Rose of No Man's Land

One

People always say to me that they wish they had my family. Like my family structure, or my lack of family structure or whatever. What they mean is, they wish they never had to go to school or clean their houses, or they wish they never got into trouble with their parents. Serious trouble, like when you get grounded or your favorite thing gets taken away and locked in a drawer somewhere. I guess they wish their parents didn’t give so much of a shit and since mine clearly do not give any sort of shit at all, they’re jealous. Really these people are massively wrong. It’s like when guys say, “Oh if I had tits I’d stay home and play with them all day, I’d never get out of bed.” Believe it or not I have actually heard my Ma’s boyfriend Donnie say this. I heard him say it with a mouth full of ham salad from Shaw’s, the pink mayonnaisey mush that he eats by the spoonful like a modern caveman. He doesn’t even bother to make a sandwich out of it and it’s not because he’s on one of the no-bread diets like my sister Kristy. Donnie just has a natural aversion to civilization. I’m surprised he doesn’t dig a stubby finger into the hammy glop and eat it like that, that’s how gross he is. Instead he shovels it into his mouth with a big silver tablespoon. I always know when Donnie’s been eating ’cause the sink is full of spoons. So Donnie said, just days ago, with his eyes on my mom’s boobs, “If I had tits I’d stay home and play with them all day, I’d never get out of bed,” and all the vowels were compromised by the ham salad tucked into his cheeks. The sort of funny thing is that all Ma does is lie around and fiddle with her boobs, but it’s because she’s a hypochondriac and she’s terrified she has breast cancer all the time. Whenever Donnie’s not around she’s flat on her back on the couch, her nightgown hiked up and the spectacle of her breasts splat on her chest, her hands meditatively rubbing the skin inch by inch, pressing, somber and focused like when she’d look through my and Kristy’s hair for bugs when we were little. So it was sort of ironic to hear Donnie say that to Ma of all people. Her summery nightgown does sort of showcase her boobs so it’s not like she doesn’t have some responsibility here. I thought the mere reminder that she had them would have made her hands fly nervously to case them for tumors, but instead she just smiled a weird, lazy smile at Donnie and gave him a slow-motion swat. I guess she liked it as most females enjoy it when their boyfriends make appreciative comments about their breasts. I have found that thinking about Ma like she’s just another girl in the world, like any of the girls going on about their boyfriends in the bathroom at school makes me less horrified that she is in fact my mother. When I start thinking of that word, mother, it’s when I can start to feel empty and panicky and filled with big scary nothing feelings. So mostly she is Ma, the girl on the couch, so afraid to be sick that she’s brought it onto herself, kept company in her make-believe illness by her food-eater boyfriend Donnie.

Ma says about Donnie: “At least he doesn’t bother you girls.” By “bother” she means “try to have sex with,” and she says it like we, me and Kristy, should drop to our knees and kiss the peeling linoleum and prostrate ourselves to the patron saint of creepy dudes for sending us such a winner. I think the biggest problem between me and my family (by which I mostly mean Ma, my mother, the girl on the couch) is we have really different standards. For example, I would like to think it’s a given that your mother’s boyfriend doesn’t try to have sex with you. I know that this isn’t always the case – look at the Clearys across the street. Their stepdad had actually been doing it with one of the older sisters until one of the younger sisters called the police I think and it was like the whole family got hauled away somewhere, I don’t know what happened to them. I don’t think they would put an entire family in jail for something like that, but the Clearys are gone, their house and the rumors left waiting for them. I would like to think that we do better than the Clearys, me and my family. I guess you could call me inspired. I’d like to think that you don’t just let creepy guys into the house, not ever, but to hear Ma talk about it, it’s a real crapshoot and the fact that Donnie hasn’t tried to get it on with me or my sister actually makes him a great man as opposed to simply not a criminal in that particular arena. Ma says I’m ungrateful and also unrealistic. That’s the part that gets me. I am ungrateful, it’s true. I’m not proud of it, but I don’t think that gratitude is something you can fake. I mean, people do. I see people being pretend grateful all the time, like at school, and I don’t know how they don’t just puke all over themselves from the toxic phoniness of it all. I think I’d rather be honestly ungrateful – realistic. I think I’m realistic. I hate when Ma tells me I’m not. We both think we’re being realistic, me and Ma, and only one of us can be living in what’s generally acknowledged as reality, and most of the time I’m pretty confident it’s me. But sometimes, like if I’m feeling particularly bad, she can trip me up with her insistence that I’m living in a dreamworld, and I start to consider that maybe Ma’s world is the real one. And that is a deeply spooky thought. That’s creepier than a hundred million Donnies all put together in one room eating a lifetime supply of ham salad from Shaws.