Tag: nonfiction

The Trouble with Rita- Chapter 6

Posted on by mccarthymichelle in The Trouble with Rita

Mothers

She remembers when she was little, around five years old, playing in the front room early every morning. The radio was her teacher, with songs and commercials at her fingertips. She was acting them out…especially the ones with catchy phrases like, “You wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pep-so-dent!”

Her mother comes out into the front room, bleary-eyed and yawning from her bedroom, wrapping her robe about all four feet eleven of her. Annie reaches for a knob deftly to turn the radio off, but it was never on. Her copper-red hair is in rollers, she stands there scratching her head. A puzzled look comes across her face as she leans in with her glasses hanging on the edge of her nose like a hawk, turning the radio on, then off, on, then off.

Rita was always singing, always making little voices, and remembering the nuances of voice actors like Bae Benaderet from “Fibber McGee and Molly.” She acted them all out by herself, singing and humming the music parts, too.

She loved to perform and entertain anyone who would listen. All her sisters and their boyfriends were instructed to sit in the parlor on Friday evenings. She led them to their seats, in the chairs, on the arms of the sofa, or on cushions on the floor. They were instructed to sit and listen when she sang a new song. While hooking them in with the first one, she threw at least four to five more songs in one sitting. When the applause began, she immediately went right into the next song.

Once, a teenage boyfriend of her oldest sister commented on Rita’s large, beautiful, brown eyes. Without skipping a beat, young Rita opened those big, beautiful, brown eyes wide and blinked over and over, sending him into hysterics at her flirtatious glances. “What a doll,” he said. “She is such a doll.”

The Trouble with Rita- Chapter 5

Posted on by mccarthymichelle in The Trouble with Rita

Kisses and Hugs

 “I hear hurricanes a-blowin,’

I know the end is comin’ soon,                                                    

I fear rivers overflowin’,

I hear the voice of rage and ruin.”                                                                                                               

Bad Moon Risin’/Creedence Clearwater Revival

I remember it wasn’t always this way, my tortured relationship with Rita…when I was a child, my mother would kiss me goodbye at the bus stop every morning as the bus arrived for kindergarten. The kiss was planted firmly on my cheek before getting on the bus. The full, feathered plum imprint smeared on my face by her rushed attempts to clean it off before I reached its doors was a ritual. The smell of Cover Girl makeup in my nostrils and the excitement of going to school in the cool mornings of September were forever tethered together, along with her hand puppet waves and blown kisses at the window. With a metal, red, and black plaid lunch box in my lap, I waved bashfully from my seat. She was beautiful. A petite, Audrey Hepburnesque young woman with long chestnut hair pouring down her back like melted frosting, large brown eyes shining as if they were painted by Margaret Keane herself, and her lips, her lips were much larger than the other moms. They had thin pursing lines of color, but my mom had a classic Hollywood pout just like Marilyn Monroe. She stood off to one side on the sidewalk, not by choice. It was the thin-lipped women who drifted away from her, she was standing still in a spotlight she could not see. I watched the awkward social dance from the window of the yellow bus every morning.

Those lips had magical powers to cure any ailment; they kissed away nightmares, boo-boos, and high fevers. In photos, they drew the eye directly to them. Cupid’s bow was shaped perfectly on top of the full upper lip, the lower lip was as full as the upper, and the vermillion borders crisply separated the boundary of face to lips. Everyone knew Rita by her full lips and her smile. However, she never opened her mouth to smile for photos. She had a significant space between her two front teeth. She was very self-conscious about this.

The words that came from her lips were magical, too. Mostly because her naivete was on full display. She was gullible enough to fall into the trap of believing everything at first hearing. “Really?” she would widen her eyes, mouth agape. Men found her sweet, lovely, and desirable. She innocently charmed them with such grace. At the local I.G.A., she would walk right into a group of them and ask where the manager was, and they would all say they were him. Quite fascinating watching all these grown men jockeying for her attention. She had five children under ten, and she looked like a teenager. These men would adjust their neckties, looking silly, staring at her mouth while she spoke.

She would sing me to sleep at night at my request. She would scooch next to me, pull me close, and then ask what I wanted to hear. She sang silly songs, old songs she grew up singing, and popular songs of the day, like the Beatles. She sang mostly old torch songs. “Someone to Watch Over Me” was a favorite of mine. Her perfect alto resonated against my head as I curled up against her,

“I’d like to write his initials to my monogram,

Tell me where is the shepherd for thiiiis looooost laaaamb…”

Her vibrato stretched and connected to the next word so effortlessly. A natural, she could sing very low in her chest voice and switch to her head voice, then slip into her falsetto without showing any strain in her facial muscles or neck. It was lush and moving, just like her lips. She would smile and sing and snuggle me to sleep, and I would wake in the morning to a perfect lipstick kiss on my forehead. The wonder of it all, the magic of her kiss. I often wonder if she knew how much I loved her, how I idolized her.

The entire family was connected to music, all my brothers were musicians. It was an escape from the reality they lived in. I started to memorize all the music they would play. I did not have much choice. Danny played the bass and listened to the likes of Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa, and Yes. Patrick listened to Zeppelin, the Stones, CCR, and Bowie. But Chris became obsessed with Rush since he played drums. Rush blew them away. With Neil Peart’s drum skills and lyricism, Alex Lifeson’s wicked guitar, and Geddy Lee’s bass playing and vocals. A progressive rock band that consisted of three musicians, but when you heard them, they sounded like at least five or six people.

I would sing every song as they practiced. I would harmonize against it. I would feel the bassline of every song. I became attuned to the lyrics, to the story of the songs that I was hearing. There were many weekends when our house was the house everyone congregated in. I attributed this to the fact that my brothers were starting to play together, and they were sounding better and better. It was 1979, and I was listening to The Pretenders, The Cars, Blondie, The Police, and Cheap Trick. I loved the makeup, the clothes, and the vibe. It was new enough for me to claim it as my own. I was steeped in seventies music, but I loved this new sound. The punk influences and the catchy hooks.

All the older girls would sit on the basement steps to listen, holding their drinks, smoking their cigarettes, and checking out the band. I rolled my eyes at them. All they did was giggle like hyenas, talk loudly, drone on about who they thought was cute, and spray their hair with Aquanet. They all had a favorite, some of them were wearing the gypsy blouses, others in concert t-shirts with the neckline cut to show cleavage, tight jeans, and perfectly feathered hair like Farrah Fawcett. I was fifteen. My job was to make sure no one was screwing in the bedrooms upstairs and my baby brother and sister were not being bothered. I also held the hair of a few girls and even the guys when they were puking in the bathroom.

Long hair was the thing, I think it was because of the music. Like Robert Plant, the lead singer of Zepplin, he had hair “like a God,” as I heard some of the girls say. I didn’t get it; I thought he was gross. As soon as one of the girls dashed to the bathroom, I would guide them to the toilet and hold their stupid hair.I was the cleaner. I was the adult in the room, though they never let me down in the basement, and they never let me sing. We were separated by our age and gender. I was a girl who could not be around their friends, I was too young. I was annoying. I was their sister.

Someday, I told myself, someday I’m gonna grab that microphone and sing. The dudes who sang and practiced with them never remembered the lyrics. They were terrible. They were always too wasted and off-key. One guy was so nasal, and he was a short, long-haired, creepy guy who thought he was every girl’s dream. Another guy was tall, skinny, and refused to play anything but crappy cover songs. I could only take so much of “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison. God, I hated that song.

Often, Rita would come home early from bartending, sit at the bottom of the stairs, and listen to them play. She loved live music; she did not mind the teenagers drinking. She sat on the bottom step of the basement with a tumbler glass of Southern Comfort, or the Peach Peril as my brother Pat called it, along with the girls on the stairs, chatting about nothing interesting and bumming cigarettes off each other. Rita still had her uniform on. A white blouse, black pants, a black vest, with a stupid floppy bow tie that she misplaced every morning. I would scour the house for it before she left for work every single afternoon. She kicked her shoes off, her feet covered by nylon stockings. She wiggled her toes and tapped her foot along to the music. She clapped and shouted with enthusiasm for my brothers. They would smile and ask what she wanted to hear.

“Oh! Hey! Play ‘There’s a Bathroom,’ that song with the bathroom on the right,” she shouts.

“Ma, that is not how the song goes. It goes, “There’s a bad moon on the rise…” Danny says into the microphone. His voice reverberated against the concrete, unfinished walls.

Everyone pans around and looks at each other. Chris plays a rim shot and taps the symbol lightly for effect, then freezes, looking wide-eyed. They all howl with laughter and then take a drink, erupt again, take another drink, and then begin the song for Rita. They love Rita. She always mistook the lyrics, and we enjoyed her take on certain songs. That one was going in the books.

The Trouble with Rita-Chapter 2

Posted on by mccarthymichelle in The Trouble with Rita

Sisters

Her sister Therese remembers when Rita was born. Therese, about ten years old, sat in the kitchen of their home holding her baby sister. Her fingers wound around little Rita’s ringlet curls; curls as bouncy as Shirley Temple’s. Her baby sister’s hair, a lovely chestnut brown, though sewn throughout, as if by the hand of God. It was stunning, with copper-red highlights the same color as their mother’s hair. She stared, transfixed by her sister’s beauty. She had a rose-budded mouth, big brown eyes, a sweet little smile, and a lilting laugh that stayed with her as she grew. When Rita was a year and a half old, she loved playing peek-a-boo and clapping with excitement whenever anyone came to visit.

Everyone commented on how beautiful Rita was. All the neighbors would stop by to see the new baby and bounce her on their knees, commenting on how well-mannered and easygoing she was. Annie, her mother, was always complimented by passersby while taking her out in the buggy. They often said that she was the prettiest Mannion girl of all. There were five Mannion girls, one more beautiful than the next, but Rita would rival each of them without even trying.

One day, Mary, who was a year and a half older, took scissors to her baby sister’s crown of curls and cut every single curl off. One by one she snipped her sister’s curls. One by one, they fell to the floor. One by one, Mary attempted to diminish Rita’s prominence as the fairest of them all.

In Therese’s recollection, their mother lost her mind. Inconsolable over what happened to her baby. Her gorgeous ringlet curls were gone, shorn from her delicate little head by a jealous sister. What’s worse was that their mother, Annie, a fighter for justice and a pillar in the community, did not know what to do with Mary. She lamented this responsibility, and the guilt rested on her since Mary seemed indifferent. She cried for days over the incident; of course, Rita had no memory of it.

She never saw the jealousy, she never acknowledged Mary’s envy through the years. Rita was different, not only striking in beauty and unaware of it; but she was also forgiving and kind.

The Trouble with Rita-Chapter 1

Posted on by mccarthymichelle in The Trouble with Rita

Generals and Majors

Generals and Majors always seem so unhappy ‘less they got a war.”

Generals and Majors/XTC

My pre-teen mind couldn’t understand my mother’s sadness. I couldn’tunderstand these adults and the choices they made. How could this woman still love him after all the abuse? My mother, Rita, cried out for my father in every way after the divorce. The good and the horrid memories that she tried to make sense of. The grief dripped from her tongue like blood. Blood that she tasted with military repetition from my father’s large military hands. These hands fixed things and broke things. Regimented, controlling hands that folded sheets and tucked them properly while making the beds in the morning. Three small beds, one set of bunk beds, and one crib for Michael-Baby.

My memory serves me wrong; Michael-Baby, was already three, and he had a twin bed. I missed his crib; we were still a family then. We were a family ruled by fear, but still a unit. Before I started calling my mother by her first name, if only to get her attention. Before I took on the role of housekeeper and therapist. Be careful what you wish for, the devil you know, and the devil you don’t…we were soon to be in territory that had no obvious borders, no obvious enemies.

It was my birthday, October 30th, 1979, and I waited for Rita to come home from the last day in court. Lucky thirteen I was, this day, and I saw the irony of it. The late afternoon lit every corner of the front room while I sat on the couch, wondering when it would end. Dust filtering in the sun’s rays at a sharp forty-five, dirty walls with the same paintings clinging to their rusty nails that hung with me straining from the weight they carried, waiting, praying that it was finally over.

Enter Rita, Rita’s lawyer, and my eldest cousin, Terry. It was as if the show was not what they expected, and I found it odd; the lack of celebration, it was more like a funeral procession. They looked like they had witnessed something beyond comprehension, shell-shocked. Their eyes drained, and their posture collapsed, knees slightly bent and about to give way. Each of them would take a few steps, then turn to the other and mumble something, then turn and take a few steps in another direction. Rita’s face strained with desperation, clutching files with her purse close to her chest. Her whole married life in those files, all nineteen years. I tried to assess the situation, I tried to debrief, but the murmuring and whispers were difficult to decode, and the adults kept swirling about. No one explained what had happened, and no one said happy birthday to me.

It was done. My father was no longer living in the house. It was quiet, empty. Fear was no longer the sludge water we waded through, waist deep, but there was a new kind of fear: the fear of what’s next. Our muscle memory hijacked us when we just wanted to be normal. We still jumped at the front door slamming. We still flinched when someone raised a hand to say hello. We still sidestepped and even ducked when a voice was raised. Yet, this new fear was just as debilitating because we did not know how to process it. We did not know what to do next. How to pay the bills or fix a clogged toilet. How to motivate the weed-smoking and the whiskey-drinking older brothers to snap out of it. How to get them to pull themselves up and stand tall, wash their damn hair, get it cut, look respectable, pay attention, stop dulling the senses for one lousy minute with the drug of the moment. How to manage my panic attacks to help Rita, how to stop my sister from having a meltdown in the middle of the store at the age of ten, looking like a seething five-year-old who wanted a Clark bar from the tier of candies at the checkout of the I.G.A. How to function when you are no longer in survival mode.

Rita had to get a job. Rita had to lead this late 1970s disheveled pack of six, aged eighteen to six. She was not mentally capable during this time, and neither were we. The oldest three boys were angry, so angry and confused by the lot they were dealt. The younger three, including me, were trying to escape the disease of apathy, trying to find something to occupy our young lives that was meaningful and safe.

A list of my siblings and me, according to our later diagnoses and misdiagnoses that were given to us in adulthood, along with nicknames our father gave us, is as follows:

  1. Daniel Supreme with Chronic Anxiety and Depression
  2. Paddy Joe with Chronic Anxiety, Depression, and Undiagnosed Asperger’s
  3. Chris the Cracker Man with Alcoholism, ADHD, Anxiety, and Depression
  4. I am Shellmire, Shelephant the Elephant, Millicent, Millibird,and several others with Chronic Anxiety and Depression
  5. Bethel-Ethel with Bipolar Disorder and Undiagnosed Asperger’s
  6. Michal-Baby, surviving, invisible, neglected, and surrounded by misery.

What a crew. The dust settled a few months later, and our leader, Rita, started to drink heavily. My mother would collapse every evening at the kitchen table with her bottle of Southern Comfort, head down, weeping. Rita loved that bottle; she loved the way it made her feel. It gave her the courage to say what she felt, over and over, without receiving a backhand to her small, yet full mouth. That caramel-colored honey on her tongue was better than reason or reality. Her remorse became a record for us, a song she would sing as if she wanted to be haunted by it. The song rang in my ears, it suffocated any joy that I could find. I never had friends over, I was too embarrassed by her soliloquy. My friends thought Rita was a sweet and empathetic woman, she made them laugh. I began to resent the constant reminder of the abuse and what it did to her and her children.

Rita had failed in her duty as a wife to keep the marriage together in the eyes of God. She would slur her intentions on me or whoever would listen. She would wave her small slender hands about accentuating her attempts to fix the damned union. She considered herself a devout Catholic, a woman who would never give up on her husband. Her idea of marriage was a hopeful illusion of two people who would share their lives, love for children, and create a happy family. But that was not how it went, and she could not accept this.

I sat there every evening at that ugly, mahogany brown, unsteady Formica table flanked by dirty brown paneling coated in nicotine. I sat there hating that table that my father would flip with a full dinner on it to put us in check when he was drunk. I sat there and held Rita’s hand with both of mine, trying to make her drink a cup of coffee, which she never did. Sitting in an unmatched chair across from her frail, little body curled inward on itself, I was trying to think of what to say to reach her. Not wanting to ruminate over what went wrong or how the rug was pulled out from underneath all of us. She knew this; why bring it up? Her brain was pickled with that tea-stained liquor; no sense in making her cry. The older ones disappeared when she fell apart. I faintly remember them blending into the dirty paneling and the dark recesses of the room. The shadows of them moved about quietly. The doors would creak and shut closed with a soft click as if they were never there.

She still loved him after everything that happened. She drank until she passed out. I would carry her petite frame to bed, change her, and wait to see if she would throw up. If she did, which happened often, I would clean her up, change her again along with the bedding, wash the dirty clothes and linens, and then clean up the kitchen once she was asleep. That is all that could be done; just clean up the mess. Clean up the broken bits, the shattered dreams, the illusion of life. Just clean it up and wipe it down. Make it less obvious, make it blend, and make it orderly and neat. That is what I did well. Manage the aftermath of the scene. Like a secret company coming in to clean up the blood, the splatter stains, the remains. That was my niche as a young person. I managed the bodily fluids, the sickness, and the unruly behavior. Rita was incapable, as she believed all people were innately good. She did not know how to deal with this cruel lesson. She looked at me one evening while I tried to help her and said, “You are just like your father.”

She kept saying it over and over.

“You are just like your father.”

“You are just like your father.”

“You are just like your father.”

“You are just like your father.”

She exhaled it, playing with the emphasis in a theatrical fervor. I could smell the sweet drink on her breath from across the table. Tears flowed quietly down my new teenage cheeks. I just sat there, afraid to blink, afraid to say a word. She hated me. She hated that I looked like him. I was tall and lean like him. I spoke like him. I acted like him. I handled everything like him. I was him. I was nothing like him, but to her, I was. I reminded her of everything she did not want to remember, I was a painful memory, not her daughter, not her child.

At that very moment, something inside me snapped. At that moment, I became detached from my surroundings, as if watching a war unfold. Tired, weary, bloodshot eyes seeing the flashes of gunfire, ears deadened by the mortar going off in rapid succession. Sweat beading from every pore, a sick taste in the mouth, the slow motion of time, and knowing it could not be stopped.

I never asked for this war, Rita. I was not going to fight a ghost any longer. I was not going to make another plan of attack to save her. I decided at that moment to retreat, there was nothing more I could do at the age of thirteen but wait to get out. I served in that house for five more years, then left to seek out how to live the life that I wanted. I had no idea how to do this, and the familiarity of remorse would revisit me again and again…like the haunting record that Rita made, worn in grooves, skipping over and over.