The Shattered Mirror

(Author’s note: Artwork coming soon.)

The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly: the peas make no mistake, but come up and show his line.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

That’s an interesting quote, and might begin to explain why I hate peas. Everything, and I mean everything, had consequences. Most times, there was no direct correlation between the alleged offense and the ensuing consequences. Even the most mundane daily activities were treated as if the fate of the free world hung in the balance. One wrong move and everyone gets it.

Mom had a chore chart. Well, sort of. She would put our initials on the calendar. At the time I didn’t think much about it, but it’s very telling that my brother and I and my father all were given equal household responsibilities. Show’s you where Pops was slotted in the family hierarchy. As you might have guessed, mom’s initials never graced the calendar. Of course, she did soooo much work on a daily basis, it was only fair that we do what little we could to pull our own weight. I don’t remember all the details, but it was a pretty basic weekly rotation. Someone would have to do the dishes, someone else the counters and floors, etc. I imagine this is not all that uncommon in households with kids.

But, nothing was ever that simple for me. I had to learn the daily lessons of how incompetent I was at the most basic of tasks. Every chore had a proper way of being done; a system. When you wipe down the table and counters, first you clear the crumbs with a light wiping of them into your open palm. Do not miss your hand and spill crumbs onto the floor. Next, you must go back and empty the crumbs into the sink, followed by a thorough rinse of the washrag. Only then can you go back and scrub off any remaining stains left on the surface. The wood counters must be dried immediately. It is a criminal offense if you have somehow missed a spot of jelly on your first two wipedowns and the offending grape somehow ends up on the clean drying towel. This is grounds for corporal punishment.

And cleaning the table is the easiest job. Sweeping floors, well now, that’s a whole different kind of animal. Though the kitchen is barely larger than the proverbial postage stamp, it’s still the largest room in the house. (Out of curiosity, I just looked up the old house on Zillow. Total square footage of 936 ft. That does seem a bit small for a family of 5, and it was. I didn’t really notice exactly how small until I came home from college. After not being in it for a while, it seemed to have magically shrunk to munchkin size.) The layout offered all sorts of crevices to house dust bunnies and their dirty little offspring. The kitchen table was round with a pedestal base and short casters that provided just enough height for dirt to crawl under, but not enough to easily get a broom under. To do an effective job of sweeping, one had to follow the rules. This meant cordoning off the kitchen into sections, picking up tiny piles at a time. This meant moving all five chairs to the other side of the room and shoving bristles into every visible nook and cranny. This meant making sure you got under the stove, and the table, and even the tater bin.

Most kids have better things to do than chores, and I was no different. You wanted to do the least amount of work necessary to get the job done as quickly as possible so you could get back to playing. This was not an option in our house. Each chore was a test of character, a measuring of your ability and worthiness as a member of the human race. I failed a lot. Mom would come in and check your work. If she found a crumb you missed, you’d have to do it all over again. And again. And again. Dad got in on the action sometimes. I’m not sure if it was his attempt to exert authority in a household where he had none, but he, too, liked to find phantom specks and order up a new round of sweeping. It was not uncommon to have to repeat a chore for hours, especially if there was some exciting fun to be had elsewhere. The better to drive home the point. For example, our neighbors were an older eastern European couple, and they had a grandkid named Georgie. He’d show up to visit them a few times over the course of the summer, and my brother and I would go over to catch frogs, gorge on all the fruit trees, and play an annoyingly hard game called Shoot the Moon. A rare batch of good memories. On one of those Georgie visit days I was tasked with sweeping the floor. I clearly did not meet expectations, and so I spent the rest of the day sweeping that kitchen, all the while gazing anxiously out the window trying to spot what my brother and Georgie were up to. I never did get to go play with them, and that sort of thing was an all too common occurrence.

There were rules to all the chores. But no set of rituals was more important than those of doing the dishes. The methodology was clearly defined. We had a double sided sink. On the left side, you drew the dishwater. Because we had a well and there was a finite water supply, you weren’t allowed to fill the sink. Later, when we got hooked up to city water, the same rule still applied, only now because we were paying for it. To combat any wastefulness in a time long before recycling and high efficiency toilets, mom had us draw the dishwater in a pink plastic dishtub. There was a proper sequence, too. First, you placed the silverware in the tub so it could soak. Not the knives, though. Don’t you know those butter knives will slice you to ribbons? Then you started with the glassware, because the water is still relatively clean. You’d move on to the plates and bowls, then make sure to wash each piece of silverware individually. Finally, you’d get the heavy duty stuff like pans. Everything was rinsed under the faucet in the right hand sink and placed in the drying rack. You dare not leave the water running in between each item, so it was a circus act of washing and rinsing and drying in the most efficient way possible.

There were subtle nuances to all the rules, and like most things, the rules were always changing. Sometimes you’d get chastised for running the water too long. Mom had the scent of a bloodhound, and she’d always come by and smell the clean dishes. Didn’t pass the sniff test? Do ’em over. Eggs were the worst. Mom required that all eggy things be rinsed in cold water. Which I diligently did, but somehow a whole batch of dishes would always end up smelling like rotten yolks. Do over. Couldn’t leave spots on the glasses. Weren’t generally allowed to dry the glasses, cause that would leave streaks and fuzz. But, the drying rack was only so big, and eventually you’d run out of room. Better not pile them too high, either. That doesn’t allow air to circulate and dry properly. For heavy duty pans, sometimes you were allowed to use the SOS pad. These were sacred creatures, to be utilized only in an emergency, and then whatever scraps remained would be salvaged for the next time. Sometimes you were an idiot for not soaking the dishes. Sometimes you were an idiot for clogging the basin with too many soaking dishes at once. As always, whatever decision you made would be wrong. Simple things like the amount of dish soap poured was scrutinized. Too many suds — wasteful! Not enough — how can you possibly get anything clean with just water?! Had to be careful not to splash too much water around, too. My head hurts just recalling all of this nonsense.

Every batch of dishes was subject to quality inspection. Mom or dad would come by, pick out a random dish or fork, and check for specks of clinging food particles. On a good day, you’d just have to rewash the pieces that weren’t up to snuff. On a normal day, you’d have to redo the whole load again. So much for not wasting water. On one particularly bad day, they yanked every single clean glass, mug, plate, and pan out of the cupboards, threw them on the counter, and made me wash them all over again. Because clearly I didn’t know how to wash dishes yet, and practice makes perfect. That was always the point being driven home. I wasn’t good enough, I didn’t know what I was doing, and I needed to be taught a lesson.

Mom was a master at driving home her message in spectacular fashion, and one day she had enough of my dishwashing incompetence. While it’s true that you could not waste water, if the dishwater in the plastic pink basin became too dirty, you were required to dump it and draw a new tubful. Of course, the point where the water actually became “too dirty” was open to interpretation, and there was a wide variance in the rules. If I thought the tub was too dirty, it was actually fine and I was wasting water by redrawing suds. If I had one pan to go and was trying to plow through with the slightly discolored remains left in the tub, I was disgusting and gross. Time to draw fresh water and do them all over again.

One day, I learned exactly how disgusting and gross and incompetent I truly was. It was summer and I was finishing up a load of dishes. Mom walked by and took a peek at the water in the pink tub. She was not happy. The water was far too filthy for her liking. She told me to pick up the tub. I was confused, I didn’t know what she meant. She smacked me, and told me again to pick up the tub. So I lifted the tub out of the sink, wondering what was coming next and knowing it wasn’t going to be pleasant. The back steps were right by the sink, and she told me to take the tub outside. I thought maybe she just wanted me to dump it out there for some inexplicable reason. Turns out I was right, and there was definitely a reason. She hit me again for sloshing the water around in the tub and getting a few drops on the floor. Funny, that made the water slosh a little more, so now I’m trying to figure out how to get out the door, down the steps, and over to wherever she wants me to dump this tub without spilling a drop. I make it outside and she orders me over to the side of the garage. This is dad’s parking spot. The gravel patch to the left of the dilapidated garage, fighting a constant losing battle to the mint leaves trying to overtake it. I’m carrying the tub gingerly, knowing that even though we are outside now, I’m still not supposed to spill anything yet. I’m barefoot. The driveway is hot. The gravel spot is painful, embedding tiny little rocks into the soles of my feet. The air smells of mint and asphalt baking in the sun. The big pine tree behind me mixes it’s pleasant aroma with the scent of dirty, pungent dishwater and the faint whiff of Palmolive remnants. We’ve apparently reached the appropriate spot, and it’s time for my lesson.

Mom now takes the tub from me. She does so with surprising dexterity. Not a grab, no wasted motion. Just a lift from my fingers, and not a drop spilled. She tells me to close my eyes. She tells me to tilt my head back. She tells me to open my mouth. My brain is starting to sense what’s coming, and I hesitate. She can’t grab me, because both hands are occupied. So she resorts to verbal exhortations. She screams now. “Open your mouth!” I do as I’m told. My head tilts back. My mouth opens. But I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes.  She tilts the tub to a corner and starts to pour. Dirty water rushes down my throat, choking me. 2 1/2 gallons of liquid filth and grime are washing me clean from my sins. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I shut my eyes now. The water keeps coming. It’s covering me now. My face, my body. I’m gagging. I want to push the tub away with every fiber of my being. I’m paralyzed. Mom is screaming. I can’t hear her. Everything seems so far away.

I can’t breathe. Choking. Gasping. Swallowing water. More water. Can’t breathe.

The flood slows to a trickle, and world slowly starts to come back into focus. I’m spluttering. Taking huge heaving breathes, desperately searching for oxygen that won’t come. There are food particles plastered to my face. I am drenched. My clothes are clinging to me in oddly twisted folds. I realize the stench I now smell is me, the heat baking the dirty water to my skin. Mom is still screaming, but I still don’t hear her. She is out of water, out of ammunition. This does not please her, she wasn’t quite done with the lesson. I’m standing there blinking, wondering what to do next. She heaves the pink dishtub at my head. I don’t move. Somehow the pain of that impact is a soothing known quantity after the panic and terror of what just transpired. She stomps away and leaves me there. Slowly the world comes back into focus, starting with the familiar scent of pine and mint. I need to get this horrible taste out of my mouth. I pluck a dry mint leaf and start to chew, still wondering what to do next, and baffled at how I can be such a complete fuckup that I can’t even wash dishes correctly.

I went back to my old high school today. Had to make a business pitch to the principal, who ironically graduated from said high school with my brother’s class a couple of years ahead of me.

I don’t think I was fully prepared for the emotional groundswell. There is no question I’ve come a long way in the years since that time, but it’s amazing how certain memories can turn long dormant scars into open wounds. It doesn’t help that the school seems to have existed in a bizarre time warp for the last 25 years. Wow. 25 years. That’s a really long time, and it’s disturbing that I can still be impacted by things from that long ago. I guess that’s the safety barometer. We hold onto the memories of the bad so as to avoid encountering them in the present.

I swear some of the same posters are still on the wall. The same trophies in the same display cases. Sure, there’s been expansion and additions, but the core infrastructure is the same as when I waltzed out all those years ago with no desire to ever return. I stopped and checked out the plaques where my brother’s name is etched as National Merit Scholar and Salutatorian. There was good and bad growing up in his shadow — I certainly got some grace and leeway with teachers and staff because of him, but it was also confirmation of what mom was doing such a good job of drilling into my head at home. He’s the good one. He’s the golden boy. The smart one. The good looking one. The strong one. The genius. You’ll never be like him.

I tried to be like him. I’m not an intellectual midget, but my brain tends to steer towards the liberal arts side of the spectrum. He’s mechanical engineer who went to all the right schools and did all the right things. I eventually learned that we were destined to take different paths. He was a band geek, I was a choir boy. He wrestled. I played basketball. Or attempted to, that’s a different story for another time. I also had the added joy of hearing from all the girls how hot my older brother was. Yet further confirmation of the messaging driven home by mommy.

I also paused to peer up at our class photo hanging in the hallway. It took me a while to find myself. I checked all the places where I thought I might be, the groups of people that I might be sitting with. Not so. I never really fit into any group. I was always trying to fit into every group. Eventually I found myself in that picture. Sitting in the middle of everyone, yet the only one that doesn’t have someone sitting next to him on both sides. Somehow the camera managed to document the void and emotional emptiness of all those years. And just like most pictures from my childhood, I look sad. Probably because I was sad.

All that sadness enveloped me once again as I floated like a specter down long forgotten hallways. The cafeteria where I experienced the daily shame of begging for change to get a little something to eat. The basketball courts where I floundered in fear and mental weakness. The weight room where I desperately tried to add soft tissue to my boney frame. The band room where I spent a lot of time but never quite fit in because, well, I wasn’t in band. The auditorium where as a skinny sophomore I got to fully inhabit the role of class geek by being cast as Eugene in Grease. (At least in that arena I was able to experience some later success and happy times.) There it all was. The shame, the embarrassment, the self-loathing, the hatred of who I was then, and the questioning of whether I’m really any different after all these years. The adolescent boy that lurks inside with all his latent insecurities likes to try and wrest control of the neural pathways and see just how much contempt I can muster up for myself.

The very entrance itself was a cruel reminder of days gone by. I spent countless hours in front of those double doors, restlessly checking every 30 seconds to see if mom was there yet. She never liked to be bothered to pick me up from practice or school activities. It was such a hassle to make the the 5 minute drive, and those darn coaches could be so insensitive to her sleeping and self-medicating schedule. Sometimes they’d keep us late to finish up a drill. Sometimes a rehearsal would run a little longer than it was supposed to. As a parent now, I realize this is the way of the world and part of your job is to sit in parking lots waiting for your kid to meander out of the building. Mom could not be bothered with that. She’d drive up to the door, and if you weren’t immediately sprinting out into the car, she’d get pissed off and drive home. Then she’d smack you around and tell you how ungrateful and rude you were when you finally walked through the door. And God forbid a friend had to drop you off. Then you’d catch holy hell for making her look bad and inconveniencing another family.

Like most things, it was a no-win situation. Sometimes I’d try to leave practice early, which coaches generally frown upon. Plus, you never really knew if mom was going to be there anyway, so if you leave practice early and half an hour later the coach walks by and sees you standing there, it doesn’t look so good. Some days mom just wouldn’t bother to show up at all. Some days she’d show up an hour or two late, for no good reason. Again, you’d better be waiting, and you’d better make record time out to the car before she pulled away with rubber squealing. I learned that no matter how long you’ve been waiting, it wasn’t long enough. So I spent hours upon hours in front of those double doors on high alert. Don’t go to the bathroom. Definitely don’t hang out with you friends — you don’t want to be caught socializing when you should have been anxiously awaiting your chariot. Nowadays, coaches are required to wait until the last kid gets picked up. That wasn’t the case back in the day. It wasn’t uncommon for me to be there until the last of the maintenance crew was closing up the building. Then it was time to begin the long walk home.

I ticked off the distance on my speedometer once a few years back. I can’t remember exactly, but my house was somewhere around 2-3 miles door to door from the school. Certainly not a long distance, and not a hard walk, even with whatever gear I had to lug with me. I managed to make the jaunt in record time once — in full dress clothes for a choir concert mom couldn’t be bothered to drive me to. But, the road was a pretty major thoroughfare, and there were no sidewalks. Thank goodness it wasn’t in today’s age of distracted driving or I’m sure I wouldn’t have survived. The real problem came in wintertime. Besides the obvious cold, there’s this white stuff called snow. And in these parts, we get lots of it. Plus, I’d often be making the trek in shorts. I know, that sounds ridiculous, and it was. But, I had learned a lesson. It was one of those days where I had been waiting for a few hours and decided that mom wasn’t coming, so it was time to start walking. I went to the bathroom to change into some pants, she (allegedly) showed up in that window of time, and I wasn’t there. I learned that day it was better to make the walk in shorts than to suffer the additional wrath from missing my ride.

You wonder why I just didn’t walk every day? Here’s the twisted logic from mommy dearest. “It’s a busy road, and it’s not safe. I don’t want you getting hit by a car.” So, she wouldn’t let us walk. She wouldn’t even let us ride our bikes 1/4 mile down the road to the cul de sac that had sidewalks. I have no idea how she expected me to get home. I wasn’t allowed to walk, I wasn’t allowed to get a ride with a friend, and depending on her mood, she wasn’t ever going to show up. I tried creating a teleporter, but unfortunately my artsy fartsy brain was better at making cool renderings than the actual sciency stuff.

So, I’d wait. And wait. And then I’d make a decision that was going to be wrong regardless and brace myself for the consequences. There was no cell phone to pass the time. No games to play. I would watch parents wait patiently out front while their kids messed around with friends in the hall for a few extra minutes. Nobody seemed to mind. I’d see kids walk out together and get in the same car. Apparently there was this thing called carpooling, but it sounded like deviant behavior to me. I’d get used to coaches asking me on the way out the door, “You got a ride?” And I’d lie and say, “Yes. Mom’s on her way.”

Maybe that’s where I started to hate waiting. I hated that cold linoleum floor and the hard brick walls. I hated the ubiquitous white-faced school clock whose hands never seemed to move. I hated the doors constantly opening as people filed in and out, sending a new blast of cold air over me every few minutes. I hated looking out the window, wondering if that next car would be the one, and it never was. I hated the anxiety of now knowing what to do, and yet knowing that whatever decision I made would be wrong. I hated that I knew every brick on the wall and crack in the floor, because I had counted them over and over like a prisoner locked in isolation.

It was not a fun walk down memory lane this morning. On the bright side, I didn’t have to wait for anybody when I left today. I didn’t have to walk home. I walked right to my car and tried to enjoy a moment of gratitude for that closed chapter in my life. Perhaps that’s a little bit of healing balm for old wounds.

Tonight I’m going to take my daughter to her volleyball match. I’m going drive her there with a smile on my face, and I’m going to sit and cheer her on. I’m going to ignore the fact that there is work to be done and a basketball game that I really want to watch, and I’m going to be present for her. When she’s done I’m going to let her goof off with her friends for a minute. Then we are going to drive home and chat about mundane things. She’s never going to have to worry about having a ride, and that’s one infinitesimally small way the cycle stops with me.