~~~
“You’re not touching your mashed potatoes, honey,” my mom said gently, gesturing to the steaming pile of starch, which looked as appetizing as a heap of albino crap.
We were having dinner, and thanks to my incident with Cheerio earlier in the day, I lost the wil to eat, even though mashed potatoes and chicken parmesan were among my favorite foods. I could only pick at it and push the food around my plate, feeling on edge and depressed at the same time.
My dad sighed, loudly, and folded his hands, his chubby fingers smeared with old ink stains. He rested his chin on them and peered at me over the top of his thick glasses.
I shot him a derisive look. “What now?”
His eyes narrowed momentarily but he managed to rein in his temper. It never did me any good to get snappish with him, but I was sick and tired of having everyone look at me like I was a mental patient. They did that already anyway, and now it was even worse.
“I think we’re al worried about you,” he said careful y. He glanced at Ada to see if she’d disagree. But from her quiet, pensive demeanor, I could see she was worried too.
“I’m also worried,” I admitted. “Animals usual y love me.”
He sighed again and leaned back in his chair. “Perry, come now, you must have done something to provoke the animal.”
“Like what?” I exclaimed. “I just waved.”
“You waved at a dog?”
“I always wave at dogs! And I always wave at Cheerio.
Go ask the neighbor.”
“We would but I think she’s stil in the hospital getting her knee looked at. That was her bum knee, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know,” I said, pushing back my plate in anger. It rattled loudly on the hard table. “How the hel should I know that? It wasn’t my fault her damn dog went psycho.”
“Perry!” he admonished. The tension in the room shot up. “We do not use that word in the house.”
“Damn? Hel ?” I repeated. “Why the hel not? You think God is going to come down and smote you for it? Fry you like a piece of Goddamn bacon right here?”
“Perry, for goodness sake!” my mother yel ed, her voice warbling in a mix of fear and anger.
I looked at my family, at their tense, tight faces, and squelched the anger I felt rising through me. I don’t know what happened, but it was like I lost al control. Not only of my emotions, but of my actual being, my body and my mind, like I was being split into two people. The scary thing was I’d been feeling like that quite a bit.
I took a deep breath through my nose and closed my eyes, trying to regain focus.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Silence. I opened one eye and saw my parents exchanging looks across the table. Ada was observing me with her big eyes and reached over to pat my hand.
“Don’t worry about it, you weirdo,” she said with a smal smile. She looked down at my hand and raised her brow.
“Wow, you’ve got some nice nails going on for once.”
I frowned and looked down at fingers. I did have nice nails. They were longer than normal, expertly shaped and coated in a shiny coral pink color.
The room started to spin slightly.
I’d never worn pink nail polish in my whole entire life. I never even had a bottle of it.
“Oh, those are nice, Perry,” my mom added, happy to change the subject. “Your nails are usual y such a mess.”
I brought my hand out of Ada’s and raised it up to my face. This was my hand, right? It was attached to my body, it had the same slight scarring across the top from when I was an emo teenager and thought cutting myself with a safety pin would be a good idea. I pinched the tips of my nails, checking to see if someone had glued on fake nails as a joke. But they were real, attached to my fingers, even though I had no recol ection of ever painting them that color.
“What’s wrong?” Ada asked.
I shook my head, swal owing the confusion.
“Nothing,” I squeaked out. “I just…don’t remember where I got this color from, that’s al . Is it yours?”
Ada looked at my nails a little closer. “No, that’s too orangey. I have a similar shade but it has sparkles.”
I looked up at my mother hopeful y. Her nails had a perfect French manicure.
“Not mine,” she said. “But I’d like to borrow it.”
I nodded at that and stared back at them. Everything around me got fuzzy and swirly while I thought things over.
When could I have done this? How could I forget something like painting my nails? Not that it was a significant event but it wouldn’t be something that would just fal out of my head.
And where the hel did I get the color? I didn’t remember ever buying it. I mean, pink? Yuck.
This was the kind of thing that happened when you were drunk. Perhaps I’d been blacking out through the NyQuil or while I was on the pain meds earlier in the week. It stil didn’t explain where the nail polish came from in the first place. Maybe I had been doing some major sleepwalking, like the kind that sent me to raid the 24-hour Walgreens for nail polish.
“I thought you were turning over a new leaf,” my mother said, delicately munching on a bite of salad. “It would be nice if you-”
She was interrupted by three quick knocks at the front door. My heart lodged somewhere in my chest. One glance at Ada’s frightened face and it was apparent she felt the same way too.
My dad frowned, more perturbed than alarmed, and got up out of his chair, tossing his napkin on the table.
“I’l go see who it is,” he grumbled and made his way down the hal . I looked at my sister and mother, who were leaning forward in their chairs, shoulders tense.
We heard my father slide the chain across and open the door.
“Who’s there?” his professor-like voice boomed out into the night. “Show yourself.”
There was a pause and the sound of his shoes on the front brick stoop, then him coming back inside, the door closing softly behind him.
He emerged from the hal , shaking his head and holding something in his hands.
“What is it?” I asked.
He stopped in front of us and held up a miniature pair of pastel blue slippers, the knit kind made for a newborn baby.
How freaking creepy.
“I found them on top of the flower pot,” he explained. The slippers were attached by a thick rope of yarn and when he hung it from his index finger they danced back and forth from the movement, as if they were taunting me.
“Ew, dad.” Ada grimaced, shielding her face. “Get them away from the dinner table, jeez.”
My mom agreed, tel ing him he didn’t know where they had been.
I was the only one who felt personal y impacted by the slippers, and was mildly horrified until my dad took them over to the trash can and placed them inside. The lid closed with a heavy thud but in my heart I felt like it wasn’t enough to keep them out.
Was this someone’s idea of a sick joke? I had a miscarriage and suddenly a pair of baby shoes appeared at the front door. But who else besides my family knew about my situation, and who would do such a thing?
I shivered and quickly excused myself from the table, not caring what my parents thought. My appetite was total y gone.