Ocean Eyes, chapter 2
That same silence which inhabited our household last week was now a thing of the past. The spine-tingling sensation disappeared when I heard roars of laughter and the clinking of beer bottles. My parents had their friends over for a get together they did every Sunday night.
Without joining them, I had crept over to my window and thrown my legs over the side, listening, just listening. The snow had stopped earlier in the day, but it was still cold. Albeit the nasty weather, I thought the cushion on the window was the most comfortable place in our home.
I tried to connect the dots in the blackboard-like sky, wondering if I could create a beautiful mural that all the world could see and rave over. They were diamonds, resting in the dark, encased in a velvet box, untouchable, priceless, even infinite, I thought.
The longer I sat there, the louder my parents and their friends slurring words would grow. I quietly thought back to the previous days in order to block out the unpleasant drunken vocabulary from below me, trying not to ignite a flame of rage I sometimes felt. I wanted to fall into a deep slumber, wishing I wouldn't wake up, wishing I could dream these dreams forever, but instead, I began to remember the days before this Sunday.
* * *
"That's really good," Andie had said to me. He pointed to the drawing in my notebook of a house on an island that I had cooked up in my head. I let my fingers roam over the intimately drawn, detailed, and shaded image that had been on my mind all that Thursday morning.
"Thanks," I said. I grinned a little, and my eyes lit up. I hadn't smiled in so long, it was so foreign and I didn't understand where this bout of glee came from. Perhaps it was the fact that I was complimented, or that he was talking to me.
I had grown accustomed to listening to him pry conversations out of me and try to make me smile, that is, before he sat with his friends on the other side of the room. This was when a feeling of intense loneliness washed over me. I detested these time when I was left alone in the corner of the room, with no one, and nothing.
He usually kept me company by telling corny jokes or funny stories about him and his friends that never quite made me laugh, but always made me want to smile. He was a charming one, I'll admit. He was one of, no the only, person to make my stomach float and flip like an acrobat.
"So do you draw all the time or something?"
"Um, yeah, I guess..."
"You're good," he smiled. He tried to flip through the rest of the notebook with the tips of his fingers, but I pulled it away before he could.
"Hey..." he said, then looked at me and realized that I didn't want my privacy violated, and backed away. My eyes hovered over the floor of the room, like a search-and-rescue helicopter, in order to avoid eye contact. I looked back up at the window and sighed, longing for the school day to be over.
After school I had decided to take a short-cut through the wheatfeild behind the school. It ran alongside Ribbon Creek and stretched long enough to reach Riley Road, which led to my neighborhood just outside of the town's limits. Since it was winter, the field was barren and ugly, void of the tall, waist-high stalks of wheat.
I had been walking to and from school all week, and I didn't know why until my mother told me Wednesday about the fight. They were arguing, and it got out of hand. They both left the house. They had forgotten me. My mother apologized and asked me if I wanted a ride. I said no, because I had been enjoying these long walks home, able to reflect on the events of the day.
The field was not rich in wheat and did not roll with the Wisconsin wind that washed my hair in the summer. I had no sun to kiss my skin and tan me, no bugs on my sticky skin that brushed the stalks while I jumped through the field. No, there was no vivid fusion of orange and yellow and red that made up the summer twilight. The vast patchwork of windfall was not quite golden brown, nor yellowish green, but nothing.
The sky was torn like a broken record, a needle scratching it, injecting it with alcoholic guilt and pleasure. As far as the little white house on the edge of the acreage, it was a ruffled, dirty layer of snow. The snow crunched under my Doc Martins as I made my way across, trying to get home as soon as possible because I had a project to finish that I hadn't even started on.
I trudged through the icy weather, pondering different things, picking at my eyelashes when my mascara clumped together, and wrapping myself even tighter with seams of cold weather clothes.
"Charlotte!"
I turned around to see Andie running towards me. He got bigger as he came closer and closer to me. I saw a smile on his face, which made me smile back.
"Need some company?" He asked. I barely saw his eyes peeking out under his long, brown hair that sat under a black beanie. I noticed he was tall for his age and was notably tan for being from Wisconsin. He was skinny, also. He was wearing a dark green sweater, black and blue skate shoes, or 'fat shoes' as I like to call them, jeans, and a big gray coat with wool lining.
"Um, I guess," I blurted. He smiled. I saw he had braces, which amused me because no one in Aurora had braces.
"Cool. Where do you live?"
"Magnolia Road. It's not far from here. I just decided to take a short cut other than walking through town," I told him as we walked.
"Me too. Those damn cars give me a headache."
I chuckled softly and sniffed a little. My nose was getting redder as I went on with him. We talked a little about how we hated school and even our own home until he asked if I needed to blow my nose.
"Do you happen to have a tissue?" I asked sarcastically, looking around.
"Nope, but you can use my shirt."
I felt a little nervous using his shirt as a tissue, but I admired him for being polite, and for being the only person trying to befriend me. I grinned, not showing any teeth. I felt like I should say something, but I didn't. I always thought there was no point in talking when there was nothing to say.
He outstretched his arm and I grabbed his wrist, taking hold of the hem of his longsleeve sweater. I didn't look; I was too nervous.
He chuckled when I backed away, and led me as we walked along the western part of the acreage. While he spoke to me about where he lived and what his parents did, I could faintly hear the murmur of Ribbon Creek, an agile vein within the limits of the state of Wisconsin.
"Got any brothers and sisters?" He asked me as we passed a barb wire fence.
"Yeah. I've got an older sister Hilary who's 18. I also have a little brother Ryan who's 4. I'm the middle child, 14 to be exact," I explained. "Ryan is the product of my mom and stepdad. My dad lives in California with his wife and stepkids." I was suprised I'd let him know this much about me. I was never open about my private life.
"I got a bunch of brothers and sisters. I have to older sisters; Jenna, who's 21, and Leah, who's 17. I have a little sister Maya who's 10 and two half brothers; James and Jeremy, who're 3, they're twins. My parents split a couple years ago...and here I am," he finished, spreading his wings like an eagle over a cluster of mighty mountains.
"Cool. You really got a big family," I smiled.
"Yeah..."
We trailed off into a detailed discussion over which flavor of ice cream was the best, who are our favorite bands are, and who's the bigger Kabbalah fanatic; Demi or Madonna. These kinds of conversations always blithely reminded me that I was 14, not 24.
Andie and I walked along the flat ground that evening, listening, still listening, to the darkness falling; the crickets chirping, the howl of the arctic wind, and the freezing water of Ribbon Creek toppling over stone - almost solid. These kinds of memories always washed back to me in vivid form.
* * *
I snapped out of my journey to last week when I heard my stepfather bellow my name up the stairs. He was just in time. It began to snow, and the falkes were landing in my room and dampening my pajamas. I heard an ignition in the distance, and then a set of screeching wheels, stumbling across our gravel driveway, a growing gap between it and our house.
"CHARLIE!" His words made me jump and I refocused on scrambling my legs off the window sill and slapping my feet on the hardwood floor of my room. At the bottom of the stairs, I saw my stepdad looking up at me with hard eyes, intensly glazed over. He'd given me the nickname 'Charlie' when he first met me because it was short for my real name, obviously, and because he thought I looked like a boy .
"Get down here!" He shouted. I never knew why he shouted so loud, nor did I dare to ask him. I knew the result wouldn't be pleasant.
I slowly padded down the creeky footsteps, cautious, alert, aware. I felt his hot breath on my cheek. It smelled rancid, of whiskey and cigars. I saw my mom standing at the counter, mixing a Bloody Mary. Ryan raced up the stairs in his pajamas and spiderman slippers, perching at the top of the stairs in the shadows.
"Did you finish your homework?"
"Yes."
"Yes what?"
"Yes, sir," I only slightly snapped back. His face, a geographic mosaic of wrinkles, decade spots and tiny scars, fell from a hard, unfeeling wall to a sarcastic expression, almost suprising.
"Don't talk back to me! Respect me, young lady!" His voice grated at my ears as he told my mother in the kitchen how I had talked back to him and that he should slap the shit out of me. For a second he just stood there, looking at me like I was stupid. Then, "APOLOGIZE!"
"I'm sorry," I said in a small voice. Asshole.
"What's your problem?" was all I heard as I trudged back up the stairs.
Jack was a character, I knew this. He was a charming, funny, entertaining man when my mother and he were first married. That flame quickly went out after Ryan arrived. I sometimes wondered what he was really like beneath his leather exterior, his mountainous skin that never twitched even against the toughest things. I wondered where the Old Jack went. He was like Captain Morgan on the bottles of alcohol he drank often, always standing with broad shoulders with rough, used hands and a face that belonged to many painful memories.
Ryan tagging along behind me, I closed the door to my room and fell onto my bed, sighing. I grew so weary of these futile fits of bickering between him and me, that I barely had time to rest my mind, to explore what was left of my sanity and perhaps imagination.
I felt Ryan lie down next to me. I held him in the darkness under the moon as I traveled through movie reels of unreachable lives I wished I could live. My mind spun around and around, hypnotized as I rested my eyelids on my pillowcase next to Ryan's head.
No matter how much I tried to block it out, I always felt a measure of pain and confusion that gathered in my eyelids and gushed down my cheeks at night. It always felt like a feeling of failure, a red-hot sting in me that didn't stop and made me want to scream, to cry out, to hurt.
I heard Ryan snoring softly, deep within the seams of my bedsheets, causing me to stop feeling sorry for myself and not cry for Ryan's sake. He was too young to understand this feeling of destitution, of abhorrent emptiness. Instead I let my mind drift away - a balloon in the limitless sky.
I decided dreaming was better than this, this unhappiness, this wretchedness, this loneliness.
Without joining them, I had crept over to my window and thrown my legs over the side, listening, just listening. The snow had stopped earlier in the day, but it was still cold. Albeit the nasty weather, I thought the cushion on the window was the most comfortable place in our home.
I tried to connect the dots in the blackboard-like sky, wondering if I could create a beautiful mural that all the world could see and rave over. They were diamonds, resting in the dark, encased in a velvet box, untouchable, priceless, even infinite, I thought.
The longer I sat there, the louder my parents and their friends slurring words would grow. I quietly thought back to the previous days in order to block out the unpleasant drunken vocabulary from below me, trying not to ignite a flame of rage I sometimes felt. I wanted to fall into a deep slumber, wishing I wouldn't wake up, wishing I could dream these dreams forever, but instead, I began to remember the days before this Sunday.
* * *
"That's really good," Andie had said to me. He pointed to the drawing in my notebook of a house on an island that I had cooked up in my head. I let my fingers roam over the intimately drawn, detailed, and shaded image that had been on my mind all that Thursday morning.
"Thanks," I said. I grinned a little, and my eyes lit up. I hadn't smiled in so long, it was so foreign and I didn't understand where this bout of glee came from. Perhaps it was the fact that I was complimented, or that he was talking to me.
I had grown accustomed to listening to him pry conversations out of me and try to make me smile, that is, before he sat with his friends on the other side of the room. This was when a feeling of intense loneliness washed over me. I detested these time when I was left alone in the corner of the room, with no one, and nothing.
He usually kept me company by telling corny jokes or funny stories about him and his friends that never quite made me laugh, but always made me want to smile. He was a charming one, I'll admit. He was one of, no the only, person to make my stomach float and flip like an acrobat.
"So do you draw all the time or something?"
"Um, yeah, I guess..."
"You're good," he smiled. He tried to flip through the rest of the notebook with the tips of his fingers, but I pulled it away before he could.
"Hey..." he said, then looked at me and realized that I didn't want my privacy violated, and backed away. My eyes hovered over the floor of the room, like a search-and-rescue helicopter, in order to avoid eye contact. I looked back up at the window and sighed, longing for the school day to be over.
After school I had decided to take a short-cut through the wheatfeild behind the school. It ran alongside Ribbon Creek and stretched long enough to reach Riley Road, which led to my neighborhood just outside of the town's limits. Since it was winter, the field was barren and ugly, void of the tall, waist-high stalks of wheat.
I had been walking to and from school all week, and I didn't know why until my mother told me Wednesday about the fight. They were arguing, and it got out of hand. They both left the house. They had forgotten me. My mother apologized and asked me if I wanted a ride. I said no, because I had been enjoying these long walks home, able to reflect on the events of the day.
The field was not rich in wheat and did not roll with the Wisconsin wind that washed my hair in the summer. I had no sun to kiss my skin and tan me, no bugs on my sticky skin that brushed the stalks while I jumped through the field. No, there was no vivid fusion of orange and yellow and red that made up the summer twilight. The vast patchwork of windfall was not quite golden brown, nor yellowish green, but nothing.
The sky was torn like a broken record, a needle scratching it, injecting it with alcoholic guilt and pleasure. As far as the little white house on the edge of the acreage, it was a ruffled, dirty layer of snow. The snow crunched under my Doc Martins as I made my way across, trying to get home as soon as possible because I had a project to finish that I hadn't even started on.
I trudged through the icy weather, pondering different things, picking at my eyelashes when my mascara clumped together, and wrapping myself even tighter with seams of cold weather clothes.
"Charlotte!"
I turned around to see Andie running towards me. He got bigger as he came closer and closer to me. I saw a smile on his face, which made me smile back.
"Need some company?" He asked. I barely saw his eyes peeking out under his long, brown hair that sat under a black beanie. I noticed he was tall for his age and was notably tan for being from Wisconsin. He was skinny, also. He was wearing a dark green sweater, black and blue skate shoes, or 'fat shoes' as I like to call them, jeans, and a big gray coat with wool lining.
"Um, I guess," I blurted. He smiled. I saw he had braces, which amused me because no one in Aurora had braces.
"Cool. Where do you live?"
"Magnolia Road. It's not far from here. I just decided to take a short cut other than walking through town," I told him as we walked.
"Me too. Those damn cars give me a headache."
I chuckled softly and sniffed a little. My nose was getting redder as I went on with him. We talked a little about how we hated school and even our own home until he asked if I needed to blow my nose.
"Do you happen to have a tissue?" I asked sarcastically, looking around.
"Nope, but you can use my shirt."
I felt a little nervous using his shirt as a tissue, but I admired him for being polite, and for being the only person trying to befriend me. I grinned, not showing any teeth. I felt like I should say something, but I didn't. I always thought there was no point in talking when there was nothing to say.
He outstretched his arm and I grabbed his wrist, taking hold of the hem of his longsleeve sweater. I didn't look; I was too nervous.
He chuckled when I backed away, and led me as we walked along the western part of the acreage. While he spoke to me about where he lived and what his parents did, I could faintly hear the murmur of Ribbon Creek, an agile vein within the limits of the state of Wisconsin.
"Got any brothers and sisters?" He asked me as we passed a barb wire fence.
"Yeah. I've got an older sister Hilary who's 18. I also have a little brother Ryan who's 4. I'm the middle child, 14 to be exact," I explained. "Ryan is the product of my mom and stepdad. My dad lives in California with his wife and stepkids." I was suprised I'd let him know this much about me. I was never open about my private life.
"I got a bunch of brothers and sisters. I have to older sisters; Jenna, who's 21, and Leah, who's 17. I have a little sister Maya who's 10 and two half brothers; James and Jeremy, who're 3, they're twins. My parents split a couple years ago...and here I am," he finished, spreading his wings like an eagle over a cluster of mighty mountains.
"Cool. You really got a big family," I smiled.
"Yeah..."
We trailed off into a detailed discussion over which flavor of ice cream was the best, who are our favorite bands are, and who's the bigger Kabbalah fanatic; Demi or Madonna. These kinds of conversations always blithely reminded me that I was 14, not 24.
Andie and I walked along the flat ground that evening, listening, still listening, to the darkness falling; the crickets chirping, the howl of the arctic wind, and the freezing water of Ribbon Creek toppling over stone - almost solid. These kinds of memories always washed back to me in vivid form.
* * *
I snapped out of my journey to last week when I heard my stepfather bellow my name up the stairs. He was just in time. It began to snow, and the falkes were landing in my room and dampening my pajamas. I heard an ignition in the distance, and then a set of screeching wheels, stumbling across our gravel driveway, a growing gap between it and our house.
"CHARLIE!" His words made me jump and I refocused on scrambling my legs off the window sill and slapping my feet on the hardwood floor of my room. At the bottom of the stairs, I saw my stepdad looking up at me with hard eyes, intensly glazed over. He'd given me the nickname 'Charlie' when he first met me because it was short for my real name, obviously, and because he thought I looked like a boy .
"Get down here!" He shouted. I never knew why he shouted so loud, nor did I dare to ask him. I knew the result wouldn't be pleasant.
I slowly padded down the creeky footsteps, cautious, alert, aware. I felt his hot breath on my cheek. It smelled rancid, of whiskey and cigars. I saw my mom standing at the counter, mixing a Bloody Mary. Ryan raced up the stairs in his pajamas and spiderman slippers, perching at the top of the stairs in the shadows.
"Did you finish your homework?"
"Yes."
"Yes what?"
"Yes, sir," I only slightly snapped back. His face, a geographic mosaic of wrinkles, decade spots and tiny scars, fell from a hard, unfeeling wall to a sarcastic expression, almost suprising.
"Don't talk back to me! Respect me, young lady!" His voice grated at my ears as he told my mother in the kitchen how I had talked back to him and that he should slap the shit out of me. For a second he just stood there, looking at me like I was stupid. Then, "APOLOGIZE!"
"I'm sorry," I said in a small voice. Asshole.
"What's your problem?" was all I heard as I trudged back up the stairs.
Jack was a character, I knew this. He was a charming, funny, entertaining man when my mother and he were first married. That flame quickly went out after Ryan arrived. I sometimes wondered what he was really like beneath his leather exterior, his mountainous skin that never twitched even against the toughest things. I wondered where the Old Jack went. He was like Captain Morgan on the bottles of alcohol he drank often, always standing with broad shoulders with rough, used hands and a face that belonged to many painful memories.
Ryan tagging along behind me, I closed the door to my room and fell onto my bed, sighing. I grew so weary of these futile fits of bickering between him and me, that I barely had time to rest my mind, to explore what was left of my sanity and perhaps imagination.
I felt Ryan lie down next to me. I held him in the darkness under the moon as I traveled through movie reels of unreachable lives I wished I could live. My mind spun around and around, hypnotized as I rested my eyelids on my pillowcase next to Ryan's head.
No matter how much I tried to block it out, I always felt a measure of pain and confusion that gathered in my eyelids and gushed down my cheeks at night. It always felt like a feeling of failure, a red-hot sting in me that didn't stop and made me want to scream, to cry out, to hurt.
I heard Ryan snoring softly, deep within the seams of my bedsheets, causing me to stop feeling sorry for myself and not cry for Ryan's sake. He was too young to understand this feeling of destitution, of abhorrent emptiness. Instead I let my mind drift away - a balloon in the limitless sky.
I decided dreaming was better than this, this unhappiness, this wretchedness, this loneliness.
