Gwendolyn Knapp - After a While You Just Get Used to It: A Tale of Family Clutter

T here had been others, in the early days after Moms divorce, men who looked like Magnum, P.I., and carted us around in their midlife-crisis-mobiles. This was back when most guys liked to wear the least amount of shorts possible to show off the greatest amount of body hair possible: the mid-1980s. Id witnessed the worst of it from the backseat of cars driven by dudes who never stuck around. Dating, Id learned by the time I was nine, was full of embarrassment and letdown. Not for kids, but for the single parent. Mainly, Id learned, it was a means to see who would stick around after Mom started yelling. By the time she was in her second year of architecture school in Tampa, two months deep into the fall semester, shed found a new victim.

Molly and I knew right away. We found Mom in the bathroom one Saturday acting all nutsy: applying a home perm, trying on a new shade of rouge, and singing Linda Ronstadt into the mirror at the top of her lungs, locking us out, though I was about to soil my pants.

I cant hold it any longer, I told her.

Well, thats nothing new, she said, waltzing out with her silk kimono draped over her thin shoulders.

Whats wrong with you? Molly asked Mom, but we already knew. Soon she would have her good pair of suede boots on, pretending she didnt count screaming as a hobby.

Nothing. She smiled. Cant I just be happy if I feel like it?

On Saturdays, she usually liked to wallow in bed until noon, warning us to keep it down with our WCW impersonations and suffocation-by-pillow competition. Then shed rise like the dead in her frilly cotton nightgown, downing a pot of black-tar coffee and slumping over her drafting table for hours. We thought that was her happy.

Ive met someone, she told us, buffing her nails, sharpening them perhaps, a deranged twinkle in her eye.

You should go lie back down, I insisted.

Yeah, Molly said. You got a new Spiegel catalog in the mail.

That was the spirit. A healthy dose of perfect models in clothes you couldnt afford was a sure way to bring any single mother back to her normal state, but Mom wasnt having it.

His name is John, she continued. She said this as if John were the most exotic name ever spoken.

John, I said, and yawned. I couldnt help it. If pronounced in German, John basically was yawn.

When John swung into our side yard that evening at fifty miles an hour, screeching to a halt next to our rusted wagon, it was no surprise Mom still wasnt ready to go. My mother ran late for everything, always had. There never was a chorus recital, movie, living Christmas tree, or Easter pageant wed ever seen the first thirty minutes of. The story of Jesus, for me, had always begun with the wino years. Some people blame repeated tardiness on selfishness and just plain being rude, but there were things working against Mom. She had a hard time getting out of bed due to the stresses of lifeno child support, two nagging daughters, graduate school, an ailing father.

My sister and I sat on the back steps and watched as John emerged from the ugliest car Id ever seen, uglier than our own even, a turd-boat on wheels with one ill-fitting, sickly green drivers-side door. It opened with several loud pops, like bones being ripped from their sockets.

John was a good-looking guy with a head of dirty-blond hair and an overgrown mustache, wearing aviators and denim on denim, smiling at us with perfect white teeth. He wasnt perfect though. He was from Ohio. Land of corn and white bread. We were from here, Florida, land of lightning and mangrove swamps, and could detect interlopers as easy as red ants in the sugar sand.

Nice car, my sister said under her breath as we watched John try to slam the green door shut three times. He leaned all his weight against it and gave it a big bump with his hip like Id seen some fat, drunk bridesmaids do to each other at a cousins wedding over the summer, knocking the babys breath out of each others hair during Disco Duck.

Things broke, John said, instead of introducing himself. I had these guys at a body shop fix it and they screwed me over. Story of my life.

He spoke to us like we were his drinking buddies, at nine and twelve years old. He took one look at our skeletal plum trees, our inflatable kiddie pool folded in on itself like a yard omelet, and said, Sure is a nice place you got here.

Isnt it? we said, showing off the tarp-covered junk and a pile of wood where a playhouse used to be before the neighbor kids burned it down.

No, its really nice. Its real old Florida, he said, and smiled.

Id heard that before. Real old Florida meant overgrown and mysterious. It meant unpaved and unlike the rest of Holiday, Florida, with its strip malls and developments. It meant cow patties, and rotten oranges, and septic tanks that occasionally flooded the yard. It meant oak trees draped in shawls of moss as if they transformed into elderly women at the stroke of midnight.

Usually when people came over, their eyes bulged in fear of the house, wrapped in vines and giant spiderwebs. John walked around with his eyes bulging in wonder, claiming, They dont make beauties like this nowadays. Rubbing his hands on the siding and concluding, Why, I bet thats lead paint.