Her house

A description of a young girl's best friend's house

 It’s been almost ten years and I can remember Mary’s as clearly as when I first stepped inside her house. The pungent smells, the linoleum floors, the cat hairs spread methodically over certain areas of the carpet like snake patterns of white and grey. The summer of ’98 was one of many firsts. She was my first friend at the (yet another) new school, her bedroom was my first sleepover, her mother my first glimpse into American mommy culture. That summer, I lived at Mary’s. My mom had just acquired a new husband, one of however many, that she insisted on living with in the city. The big, loud, dirty, dangerous city. The Chicagoland with no playgrounds, no Mary, no cats to nuzzle you awake, no Margie’s with 20 flavors of ice cream, no Mexicorn from the local friendly Mexican store, and no chocolate peanut butter. I threw a big fit only girls can throw to get inside their mothers’ deepest insecurities about their daughters and in return got what I didn’t know I had wanted. A summer at Mary’s. 

        We were the M&M’s. She was Mary, I was Maya. She was the chocolaty and sometimes bitter inside, and I was the sweet and shiny, nicely labeled M, outside. She was soft and curvy, and I was the crunchy first impression, always bright, always shiny, always covering something. Virginia, Mary’ mother, was like my own that summer. She loved me as her own, never having had her own. Mary and her brother, Thomas, had both been adopted and Virginia would probably have adopted me as well if she could have. 

        The front porch is what stands in my memory clearest. Maybe it was the smells that welcomed you as soon as you opened the screen door, or the forever broken small windows on the sides, letting the hot air lick your skin where air conditioning did not penetrate. Mary’s house was always dark, dark, dark. Dark with the ever-present hum of the air conditioning unit in the wall, leering out like a black monster, throwing angry cold into the room. Her parents’ bedroom was on the first floor, leaving us to slowly tiptoe past it when sneaking out. We never had to try too hard, her parents always fell asleep to the Letterman Show blasting all throughout the night, lighting up their faces with his awful comics as they slept. 

        Mary’s room was in the attic, a conjoined room full with a kitchen and a bathroom, made to be a second upstairs apartment but never fully finished. The stairs that led up to her bedroom apartment were narrow and creaky, winding a little at the top full with a door and a small little window that led out onto the roof. We always stopped halfway up the stairs to look out the window, to make sure there were no bad men in the backyard. If it was a full moon, we made ourselves snacks and then ate them on the roof, talking about our plan to marry each other if we were fifty and were still single. We’d be the sexy 50-somethings on the block, witch a bunch of cats. We would adopt at least 10 cats and on Halloween, we would always give the best candy to the other kids. We promised ourselves to remember what it would be like to be kids. But that was only if there was a full moon, only if it was bright enough to see everything, otherwise we didn’t go outside. Neither one of us would have ever admitted it then, but we were scared of everything. When I was the only one on the stairs, going down in the middle of the night for a glass of water or a small snack, I always ran up them, making sure the monsters behind me wouldn’t be able to catch me. The monsters that lived inside the grease-stained walls of the kitchen or if the cats meowed. Cats always knew when there were ghosts, it was their destiny. All of that Egyptian worship had given them special detection powers. If one of the cats meowed while I was on the stairs (which happened often – there were 6 of them) I would run as fast up the stairs as I could, trembling when I finally reached the top. Mary did it too, I’m sure. I heard her run up the stairs when I wasn’t with her. We both did. 

        The kitchen was my favorite part of the house, probably because it was the only clean part. Everywhere else in the house there was the distinct odor of cat piss, stale laundry, and little boy piss. Mary’s younger brother, Thomas, was already 8 but still wetting his bed, a trauma given some fancy name by his doctors, which at the time I didn’t quite catch nor did I care about anything else but the smell. He was too ashamed to admit he had wet his bed again, so he wouldn’t tell anyone, just let it dry throughout the day so that the smell, mixed in with the humid air, would slowly fill every corner of the house. Virginia didn’t want to admit her perfect little boy still wet his bed, so she ignored the smell as well, and if he didn’t run up to her in the morning and tell her he had had an accident throughout the night, she smiled and assured herself the drugs were working.         

        Virginia was kind to us, and trusted us to cook for ourselves. We usually just made chocolate peanut butter sandwiches with apple juice, but sometimes we got creative and microwaved things. Virginia was too busy volunteering at the library to cook and Mary’s father, big Thomas (to distinct between pissing little Thomas) was always holed up in the basement chain-smoking Cubans and typing fast at his computer. He was a computer data analyst processor company economist working from home – something long and complicated which made him very stern when we disturbed him. Regardless, I hated going into the basement. It was cold and always foggy from all the smoke which choked not only me, but the furniture and the walls. The walls, ironically, were yellow from all the smoke only where big Thomas sat day in and day out. I hated doing laundry at Mary’s because it was in the basement, and no matter how many times I tried, it always ended up smelling like a Cuban cigar. After a while, I understood why Mary insisted on wearing her dirty laundry instead of washing it. It gave an interesting smell to her room, but that was before puberty and smelliness really hit. 

Author's Note

Still unfinished story. Never quite got around to finishing it.