left ellipses dotted across the floor on the way to and from the dog food bag. I did not complain about the dead plants still in their pots and plant-hangers, the multiple colors of ooze in the bottoms of the refrigerator bins, the smell of the blankets that were thrown into the back hall for the dogs, never to be washed again.
I did not complain about the rat I saw in the basement eating dog shit, or maybe it was cat shit. I did not blame the dogs, or the cats. They had to go. They found places to do it. The dogs were let out, at least some of the time. The back yard was somehow meant to fend for itself. My father insisted that Nature took care of it, that the dogshit decomposed, which of course it did, but not so quickly that the yard wasn’t an unwalkable minefield. I pitied the dogs, untrained, scantily attended to. My father’s approach to dog ownership was essentially to act like an American tourist in France, doing a lot of shouting on the theory that loudness and anger would miraculously produce understanding. He bellowed commands the dogs had never been properly taught, and when reasonably enough they did not obey, he bellowed some more. And as with the ugly tourist, it all came with the air that his way was the right way, that knew better than you did, and you didn’t dare say otherwise.
You didn’t dare say otherwise about the rhododendrons swallowing the front porch, the dangling gutter, the dry-rotted plywood over the beams in the garage that was all that was keeping a tangled morass of fishing gear and ice chests and canoe paddles from crashing down into everything else that had been crammed, bicycles and old tires and lawnmowers and half-used rolls of chicken wire, into the space below. You didn’t dare say otherwise about the stink of mildew and worse that emanated from the cinderblock walls of the cellar even when by some miracle someone had cleaned up the shit on the floor. He always had an answer for it, and the answer was that I was being ridiculous, hung-up and anal-retentive, a control freak, a tight-ass. Just like my mother.
