GOOD & PLENTY FAIRY DUST

       GOOD & PLENTY FAIRY DUST                  by Joy Strouse

If someone had asked me my idea of hell, I would have told them, “Being stuck in a car for 10 hours with my sister.” I would have said, “Anyone but Katherine! Give me wicked Uncle Ernie or the screaming, bratty Rodriguez twins from next door, but please… not my polar opposite, Katherine-Not-Kathy Patricia Clark!”

But nobody asked me, so the summer of 2005, my 18^th, begins in hell.

Our Grandmother is dying, and Mom has been in Indiana for the past two weeks, “getting affairs in order.” Grandfather has dementia and needs to be put somewhere—her words, not mine. God forbid, she step up and bring him home to Maryland! I haven’t laid eyes on either grandparent for years, but I still love my Pop more than anybody in the family. Pop is funny and kind, a senior citizen Peter Pan, and an artist like me.

When I was six, my mother’s parents came to visit for the last time, right after Daddy died. There was some big blow up and I never saw them again. When Mom was at work, I made secret calls to Pop once in a while, right up until last year, when he forgot how to work the phone.

But I digress… It is Queen Katherine, ruler of all, who is the problem, the Queen who walks like she has a ruler stuck up her ass, who never broke a rule or a heart in all her life. She lives in Baltimore, has since she went to college eight years ago. I still live with my Mom in Berlin, a small town just outside of Ocean City, MD.

I’ve been having the time of my life, the house to myself, my boyfriend, Jason, over every night. I’m smoking a doobie in the living room, feet up on the God-almighty-get-your-feet-off table, Jason nibbling on my neck when the phone rings…

“Carly, It’s Katherine. Mom needs us in Indy.”

“You go, I’m sure anything she needs, you can handle quite succinctly,” then I giggle a little because Jason is nibbling my nipple.

“I’m sorry, but her instructions were clear. You are to drive her car here to pick me up and we are to drive there together. She needs the car to bring home things from the house. I’ve already rented a U-Haul trailer to pick up tomorrow. If you leave there at nine am, you’ll avoid traffic.”

“That’s fucked!” I holler into the phone. Jason stops nibbling and gives me his wide-eyed look.

“There is no need for obscenities, Caroline. I expect to see you at noon.”

“What about Tink? Who’s gonna feed my cat?”

“Mrs. Rodriquez. Unless, of course, you would prefer Justin or whatever his name is. I’m sure he has been there all week, anyway.” I can feel her smugness oozing through the phone. I hang up.

“Shit Fuck Shit!” I yell in Jason’s face.

“Chill, babe.” He says and starts nibbling again.

I would have been here at 11:45, but I sit on the corner until 12:10 just to piss her off. She’s waiting outside her apartment building, suitcase by her side, anger steaming from her ears. She opens the back door and places her suitcase in the back seat.

“Hello, Kathy. (I couldn’t resist after she called me Caroline last night, which she knew I hated.) Hurry up and get in, we have an agenda!”

 “OK, smartypants, let’s go.”

I drive to the U-Haul place off the beltway. All the while she’s taking note of the gas gauge, emergency lights, mileage, and so forth, and jotting in her little Miss Efficiency notebook. Once the U-Haul is attached, she takes over driving, which is fine with me. I pull my hoodie up over my eyes to nap. Just as I’m dozing off,

“Hey, you need to co-pilot. No sleeping.”

“Come on, really?”

“Why, did Justin keep you up all night?”

“Jealous much? And it’s Jason! Jesus, why do you have to be such a bitch?”

“I’m teasing you, dummy. Get over yourself. On second thought—take that nap, you grouch.”

I try to sleep, but I’m too angry. She just loves to pick on me, always has.

Like I said, Daddy died when I was six. I worshiped him, plain and simple, and he loved me to the moon, said we were kindred spirits. Daddy had the Peter Pan thing going too, and Kathy always resented that he called me his Tinkerbell. She is more like Mom, always controlling everything, never just having fun.

I reach over and turn on the radio, some talk show voice blares out and I quickly change the channel. No political discussions allowed; the car would explode before we get to Ohio. I switch stations until I hear 3 Doors Down singing “Kryptonite” and start banging percussion on the dash. I figure it’ll piss her off, but she starts quietly singing along! I start singing too, and she looks at me and smiles. Then an ad for Bill Kidd’s Toyota comes on and the bubble bursts.

We stop in Frederick to pee. Katherine gets a black coffee, I grab a diet coke and a box of Good & Plenty. She looks down at my purchase on the counter and says, “Your teeth are going to hate you.”

It’s something mom always says. I don’t know, maybe it’s Kathy’s idea of humor but…

I throw a bag of Gummy Bears on top of the Good & Plenty, with a scowl.

She shrugs and heads to the car.

After I pay, I wander out and get in. Katherine starts driving and the only sound is pink and white candy tumbling from box to hand. I’m mad at Mom now, too. Thanks, Queen Katherine!

Katherine was eight when I was born. She was the unexpected child that caused Mom and Dad’s marriage. I was the unexpected child that kept them together. My mother never lets either of us forget how we ruined her life.

Mom was on vacation with a friend from college when she met Dad. He was a musician, played in a band at the clubs in Ocean City. Daddy said Mom was wild when he met her, though I’ve never seen that side. By the time I came along, she was straight-laced and strict as a nun, and Katherine was mini mom.

I’ve never figured out what Dad saw in Mom, they were so different, and she was always on him for something. I was little but I remember—“get your lazy feet off the table,” “you spent fifty dollars on what?” “Coke will be the death of you.” “Don’t give her those, her little teeth will hate you!” “OK, you pay the dentist bill!”

“Why the hell did mom care about him eating these, anyway?” I ask, more to myself than her.

“Because they’d be all over—the floor, in the cushions of the couch, in your crib, even.”

“So?”

“So she got tired of cleaning them up,” her voice changes, loses its edge, “of cleaning all his messes.”

I turn the radio back on. I don’t want to hear bad stuff about my dad.

The song ‘Babe’ by Styx is playing. Daddy used to sing that to me. I look out the window and try to conjure his voice.

“Let’s get something happier,” Katherine says and switches the channel.

 I turn to her, “You don’t like that song?”

“Dad sang it to me, makes me sad now.”

“Huh,” I say, “I thought… Huh…”

“What? That he only sang it to you?” she snaps, “I loved him too, you know. Why don’t you get that I lost him too? We all lost him!”

I sit with my mouth open, taking that in. Katherine stops the dial at “Don’t Phunk with my Heart” and turns up the volume. After a minute, I say, “Mom never seemed to care, I mean I remember she cried at the funeral but then all the pictures went away and she just went on.”

“She had two kids to care for, she had to go on. She had to prove she was capable.”

“Prove?” I switch off the radio again, this song is irritating.

“After dad died, Grandmom tried to take us back to Indiana. Child Services came to check on us and everything.”

“What? Why? Mom was great at taking care of us. She ain’t so good at fun or nice but at cleaning and discipline…”

“That’s why she got so anal, dummy, she didn’t want to lose us.”

“But why would Grandmom… I don’t get it.”

“You were only six, you don’t remember how it was.”

“Tell me.”

Katherine switches lanes without even signaling, “Mom would kill me if I told,” and lets gravity take us down the mountain road without touching the breaks.

It’s so un-Katherine, it freaks me out a little! Once we start up the next rise I say, “You’re gonna kill yourself first if you keep driving this way so tell me!”

She chugs us up to the top of the mountain crest, and down we go, at 75 miles an hour with a U-Haul bumping behind. “You used to love this when we went to Grandmom’s. Mom would dare dad to stay off the breaks, and you and I would squeal from the back seat, ‘Faster, faster!’”

Up we chug to the next crest and a memory surfaces, Mom laughing—eyes sparkling, the open window blowing her hair around an unlined and carefree face. A laugh escapes me, and we look at each other in surprise, then Katherine laughs too, and down we soar at 8o mph, laughing hysterically.

“Hope there’s a rest stop soon, I’m gonna pee myself!” she chokes out, and that gets us laughing even harder.

A sign points out a rest area and Katherine steers us into the lot, throws open her door, and runs in without even turning off the engine. I am the responsible one for the first time ever. I turn off and lock the car before following her.

Back on the road with me at the wheel, we travel through Ohio, flat and boring. My face still aches from our hysterics, “I remember that I think—the mountain rides. Weird I didn’t before.”

“You were only four the last time we drove there. We never visited again.”

“Why?” Katherine turns away toward the window, “Kathy… Katherine! Please! You can’t keep my own life from me.”

She faces forward, a brisk twist of neck, “The hell with it, you’re 18, you deserve to know.” She takes a deep breath, “Daddy got out of control the last time we were in Indy. He wrecked Pop’s car. Grandmom and Mom had a terrible fight with Pop trying to calm them both down and Dad hiding in the bedroom.” Now she turns to face me, “He was an addict, Carly, cocaine.”

“No,” I grip the wheel, “that doesn’t make sense. Mom wouldn’t have…”

“Mom was into it too, when they met until she found out about me. I’m lucky I don’t have two heads,” she chuckles under her breath.

“Luckily, she found out she was pregnant and quit right away. She said he tried but well… couldn’t shake it. Remember the weekend she came to Baltimore for my 21^st?”

“Yes, she left me with the Rodriguez’s,” I remember feeling left out of their perfection club as usual. I was 13. That’s about the time I stopped trying to break into their clique.

“She got drunk! I couldn’t believe it but we went out to dinner and it was my 21^st so Margaritas flowed and so did her mouth.”

My jaw drops open. 

“Mom drunk? That I’d love to see!”

“The whole thing came out of her like a dam burst. She said she left him for a while but she loved him, said she was miserable without him and that I cried for him, I was about five, so she went back. She started using again just so they could be together. Not all the time, but you know, on weekends and stuff. Then you came along and she came to her senses. Daddy sure loved you. I was always careful and shy. Not you, you sparkled from the minute you were born.”

I’m not sure what to say to that. Does she really think that about me, that I sparkled?

 “I loved you so much, but by the time you were two, you only had eyes for daddy. I was so fucking jealous of the way you were with each other!” Katherine smacks her hand against the dash, and I almost drive off the road, hearing The F-Word on her lips.

“That’s why I started doing everything with mom, because you and dad left me out, left us both out.” Katherine stops talking and rummages in her purse for a tissue, wipes her eyes, and continues, “Anyway, Mom said he only got worse after you were born. He was scared to death of responsibility. That’s why Mom called him Peter Pan.”

I didn’t know that came from mom. I thought I’d come up with it when he started calling me Tinkerbell.

“He started shooting the stuff, you know with a needle. Then he’d drink like a fish until he’d pass out. Mom said a couple times she came home from work to find him high as a kite and swinging you around like a rag doll… in the middle of the day!”

I get a flash of that, all at once—the world spinning around us as I giggled and tried to catch my breath, Daddy’s smile wide as he sang “Spinning Wheel.”

“What goes up, must come down,” I say.

Katherine gives me a wry look, “That’s the truth, alright. Daddy came down when his heart burst. He died of an overdose, Carly.”

My eyes get blurry, suddenly. I wipe at them, fiercely, and search for a place to pull over. An exit appears. I jerk the wheel to the right, pull off the highway, and into a McDonalds.

“All this time, nobody told me?” a great sob bursts forth and I feel something crack inside. My truth, my life as I knew it is shattered. My hero falls hard from his pedestal as I remember him hunched over the table with a lighter and a spoon and Mom saying, “Coke will be the death of you.” Not Coca-Cola—cocaine.

“Mom wanted to protect you. You were too little to understand.”

 “Grandmom knew, that’s why she tried to take us.”

“Mom wouldn’t let that happen. She told me that night. She couldn’t let us be raised like she had, by a heartless woman. Then she started crying and said, ‘I’ve become the heartless woman.’”

I sit there thinking back to those fuzzy days when I was six and seven and eight when I cried for my daddy every night, when I felt so alone. Now I see Mom was there, crying too, rubbing my back and softly singing “Babe” by Styx. “She wasn’t heartless was she?”

“No, she was all heart, she just didn’t want us to see it breaking.”

 I look at Katherine, “You and me used to play Barbies. You always kept them organized for me, all their little shoes matched up and all.”

“I loved playing with you,” she says, “but then I had to grow up. Mom needed me and we needed her.”

“You were Wendy. Daddy called you Wendy.”

Katherine’s eyes crinkle and a wistful smile lights up her face.

I turn the car around and head back to the highway.

“I guess Grandmom is Captain Hook,” Katherine said.

She picks up my box of Good N Plenty and shakes some into her mouth.

“Your teeth with hate you,” I tell her and turn the radio on to a song we both can sing.