Melanie Page

The Naturals

Mom

You can’t reason with her. It’s about like talking to a pond fish. The mouth opens and closes in “O” shapes.

O o O o (ad nauseum).

Sometimes food flips out and sputters in the air. Sometimes a rock that she (or the fish) has accidentally eaten.

When I was a kid, she threw my Barbies in the yard, said I didn’t pick them up, that she stepped on them all the time because I left them on the floor, which explains why Totally Hair Barbie had a missing breast, where a jagged plastic hole was the key evidence that my mom was a threat in her high heels.

Brother

“Shut up.”

“Quit worrying.”

“None of your damn business.”

It’s like pushing a button on a toy: one of these phrases will pop out, but I’m never sure which.

When I was in tenth grade and he was in twelfth, he would drive me to school at 7:00am, dump me off at the main entrance, and say, “get out.” School started at 7:40. He and his friends hung out in the parking lot, comparing rims, cherry bombs, and truck beds. I paced the hallway; he knew I didn’t have any friends.

Later that year, during my morning pacing, I saw a girl from my ceramics class. We were working on coil pots. She smiled, “Hey, girl,” and fell on the floor, humping the industrial-strength carpet. I knew she was having another seizure; they had mysteriously begun to occur earlier that semester, but I didn’t know what to do. Instead, I went to class early and sat in my desk, faking surprise when I heard people whisper excitedly, “That girl had another seizure! I heard she even peed her pants this time!” I couldn’t look her in the face after that, even though she had to know I abandoned her, my image imprinted on her corneas right before she hit the deck and seized, probably chewing her tongue to bits.

Dad

I think he doesn’t get enough sex from Mom.

The last time I went to visit I slept on the couch, as usual. They put all of their random, useless crap in my old bedroom and closed the door. Lying on the mushy cushions, facing the back of the couch, I’m started awake; it’s too quite for Mom and Dad’s house. They’re usually noisy creatures, banging pans to make eggs and clinking coffee glasses to make me wake up, too, at 6:30am. But it’s still night, the windows dark, and the dog snoring in her cage. I lift my body to roll over, one eye open, and see a naked bouncing breast on TV, the owner’s “O” face completely silent. Dad thinks I’m going to catch him watching Skinemax and immediately shuts off the big screen, walking with sleek definition into his own room. Mom’s already asleep, but he closes their door with a big click. I can’t tell if I’m supposed to laugh, so I do, but then I feel like I don’t even know my own father, willing to watch soft porn ten feet from his visiting college daughter.

He used to call me a rag head when I was a little girl, because I refused to comb my hair and I loved Raggedy Ann and Andy. I had a giant plastic strawberry toy box that I kept their tiny figures in, along with a small army of friends and a village of houses. When I was a junior in high school, and the planes swooped into the towers, Dad wasn’t allowed to call me his little rag head anymore.

Brother

We’re at a college girl’s apartment. My brother is pissing in the corner of her bedroom. The carpet gets dark, darker. I am so drunk that I hit on the college girl’s little brother. He’s technically a minor, just seventeen, but he looks older and wears a mesh trucker hat. Because my apartment is a mile away, I drive him to my place. In the darkness of my tiny rented bedroom, he pulls off his pants, and I laugh.

“Kid, I can’t beelief I brot you heres. I’m waashted. Shorry I lafted. Put yer pantsh back on.”

Back at the party, I tell my brother what happened, and he laughs, too.

“Don’t worry about it, and shut the hell up!”

“Yeah?”

“Just find a condom and you can fuck whoever you want!”

This was before the Xanax 0.25 milligram tabs that came in bottles with 60 pills.

Mom

Sometimes I don’t come home.

The one summer I lived with Mom and Dad, I thought I’d hang myself from the rafters in the garage, even though they were dirty and housed spiders. I’m twenty, and I stay at a guy’s house almost every night. I get off work at 11pm. He’s got a big bed and plays guitar like Stevie Ray Vaughn. Mom tries to ground me by making me help her and Dad clean the garage. I think, good. Now it will be prepared, should I decide to hang myself. This was before the Effexor XR 75 milligram, extended release capsules that come in bottles of 90 pills. Sometimes I call her Black Betty and dance around singing the guitar riff. When she danced too, that was the best, even if the skin under her arms did resemble wings.

Brother

My brother isn’t convinced that reading is necessary. When I pee at his house, I flip through the magazines in the big basket next to the toilet. Most of them are porn with girls in cowboy hats. The men wear leather boots with little heels and spurs. Giddy-up. My brother’s girlfriend, who recently moved in with him, has a copy of Pamela Anderson’s Star in the basket for her reading pleasure. I conclude that everyone likes to read while they’re in the bathroom. The cover is hot pink and silver. I want her to read something else, but I can understand why lines like “SHUCK ME SUCK ME EAT ME RAW” are so enticing. There’s even a part about how to do anal properly.

Dad

When we were kids, Mom always made dinner. During her one-year stint of Night College, Dad talked me into making hot dogs and macaroni & cheese every night to reinforce my independence, ultimately shirking his. But, when Mom did make dinner, Dad often snuck up behind her, hugging her from behind. I always thought it looked romantic, but she called him a pig and said “not in front of the kids, you hound.”

I guess his actions made her think of her dad, who used to flip up her mom’s shirt and expose her dirty breasts. Grandma still looks dirty. She smells bad too. And she always has food in her dentures, but I never, ever tell her. I don’t like her enough to do that.

Mom

“Don’t be hatin’.”

“Where on earth did you pick up that kind of language, Ma?” The phone is barely near my ear or mouth.

“I’ve been listening to a radio station out of Detroit. Ain’t nothin’ but a hoochie mamma.”

“Oh, for chistsakes.”

“Watch your language.”

“Do you even know what a hoochie mamma is?”

“My hoo hoo.”

“You can’t even make the effort to speak like an adult?”

Mom says that she can never do anything right when she is around me, crying her eyes out, her little concave chin quivering. I’m sure she can get her act together and be like a human, which she rarely does.

“Maaa, you drive me nuts; you pull this crap every time I come visit you!”

This is around the time I started using Triamcinolone Acetonide Cream USP, 0.5%--it’s a steroid to stop immense itching caused by anxiety that can’t be conquered by over-the-counter drugs.

“Can I come visit next Friday?” she sniffles.

Dad

One time when I was a tiny kid, I snuck out of my bed, down the hallway, and peeked around the corner. Dad was watching TV, and these two women were naked, rubbing each other’s crotches. Sometimes they kissed. I had no clue, but still, Dad saw me, a three-year-old spy, and yelled, “Hey!”

When I actually learned what sex was in fifth grade from a book my mom picked up at a garage sale that summer entitled GROWING UP, copyright 1965, Dad’s midnight porn was the first thing that came to mind. That, and the fifteen feet long boa constrictor that was the fifth grade class pet. She ate mice every two weeks. Once, she tried to eat the teacher’s hand. He yanked it out after the expandable jaws flew shut, and blood splattered on the white brick walls behind him.

Mom

We ended up with an old gray and brown barn cat. My mom’s dad said he was going to shoot it, because it kept shitting in his garage, because the floor was so dirty, it was like the beaches of Lake Michigan. I think it’s safe to say that all farmers have guns, and all farmers are willing to shoot a nameless cat, especially one that is, logically, shitting in dirt, like it’s supposed to. I could never understand a word he said because he mumbled and spoke too fast in low tones. Now he’s old and crippled, and grandma doesn’t see him because he was verbally abusive all twenty-three years they were together, which I already knew. When she does visit him in the odiferous old-folks’ home, we ask why, and grandma yells, “Mind your own fucking business!” This is not surprising.

This is around the time I start taking Bentyl, 20 milligrams, in bottles containing 40 pills per refill. These beauties stop stomach spasms, which cause diarrhea, which all start in the first place from being anxious or nervous. The diarrhea causes constipation in the next few days, so I started taking fiber tablets to balance out my tortured digestive system.

Brother

No one believed my brother and I were related when we went to high school. He told everyone his name was Paulo Lopez, the Mexican kid, and when he graduated he received a shirt from his girlfriend with his new last name across the shoulders, which he wore everywhere.

When you’re completely pale and blonde and your only brother is incredibly dark-skinned with black hair, you just can’t explain it to others. Not until some punk in biology snaps your bra and your brother threatens to kill him after school, sliding a note in the kid’s locker that reads, “I’m going to kill you after school, motherfucker.” When Mom asks what’s going to happen if the bra-snapper tells, my brother says he learned in government class that it’s just assault so far, not battery, so he’s okay.

Mom

Mom starts going to counseling for her emotions. Then to a counselor-recommended class for food issues. Then she goes to the counselor whenever she has a random problem that any sane-minded friend could talk her through. Phone calls home from college usually consist of: “Ma… Ma…. Ma…. will ya calm down? Ma? Ma, just stop a moment. Ma, don’t waste their time at the clinic with that crap. Ma, ma, people are allowed to be mean; it’s their right as an American. People don’t have to like you.”

Now Mom reads new-age spiritual books, each one a bible for various experiences. She always tries to convince me to read her scriptures, like I have time at college, and she offers to loan them to me. I take them to be nice, but put them on a shelf in a stack and plan to take them home at Christmas after using Wikipedia to get the gist of each book.

The longer it goes on, the worse it gets: she starts meditating, thinking of a river, her problems as leaves drifting away on the river. “Ohhhhhmmm…..Ohhhhhmmmmmm….” over and over again.

Dad

All I can think of is the fish with the rock in its mouth, and if Dad has had sex lately. Sometimes he comes home from the bar, dollar-pint Thursdays, and hugs her a lot more than normal. She gets pissed because she has to work in the morning, and hugging is an inconvenience. I can just picture her lying on her back, limbs Rigor-mortis rigid, Dad trying to get in.

Mom

All the “ooohmm-ing” has led mom to believe that getting back to nature is what her frantic family needs, although none of us is frantic except her. To be agreeable, I promise to live with them over the summer to save money and be sociable. We move to Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula, purchasing a cabin from a hippy and his girlfriend. The mid-thirties hippy meets us on the property the day we move in to explain all the ins and outs of the dwelling. He claims his girlfriend peddles a stationary bike for hours to power the generator, and I believe him, watching the calf muscles pounding through her skin. She looks Native or Hispanic, but I find out later that she is just Polish, and her grandma makes them eat blood soup at Christmas.

“The toilet,” the hippy says, “is utilized with peat moss.” Apparently, when I sit on the seat, a sliding door will open under me to a bucket. I will crap, wipe, put the toilet paper in a garbage can, then sprinkle peat moss on my poop. Within days, he has indicated, we will have a bucket of high quality dirt to throw in our back yard. Mom wants to plant flowers in the fertilizer; Dad threatens to leave.

Dad won’t go along with it at first, until they compromise and called this new house the “summer home.” No one thought it would be permanent. Even though we have a typewriter with a backspace button and cable TV as our link to the technological world, the cabin is rustic, even for us. The place is more like a retreat for anthropophobics. On the northern side is a steep decline to trees and trees and trees. Standing on the back deck is the only way we can see a mile-and-a-half away our closest neighbor, Wal-Mart. I asked my mom if she is all right, seeing other people, being exposed to that big scary world out there.

“De nada.”

“Ma, where did you learn Spanish, Ma?”

“From the Mexicans.”

“Go on…”

“That’s it. Mexicans.”

Mom grew up in a town seventeen miles from our house, and I suppose there are Mexican immigrants picking beans in the field. I suppose. The people in her hometown are so poor that camping in the backyard is a good time. This is a real step up for her. I let her hold my hand and forgive her just a little for who she is.