We can get sidetracked, I said to no one, and off the track completely, if we only pay attention to certain things, the same things over and over. If we don’t widen our scope and look at the broader picture, we may find ourselves repeating and looping endlessly, pointlessly. You have to continually see the world in new ways or else you get stuck, I said to no one. So perhaps one day, when you wake up, you pretend to be Fiona Apple, imagine what your daily life would be like.
It was a unique perspective, on the floor, and I began to notice pieces of dried-up mucous stuck to the wall along the baseboards, crusty pieces of snot attached to the wall. It was my adoptive brother’s mucous; no one else in the house used this bathroom, as it was attached to his bedroom. Perhaps this was part of the cruel plan Chad Lambo talked about. He left the snot for us to discover and bring back to life. When I tried to peel it off, it broke into pieces, sharp pieces of dried-up mucous cut through the bandages and sliced into my fingers and made them bleed all over again. Some of the wallpaper ripped off.
I stood up, went to the sink, washed the blood off my hands, splashed my face with water and rinsed out my mouth, and replaced my bandages. When I was little, I used to say bad things and tell lies, like all little children. Especially when I lied, my adoptive mother picked me up and carried me to the sink and rubbed my mouth with a bar of white soap, probably Dove. There was always a bar of white soap by the sink. I wondered what the soap would taste like now. As a thirty-two-year-old woman, I picked up the soap, which had bubbles on top from my previous washing, and I placed a bit of the end inside my mouth. I gagged immediately, it was disgusting, more disgusting than the taste of sperm. I’d rather swallow sperm, I said to no one, I’d rather eat a tray of pubic hair. My adoptive mother’s punishment came back to me clearly and I pictured how frenzied she became as she wiped the bar of soap all over my mouth, and I saw her throwing down the bar of soap in disgust and dropping me to the floor. I was seven years old. It actually made me feel a little better to gag again, to get the alcohol out of my body.
A person knocked at the door.
Is someone in there? a relative asked.
Yes, Helen’s in here, I said. To be honest, I’m not doing well.
Should I get your father?
Please don’t do that, anything but that!
The relative didn’t hear me, because after a minute of silence, my adoptive father knocked at the door.
Helen, what’s going on in there? Other people need to use the bathroom. You can’t just stay in there all night. Don’t be so selfish.
I know there are other people out there and it’s very selfish of me to hog the bathroom, I said, but there are other bathrooms. Can’t they use those?
Your aunt’s pill container is in that bathroom, and her things, he said. Open the door.
I pictured the other people in the hallway. They hovered around the door and waited anxiously. I picked up a towel from the closet, maybe the same one I had masturbated with, and wrapped it around my head. I opened the door and, without a word, stepped out.
My face was covered with the towel, but I knew if I walked approximately twenty steps and turned to the left, I would come to the door of a never-used guest room that functioned mostly as storage for my adoptive father’s hoarding tendencies. No one even tried to stop me.
It’s all yours, I heard my adoptive father say to a relative.
The bathroom door shut.
39
Two steps forward, one step back. One step forward, two back. I was very far away from where my adoptive parents wanted to put me: my adoptive brother’s bedroom. Thirty steps, fifty steps away, who could say? I was in a room that no one paid attention to. It was drab and filthy. A pullout couch covered in cigarette burns took up most of the room. No one in the house smoked, the smoker must have been the previous owner, the couch must have been owned by someone else and purchased from Goodwill. The rest of the room had been taken over by stacks of books, papers, files, documents. The room was nothing more than a paper landscape, with one single window that looked out onto nothing, the panes of glass covered in thousands of fly carcasses and spiderwebs, impossible to see out of. I sat on the couch. I felt like I was sitting in the most depressing and disgusting waiting room, worse than the Milwaukee DMV. The room always smelled like body odor, even though no one ever spent any time in it unless one was forced to. Sometimes, when we were little, my adoptive father locked us up in this room. It was a real and serious punishment worse than being spanked. Go to the smelly room, he would say, and think about what you did. To get out, we would have to beg. To be put in a begging position as a child sickened me even more than the bar of soap in my mouth.
For the first time in my life, I realized I disagreed with Kafka. My adoptive brother and I had no weapons, not even metaphorical ones. We were too dumb to figure out how to climb out of the window and onto the roof to escape. We were too dumb to do anything except beg.