LJ – ch. 1

Lizzie’s Journal

Complete manuscript: 288 pages

Chapter 1:  Early Morning

3/21

I know he loves me.  He says he does, and I believe that in his heart he really does.  But I also know that you sometimes have to judge someone by their actions, not their words.  I have to figure out who to ask for advice.  I usually ask Bud, but I’m a little embarrassed.

It’s not easy to walk when you’re drunk.  It’s even harder when it’s dark, like at about 3 in the morning.  And it’s yet harder when you’re tired and have spent the whole day at school.  Doesn’t get any better when you’re only 16.  Jane walked up the front steps of her Philadelphia row house as if a flowing river was pushing against her legs, and she carefully planted and lifted each foot up the cement path until she was able to hang onto the front door.  Her impaired hearing was not keen enough to detect how loudly her key was scratching its way into the lock, nor did she realize how loudly the front door opened and closed as she flattened her back against it and slowly slid to the hardwood floor.  Fortunately, for all involved, the rest of the house did not hear it either.

It took about twenty minutes before her eyes opened, and she remembered that she had made it home from the keg party in Pennypack Park, less than a mile from home and adjacent to the high school she attended when she felt like it.  It would be half a day before she’d remember who else was there, how she got home, and whose hands had successfully made it up her skirt and stretched her panties until he could find what he wanted.  Even when she did remember, she would not care.  She crawled across the dark pine floor, not noticing the pain to her knees until she reached the kitchen and looked around as carefully as a drunken teenager could.  It was not her room.  She could tell by the cold floor.  Hers had a rug, but at the moment she preferred the relief given by the coolness of the linoleum.

She stood slowly, like a newborn horse on newborn legs, and managed to wobble back to the living room to find the stairs.  It was very dark up there except for the trace of a streetlight that reflected in a glass of a picture frame at the top.  It looked further away than usual, but she had no choice other than to pull on the banister until it was behind her and she would be at the top.  When she ran out of banister, she knew she had managed the stairs.  But now she had only a 33% chance of choosing the right room.  If there were suddenly a 12-year old boy’s voice yelling, that would indicate a poor choice.  If there were suddenly a 35-year old woman’s voice yelling, it would be a worse choice.  It might also be followed by a 35-year old woman’s hand slapping her across the face.  Silence would be good.  It is what she got.

Again, quietly opening and closing a door, which would have been a much easier task without so many cups of Coors Lite having been emptied during the previous six hours.  Once on her side of the locked door, she was mostly safe.  Even if her mother or brother would hear anything, she would just do her best to pretend to be asleep.  Wading through the river of alcohol still in her bloodstream, she made it to the bed and very thankfully flopped on board.  She was lying on her stomach with her head almost off the window side and her ankles off the closet side.  She wiggled her feet and ankles until her black platform shoes hit the floor.  Then she reached her thumbs into the sides of her plaid skirt, arched her back, sucked in her stomach, and slid the skirt over the curve of her ass and further down until it passed her numb feet before tossing it across the room.  On the back of her door she had written the names of any boy she could remember dating at least once.  There had been a handful of guys whose names she failed to remember the next morning.  She aimed the skirt at the door and it landed beneath it.  She didn’t notice that there was no need to remove her underwear because the stretched and abused pair that she had been wearing earlier was now on the sidewalk halfway between the park and her front door.  They were also the reason she had tripped when she was about to cross Downey Street on her way home.  She wouldn’t remember tripping.  She wouldn’t remember losing the underwear, nor would she care.  The only two reminders would be the dried bloody knee she would clean and bandage the next afternoon and the confusion on her mother’s face while wiping unusual crimson spots on the living room floor.  Jane’s explanation would be, “I must have tripped on something.”

With everything from the waist down gone, she pulled the ratty black t-shirt over her head.  It took great effort, but after wrestling it past her shoulders and elbows she was finally able to toss it near the skirt.  It landed “Ramones” side up.  The March weather was warm enough that she could dress so lightly, which made it easier for the guy whose hands, if not more, were up her skirt.  Only a month ago she might have been wearing jeans too tight for a hand to get inside.

After tossing the shirt, she made a big mistake.  She rolled over to her back.  Bedspins.  Nothing is worse than bedspins.  When you’re drunk and lying on your back, bedspins make it feel as if you’re lying on a merry-go-round that’s not only spinning laterally but also flipping around as if you were tied to a coin that someone had tossed in the air.  There are only a few ways to avoid bedspins.  1. Don’t lie on your back.  2. Keep your eyes open.  3. Don’t get drunk.  Jane quickly sat up to avoid vomiting, a result of bedspins if you’re not aware of 1, 2, and 3.  She placed her back against the headboard of her bed, forcing herself to sit up and break free from the airborne, flipping coin.

She had removed everything, yet she was still sweating from the excessive alcohol that wanted out of her body.  She was too unstable to do anything other than lie down, but she was too spin-prone to lie down.  She put a pillow under each arm and at her sides in order to prop herself up and avoid spinning.  When breakfast would be ready the next morning, this would be the position she would slowly rise from when her mother would knock at the door and order her to help her younger brother Tyler finish off the pancakes on the kitchen table.

Her mother knocked several times and called to her through the door, uncertain if her daughter was even in there.  It was not the first time Jane would come home drunk, not the last, but each time her mother was not sure which was growing faster.  Impatience, anger, or fear.  As in the past, her mother gave up knocking and then knelt to peer beneath the door, looking for a shadow of motion or anything to show evidence of Jane’s presence.  The clothes that Jane had tossed against the door the night before were blocking Mom’s view.  That was good news and bad news.  Good because it showed that Jane was home, as those clothes had not been there when she had left the previous night.  Bad news because there was a good chance that those clothes had been intentionally place to prevent her from seeing anything – or anyone – in the room.  Perhaps Jane had brought home another uninvited guest.

Mom raised a fist to continue pounding on the door but slowly lowered it.  Her shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair bounced as she turned to face away from the door, stepped across the hall, and slowly brought her right hand to her blue eyes in an attempt to hold back tears and massage the headache that was due soon.  She gripped the banister with her left hand and looked down the stairs.  Anger fought against Impatience, which was a little later than usual.  Fear was always last and started kicking Impatience in the ass.  Anger cut down Impatience with a shot to the back of the head when Impatience turned to face Fear.  Fear ran away and left Anger alone.  Anger won, which prompted Mom to turn with a fist ready to pound on the door again, only to find the door open as Jane’s 5’ 7” frame emerged, looked down at her shorter mother, and staggered down the hall to the bathroom.  Before Mom could catch up or even begin the questioning, the bathroom door had been shut and locked.

All Mom could do was look get into Jane’s room and search for evidence of anything or anyone that she could use in an attempt to ground or punish her daughter.  No sign of anyone, and she was mindful to check the closet and under the bed.  One time a guy was hiding beneath a pile of clothes on the floor, a very clever move that was given away because even mothers know that clothes don’t have early signs of emphysema.  Mom knew one thing to never look for.  Cigarettes.  No matter how cool any dumbass teenager thought they looked with a smoke, it was something that Jane would never go for.  She had made and would continue to make many mistakes in her life, but smoking would never be one of them.

There had been no one in her family whom she loved more than her grandfather, skinny ol’ Grandpa Hank.  Nobody other than Grandma Ruth would ever have a bad word about him.  Grandpa moved in with Patti and the kids after Patti’s husband left them for his secretary, whom he eventually left for the next secretary.  No child left Hank’s presence without a smile and a dollar.  No grownup ever left his presence without a laugh and a hug.  But there was no day that would pass without several drinks in his hand and a pack of cigarettes burning through his body.  When Jane had to visit the hospital day after day and watch the life slowly drip out of his body, she knew to blame cigarettes.  When it was time for Grandpa Hank to have a few words with each of the grandchildren, he had only three things to say to Jane.  “Take care of your mother, don’t smoke, and be happy.”  Two out of three wasn’t bad.  She took care of making her mother angry.  She didn’t smoke cigarettes.  Happy often came in the form of not going to class, finding beer, exploring her hormonal urges, and doing whatever the hell she wanted.

Mom didn’t detect anything alarming in Jane’s room that morning other than the usual explosion of clothes.  She also didn’t detect her son’s voice calling from the kitchen, but he wasn’t calling her.  He was at the kitchen window calling to Casper, the stray dog in the neighborhood, to come and eat the sausage he was throwing outside in the alley behind the kitchen.  Too many health classes in school taught him to stay away from greasy fatty meat like a frozen breakfast sausage off a paper towel from the microwave.  Too many weeks, months, and years of Sundays with her family taught Mom that Sunday breakfast meant sausage, pancakes, and toast.  Twenty years ago it was Grandma Ruth yelling at little Patti and her brother Sean to get dressed for church while breakfast was still in the frying pan.  Today it was a grown Patti with a hyperactive 12-year old refusing to eat chunks of microwaved greasy semi-meat while she tried to make sure her 16-year old daughter was still breathing.

As much as Mom thought about the pounding to the face she would have gotten for coming home so late and in such a condition, she also thought about how those poundings did nothing to prevent her from being a mother at the age of 19.  And those poundings would never come from Patti because there are few forces as strong as the guilt held within a single mother when the father has abandoned his family and she’s been struggling for years to do anything within her power to make her kids happy.  It was hard to spend so many weekends finding her daughter in such condition on a Sunday morning.  It was equally hard to deal with the fights and arguments that took place when Patti had the nerve to speak such phrases as “you’re grounded, no more makeup, he’s too old for you to date, this house isn’t a party house for your friends when I’m away, I don’t want your brother seeing things like that,” or anything else that resembled a desperate parent trying to regain control of her home and children.

Patti joined her son for breakfast and waited for Jane’s arrival.