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My saddest summer memory is the summer when I was 12 and my mom and I lived in the sunroom of my uncle’s house near Attleboro because my mom lost her job and we had nowhere else to go. My uncle had sexually abused my mom when she was younger (he’s ten years older than her) and he could still be physically abusive to me and drank a lot so we put a lock on the door between the sunroom and the rest of the house and would climb out one of the windows to leave or if we had to pee in the night. The whole sunroom was glass on three sides, so the way we got privacy was to rig up sheets but we didn’t have enough sheets, so there was still one side where we didn’t have privacy. We moved a couch and a chair to block the view from that side at least to waist height, and we would sleep on the other side and change our clothes crouched down behind the couch. We called the place we slept “the bedroom” and the rest of the sunroom “the living room.” We had a hotplate in the corner and a hose from outside that we ran through a hole in the screen mesh from the garden. You could open a window and reach out to turn it on without having to go outside. The hotplate and the hose were “the kitchen.” The side with the unblocked windows looked out onto a tall hedge between my uncle’s property and the neighbor’s yard, so it was still kind of private, but it creeped both of us out. We were pretty sure my uncle would look in from that side at night, but he couldn’t get into the sunroom because he was such a fat gently caress that he wouldn’t fit through the windows. The windows were on a hinge that swiveled at the center and opened with a crank, so when you opened one, half the window would be projecting into the sunroom and the other half would be projecting out into the yard. The sunroom on that side was about three feet above the ground, so what we would do was open the window and slide underneath the windowpane, putting our hands out in front of us onto the ground and then wheelbarrowing out. I was taller than my mom even at 12 but my mom wider so we used to joke about who had it rougher trying to get out “the front door.” When we went out for the day we would leave the window open. One day when we came home, Tyson was there. Tyson was a big gray cat, a real bruiser, broad-shouldered and swaggy. We called him that because of Mike Tyson. He must’ve belonged to some other family but he came around all the time. My mom would never have paid for cat food, but she didn’t mind if I fed him little bits of whatever I was eating. Tyson would often spend the night. It was hard to sleep in the sunroom. It would get up into the 90s inside on hot days and even in the evening it would take a long time to cool down. There were bugs because we had to keep the windows open. It was not easy, but it really helped when Tyson would plop down next to me, even though he was big and warm. In the beginning of August, when Tyson was over for one of his visits, I woke up in the night to hear glass shattering. My mom had been trying to leave to pee and the back of her heel caught the windowpane and broke it. She couldn’t come back in the same way because she would have had to crawl on glass, so I opened a different window on the other side of the sunroom and she shimmied in that way. It was late and we were tired. She said she would clean it in the morning. In the morning there were bloody paw-prints everywhere around the window. I don’t know how a cat steps all over shards of glass and doesn’t make a sound (at least not a sound that woke us up), but he did it. And that was the last time Tyson ever showed up. Mostly, when I think about that summer, I think about walking, walking everywhere, walking miles a day with my mom “looking for work.” At the time, I vaguely accepted that story. We did go to the library every day and she would look through the want ads, and sometimes we would even walk somewhere so she could fill out an application. But a lot of the time, we would just walk. Thinking back on it, I think she was just trying to give us something to do, some sense of forward motion, some way to get us tired out enough to go to sleep in that sweltering sunroom so we could wake up to do it all over again. Every day by 11am my feet were sore and throbbing, but I didn’t say a word. A few years later I became crazy and rebellious, but that summer I was quiet, responsible, reserved. I walked with my mom wherever she said we should go, and I didn’t complain. So I suppose when I saw those bloody prints, they made a lot of sense to me. “Tyson,” I thought, “I know just how you feel.” That’s not my actually my saddest summer memory. It’s not even my saddest memory from that summer, but it’s the saddest thing I’m going to write about and share with other people here, and it’s one that has really stuck with me even after worse things have faded away. ---------------- |
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Jun 15, 2016 00:54
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 10:19 |
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