piss
Under the gun again. Susan’s house was always a respite from what I considered to be the world. As a child your world is so tragically tight and there’s not much room to travel out past the concentric miseries in your family community and particular class standing and local ecosystem. I knew my mother father and Father Morissette who gave me wooden crosses when I was an altar server at the church and wore white robes with dirty white sneakers unlaced. I went to school and then I went home like everyone else. I played soccer and drank Gatorade and watched ABC Family. There wasn’t much to it all which made the small polyps in our world all the more inflamed. I went to my Aunt Susan’s quite a bit when my father was bad. She always had a bottle of wine labeled Bitch and a few of those tacky faceless angel figurines, which I think were gifts from the many old Catholic women in her life. On her fridge was a magnet of Michaelangelo’s David that you could dress in business casual or athleisure depending on which items you picked from his magnetic wardrobe. Her house was full of items you would find at a store that sells pins socks and Ruth Bader Ginsberg paraphernalia— things that swore and boasted ironic pop-art renditions of housewives. It was a place not quite suitable for children and I loved that more than anything else. Susan was a control freak and very judgmental. She was also terminally ill, so I never faulted her. I slept in her bed when I could and that was the nicest bed I’d ever slept in. Before she died her bathroom was a glue cave of hair products with half-intact TJ Maxx stickers and it was very, very clean. I had never lived anywhere that clean. When my father left the anchor pins of the house sagged into the earth and sighed with exhaustion, and my mother followed suit. The shutters fell off. We broke the front window and it remained that way for years. My mother slept on the couch in the blue light of every infomercial ever. Behind certain bookshelves and dressers were hard accumulations of cat shit I tried to obscure from my friends when they came to sleep over, which they always wanted to do since we could stay up as late as we wanted and take sips of the stale Fruit Loop-flavored vodka my mother kept in the garage next to the broken lawnmower. Having outgrown my children’s bunk bed at eleven years old, I slept on a large denim beanbag for a year. My friends thought this was incredibly grown of me. Mostly, my back hurt. I watched MTV every night until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore and would wake up realizing I had pissed myself yet again. Routine. I bundled my rancid clothes in a discreet pile under the beanbag and went to school. We’d see my father every few weeks in reluctant Schedule D custody. He rented a creepy old house that had the sorts of nooks and crannies that should be exciting to a child but instead really made me uneasy. It was clean, and I had a bed, but there was no food and a limited number of things to play with. We kind of just sat around eating Fig Newtons, which were my father’s idea of a snack, or he would take us to the oft-empty Mid-China Buffet in the now-demolished shopping complex, where my sisters and I would chat and make up games based on our favorite fantasy series while my father sat quietly and ate lukewarm fried rice with a fork. It was small-town America. On weekends sometimes my sister and I would walk to the school playground down the street which was in the welfare part of town. We invented a game where we would talk loudly about our progress in karate class when men walked by who seemed to stare a little too long. When my mother came to, it was like a plant that had died all the way back except for maybe a leaf. We removed the statue parks of hardened cat shit with gloves and SpotShot. Mom made friends with doe-eyed men who fixed our computer, installed railings when I broke my leg, scraped the mold out of our basement. She thanked them with dinners, and they kept coming back though she never returned their dopey gaze. She was smart that way. They hauled the beanbag to the curb and left it to rot like piss in the sun. We did other things, too, that took longer, but the stains are all still there. I know some important people who wet the bed. If you look long enough, you can find important people who did really anything in order to justify your doing it. In his essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” George Orwell explained that “bedwetting is a normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a strange place.” But I had not been removed from my home. In fact, I was arguably the most aware of my home than I’d ever been. When I was on the knife’s edge of solid memory, my father tried to scare the piss out of me. If you ever wet the bed again, he told me one day after finding a pile of my soiled underpants in the crack between my bed and the wall, then I will punish you for one hour. He stood over me in his suit jacket, the clump of crumpled pisscloth in his fist. And if you try to hide it from me, I’ll punish you for two. My Irish great-grandmother was known to be physically abusive. One time, she hit my mother on the head with a hairbrush for making too much noise. Even as a child, my mother thought, Now that’s a bit extreme isn’t it. She told me she never understood why a big person would hit a little person, so she never did. I loved her for that. She swooped in like a trained bird, only after the fact, but still. As a child I had a purer understanding of justice. I knew what things one can and cannot control. I also knew that it wasn’t up to me to decide whether or not I’d done something wrong. This feeling of justice merged with helplessness and it hardened like a crust around the underpants that terrorized my father after work. He was exhausted and I was a requisite thing. It makes sense and sometimes I still find myself holding in my piss. Orwell writes, “…[a child] lives in a sort of alien, underwater world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination.” I’m not quite sure what he means by divination, perhaps the unique and tedious rituals parents must perform in lieu of proper communication with their child, but even that is mostly ineffective. I had a distorted view of my parents, of the world, which I saw as if looking up through the meniscus curve of lakewater while swimming in the vast, terrible expanse of Lake Ontario, or Lake Erie, where my mother’s extended family camped each year off the shores of northern Ohio. At five I had a purple swimsuit with a sequined silver heart on the front. My mother told me that if I had to go I needed to go in the water. Squatting in the crap-piles of lake algae, I felt such incredible humiliation. This is how most dreams went when I wet the bed. Everyone was watching, wet was everywhere, and then I woke up. Shame always feels like that. As a child, to feel shame means to feel that you are never alone. When I was fifteen, I had a dream that I was standing in my mother’s driveway late at night, watching my father’s Nissan pull out onto the highway, when he got absolutely slammed by a semi. I was barefoot and still waving when the car became a paper cup. His body flew out the driver’s side window and fell all wet and sad-like. There were no paramedics. I wore a sundress and he wore a suit when we drove up together to my mind’s banal operation of heaven. It was an apartment complex similar to the one he lived in during our first custody years. I came inside to drop him off. He showed me his CD collection, neatly stacked in the corner. We said goodbye. I woke up to my best friend shaking me, drenched in still-warm piss. You peed on me, she said, with some two-edged glint of pity or surprise. I laid there like a lake.