unfinished

Entitled: Since Saturday I have been wearing a small tin pendant on which is stuck a circular picture, grown pink with age, of me as a toddler with my infant brother.

This weekend I stayed in a hotel room with my parents. Actually, "hotel" may be an exaggeration. On the street, its presence was indicated by a sign with a sheet of black plastic draped over it and a piece of gold canvas reading "Lenoir Inn" tied between the sign posts. Grass grew up through cracks in the driveway. As I followed my parents' two cars behind the office towards the brick buildings, reminiscent of a Days Inn, I felt a sense of impending dread. I've stayed in gross Days Inns before. This one couldn't even hang onto the Days Inn name. People wandered around the grounds, blank-eyed stares making me fear the dark corners. After eating at a Mexican restaurant called "Pancho Villa" in a strip mall containing a Blockbusters and a gas station, we headed back to the hotel.

We began taking showers to wash off the mold and dust covering each of us. My parents went first, giving me plenty of time to notice all the little things that probably added up to the Days Inn franchise being lost. I was in the small town of Lenoir, North Carolina, helping my parents clear out a house my mom has owned for almost twenty years. No one's lived in it for almost 15 years. It's really a glorified storage unit, actually. Stuff that we never moved to Shelby, stuff we moved, but then moved back when my mom lost her job there and we had to clear out the house we had started moving into already. Stuff from my grandmother's house in Asheville that she had to sell when she fell and broke her fragile hip, leaving her unable to take care of herself unassisted.

Some of the memories of the past 15 years are painful. My family has undergone some serious changes. When I arrived at the house earlier that day, Mom and Richard had already begun. I looked around at the overgrown yard, the brick sidewalk covered in a thin layer of moss.

As I walked up, looking around and seeing memories that were no longer there, my mom handed something to me with a big smile and a twinkle in her eyes. It was a little book of photos, and when I opened it I saw pictures of her in the hospital, with newborn me. My dad was there with a name badge on it that said "Coach Crabtree." My grandmothers were there, and my grandfather. They were all holding a little tiny baby; they were holding me. They were looking into my squished little face with such love and excitement! They had no idea what to expect, and it didn't matter, they loved me anyway.

I thought about those pictures the rest of the night. I looked through all the stuff in what used to be my room and remembered things I hadn't thought about for years. My fledgling clown collection, more dolls that I would have imagined (yet I fondly remembered every single one), books, some of which had been given to my mom from her mother in the 50s, makeup in unbelievable colors, pairs of fluorescent shorts so bright I couldn't actually see the color, just felt the burning in my corneas, bodysuits, purple jeans, leggings, training bras, tiny skirts and huge t-shirts, patriotic and Christian t-shirts shouting such slogans as "We Support Our Troops, Operation Desert Shield [pre- Storm]," "Reeborn," "People Need the Lord," and what appears to be the entire 1991-1993 Limited Collection of knit tops, marveling and the largeness of all the t-shirts and the comparative tinyness of all the skirts and jeans. I picked up everything in turn, running the fabric of the clothes through my fingers, smelling the fading perfumes of my youth, smoothing the hair of the dolls down into a presentable condition. I found notes from my high school and middle school days, pledging love and loyalty to people I now can't remember at all. I tried on a dress my mom had given me years ago and remembered her saying as she handed it over, "This is from when [such and such] used to take me dancing. He taught at [such and such a] dance studio and we went dancing every weekend." I twirled around and imagined my mom all those years ago, gliding across the dance floor, thinking about me and my brother, at home with the babysitter.

When we got back to the hotel, we changed into our pajamas and relaxed with some beer and television. I had to call the front desk a few times for missing items, and noticed a very strange and alarming smell in the receiver. We watched Destry Rides Again, with a very young James Stewart. My stepdad went to sleep, my mom picked up her Su Doku and I watched the movie, explaining to mom what she had missed every time something loud happened and she looked up from her puzzles.

Saturday it was more of the same, after a diner breakfast filled with smoke during which my mom reminded me of her emphysema. I felt embarrassed to have forgotten, and then I remembered that I did so because it's absurd. She has never smoked. When she told me I remembered the caricature of Joe Camel with emphysema. I helplessly inhaled the second hand smoke surrounding us and listened to her tell of her drug regime. I began imagining somehow protecting the air around her face, preventing the irritants from entering her innocent lungs. I remember how she had a cough so long I begged her to go the doctor every time I saw her. Finally she did and the confusing emphysema diagnosis was relayed over the phone to me months ago.

Saturday I went into the basement and saw the upright piano into which Eric had carved an intricate cash machine so many years ago. My mother had been so upset, but unable to be mad at my severely autistic stepbrother, she tried to explain to him why it was not ok. He stood there, hitting his balled up fists against one another in front of his face, making irritated noises until mom let him go. I saw the sheet music I had kept from All-State chorus and remembered how proud I had been to sing. One summer when I was feeling particularly ambitious, I had recorded all the complicated four-part arrangements into my parents' four-track tape recorder, singing each part in turn. I would listen to it over and over again, adjusting the levels until they were right, re-recording parts that weren't up to par. I didn't let anyone else listen to it, and I remember chasing my brothers out of the basement with a wail when they would try to sneak in.

I found a stack of papers with schoolwork belonging to all three of mom's biological children. We were looking for Baxter's baby book, which he's desperate to find. He's getting his life in order, preparing to marry his sweetheart, and maybe thinking about kids of his own. And there are writing assignments where he tells short broken misspelled stories about how he loves to ride his skateboard and can't wait until Christmas when he just knows he's getting Metroplex. There are cards to Mom from me, and one to me from Mom. I had started drawing something and my mom finished it, giving it back. When she would do this I would sometimes write "To ___________" and "From ____________" and she would lovingly fill in "Charity" and "Mommy." I found a card drawn by Isaac that says "For you ten hrt baluns. I love you a lot Cherty." Ten little heart-shaped balloons attach themselves attentively to the sign bearing his message to me.

I remember riding up to Lenoir with my stepdad, who still worked in Greensboro where we lived with my dad, and listening to Jackson Browne, Don McLean, or Fleetwood Mac, watching the lights pass by on rare occasions when the highway passed a city. When I was old enough to drive, he would make me drive the little stickshift that eventually made it into mine, then my two brothers' possession in turn. Richard would reach over and shake my arm and tell me I had to relax, or give me lectures on car maintenance and safety.

When Isaac was still little, he would wait all week with Mom in Lenoir for us to come with his daddy, and he would run through the house, yelling "Richard!" and "Kids!" since that was what Mom called us. This was after Richard and my dad got back from Saudi Arabia (we all appreciated our dads a little more after that, I think).

Isey had a special place in his little kid heart for me. He used to make things for me all the time. I think it's because when he was first born I took care of him every chance I could. We'd play games and I would take him for walks. He was like one of my dolls, only better: like my own little Pinnochio.

He also loved his big brother. Once Baxter and I were reading in Isaac's room and Isaac tore down the hall and stood there in the doorway in a pair of little boys underwear with a red towel tied around his neck, wearing some yellow toy sunglasses, socks, and wristbands made of terry cloth. "Hey Batster," he called out. "Wanna wrestle?!?" I rolled my eyes and Baxter tore off after him, with Isaac slipping and sliding over the hard wood floors in fits of hysteria. He was such a happy child (he only later realized how weird our family was and began overcompensating with brand-name indicators of normalcy).

I remembered that he had missed us so much during the long weeks alone with mom, and that he could not understood why we used to be there all the time and then all of a sudden we were not. This past weekend, as we drove through the windy roads of the outskirts of our neighborhood, Mom told me about walking and driving the streets in the evenings, having nothing else to do, knowing no one and being all alone with a toddler. I realized I never really wondered about what Mom did in Lenoir all week, and I felt bad.

Saturday night we watched a documentary about the DeFeo murders in Amityville and Batman Begins. That night mom could not sleep, and the next morning she told me about insights she had had. I listened to her talk of God and Heaven and the good and bad coming around. She thinks she has deserved the bad things that have happened to her in a way. That somehow, she has atoned for her sins through them. [I thought later about what I was atoning for and then realized that nothing bad is happening to me.] I asked her about friends who have sinned, but who seem to be doing well; "it can take a long time," she replied. I kept pushing her, finally arguing that four-year-old girls who get violently raped and murdered haven't done anything wrong, and she explained that angels can remove people from the pain they are feeling in this life and take them on to the next one; "that's the one that matters, anyway, Charity."

Even as she defended herself I wondered why I always do that. Why I always push her when she tells me something, always trying to bring out the impossibilities.

Earlier, at "Pancho Villa," in conversation about some old friends, I half-jokingly asked "I mean, am I scary or something?" After looking down a second and out the sides of their eyes, they both replied, "When you're angry."

"You're just..." my mom began. "There's no compromise," my stepdad followed. "Yes, no compromise," my mom finished, "and you get stiff and just look...scary."

Finding out I scare my family was a little disheartening. As Katie Holmes' character said (sideways) in Batman Returns, "It's not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you." That's something for me to remember, especially when interacting with people I know and love.

It's hard to look at that little baby in those pictures of me less than an hour old and think about all the things that have happened to her to make her who she is today. I really had a fresh slate, a so-called "tabula rasa." It has since been filled in, with happy things and sad, comforting and scary. All the things there now have made me who I am today, and while I can't do anything about what's there already, I can try to be more aware of what goes on there today, and in the future. Most importantly, hopefully through my awareness I can prevent what's there from manifesting in ways that are painful to those I care about.

There's so much stuff up in Lenoir I'm going to have to go back this weekend, too, which makes me very anxious since I have so much to do here. But I guess, family first. And maybe I'll learn a little more about myself in the process, too.