The Funhouse

Memoir Series

Content Warning: Emotional, psychological, and physical abuse, alcoholism, mental illness

When I was young, ours was the fun house on the block. Although our mother was strict with us when we were very young, with many rules and regulations, she lightened up a bit as I hit age five or so. We’d been programmed at that point to behave under threat of spankings and groundings so I pretty much always did as I was told.

My younger sister would push back more than I, with a need to assert herself in a way I never did back then, refusing to eat her vegetables, she’d sit at the table long after the rest of us, deciding she suddenly did not want to do the things she’d signed up to do, never having an issue displaying her anger towards our mother, “I’m not talking to you!” or the even more weaponized, “I’m not looking at you!” She’d flip her head to the other side as my mother would try to force eye contact.

Me, however, I was much more of a people pleaser, perhaps it was my Venus in Pisces or my Mars in Libra, or maybe it was knowing that my mother’s mother had died when my mother was a little girl that caused me to make her needs more important than my own. Whatever it was, I did not want to make a scene, so I saved my dramatics for the stage while being secretly jealous of my sister and her ability to assert herself.

When it came to play, however, we could pretty much do anything we wanted as long as we put it all back when we were done. Ours was the house everyone congregated at. We’d pull the cushions off the couches and turn them into ships, build forts with blankets in the living room, write plays and perform them in our garage with the boys next door wearing our mother’s old nightgowns, and drag our old crib mattresses out of the crawl space using them as toboggans as we rode them down the flight of stairs from the second floor to the first. We’d play flashlight tag well into the darkness during warm summer nights with those same boys, my best friend who lived in the house on the other side of ours, and any other kids on the block who were around.

There were always snacks and sodas aplenty, heart-shaped cookies on Valentine’s Day, homemade gingerbread houses on Christmas with trays and trays of cookies of all kinds, and epic birthday parties with all of our friends. Although it was the 70s, our house was more like the 50s with a clear delineation of roles based on gender. Our father got up, went to work, came home, and drank a Manhattan while he smoked his cigarettes. Our mother cooked, cleaned, raised us, and would sneak over to drink with the next-door neighbor after we’d gone off to school for the day.

For a year or so our father went from sporadic traveling to being gone all week long, Monday morning we’d pile into the car at 5:00am, get him to the airport, my sister puking with car sickness, and on Friday he’d return. He controlled the money and she controlled everything else.

When I was in first grade she got tired of not having her own money and started selling Mary Kay Cosmetics. The ladies would gather in our home, as she walked them through the products, and she ascended pretty quickly in the MLM, realizing her talent at sales.

At some point during the next year, I started to gain weight. That’s also the same year my mother started fucking the neighbor. It’s the year she left. Oh, she did not leave physically, she remained in body, but much of her left. I was eight, the same age she was when her mother died. She was thirty-three, also the same age as her mother was when she died.

She told me years later that she always thought she would not live past thirty-three. When she made it that far and realized she wasn’t going anywhere, she looked at the life she had created by getting pregnant with me after only knowing my father for a few weeks. He was nine years older than she, worked in sales, and was a ticket out of the blue-collar Cleveland crowd she was hanging out with. He never wanted kids. They were married soon after and moved to Chicago for his new job. She was pregnant again a few months after I was born. “I just took care of it,” she once told me when I asked why they had kids when he didn’t want any.

She’d created a replica of her early childhood life, two daughters, close in age, a working father, and a stay-at-home mother, and then she threw it all in the trash, us along with it.

It took me a long time to understand that she had left without physically leaving. Living with the ghost of the woman who used to be my mother was confusing as hell. She got a job, made new friends, and started to carve something out for herself that had nothing to do with the rest of us. Our father held on with all of his might knowing nothing about the two-year-long affair she was embroiled in with the man who lived around the block, knowing nothing about most things and yet intuitively feeling it all creating behaviors in him that made him less and less fun to be around.

The summer I was ten they started going out once a week. They said they were going to some kind of weekly meeting. They came home one night and asked us to come into the kitchen. They told us they had been going to counseling and were going to separate. She wanted out. He did not. It was clear. My sister had to move back into the room we used to share and our mother moved into what had been my sister’s room.

Things got dicey in our house. Our father was deeply steeped in denial, unable to take responsibility for his part of it, his abandonment and rejection issues at the fore. She would go out leaving us with him. We heard them fight, screaming at one another late into the night. My sister cried and I felt enraged. We were going to move out, the three of us females and he was going to stay in the house. This was his final salvo at trying to force my mother into relenting and changing her mind. At this point, “There were other men,” according to my mother.

Our house was no longer fun. It was sad and angry.

Our father relented and moved out that fall, my sister had just turned nine. I remember him leaving, witnessing the pain and sadness on his face. I’d seen him cry earlier that summer for the first time and it shocked me into silence. We had been arguing at the time. He swore me to secrecy, begging me not to tell my mother that he’d cried.

I bore it, his pain, while also understanding why my mother did not want to be with him any longer. His misogyny was apparent to me even back then, his racism and homophobia even more so. He was crude at times and was living a life he never really wanted. He had been coerced into parenthood and everything he did with or for us he had to be forced to do. My sister and I suffered as we could feel it even at that age, that he never wanted us or wanted to be near us. He has always had a hard time sitting directly next to me. The last time we went to the movies together he sat down and I sat next to him. He got up and moved a seat over leaving an empty seat between us saying, “Don’t you want to spread out? There’s hardly anyone else here.” He could not handle the intimacy of sitting right next to his thirty-four-year-old daughter. I knew the why of it, that it was not about me, and yet the rejection was something I still felt.

Being an every-other-weekend dad was perfect for him, and even then, he could never spend time with just us throughout the weekend. There were quickly other women on the scene and often we were left in his apartment alone as he went out drinking and gambling and carousing.

Soon after my eleventh birthday, just a few months after our father had moved out, our mother introduced us to the man she had been dating. We met at a restaurant, and he seemed nice enough. I got up to go to the bathroom and when I came back our food had arrived. I picked my burger up and took a bite out of it, noticing that everyone was watching me. I felt something weird in my mouth and pulled out the paper napkin he had inserted under the top bun before I returned to the table.

Everyone laughed.

I did too. It wasn’t funny. It was weird, but they all were laughing, and I did not want to be the odd one out.

It got to the point where I learned to always check my food before eating it when he was around or, conversely, never leave the table when he was there. To this day, I have no idea how many weird things I may have ingested.

Let’s give him a name, “Malcolm”.

Scenes From The Funhouse -

I’d wake up at 2:00am with thunder crashing outside our windows, realizing my sister and I were home alone, afraid, while my mother spent the night at his place.

They’d go out for the night, he and my mother. My sister and I would sit down to watch TV after they left only to discover that the cable was out. It took us a few times to realize that he had disconnected it before they left. Moving forward we’d make sure to turn the TV on and make sure everything worked before they left the house.

I don’t remember when this one began, the endless insanity we lived through is one long blur. My sister and I would be doing our homework in our bedrooms. He was watching TV downstairs with our mother.

Suddenly the lights would go out. I thought the power went out. I opened my bedroom door at the same moment my sister opened hers, and we could hear the TV below.

“Maybe a fuse is out?” I said to her.

We would go down to the basement and check. It was. I’d flip it back on and we’d go back upstairs. A few minutes later our power was out again. Again I’d go to the basement letting our mother know along the way. He was next to her on the couch laughing.

“I’m trying to do my homework!” I yelled at him as I went back upstairs after flipping the fuse again. The inevitable string of verbal abuse flew out of his mouth towards me.

“Stupid piece of shit, fat, lazy asshole”

This would go on for hours and get worse. He’d unscrewed the lightbulb over the basement stairwell and put items on the steps creating an obstacle course as I gingerly picked my way down them to return the light to our rooms.

Darkness again.

And again.
And again.
And again.

I could not open my door this time as he’d tied an extension cord from the doorknob on my bedroom door to my sister’s effectively trapping us in our rooms. We both yelled and screamed and banged on our doors to finally break our mother’s stupor.

“Have you ever been on a snipe hunt?” his son asked me one night a couple of months later. We were at Malcom’s apartment. He was now a fixture in our lives. His son was a couple of years older than I.

“No,” I said. My mother stood right there listening. Malcolm smiled and nodded. I was twelve.

My mother watched as Malcolm’s son and his much older daughter’s boyfriend drove away with me. They took me down to a big field with a creek running through it bordered by a forest and taught me how to “hunt for snipes”. While clacking my sticks I suddenly realized I was alone, completely and utterly alone in this giant field in the pitch black night, as they had abandoned me there, part of the game of tricking someone into doing something that does not exist.

Meanwhile, they got in the car and left, returning to Malcolm’s apartment without me.

Realizing I had lost sight of them, I stood there calling their names. The knowledge that they had left me there to fend for myself began to dawn on me as suddenly I saw a light moving towards me and the sound of a motorcycle. I started running away from it, terrified.

“Nora, it’s me!” the daughter’s boyfriend yelled. I had to hold onto him as he drove me back, completely repulsed by the feel of his back against me. I cried when we returned.

Later my mother said that Malcolm had said to them, “If anything happens to her, I’ll kill you both.”

This was all for show. He did not give a shit about me, and clearly, at this point, neither did she. She let me drive away with them knowing what they were about to do.

That was the summer I was not included in the family trip to Disney World and instead was dumped at my father’s.

“Your behavior with him is unacceptable,” my mother’s voice, stuck in my head, telling me that I was the bad one, the wrong one. The truth is that he was paying and he did not want me there. She chose him and the money, a theme.

I’d already been uninvited to everything else. They would go out to dinner, the movies, and on other adventures, my mother, my sister, and he. Meanwhile, I would dine at home alone on instant mashed potatoes, Kraft macaroni and cheese, bologna sandwiches slathered in mayonnaise, canned tuna on a cracker, and popcorn while losing myself in a book or TV. My love of Stephen King was born. The horror he wrote about felt like a relief contrasted with the realities of my life.

After three years of dating, he moved in and walled up our family room, taking it for himself, and filling it with his metaphysical items. We lost our family room.

I started stealing from him, a dollar in quarters every day from the big bag of quarters I found in a dresser drawer from his old apartment that he’d moved into our house and had put in “his room”. It was the only recourse I could think of, the only way I could fight back that would not get me into immediate trouble. Every day after school my best friend and I would walk to the convenience store in our neighborhood, and I’d treat her to candy on him. She never knew where the money came from.

I was always terrified he’d notice and yet the high I got off of stealing from him was exhilarating. This was something I would repeat in college, this time shoplifting cigarettes until the night I was caught by a security guard at Walgreens. I lied my ass off to the manager and said I had planned on paying for them but had run out of room to hold things which was why I had put them in my pockets. It was true that my hands were filled with items I had planned on paying for. It was my shoplifting system, one I had perfected over months.

“Pay for them,” the white, male manager said to me. The female security guard with the brown skin looked at both of us in disgust. She knew I was lying, and she also knew I was getting away with this due to the color of my skin. I knew it as well. I never stole again.

On October 18th, 1981, I came home from high school to see a marriage certificate on the refrigerator. They’d gone to city hall. We knew it was coming. He had already bought her four gem and diamond studded rings. My sister and I were not invited or even told that morning. They went and did it, and we discovered they were married by the thing hanging on the fridge that would become null and void two years later after the last run-in he and I would have (a story for another time).

October 18th is also my sister’s birthday. At this point, she was vocally and adamantly opposed to their relationship, going so far as to not look at the rings when our mother tried to show them to her, mimicking her much younger self’s version of not looking at our mother when she was angry with her. I, on the other hand, was hopeful that once married, he’d become less abusive. I know this makes no sense. I guess I thought that once he had what he wanted he’d leave me alone.

And our house was once again a fun house, the kind where you feel lucky if you make it out alive. He bought a pool table for the basement and a player piano for the foyer. He came home one day with a puppy and bought an above-ground pool for the backyard. He’d hold my head under the water until I thought I was going to die, but all of the neighborhood kids, and all of my high school friends spent much of the summers in our backyard.

“Your friends aren’t really your friends. They don’t like you. They are just using you for the pool. You should hear the way they talk about you behind your back,” his voice. “Why bother getting contacts? No one will ever want you as long as you’re fat.” I knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t, was it?

I walked into my bedroom and smelled something. I discovered the pile of dogshit on the paper plate that had been sitting under my bed for, I don’t know how long.

Me, banging on the diamond-shaped window panes on our front door one night. He’d locked me out and I was out without my keys. My fist inadvertently smashing through the glass, my wrist covered in blood, and my mother grabbing my arm to make sure I had not cut an artery.

“Clean it up!” she disgustingly yelled once seeing that my wound was superficial. My next-door neighbor and childhood best friend bandaged me up and helped me sweep up the broken glass. I still have the scar.

Opening the refrigerator and seeing that he had taken one bite out of every single thing inside of it, each piece of leftover BBQ chicken, each slice of watermelon, each ear of corn, each slice of pie, everything, one single bite. His mental illness was progressing.

“He told me he believed he was the reincarnation of Jesus,” my mother once said a couple of years after he was gone. I’m pretty sure she believed him for a while, her Catholic programming, alcoholism, and her own mental illness disabling her from seeing the actual psychosis playing out in front of her.

I was sixteen when I walked into my bedroom to discover that everything had been turned backward, everything, from furniture to items on my desk to the bed to the art on the walls, everything. He’d enlisted the help of the teenage boys next door, inviting them into my room. I put it all back by myself.

The fucking with me was endless. There was nowhere and no one safe.

There was just my younger sister, locked away in her room escaping into her violin, surviving it the best she could.

There was just me, my hands shaking all of the time, obsessively checking my food, waiting for the next hit, things to be thrown at me, raw eggs smashed into the top of my head, the next “practical joke”, and the constant stream of verbal abuse tearing my sense of self into shreds.

And there was just our ghost mother, there but not actually there.

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