Kindly Leave Me Be

Mar 10, 2008 - 19:57 PM PST

She climbed into bed with her sweater still on. She didn't like to brush her teeth here; the water tasted different, distant, unfamiliar.
She'd had four glasses of champagne.
"It's okay if your uncle says you can," said her uncle.
The girl wished her life was as romantic, as much of an adventure as she imagined it was. Her five aunts and five uncles told her stories about her father running through the halls of his dormitory in nothing but his plaid boxers, a pair of chocolate Labradors trailing after him, wagging their tails. These types of tales caused her to blurt out mordant statements, her aunts staring at her in disappointment and her uncles quietly chuckling condescendingly. She couldn’t imagine how she'd gotten stuck with this family, in this colossal house in the noisome state of Connecticut, but she couldn't imagine anything else.
The morning after the Thanksgiving with the two glasses of champagne, she woke up feeling queasy and like something was missing. She thought hard and all at once memories of a dream she'd had came rushing to the front of her mind and her forehead throbbed. She remembered rain, thunderous rain on the windshield of a bright orange van. She remembered a man with a scratchy brown beard in the driver's seat next to her. He turned to look at her but before she could see the rest of his face they were hurled through a spiral that had appeared on the road in front of them. What stayed in her mind was that scratchy beard, and how it made her tummy feel like the spiral in the road.
Reluctantly, she made her way slowly down two flights of tilted wooden steps covered with a tattered green rug. As soon as her bare feet had touched the cold marble of the kitchen floor, she was ambushed by a pair of her old aunts.
"How did you sleep, my dear?" the one who called herself AJ, but everyone else called Aunt Jude, inquired.
"Would you like a banana, honey? That ripe one is calling your name! I can hear it! Can't you?" exclaimed the aunt the neighborhood kids called Crazy Carrie.
The girl grabbed a piece of toast, and left without saying a word. She wandered around the creepy old house biting her toast and trailing crumbs on the worn carpets. While trudging through the dark halls, she was interrupted by Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Jerry.
"Well doesn't she look hung over, that little cutie pie," said Jerry.
"It's probably her first time. Oh, sweetums. Don't worry, it'll pass," assured Eleanor.
Maybe it was impossible to have some isolation from the animals, even in this big house, thought the girl resentfully as she noticed her uncle's Star Wars tie was askew.
"Kindly leave me be," said the niece to the pair of relatives. She wished they'd stop meddling in her life for once. About two minutes preceding the exit-stage-left of Jerry and Eleanor, the girl had gravitated towards the front door. Maybe it's time I escaped this big old stinks-of-moth-balls house, she thought, and slid out the door. Once the front door had been opened and shut, she was faced with another door. The handle on this one was big and silver and she had a hard time turning it. But determined as she was to escape the zoo of a family she had, she triumphed over the rust. She felt different once she was out in the open. She listened to the pitter-patter of rain drops on the porch roof above her.
She thought of what her aunts and uncles would say if they saw her dripping rainwater on the rotting wood floors, tracking mud on the carpets with her bare feet. What would Noah have thought of her chickening out of a chance to piss off her relatives, out of running to the beckoning precipitation? "The worst part about having a good dream is that you wake up and wish it was real," she remembered he'd told her. "Don't spend your life dreaming, Rita. Keep it real. Not every day is a rainy day." She daydreamed of his scratchy brown beard on her fingers, but when the rain stopped she began to run down the porch steps, and slipped on the tilted one that was covered in the rain she had dreamt through. After she fell and banged her left elbow twice on the second step, she got up slowly, her whole body turning from cold to hot. She turned around and stood in the after-rain, staring at the open front door, with the second front door closed behind it.
Rita turned back around and headed towards the garden. She squished her heels in the mud and sat defiantly in the wilting grass. She picked two blades of grass and pulled each apart down the middle into thin strips.