Nonfiction

by rebekah Morris

36836 Shoreview Drive

Eight years after starting the addition to make the cabin on the lake into a house, my dad finished the trim on the windows. Nine years after, he added the flooring. (After year five, my mom painted the plywood gray to create a refined illusion). We called it the Christmas project: that year we had a three-foot tall tree and only bought little presents to fit underneath it. Thirteen years after, the fireplace was perfected to give it a rustic décor. The running joke about a carpenter finishing his house last is not untrue. Let’s just get it finished, my mom would say every year.

But in the first year, when the walls were built and my sister Hannah and I took turns wheeling around the nail collector, our cabin turned into a lakeside home. The addition had added three bedrooms, a living room, and a dining room. Even though the house would sit unfinished throughout my entire childhood, it was still a home.

Nineteen years later my parents decide to put our home on the market.

Staircases

We have three floors in the house: a basement, the main levels, and an upstairs. The basement is part of the old cabin built in 1974; it contains the laundry room and storage. The main level has two different living rooms while the kitchen is a wide hallway separating them, with the dining room included in the newer section. Hannah’s bedroom upstairs faced the lake, mine faced the road, and a spare room for guests was a baby blue. To the realtors, our home is only a floor and a half, not three, because the floors aren’t stacked on top of one another like the yellow barrel of red monkeys.

There is one staircase on the old side of the house, and one on the new. The new one is carpeted plushy brown, and is wide enough for three people to go up at once. The old staircase leading downstairs is thin and wooden: it fits one person, depending on the person; he or she might have to turn sideways to go down those stairs. The dogs wouldn’t use the old staircase as it was hollow; the backs of the stairs were open. The old staircase never went on my dad’s project list.

My mom has four older brothers, and one older sister. She was the baby in the family, and her defensive streak was given to her by birthright. She spent some time in the foster care system before she turned eighteen, as one older brother, Mike, abused her. One night a few of the brothers thought it would be entertaining to put my mom in a sleeping bag, tighten the zipper all the way so only heavy breaths could be taken, and see if she would roll or slide down the staircase. She slid.

Broom

My mom hit me, one time, with a broom, square in the face. I was young and trying to convince her to say yes, instead of no. I probably said the words, I hate you, following the broom hit. After my attempt at persuasion failed and before she hit me, I purposefully used cruel words to try and hurt her. She was sorry, she shouldn’t have hit me, but I deserved it.

We have a new broom now that sweeps our wooden floors; it is plastic with crisper needles. The old broom is stored outside, used for hurtling the cobwebs with their homeowners off our home, but the spiders always crawl right back up and re-spin their households.

Docking the Boat

My dad bought a boat because my mom rescued a dog from the pet store when I was around the age of eight. (Last year, in 2017, he bought a motorcycle after my mom decided to get a second cat). My dad loved to waterski; his father had taught him when he was a boy. During the summer, after he got off work when the water was still and silent, my mom would drive the boat while my dad skied behind it. He’d put the handle of the rope in the crook of his elbow and it seemed like he pulled the boat back towards him as he carved side to side, over the wake, into the safe zone, and over the wake again.

There’s a sandbar on Wabana Lake, people call the Sandbar or Jackass point (depends on the type of person you ask). Pontoon boats file along the side during the hot summer days as people take advantage of the perfect foot-and-a-half water level that spans across the peninsula of the point. One weekend, my dad was weaving behind the boat; there were no boats at the sandbar as it was late summer and the wind was a little strong. My sister and I had clothes underneath our lifejackets. After mom swung around the point, my dad let go of the rope and glided into shore. My mom misjudged how close we were to the sand underneath the water. She hit it hard, and my sister sitting in the front of the boat popped off the boat like the top of a champagne bottle. The sand that abruptly stopped us also saved us from running Hannah completely over.

From that moment forward, my dad lost his skiing opportunity, as my mom refused to drive the boat.

Elephants

My grandfather (my dad’s step-father) loves elephants. And so, like a normal family, each Christmas he received an elephant figurine from his family. My grandparents would host Christmas because they had a big house that included fondue machines. Unlike regular families, every other year we went on a different date: one year we would go on Christmas day, and the next year would be two to three days after Christmas. And thus the cycle continues today. My grandparents live five miles from home, and we would see them maybe twice a year.

My cousin Richard (my dad’s sister Sarah’s son) molested my sister and I within two years of moving into our home when she was three and I five. My mom found out when I told her, nonplussed, that my cousin and I had played alone for some time without clothes on. We found out later he had been doing it to my sister for quite some time.

On Christmas day, my dad’s sister Sarah and her family go to my grandparents for dinner and presents. Two days later, my family goes, and then it switches year after year. We all went to therapy for some time, my mom included. My mom abhorred my dad for even wanting to maintain a relationship to his sister. Her son was good and we were liars. My mom started to hate my dad—where was his anger? His rage?

Whenever I think of my grandparents and their house, I think of all the elephant figurines staring down from the shelves, and how easy it would be for them to fall off the shelf and break.

Teeth

My mom had braces at the age of thirty-five. She ground her teeth when she slept—the sound gave me nightmares of heads being run over by semi-trucks. Her teeth started to push out from the inside, which caused one of her front-teeth to edge out further than the others.

She didn’t get her high school diploma right away; she had to go back to and get her GED. She didn’t go to school more days than she went. But she went one day to school to meet Misty, a pretty blonde who had the audacity to kiss my mom’s boyfriend. My mom walked up to her and hit her in the face.

Everyone called her Rocky after that.

Dining Table

Our dining table is unique. It has two leaves inside of it to extend it from a table of four to a table of fourteen. This happens every Memorial Day and New Years (the table was only extended on Memorial day if too many people were too sunburnt to eat outside). You might think the fourteen or more people contained some aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins, but it didn’t.

Instead these people were my parent’s friends from high school, and their children. But I claimed them as my aunts, uncles, and cousins. After a few years of this my oftentimes drunk “uncle” Jeff almost flipped over the table as the ends were bowing to the weight of the food and the weight of his hand as the center of the table contained the only support. He leaned on the end of the tables and food rushed down towards him. My mom made my dad put some wooden supports under the ends, so the table would remain sturdy.

We didn’t have 14 chairs to go around. The piano bench always fit the two, sometimes three, smallest people. Two office chairs on wheels were rolled to the wooden table—my dad always took one of these. A white chair in my room was taken; my sister or I took it, as it was slightly unsteady. And we also lost a chair every other year due to Jeff mishaps; my mom jokingly told him to start sitting on the floor. (He would have eventually chipped that too though).

But ordinarily the dining room table was ordinary; a place where a normal family sits down around 5:00pm—mom makes food, kids grumblingly set the table, and dad gets home from work. Then the family tells the highs and lows of the day, the sisters bicker often, probably tattling on one another, and mom makes sure everyone eats their greens, right? Well, that was my family.

In high school my parents made our family sit down together. They had news for us: they had been talking about getting a divorce. My sister and I cried, but we were old enough to understand the unrelenting fighting needed to stop. After this talk at the dining table we made a better effort to get together and talk about our highs and lows, and my parents ended up thriving together.

Stained Glass Window

A stained glass window was framed above the fireplace. It had beautiful yellow, orange, and red tones that glowed when the light from the fire radiated upwards. The yellow pieces were shaped in a squat cross- almost like it had been missing one piece to make the cross as long as it should have been. When people visited our home they would ask, is that a cross? And the answer they usually received was, it’s beautiful.

My family went to church regularly on Sundays for ten years, from the time we moved until I was about thirteen. As my sister and I got older we were busier: sports, friends, hobbies, cars, and sleeping in on Sundays were more important than going to church. My mom and dad fought a lot after the elephant. There was blame, yelling, discussing not fighting, and then we ceased going to church. To this day, I think my dad regrets that. He loved going to church, and I know he wishes I believed and shared with him the faith of the Lord. My mom on the other hand went to Catholic school as a girl, and was fine with not going to church.

My dad’s parents were ministers. And when my grandmother remarried after my dad’s dad died, she married a different minister. My dad was the ministers’ son who married a girl nicknamed Rocky. My grandparents didn’t acknowledge the elephant. Strange, right? since that was a sin committed in the eyes of the lord. They pushed the elephant back so far it was never brought up again.

One night my family woke in the middle of the night after the stained glass window fell from its nail onto the floor. Curiously, it survived without shattering, but the window wasn’t hung up again. My dad put old magazines from his father in a frame and replaced the stained glass window. 

Piano

My great-grandmother (my dad’s grandmother) had a piano, and before she died she wanted it to be put to use. It was decided I would learn to play. During the summers, I was allocated certain hours to play—never during mom’s rest time. (She is an insomniac with restless leg syndrome and fibromyalgia). I would play during the evenings, and she suffered through section after section after section, again and again, as I memorized songs.

My piano teacher’s name was Chris Brown; she went to the same church we had. When we stopped attending she never asked us why or when we were coming back. My mom drove me to the weekly practices for eight years, and then I drove myself for two more years. My mom drove me to the yearly test where a judge evaluated my skills—after the first year she would wait in the car because no one was allowed in the room except for the judge and musician.

The piano is mine to have, but until I live in a stable place where I can keep it (and play it), it will stay at the house. But if the house is sold it will be moved to my grandmother’s basement. I imagine it going in the basement—my grandparent’s have a gigantic room in their basement filled with boxes. Empty boxes stack on top of one another. When my sister and I were really young I remember imagining a jungle with high trees, only the trees were stacks of boxes. The piano could go down in the basement (the staircase is plenty wide enough) and endure alongside, in between, and under the boxes: all waiting to be used once again.

Doors

Before our home is on the market I decide to move out and get my own apartment. My mom tells me she understands I want to be alone. My dad is upset that I signed a lease in a town he wishes I’d leave. When our house was only a cabin there was a total of three doors in it: the front door, one to the upstairs bedroom, and one downstairs that led to the lake. Nine doors were in the house after the renovation: four upstairs, a new front door, and a mudroom front door. My parents created an incalculable amount of doors for me, and now I open and close those doors myself.  I wonder if I will ever go through one of those nine doors after the house is sold.