Adverse Possession
Deborah Ross
Adverse Possession
The occupation of land to which another person has title with the intention of possessing it as one’s own.
--Oxford Dictionary
Andrew
He liked to keep the blood. He was sort of proud of it. He had even painted pictures in it and posted them on Facebook a few years before, when he was a miserable teenager, and his cousin had told his aunt who told his mom. That was the second time he managed to get through to her that this was serious. The first was that night she turned up at the back of the ambulance where he had woken up and found himself trying to blink away the fluorescent lights, electrodes stuck to his chest and monitors beeping. Something had happened to his watch. Later he remembered some stuff. The fight with James, who stopped answering his texts. The bottle of vodka he scored from Foodland. Finding his watch was gone and retracing his steps to find it, climbing over fences and into backyards in the dark. Then the old guy standing over him with a baseball bat. Then, finally, the blare of the sirens and Mom, framed in the door to the ambulance, for once with nothing to say. But at least he’d gotten her attention. Most of the time, as long as he had stayed quiet in his room, she didn’t ask and he didn’t tell. She usually kept out of his room when he wasn’t there, which was hardly ever anyway. The one time she went in to look for a screwdriver or something and found his needles and one of her spoons with the bowl blackened and one of her shot glasses with a little piece of cotton in the bottom, he told her it was from a long time ago, and she believed it, or pretended to. He’d finally worn her down on that one. If that was what he really wanted to do.
This time the blood was on the floor from where he had stepped on the shards after smashing the full-length mirror. What a dump this room was. She always ran on and on about how much it cost to build it, so passive-aggressive, how she had to take out a second mortgage, she’s done so much for him, he never appreciates it, blah blah blah. But the room was tiny, the air conditioner had dripped and stained the paint almost right after it was put in, the loft bed they had somehow managed to put together, together, without fighting was too close to the light fixture, so its plastic shade had long ago fallen off and broken, so the bare bulbs were inches away from his feet when he was trying to sleep. Which he usually couldn’t. He hadn’t slept for more than a few minutes in days. Those fuckers at Kaiser wouldn’t give him enough Klonapins, probably because she called and told them he would take them all at once, which really wasn’t true, he just took what he needed, which was more than they would ever give him.
And the room was so full of stuff you could hardly move around. That piano keyboard she got him for Christmas a few years ago took up most of the room under the window, and it was useless, only good for putting things on like ashtrays and pill bottles, he never figured out how to make it work with his computer, the software it came with was so out of date. And the electric bass and amplifier. And the acoustic guitar. And the computer, and all the guts from the old computers that you couldn’t just throw away, they would be useful for something at some point. And the tools that had to be right there or he’d never be able to find them, it was hard enough to find anything even when it was right there. And the clothes that couldn’t be put in drawers like she was always telling him to do because the drawers were already full of clothes he would never wear, clothes from Grandma, like shirts from Surf & Sea, clothes that were meant for the handsome, popular young man she was trying to make him into. Yes, he knew he was a stereotype, the over-privileged millennial who had everything he could possibly want and was still miserable, too lazy to learn to play any of his instruments, claiming ADHD and Aspergers and whatever else as excuses for not getting, or not keeping, a job, spending all his time, when he had any money, getting high and playing Halo and watching Top Gear, usually all at once. He hated that room. It was a mess. And yes, he knew that was partly his fault, he could clean it up. And he would clean it up eventually, if only she didn’t tell him to do it because then of course he couldn’t.
But even more he hated the living room (or living/dining room, this wasn’t a very big condo) because she was always in it, watching something awful on TV, some Dateline episode where the woman was murdered, always by the husband or boyfriend, or sometimes her kids. And she had that stupid rule that you have to eat out in the living room, not in the bedrooms, a rule she knew perfectly well he ignored, didn’t even bother to hide the Burger King wrappers and Dr. Pepper bottles on his floor. Who could eat out there with all that crime going on all the time? If he couldn’t eat in his room he just wouldn’t eat at all, and would get skinnier and skinnier. Not that she would notice.
Even when she wasn’t home, he hated the living room because it was like a shrine to his childhood—full of pictures of him and his sister, more of him than her since he was the first kid. There were pictures of him as a baby on the piano, magnets with his picture in preschool, and kindergarten, and first grade on the refrigerator, and lots of other tiny snapshots all over the house, a baby covering his face with birthday cake, all the classics, always smiling. It was even worse at Christmas, all those picture ornaments from just about every school year, the construction paper they were mounted on long faded and partly eaten by something in the storage room, mice or rats or roaches. And her pride and joy, hung on the living room wall: the studio portrait of him at age five that she’d had printed onto glass, with that impish grin on his face she always said captured his personality so perfectly, which shows how much she knows about that. She had no idea how miserable he had been that whole time. He had always hated how he looked, and he used to try to tell her, but she just wouldn’t listen, and now she had completely blanked it out and said it never happened.
So this time he was in his room, hungry because he couldn’t walk right past her and through his door with a McDonald’s bag, tired because no one would give him anything to help him sleep, and James wouldn’t answer, and he just lost it and smashed the mirror with one of the broken guitars, and then he cut his foot, and there was blood on the floor. Later when she was helping him clean up the mess he would ask if he could leave it there. Sort of a souvenir.
Mom
Of course that wasn’t really Andrew’s internal voice. All of the sections I’ve marked as his are being told by me. There are echoes of things he actually says out loud, here and there, but mostly I’m just a far from omniscient narrator, trying in imagination to get inside his head. Or back inside. It’s a new feeling, this uncertainty about what he’s thinking. All during his childhood, my main job wasn’t being an educator, though teaching college English was what I was being paid for, but negotiating with educators on his behalf. That is, I interpreted him to the army of professionals-- psychologists, doctors, social workers, special ed. teachers, regular teachers, principals, etc.—deployed to help those with “learning differences” navigate the system. Sounds like the stereotypical helicopter parent, I know, as several of his less sensitive teachers obviously thought. But the ones who actually liked him and saw him as “special” in a good way welcomed my interventions and mediations as crucial time-savers. And when he was younger he would always endorse the version of him I presented to them. Yes, he would say, that’s what I meant. I was blowing on the other kids during nap time to cool them off. I couldn’t hear Miss Davis’s question because there were birds on the windowsill and I was figuring out how their feathers are stuck on. I couldn’t do the arithmetic worksheet because I didn’t have any more pencils because people who said they were my friends kept asking me to give them one.
But I can see how horribly constricting my interventions would seem to him now, at 22, how he must have felt for a long time before I realized it. I’ve been sort of like the British Raj, colonizing his personality, believing myself to have only the best intentions, but still a usurper destined to be overthrown, leaving the indigenous populace struggling, often violently, to find its way to self-rule. I just wish he could do it without destroying the past, when we were so close, I’d swear we were, though he doesn’t seem to remember that. When he comes into the living room now, he demands that I get rid of all those pictures from his childhood. But this is my house, I want to say, though I stop short of saying that. I never wanted to be that parent who says, “As long as you live under my roof you abide by my rules.”
Why? Partly because we’d already tried that, twice. Once, three years ago, I kicked him out for smoking weed, which amazes me to think of now when I’m so happy when he has some to help him stay calm and eat and sleep. Then a year ago, when he turned 21, he cashed in the investment account the grandparents had been feeding every birthday and Christmas, the money meant for college or the down payment on a house, or Yacht Club dues (that’s how in touch with reality they were). He took the cash and went off to Washington State to be near James. Both times he ended up on the street after a few months. That’s how I learned that for my own sanity the least I could do for as long as I’m alive is give him food and a place to sleep. That was the one principle I was holding onto when it seemed impossible to figure out the right parental thing to do.
The night he smashed his mirror and cut his foot, I called 911, and the police and an ambulance came and took him to the ER. At 1 a.m. he called me to pick him up. I told him he couldn’t live here if he was going to keep smashing things, reminded him that I have kicked him out before and could do it again. He promised to stop. And I agreed to move some of the pictures he hated into my room.
Andrew
He could see she was trying. (But then that was a favorite joke of hers—“Yes, you are trying. Very trying.”) And he was trying too. He would do anything rather than go back to sleeping behind a dumpster in the freezing cold in Spokane. So he talked to her nicely, stayed in the living room to watch a few minutes of her shows, agreed that Johnny Gage on Emergency! was really cute, though by now in real life he must be over 80. And it paid off. One afternoon she actually answered his questions about what Dad had been like when he was his age, the punk band he had played in, the girl he was engaged to before they met, details about his motorcycle and the fatal accident. She even went to the storage room with him and went through the boxes of Dad’s stuff with him, laughing over the Nirvana and Velvet Underground buttons and the thrift shop army shirt decorated in sharpie. And she let him bring one of the broken guitars out to play around with in his room without even mentioning that he still hadn’t cleaned up all the junk that was already there, like he’d promised.
But the next day she was at it again, watching a show about the Menendez brothers, who I guess claimed they shot their parents by accident or something, while they were on the couch watching TV, probably a Dateline episode about kids who killed their parents. He couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stay in the living room even long enough to microwave a frozen cheeseburger, and he was pretty hungry because his stomach had been fucked up and kept him awake the whole night before. So he went back to bed and tried to sleep, but he could still hear the TV, and his stomach was still talking to him. He just needed to smash something. He tried not to, asked if she’d please turn off the TV just for a little while, but she said not till the show was over. So he went right into her room and smashed that glass portrait of his five-year-old self that she loved so much into about sixteen pieces, and then he came back out and told her right to her face, “You know what that was, don’t you?” He couldn’t believe how hard and how long she cried. It was only a picture.
Mom
After he smashed the picture I cried a while, then pulled myself together and took Romeo, our little white mop of a mutt, and went out for a drive to cool off. When I got back, the front door was locked. When he heard me trying to get in, he came and opened it. “I just wanted you to see what it feels like to not be allowed in your own house,” he said, or rather shouted over the din of the vibrating bass of something he called music that he had put on my DVD player--the full-on version of what I could usually hear leaking out of his ear buds when he was in his room messaging his friends. He had moved the living room couch to face away from the TV and rearranged my work space to put the speakers in what he said was a more optimal listening position. I was not to move them back. After all, he said, it’s his house too.
Maybe I should have put my foot down right then. But I have to admit, I was afraid. Just like the battered wives and girlfriends on Dateline, I had gradually learned to avoid saying no to him whenever possible. The police, it turned out, seemed to endorse this strategy. They had come with the ambulance the night he broke his mirror and cut his foot, and again a few days after he had broken his glass portrait and locked me out, when yet another rampage had brought the neighbors on each side to my door to see if I was okay. This time the officer took each of us aside to talk to us separately and then left, and no wonder: Andrew had seemed perfectly calm, almost amused by his own behavior, enjoying the attention. When the next night he took a match to a picture of James while standing over the living room rug, I called again. The same officer responded and this time said there was nothing they could do unless I got a restraining order. So, I asked, there’s no law against him destroying my property? In theory, maybe, he said, but there would be no way to prove it wasn’t his property. After all, I had allowed him to establish his residence with me. It said so on his driver’s license.
This was scary. But a restraining order? That would be the end of my one remaining parenting principle, my one certainty in all this fog--that no matter what, he would always have a home with me if he needed one. Anyway, it wasn’t as if he was actually threatening to hurt me—though come to think of it, he was getting bolder about crossing that line, like pulling me back into the house by my shirt when I tried to go to the door to talk to the neighbors. And he did, accidentally?, kick me in the stomach when I tried to help him up from the floor to get dressed for a doctor appointment.
Still, I just couldn’t see getting a judge involved. I had to keep trying. So I chose a calm moment and asked to have a serious talk. He agreed, as he had before, that no one should have to live in an atmosphere of violence, which is what it was, breaking things, slamming doors, screaming obscenities. This time I typed up a contract stating that he would not do these things again, to try to make it official, and he signed it. So that was that.
Andrew
He could see her point, no one should have to live in an atmosphere of violence, including him. What she couldn’t see, or wouldn’t admit, was that it was at least half her fault. She provoked him. He signed the paper because what choice did have? He had nowhere else to go. She had all the power. He’d heard about that in one of his therapy groups, financial abuse, a form of bullying where the one who controls the money gets to call all the shots. But sure, she was right that the chaos he was creating around him wasn’t good for him either. When he first got back from Washington he had really appreciated how neat his room was, and he even thanked her for cleaning it. But she couldn’t seem to understand that by bringing this up every other day she had made it impossible for him to clean, that every time she asked him to do it she was forcing him to do the opposite.
Still, he had to agree, the way to make both of them happy, to make him more independent, was for him to get a job. And though she didn’t seem to realize it, he was constantly sending out applications. It wasn’t his fault no one ever called him for an interview. She was just wrong when she said you have to show up in person, follow up with phone calls. He’d shown up at a McDonald’s where he’d applied once and they just told him to apply on the web site. In Washington he’d worked for a while at a call center, before they cut his hours down to zero so he couldn’t afford his rent any more and had ended up on the street. He’d hated that job, basically hated phones, always had, he was supposedly on the autism spectrum after all and was probably the last person who should have a job where all he did all day was chitchat with hostile strangers. But the few months’ experience, which he called a year on his résumé, did get him an interview with a bank back home. The problem was, they had a zero tolerance policy for weed, even though it was practically legal now, and he would have to pass a pee test before they would hire him. He managed somehow not to smoke for three, almost four weeks, and luckily that was enough, and he passed.
He had to admit, this made things better. She never asked him to clean his room any more, and he could buy his cheeseburgers and Dr. Pepper and cigarettes on his own, though she would also pick up whatever he liked at Costco, frozen cheeseburgers, cans of corned beef hash, cases of sweet green ice tea. In fact he rarely had to ask her for anything, and they could have normal conversations, about which of the contestants on Bachelorette were hottest, stuff like that. She even helped him buy a moped to drive to work, when before she’d always been too afraid to let him, because of Dad. And when it was raining she drove him to work and picked him up.
Mom, by Andrew
She probably really loves him but just doesn’t know what to do.
Mom
Things were so peaceful I started to feel once more that I understood my son. As a writing exercise I even tried writing a story in first person from his point of view, in which he imagined what I was thinking and feeling. I had him figuring out that his mom really loves him and just doesn’t know how to help him. But as events unfolded, I soon realized that this was just what I wanted him to be thinking, instead of what seems to be the painful truth. More likely, when he bothers to imagine my point of view at all, which wouldn’t be often, I’m the cold-hearted, controlling bitch who makes him suffer while telling herself what a good, self-sacrificing mother she is.
That time between his first interview with the bank and his actual hiring was tense. Not having weed meant he couldn’t eat and had trouble sleeping again, so his temper was perpetually short. Every few days I bought him a drug test at Walmart—the cashiers were probably wondering what kind of wild life this old lady could be leading—and we would argue over the result. A line next to the word “drug” meant he’d passed. So was there a line, maybe a really, really faint one that only he could see? Or not?
But he did pass, and for a while things really were better. After a few weeks, though, there would be a day here and there when he said he just didn’t feel well enough to go to work, and he’d call in. And those started to happen more and more often. Also apparently the workers were rated on how many calls they made and how long they’d gotten people to stay on the line, and his ratings fluctuated wildly. One day he came home with a certificate naming him Employee of the Week. Another day he would say he had been given a rating of sub-par because of too many bathroom breaks and was told that if he got three of those he would be terminated. The stress was making it even harder for him to eat and sleep, so after a while he talked to his supervisor about possibly switching to part-time, or to another department where he could be mainly inputting information instead of talking to people. All of this sounded good to me, a constructive way of dealing with the problem. I, and I thought he, was hopeful, waiting for a departmental transfer offer to come through. But then one day he just up and quit.
Meanwhile the refrigerator was full of his meaty leftovers, the moped was parked on the deck so the lawn guy couldn’t get his mower into the gate, and I got a threatening letter from the condo association about the state of my yard.
Andrew
So now he was home all day again, and since it was summer and school was out she was home all day too, and there was no escape from the murders in the living room. Every day she had some suggestion about jobs he could apply for, a temp agency he could register with, or even an unpaid internship or charity where he could volunteer. What good would that do when what he needed was money of his own? Did she think he wasn’t trying to find work? Did she think he even wanted to be here? Why couldn’t she see that every time she made a suggestion, that would be one more thing he couldn’t possibly try?
Besides, he tried to tell her his wrist hurt, he thought he had carpal tunnel, she needed to take him to the ER right away. But as usual she didn’t take it seriously, like she didn’t believe in his insomnia and anorexia and joint pain and IBS. She told him to wait till the weekend was over and call for an appointment with his regular doctor, as if he could just wait months, which was what always happened when he tried to schedule appointments over the phone. And all that time he wouldn’t be able to type or text, which was practically the only way he could communicate with James because he didn’t pick up actual phone calls.
Mom
Whenever I’d make a suggestion, like maybe he could contact the temp agency that had offered him jobs before, he’d say, “Sure, you want me to sell hot dogs in the blazing sun at the stadium?” Which of course was impossible—for sure that job was always listed because no one wanted to do it or maybe even could do it for long. But that wasn’t the only job they’d mentioned. He used to talk about delivering pizza, like that was something he’d enjoy, but now when I brought that up he’d remind me that he would have to pass a drug test, and that there was no way he could stay off weed for three or four weeks again. And I agreed: that had been a nightmare.
Then he started complaining that his wrist hurt, and I tried to tell him he could make a same-day appointment on Monday, only a day and a half from now, and it would be much cheaper than the ER and better because the doctor would have his file and know his history. But he was too mad to listen and seemed to think I was making up the whole idea of same-day appointments.
Andrew
Anyway, he had no money and so couldn’t buy weed or even cigarettes. And then James, his only friend now, stopped answering his texts, and the only thing that made him feel better was smashing things, so why shouldn’t he be allowed to do that? They were his own things after all: his monitor, his TV, his framed pictures, his door that he made a hole right through by hitting it with his tripod.
Mom
His door but my house. And the pictures he called his, some of them, were pictures of him, ones he knew I treasured, ones I had obligingly moved out of the living room so he had to go into my room to get at them. Besides, the sound of that door breaking must have been heard all over the complex and would no doubt be one more thing added to the list of ways we were now in violation of condo association rules.
Andrew
He just wanted to die. Or kill her. It had to stop. He just wanted her to call the cops, and they would come and maybe shoot him. Then it would be over and she’d have to live with what she’d done to him.
Mom
He kept screaming, “Call the cops.” But he didn’t know that last time the police had basically told me they wouldn’t come over here again. Eventually, though, when even the broken door hadn’t slowed down his rage, I had to call 911, and when the dispatcher heard the background noise she sent both police and ambulance. I don’t know what he told them, but they took him to the ER rather than to jail. And again he called me at 2 a.m. to come pick him up. And the first thing I noticed when I pulled up by the entrance was the plastic brace on his wrist. Which I guess was what all this had really been about. Once again, he’d managed to get exactly what he wanted.
Andrew
He couldn’t possibly sleep in his room, it was full of broken glass again, the dresser drawers were all dumped out and broken. And the smell. Somehow a tube of Nair had opened up and spilled all over his clothes and the floor. So she said he could sleep in his sister’s room temporarily. And why shouldn’t he? Margie didn’t even live here any more.
She said she’d help him clean up his room tomorrow so he could move back in there. But he had to get it cleaned up right away! He had to make everything all right again, make it all not have happened. When he realized some of the things he loved were gone for good, he sat down and cried. And she wouldn’t even help! He just wanted to get that Nair off his clothes before it stained them, get the glass swept up, get the broken furniture out onto the deck, that was all, the rest could wait. But she kept saying No, tomorrow.
Mom
So when he wouldn’t stop screaming at me until I agreed to help him clean up his room, at 3 a.m., I gave in. Well, not right away, I was so exhausted. But the stench of Nair was making him panic, and I could see he was just realizing that the guitar he’d broken and the pictures of James he’d trampled to death were really gone, the grief was immense, he just had to do anything, get me to do anything, to make it not have happened. So I agreed to help for one hour, then two, to clear a path to his bed, until surely even he could see that it was still going to have happened.
As dawn was breaking I took four garbage bags of his destroyed stuff out to the car, drinking in the Nair-less air, and drove them to the dumpster at the far end of the parking lot, hoping no neighbors would see me. But of course Ron across the way and Glen next door were getting in their cars to go to work, and of course they said good morning and looked at me a little too long.
Andrew
So of course he still needed to sleep in Margie’s room, the next night and the night after that, because after all no one else was using it, so what was the big deal? He put all the stuff from her desk on the floor and moved his computer and monitor in there. He moved Margie’s office chair into his mom’s room and replaced it with his better one.
Mom
After a few days I asked when he was planning to finish cleaning his room and move back in there, and he exploded again. True, Marguerite had been away at college most of the time, but she still came home at Christmas and summers. It wasn’t time to give away her room yet, was it? He started screaming and threw another picture on the floor, shattering the glass. The one of Margie flying through the air in her gymnastics uniform, that I had sent to the grandparents for Christmas years before. This had to stop. I tried to reason with him, told him to think about how bad he had felt the last time he broke things. Or to think of my feelings. And what about the agreement he had signed?
Andrew
He remembered perfectly his grief over his lost things. But what did anything matter now? Clearly he was fucked anyway. As for her feelings, when he thought about them he just wanted to smash everything in her room and her face along with it. He didn’t believe he’d signed any kind of paper, but when she showed it to him, he had to admit it was his signature. Oh well, he guessed he just wasn’t the kind of person who honored agreements.
Mom
I looked at the piles of Margie’s papers and pens and pictures on the floor, at the broken glass, at Andrew’s dirty clothes everywhere. The room was already almost a mirror image of his own. I backed out into the living room and looked at the mess of my papers and the laptop that Andrew had tossed aside when he moved the speakers, at the couch now jutting out at a weird angle, facing nothing. I looked out the sliding glass door and saw the deck now filled with his moped, his broken bureau drawers, his shattered screens, the grass behind it a mile high. I retreated to my room, now so filled with things Andrew wouldn’t allow in the rest of the house, his house, that I could barely reach my bed. I tried to lie down to rest and think, but on the other side of the wall I could still hear him yelling and cursing. There was simply no space left for me.
So I took my purse and Romeo and went out to the car. And that’s where I am now, my head resting on the steering wheel, by turns crying and writing this story down in my little notebook. A minute ago my eye caught a small stone on the passenger side floor mat. It’s a polished piece of malachite that must have fallen out of one of the garbage bags I’d filled up from Andrew’s room on the night of its climactic destruction. It’s beautiful, with intricate little lines and squiggles decorating the deep green. It feels smooth and cool in my hand. I consider bringing it back in the house and giving it back to Andrew. But then he’d realize that while trying to clean everything up in the middle of the night I’d probably thrown away a bunch of his stuff without really looking at it, and he’d go off again.
So here I sit, in the driver’s seat but going nowhere, rolling the stone over and over in my hand. My new home. My stone. My story.
Deborah Ross
Adverse Possession
The occupation of land to which another person has title with the intention of possessing it as one’s own.
--Oxford Dictionary
Andrew
He liked to keep the blood. He was sort of proud of it. He had even painted pictures in it and posted them on Facebook a few years before, when he was a miserable teenager, and his cousin had told his aunt who told his mom. That was the second time he managed to get through to her that this was serious. The first was that night she turned up at the back of the ambulance where he had woken up and found himself trying to blink away the fluorescent lights, electrodes stuck to his chest and monitors beeping. Something had happened to his watch. Later he remembered some stuff. The fight with James, who stopped answering his texts. The bottle of vodka he scored from Foodland. Finding his watch was gone and retracing his steps to find it, climbing over fences and into backyards in the dark. Then the old guy standing over him with a baseball bat. Then, finally, the blare of the sirens and Mom, framed in the door to the ambulance, for once with nothing to say. But at least he’d gotten her attention. Most of the time, as long as he had stayed quiet in his room, she didn’t ask and he didn’t tell. She usually kept out of his room when he wasn’t there, which was hardly ever anyway. The one time she went in to look for a screwdriver or something and found his needles and one of her spoons with the bowl blackened and one of her shot glasses with a little piece of cotton in the bottom, he told her it was from a long time ago, and she believed it, or pretended to. He’d finally worn her down on that one. If that was what he really wanted to do.
This time the blood was on the floor from where he had stepped on the shards after smashing the full-length mirror. What a dump this room was. She always ran on and on about how much it cost to build it, so passive-aggressive, how she had to take out a second mortgage, she’s done so much for him, he never appreciates it, blah blah blah. But the room was tiny, the air conditioner had dripped and stained the paint almost right after it was put in, the loft bed they had somehow managed to put together, together, without fighting was too close to the light fixture, so its plastic shade had long ago fallen off and broken, so the bare bulbs were inches away from his feet when he was trying to sleep. Which he usually couldn’t. He hadn’t slept for more than a few minutes in days. Those fuckers at Kaiser wouldn’t give him enough Klonapins, probably because she called and told them he would take them all at once, which really wasn’t true, he just took what he needed, which was more than they would ever give him.
And the room was so full of stuff you could hardly move around. That piano keyboard she got him for Christmas a few years ago took up most of the room under the window, and it was useless, only good for putting things on like ashtrays and pill bottles, he never figured out how to make it work with his computer, the software it came with was so out of date. And the electric bass and amplifier. And the acoustic guitar. And the computer, and all the guts from the old computers that you couldn’t just throw away, they would be useful for something at some point. And the tools that had to be right there or he’d never be able to find them, it was hard enough to find anything even when it was right there. And the clothes that couldn’t be put in drawers like she was always telling him to do because the drawers were already full of clothes he would never wear, clothes from Grandma, like shirts from Surf & Sea, clothes that were meant for the handsome, popular young man she was trying to make him into. Yes, he knew he was a stereotype, the over-privileged millennial who had everything he could possibly want and was still miserable, too lazy to learn to play any of his instruments, claiming ADHD and Aspergers and whatever else as excuses for not getting, or not keeping, a job, spending all his time, when he had any money, getting high and playing Halo and watching Top Gear, usually all at once. He hated that room. It was a mess. And yes, he knew that was partly his fault, he could clean it up. And he would clean it up eventually, if only she didn’t tell him to do it because then of course he couldn’t.
But even more he hated the living room (or living/dining room, this wasn’t a very big condo) because she was always in it, watching something awful on TV, some Dateline episode where the woman was murdered, always by the husband or boyfriend, or sometimes her kids. And she had that stupid rule that you have to eat out in the living room, not in the bedrooms, a rule she knew perfectly well he ignored, didn’t even bother to hide the Burger King wrappers and Dr. Pepper bottles on his floor. Who could eat out there with all that crime going on all the time? If he couldn’t eat in his room he just wouldn’t eat at all, and would get skinnier and skinnier. Not that she would notice.
Even when she wasn’t home, he hated the living room because it was like a shrine to his childhood—full of pictures of him and his sister, more of him than her since he was the first kid. There were pictures of him as a baby on the piano, magnets with his picture in preschool, and kindergarten, and first grade on the refrigerator, and lots of other tiny snapshots all over the house, a baby covering his face with birthday cake, all the classics, always smiling. It was even worse at Christmas, all those picture ornaments from just about every school year, the construction paper they were mounted on long faded and partly eaten by something in the storage room, mice or rats or roaches. And her pride and joy, hung on the living room wall: the studio portrait of him at age five that she’d had printed onto glass, with that impish grin on his face she always said captured his personality so perfectly, which shows how much she knows about that. She had no idea how miserable he had been that whole time. He had always hated how he looked, and he used to try to tell her, but she just wouldn’t listen, and now she had completely blanked it out and said it never happened.
So this time he was in his room, hungry because he couldn’t walk right past her and through his door with a McDonald’s bag, tired because no one would give him anything to help him sleep, and James wouldn’t answer, and he just lost it and smashed the mirror with one of the broken guitars, and then he cut his foot, and there was blood on the floor. Later when she was helping him clean up the mess he would ask if he could leave it there. Sort of a souvenir.
Mom
Of course that wasn’t really Andrew’s internal voice. All of the sections I’ve marked as his are being told by me. There are echoes of things he actually says out loud, here and there, but mostly I’m just a far from omniscient narrator, trying in imagination to get inside his head. Or back inside. It’s a new feeling, this uncertainty about what he’s thinking. All during his childhood, my main job wasn’t being an educator, though teaching college English was what I was being paid for, but negotiating with educators on his behalf. That is, I interpreted him to the army of professionals-- psychologists, doctors, social workers, special ed. teachers, regular teachers, principals, etc.—deployed to help those with “learning differences” navigate the system. Sounds like the stereotypical helicopter parent, I know, as several of his less sensitive teachers obviously thought. But the ones who actually liked him and saw him as “special” in a good way welcomed my interventions and mediations as crucial time-savers. And when he was younger he would always endorse the version of him I presented to them. Yes, he would say, that’s what I meant. I was blowing on the other kids during nap time to cool them off. I couldn’t hear Miss Davis’s question because there were birds on the windowsill and I was figuring out how their feathers are stuck on. I couldn’t do the arithmetic worksheet because I didn’t have any more pencils because people who said they were my friends kept asking me to give them one.
But I can see how horribly constricting my interventions would seem to him now, at 22, how he must have felt for a long time before I realized it. I’ve been sort of like the British Raj, colonizing his personality, believing myself to have only the best intentions, but still a usurper destined to be overthrown, leaving the indigenous populace struggling, often violently, to find its way to self-rule. I just wish he could do it without destroying the past, when we were so close, I’d swear we were, though he doesn’t seem to remember that. When he comes into the living room now, he demands that I get rid of all those pictures from his childhood. But this is my house, I want to say, though I stop short of saying that. I never wanted to be that parent who says, “As long as you live under my roof you abide by my rules.”
Why? Partly because we’d already tried that, twice. Once, three years ago, I kicked him out for smoking weed, which amazes me to think of now when I’m so happy when he has some to help him stay calm and eat and sleep. Then a year ago, when he turned 21, he cashed in the investment account the grandparents had been feeding every birthday and Christmas, the money meant for college or the down payment on a house, or Yacht Club dues (that’s how in touch with reality they were). He took the cash and went off to Washington State to be near James. Both times he ended up on the street after a few months. That’s how I learned that for my own sanity the least I could do for as long as I’m alive is give him food and a place to sleep. That was the one principle I was holding onto when it seemed impossible to figure out the right parental thing to do.
The night he smashed his mirror and cut his foot, I called 911, and the police and an ambulance came and took him to the ER. At 1 a.m. he called me to pick him up. I told him he couldn’t live here if he was going to keep smashing things, reminded him that I have kicked him out before and could do it again. He promised to stop. And I agreed to move some of the pictures he hated into my room.
Andrew
He could see she was trying. (But then that was a favorite joke of hers—“Yes, you are trying. Very trying.”) And he was trying too. He would do anything rather than go back to sleeping behind a dumpster in the freezing cold in Spokane. So he talked to her nicely, stayed in the living room to watch a few minutes of her shows, agreed that Johnny Gage on Emergency! was really cute, though by now in real life he must be over 80. And it paid off. One afternoon she actually answered his questions about what Dad had been like when he was his age, the punk band he had played in, the girl he was engaged to before they met, details about his motorcycle and the fatal accident. She even went to the storage room with him and went through the boxes of Dad’s stuff with him, laughing over the Nirvana and Velvet Underground buttons and the thrift shop army shirt decorated in sharpie. And she let him bring one of the broken guitars out to play around with in his room without even mentioning that he still hadn’t cleaned up all the junk that was already there, like he’d promised.
But the next day she was at it again, watching a show about the Menendez brothers, who I guess claimed they shot their parents by accident or something, while they were on the couch watching TV, probably a Dateline episode about kids who killed their parents. He couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stay in the living room even long enough to microwave a frozen cheeseburger, and he was pretty hungry because his stomach had been fucked up and kept him awake the whole night before. So he went back to bed and tried to sleep, but he could still hear the TV, and his stomach was still talking to him. He just needed to smash something. He tried not to, asked if she’d please turn off the TV just for a little while, but she said not till the show was over. So he went right into her room and smashed that glass portrait of his five-year-old self that she loved so much into about sixteen pieces, and then he came back out and told her right to her face, “You know what that was, don’t you?” He couldn’t believe how hard and how long she cried. It was only a picture.
Mom
After he smashed the picture I cried a while, then pulled myself together and took Romeo, our little white mop of a mutt, and went out for a drive to cool off. When I got back, the front door was locked. When he heard me trying to get in, he came and opened it. “I just wanted you to see what it feels like to not be allowed in your own house,” he said, or rather shouted over the din of the vibrating bass of something he called music that he had put on my DVD player--the full-on version of what I could usually hear leaking out of his ear buds when he was in his room messaging his friends. He had moved the living room couch to face away from the TV and rearranged my work space to put the speakers in what he said was a more optimal listening position. I was not to move them back. After all, he said, it’s his house too.
Maybe I should have put my foot down right then. But I have to admit, I was afraid. Just like the battered wives and girlfriends on Dateline, I had gradually learned to avoid saying no to him whenever possible. The police, it turned out, seemed to endorse this strategy. They had come with the ambulance the night he broke his mirror and cut his foot, and again a few days after he had broken his glass portrait and locked me out, when yet another rampage had brought the neighbors on each side to my door to see if I was okay. This time the officer took each of us aside to talk to us separately and then left, and no wonder: Andrew had seemed perfectly calm, almost amused by his own behavior, enjoying the attention. When the next night he took a match to a picture of James while standing over the living room rug, I called again. The same officer responded and this time said there was nothing they could do unless I got a restraining order. So, I asked, there’s no law against him destroying my property? In theory, maybe, he said, but there would be no way to prove it wasn’t his property. After all, I had allowed him to establish his residence with me. It said so on his driver’s license.
This was scary. But a restraining order? That would be the end of my one remaining parenting principle, my one certainty in all this fog--that no matter what, he would always have a home with me if he needed one. Anyway, it wasn’t as if he was actually threatening to hurt me—though come to think of it, he was getting bolder about crossing that line, like pulling me back into the house by my shirt when I tried to go to the door to talk to the neighbors. And he did, accidentally?, kick me in the stomach when I tried to help him up from the floor to get dressed for a doctor appointment.
Still, I just couldn’t see getting a judge involved. I had to keep trying. So I chose a calm moment and asked to have a serious talk. He agreed, as he had before, that no one should have to live in an atmosphere of violence, which is what it was, breaking things, slamming doors, screaming obscenities. This time I typed up a contract stating that he would not do these things again, to try to make it official, and he signed it. So that was that.
Andrew
He could see her point, no one should have to live in an atmosphere of violence, including him. What she couldn’t see, or wouldn’t admit, was that it was at least half her fault. She provoked him. He signed the paper because what choice did have? He had nowhere else to go. She had all the power. He’d heard about that in one of his therapy groups, financial abuse, a form of bullying where the one who controls the money gets to call all the shots. But sure, she was right that the chaos he was creating around him wasn’t good for him either. When he first got back from Washington he had really appreciated how neat his room was, and he even thanked her for cleaning it. But she couldn’t seem to understand that by bringing this up every other day she had made it impossible for him to clean, that every time she asked him to do it she was forcing him to do the opposite.
Still, he had to agree, the way to make both of them happy, to make him more independent, was for him to get a job. And though she didn’t seem to realize it, he was constantly sending out applications. It wasn’t his fault no one ever called him for an interview. She was just wrong when she said you have to show up in person, follow up with phone calls. He’d shown up at a McDonald’s where he’d applied once and they just told him to apply on the web site. In Washington he’d worked for a while at a call center, before they cut his hours down to zero so he couldn’t afford his rent any more and had ended up on the street. He’d hated that job, basically hated phones, always had, he was supposedly on the autism spectrum after all and was probably the last person who should have a job where all he did all day was chitchat with hostile strangers. But the few months’ experience, which he called a year on his résumé, did get him an interview with a bank back home. The problem was, they had a zero tolerance policy for weed, even though it was practically legal now, and he would have to pass a pee test before they would hire him. He managed somehow not to smoke for three, almost four weeks, and luckily that was enough, and he passed.
He had to admit, this made things better. She never asked him to clean his room any more, and he could buy his cheeseburgers and Dr. Pepper and cigarettes on his own, though she would also pick up whatever he liked at Costco, frozen cheeseburgers, cans of corned beef hash, cases of sweet green ice tea. In fact he rarely had to ask her for anything, and they could have normal conversations, about which of the contestants on Bachelorette were hottest, stuff like that. She even helped him buy a moped to drive to work, when before she’d always been too afraid to let him, because of Dad. And when it was raining she drove him to work and picked him up.
Mom, by Andrew
She probably really loves him but just doesn’t know what to do.
Mom
Things were so peaceful I started to feel once more that I understood my son. As a writing exercise I even tried writing a story in first person from his point of view, in which he imagined what I was thinking and feeling. I had him figuring out that his mom really loves him and just doesn’t know how to help him. But as events unfolded, I soon realized that this was just what I wanted him to be thinking, instead of what seems to be the painful truth. More likely, when he bothers to imagine my point of view at all, which wouldn’t be often, I’m the cold-hearted, controlling bitch who makes him suffer while telling herself what a good, self-sacrificing mother she is.
That time between his first interview with the bank and his actual hiring was tense. Not having weed meant he couldn’t eat and had trouble sleeping again, so his temper was perpetually short. Every few days I bought him a drug test at Walmart—the cashiers were probably wondering what kind of wild life this old lady could be leading—and we would argue over the result. A line next to the word “drug” meant he’d passed. So was there a line, maybe a really, really faint one that only he could see? Or not?
But he did pass, and for a while things really were better. After a few weeks, though, there would be a day here and there when he said he just didn’t feel well enough to go to work, and he’d call in. And those started to happen more and more often. Also apparently the workers were rated on how many calls they made and how long they’d gotten people to stay on the line, and his ratings fluctuated wildly. One day he came home with a certificate naming him Employee of the Week. Another day he would say he had been given a rating of sub-par because of too many bathroom breaks and was told that if he got three of those he would be terminated. The stress was making it even harder for him to eat and sleep, so after a while he talked to his supervisor about possibly switching to part-time, or to another department where he could be mainly inputting information instead of talking to people. All of this sounded good to me, a constructive way of dealing with the problem. I, and I thought he, was hopeful, waiting for a departmental transfer offer to come through. But then one day he just up and quit.
Meanwhile the refrigerator was full of his meaty leftovers, the moped was parked on the deck so the lawn guy couldn’t get his mower into the gate, and I got a threatening letter from the condo association about the state of my yard.
Andrew
So now he was home all day again, and since it was summer and school was out she was home all day too, and there was no escape from the murders in the living room. Every day she had some suggestion about jobs he could apply for, a temp agency he could register with, or even an unpaid internship or charity where he could volunteer. What good would that do when what he needed was money of his own? Did she think he wasn’t trying to find work? Did she think he even wanted to be here? Why couldn’t she see that every time she made a suggestion, that would be one more thing he couldn’t possibly try?
Besides, he tried to tell her his wrist hurt, he thought he had carpal tunnel, she needed to take him to the ER right away. But as usual she didn’t take it seriously, like she didn’t believe in his insomnia and anorexia and joint pain and IBS. She told him to wait till the weekend was over and call for an appointment with his regular doctor, as if he could just wait months, which was what always happened when he tried to schedule appointments over the phone. And all that time he wouldn’t be able to type or text, which was practically the only way he could communicate with James because he didn’t pick up actual phone calls.
Mom
Whenever I’d make a suggestion, like maybe he could contact the temp agency that had offered him jobs before, he’d say, “Sure, you want me to sell hot dogs in the blazing sun at the stadium?” Which of course was impossible—for sure that job was always listed because no one wanted to do it or maybe even could do it for long. But that wasn’t the only job they’d mentioned. He used to talk about delivering pizza, like that was something he’d enjoy, but now when I brought that up he’d remind me that he would have to pass a drug test, and that there was no way he could stay off weed for three or four weeks again. And I agreed: that had been a nightmare.
Then he started complaining that his wrist hurt, and I tried to tell him he could make a same-day appointment on Monday, only a day and a half from now, and it would be much cheaper than the ER and better because the doctor would have his file and know his history. But he was too mad to listen and seemed to think I was making up the whole idea of same-day appointments.
Andrew
Anyway, he had no money and so couldn’t buy weed or even cigarettes. And then James, his only friend now, stopped answering his texts, and the only thing that made him feel better was smashing things, so why shouldn’t he be allowed to do that? They were his own things after all: his monitor, his TV, his framed pictures, his door that he made a hole right through by hitting it with his tripod.
Mom
His door but my house. And the pictures he called his, some of them, were pictures of him, ones he knew I treasured, ones I had obligingly moved out of the living room so he had to go into my room to get at them. Besides, the sound of that door breaking must have been heard all over the complex and would no doubt be one more thing added to the list of ways we were now in violation of condo association rules.
Andrew
He just wanted to die. Or kill her. It had to stop. He just wanted her to call the cops, and they would come and maybe shoot him. Then it would be over and she’d have to live with what she’d done to him.
Mom
He kept screaming, “Call the cops.” But he didn’t know that last time the police had basically told me they wouldn’t come over here again. Eventually, though, when even the broken door hadn’t slowed down his rage, I had to call 911, and when the dispatcher heard the background noise she sent both police and ambulance. I don’t know what he told them, but they took him to the ER rather than to jail. And again he called me at 2 a.m. to come pick him up. And the first thing I noticed when I pulled up by the entrance was the plastic brace on his wrist. Which I guess was what all this had really been about. Once again, he’d managed to get exactly what he wanted.
Andrew
He couldn’t possibly sleep in his room, it was full of broken glass again, the dresser drawers were all dumped out and broken. And the smell. Somehow a tube of Nair had opened up and spilled all over his clothes and the floor. So she said he could sleep in his sister’s room temporarily. And why shouldn’t he? Margie didn’t even live here any more.
She said she’d help him clean up his room tomorrow so he could move back in there. But he had to get it cleaned up right away! He had to make everything all right again, make it all not have happened. When he realized some of the things he loved were gone for good, he sat down and cried. And she wouldn’t even help! He just wanted to get that Nair off his clothes before it stained them, get the glass swept up, get the broken furniture out onto the deck, that was all, the rest could wait. But she kept saying No, tomorrow.
Mom
So when he wouldn’t stop screaming at me until I agreed to help him clean up his room, at 3 a.m., I gave in. Well, not right away, I was so exhausted. But the stench of Nair was making him panic, and I could see he was just realizing that the guitar he’d broken and the pictures of James he’d trampled to death were really gone, the grief was immense, he just had to do anything, get me to do anything, to make it not have happened. So I agreed to help for one hour, then two, to clear a path to his bed, until surely even he could see that it was still going to have happened.
As dawn was breaking I took four garbage bags of his destroyed stuff out to the car, drinking in the Nair-less air, and drove them to the dumpster at the far end of the parking lot, hoping no neighbors would see me. But of course Ron across the way and Glen next door were getting in their cars to go to work, and of course they said good morning and looked at me a little too long.
Andrew
So of course he still needed to sleep in Margie’s room, the next night and the night after that, because after all no one else was using it, so what was the big deal? He put all the stuff from her desk on the floor and moved his computer and monitor in there. He moved Margie’s office chair into his mom’s room and replaced it with his better one.
Mom
After a few days I asked when he was planning to finish cleaning his room and move back in there, and he exploded again. True, Marguerite had been away at college most of the time, but she still came home at Christmas and summers. It wasn’t time to give away her room yet, was it? He started screaming and threw another picture on the floor, shattering the glass. The one of Margie flying through the air in her gymnastics uniform, that I had sent to the grandparents for Christmas years before. This had to stop. I tried to reason with him, told him to think about how bad he had felt the last time he broke things. Or to think of my feelings. And what about the agreement he had signed?
Andrew
He remembered perfectly his grief over his lost things. But what did anything matter now? Clearly he was fucked anyway. As for her feelings, when he thought about them he just wanted to smash everything in her room and her face along with it. He didn’t believe he’d signed any kind of paper, but when she showed it to him, he had to admit it was his signature. Oh well, he guessed he just wasn’t the kind of person who honored agreements.
Mom
I looked at the piles of Margie’s papers and pens and pictures on the floor, at the broken glass, at Andrew’s dirty clothes everywhere. The room was already almost a mirror image of his own. I backed out into the living room and looked at the mess of my papers and the laptop that Andrew had tossed aside when he moved the speakers, at the couch now jutting out at a weird angle, facing nothing. I looked out the sliding glass door and saw the deck now filled with his moped, his broken bureau drawers, his shattered screens, the grass behind it a mile high. I retreated to my room, now so filled with things Andrew wouldn’t allow in the rest of the house, his house, that I could barely reach my bed. I tried to lie down to rest and think, but on the other side of the wall I could still hear him yelling and cursing. There was simply no space left for me.
So I took my purse and Romeo and went out to the car. And that’s where I am now, my head resting on the steering wheel, by turns crying and writing this story down in my little notebook. A minute ago my eye caught a small stone on the passenger side floor mat. It’s a polished piece of malachite that must have fallen out of one of the garbage bags I’d filled up from Andrew’s room on the night of its climactic destruction. It’s beautiful, with intricate little lines and squiggles decorating the deep green. It feels smooth and cool in my hand. I consider bringing it back in the house and giving it back to Andrew. But then he’d realize that while trying to clean everything up in the middle of the night I’d probably thrown away a bunch of his stuff without really looking at it, and he’d go off again.
So here I sit, in the driver’s seat but going nowhere, rolling the stone over and over in my hand. My new home. My stone. My story.
