Tomorrow, or Monday, I’ll make a real post that involves my life.
However, in the mean time, here’s the third entry from Snell.
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Even if Mom had already bought a house and might have, to other eyes, appeared completely prepared, this was about as far from the truth as Charming was from New York City. We had one car, a medium-sized truck, and Mom did not believe in hiring movers because of some past bad experience involving a couple of forks, a beagle, and some guys from Two Men and a Truck. I never did get all of that story. So we got to do it all on our lonesome, and it was by the nature of the thing the opposite of an adventure.
That is to say, it was a total and utter disaster.
Even if you’ve lived your whole life in an apartment, there is just a certain amount of Stuff that you acquire. When your mother is a medicated bipolar writer free spirit, you accumulate a lot of this Stuff. We had at least ten paintings from Melissa, from the size of a matchbox to three that were almost as tall as I was. We had lots of knickknacks from Mom’s traveling years, including a shrunken sheep head that I’d never been able to decide if it was real or not and three hat racks that were carved like live oak trees complete with Spanish moss and a few beautifully depicted least terns. I had my own vast cactus collection—I got a new one every time we went to Birmingham from the Lowe’s there—and the equally vast assortment of carved or cast or pottery cats. (I didn’t even like cats all that much, but I liked fake ones.) Luckily, the apartment had come furnished, so we didn’t have to deal with most of the chairs and couches and such, but there was a coffee table that Mom’s great-great aunt had painted and an ancient overstuffed armchair from my room that I refused to part with.
Mom’s boss gave her about thirty packing boxes that still smelled like Peruvian coffee beans. After packing and repacking and then taking it all out and starting over again to try to maximize every square inch of space possible—organization was neither of our strong points—we shoved every last bit of Stuff into the truck as humanly possible. But a third of it was simply not going in. Mom broke two glasses, just for the fun of it.
“At least that’s two more things we don’t have to pack,” I said, leaning my forehead limply against the door frame.
There was a tinkle of glass as she dumped them into the trash can. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her twirling the sheep head on the base of its skull on the kitchen table.
“Maybe we should have thought this through a little more…”
I tactfully decided not to say anything about this.
“You know, it’s not too late to call some movers—”
I should have known better.
“No,” said Mom shortly. “No movers. We’ll just have to make it work.”
I stood up wearily and stuck my finger in the empty eye socket of the sheep.
We walked down the street and got a couple of bars of chocolate, which was what we always did whenever we couldn’t figure out what in the world to do. When we got back, a small crowd of children from the apartment complex were playing in the parking lot, furtively staring at the mountain of boxes and odds and ends tarped and bungee corded down in the back of our truck. We waved heartily at them, and they went running off back to their apartments, undoubtedly to tell their parents that the perverted writer and her bastard daughter were finally leaving.
Well, sort of. If we could. Not a single other thing was going into that truck, and that was that. So we went up to our balcony and sat on the concrete since we’d already loaded up our folding chairs and waited for a light from heaven to bring us a miracle.
“We need a Tardis truck,” mumbled Mom.
“A retarded truck?”
“No, a Tardis truck. You know, bigger on the inside.”
I looked at her blankly. She shook her head.
“Never mind. It’s just an old show that your Uncle Carter used to watched obsessively when he was younger.”
I leaned my head back against the wall, staring at a wasp that was circling the nest hanging fruit-like from the awning. For a second, I considered worrying and trying to figure out a solution to the problem of what in tarnation we were going to do with all of the Stuff, but instead, I fell asleep. I’m a little bit of a narco. I got to sleep basically whenever I get still, one reason why I was seriously glad that I’d been home-schooled. Real school would have been disastrous—I probably wouldn’t even be able to read.
Next thing I knew, I was suddenly being shaken awake and Mom was shouting that the Rapture had come and we were saved, saved, SAVED! Getting groggily to my feet, I saw that Melissa had pulled up under the balcony with a horse trailer attached to the back of her SUV.
“Umble dumble unph,” I said, or something like that. I’ve always wondered if someone gave me a breathalyzer test after I woke up, if I would pass or fail.
Mom pelted down the stairs and I groggily followed after her, wondering what could have possibly caused her to suddenly get religion and start proclaiming the end of the world. But it quickly became evident.
Melissa jumped out of her vehicle, violently aqua marine hair done up in a fantastical series of tiny ponytails all over her head, pulling my mother into a tight hug.
“Oh Amelia you are an absolute lifesaver I don’t know what I would have done without you with Rick’s leg broken and me having to take off work to take care of the horses and I absolutely had no time to do this and I promised them I’d have it there yesterday and oh Amelia you are just a dear.”
Believe it or not, that was actually a short sentence for Melissa. Talking to her was generally like trying to drink from Victoria Falls.
Taking Melissa’s shoulders—sometimes I think they fancied themselves in the middle of some sort of modern Lord of the Rings—Mom smiled widely.
“Melissa, hon, you have absolutely saved our souls. This is the most fortunate of arrangements to have every blessed our household.”
Like I said. A little bit overdramatic.
“Okay,” I said. “What?”
“Oh hon, it’s just wonderful! It’s fabulous!” exclaimed Mom. Christmas, apparently, had come early, and twice, to boot. “Melissa needs this horse delivered up to a farm just ten miles from our house, and she is going to let us take the horse trailer with us! And since there’s only one horse, we have plenty of room to pack all of the rest of our Stuff! The miracle has arrived!”
The horse, a big dapple grey stallion that I vaguely recognized, stuck his head out of the back of the trailer and whinnied. I gazed at him dubiously.
“What’s his name?” I asked to buy time before I asked Mom how exactly she was planning to pull a horse trailer when she sometimes had trouble simply parking in between the lines.
“Bob,” said Melissa, smiling broadly.
“Bob?” I said incredulously. “That’s the most boring name ever.”
“Sometimes, my dear, simplicity is the most beautiful thing of all, such as you can see in Matisse’s art books and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, in the poetry of Carl Sandburg and the writings of Hemingway…”
She went on in this way for quite a while without a single period or breath to speak of, and without turning blue, which was the truly impressive part. I turned to Mom, knowing that Melissa would keep talking as if I were riveted to her words with steel, uh, rivets.
“So Mom, how exactly are you planning to drive this thing?” I asked casually, pretending to look at my reflection in the tinted windows of Melissa’s car.
“Oh hon, you should know I’m not going to even try to drive it! We’d crash for sure, right off a mountain and down into some deep ravine where it would take them years to find us and we’d only be rotting corpses.”
Uh-oh.
“You’re going to drive it, of course! Plus, you’re much better with horses than I am, so you’re the natural choice.”
I declined to point out that this had absolutely nothing to do with being able to drive a truck that had suddenly gone from sixteen feet long to thirty-two, at least.
The rest of the morning went pretty smoothly. Melissa helped us with the hat racks and my armchair and all the other assorted boxes that had flatly (or rather, cubely) refused to fit into the truck. Bob was rather unenthused about the cargo that he was sharing the trailer with, and let us know this by repeatedly dropping hamster-sized turds that smelled like the end of civilization every few minutes.
Our landlady came and took a look at our apartment to see if we’d damaged it. There was about an hour-long drama in which she insisted that the bright yellow stain on the wall that we’d covered with one of Melissa’s paintings had been our fault, but eventually she managed (with Mom’s rather forceful help and the intimidation factor lent by Melissa’s hair) to find the damage report we’d filed immediately after we’d moved in. She scowled and gave us our deposit and then practically ripped the keys from Mom’s hand, making it clear that we were about as welcome in Charming Hills Apartment Complex as Ebola outbreak in an orphanage.
Melissa made long and verbose promises about coming to visit us. I didn’t doubt this; the Appalachians seemed like the kind of place where artists would gather in droves to camp and get high and sit around nude and sing John Denver and Cranberries on a regular basis. Then we put the last of our stuff in the truck—about all that could fit was our bodies and a few water bottles—let Bob out of the trailer to make one last dung bomb in the middle of the parking lot as a parting gift to Charming, and headed out of town.
Luckily I managed to convince Mom to take the practical route rather than the scenic route. It was easy for her to want to take every twisty windy-turny kick-back road that took us generally in the direction of Meat Camp—gah, I didn’t think I’d ever get used to saying that—but first of all, as I had zero experience driving a horse trailer, I didn’t want to take any more chances than necessary, and secondly, cleaning up carsick horse vomit off of all our earthly possessions sounded even more fun than moving to a place called Meat Camp in the first place. So we took the interstates, traveling through the traffic zoo of Birmingham and along the river in Chattanooga and up through the rolling hills of Tennessee.
We stopped for a sort of lumper—this, in case you don’t speak Southern, is a cross between supper and lunch—at a Cracker Barrel in Sweetwater, Tennessee.
“Cracker Barrel, Mom? Really?”
“We’re moving, hon. Everybody stops at Cracker Barrel when they move.”
We sat outside in the rocking chairs until the little plastic box started buzzing enthusiastically, nearly leaping out of my hand. Then we went inside and played the game with the triangle and tees that told you how smart you were. Mom got Purty Smart twice in a row, but I was an Egg-No-Ramus every time.
It was after the meal when both of us ate too much fried catfish and dumplings that we discovered the second hitch in the whole moving extravaganza. As I closed the door on the horse trailer after giving Bob some water, I saw a little yellow tag on the bumper.
DOES NOT BACK UP.
“Uh, Mom?”
Of course, we’d pulled in. Straight, directly in to a parking spot that was not directly across from another parking spot—oh no, that would have been too easily solved, just a matter of finding the owners of the car in front of us and asking them to move. Instead, we had parked right in front of the back wall of the Cracker Barrel.
Two and a half hours and multiple, increasingly liquid horse patties later, we made it back on the road, hot and sweaty and, above all, snappy as Chihuahuas in heat. After an hour and a half of miserably failed attempts to convince the trailer that yes, you will back up despite the laws of physics, because I said so, and getting the entire rig totally discombobulated, we’d finally given up and called the tow truck, which was close enough to movers that Mom immediately became ten times more ill. The two men who had showed up with the tow truck had openly stared at us—the whole white mom/black daughter issue tends to draw attention like a legless veteran in a wheelchair—and then made comments about Mom’s butt barely under their breaths for the rest of the time.
The rest of the trip was no more pleasant. I took two wrong turns and got a full hour off course both times. Despite our best efforts, Bob did throw up, and all over the sheep’s head, too, and that took another forty minutes to try to clean it off the Stuff and walk him around a bit; he rewarded us by biting Mom so hard on the neck that he drew blood. By the time we got to the abysmally complicated out-in-the-boondocks, oh-my-gosh-is-there-really-enough-room-for-two-lanes-on-this-road, endless-switchbacks-with-no-side-rails-between-us-and-the-million-foot-drop-next-to-the-road part of the drive, night had fallen with a pitch black vengeance with no moon and no streetlamps anywhere. I would have cried except then I would have been able to see even less.
However, when we finally pulled up in the driveway of our new home four hours later than we expected to be, our headlights sweeping across the house and giving us our first ever view of it, I did cry.
We sat there in silence for a good long while except for my stifled sobs, Mom’s eyes glazed over in a state of shock as the enormity of what we’d done started to sink in nice and deep, like a crap-load of plastic debris dumped into the Pacific Ocean over the Maryanna Trench.
If Bob hadn’t started bouncing in the trailer, we might have sat there all night long.
“Okay, Snell, enough,” said Mom. She spoke in the voice that said for itself, “Even if I have Abominable Luck and even worse decision-making skills, we’re going to darn well make it work.”
“But—Mom. Look at it.” I hiccupped. “It’s a dump. I cannot sleep in there. I just can’t. There are going to be mice, and spiders, and snakes, and birds—”
I don’t think I’d ever used so many italics in my life.
Mom sighed. “We’re just going to have to make the best of it.”
I folded my arms and scowled at her. “I am not sleeping in there. I’m not living in there.”
And I started crying again.
Inarguably, it was an absolutely stunning house. That much was obvious even in the splotchy, washed-out car lights. Whoever had built it had created an absolute masterpiece with a gabled wrap-around porch, high peaked roofs, a balcony nestled beneath an ornamental awning and guarded with a lovely iron railing, flowerboxes under every grand window, and a central turret rising from the second floor a full two more stories. There was even a small greenhouse jutting out to the left. It was a model example of Victorian architecture, like something dragged unwillingly straight from the pages of a coffee table book on the very subject.
Except it hadn’t been dragged from a coffee table book. It had been dragged kicking and screaming and hollering the worst curse words it knew up through the aeons from the eighteen hundreds, and it didn’t look like a single soul had lived in it since then. Well, that was probably an exaggeration, but I was past caring about that at that point. The arched oaken door hung drunkenly from its hinges. Not a single one of the aforementioned grand windows had a complete pane of glass left in them, and weeds spewed from the flowerboxes like the hair of long-dead corpses in the flush of the violently modern headlights. Some sort of crawling plant had taken over so much of the front of the house that you couldn’t even tell what color the paint was, and the few patches had faded to a sort of nondescript deadness.
The massive oak tree growing straight up out of the greenhouse roof might as well have been the cherry perched atop the most infernal catastrophe cake of our entire lives.
“Fine,” said Mom finally, giving in. Her voice might have broken a little. “We’ll stay in a hotel tonight.”