Daddy-Long-Legs

For most of my childhood, I lived the life of a hermit. It was not a choice. Until I turned seventeen, I was allowed only three places to go: school, church and whatever extra curricular activity I happened to be forced into at the moment. But for most of my time, I assumed the typical pose: head in hand, in a dingy love-seat inside a room with yellow walls, a 20 gallon tank with a tiny black seahorse named Bagel, an old window and a list of rules I never understood. My father’s voice filled the room thick with: No waking up past 9am, no bedroom doors closed, no shoes left tied, no car, phone, boyfriend, job, make-up, nail polish, friends allowed over, TV, touching his computer, eating his food, talking back, sleeping over at anyone’s house, and no seeing friends outside of school. These were just a few. There was a time in my life when I tried hard to follow his list, but there was just such a gross amount of rules it was difficult not to fail miserably on a daily basis. It was also terribly hard to get away with anything because he was always home.

Daddy has had terminal cancer since I was 13 and has been on many different types of medications that have all made him become more of a pissed-off psychotic stranger living under the same roof than anything. He had this look in his eyes that displayed no concern, humor, nor frailty, there was nothing in them at all, no mercy, no nothing. They were just this cloudy yellow as if he had never cried in his whole life or even had a life and was ever a child. He would wander around the house with those eyes searching for things to bitch about making sure everyone else was becoming as crazy and unsatisfied with life as he was. To say the least I always felt a bit cheated. But the trick to not feeling cheated, is to learn how to cheat. So in order to find some kind of tolerable balance in my life, I became determined to find as many gaps in that list of rules as possible.

The first one began to show itself the summer before 8th grade. The phone had stopped ringing and my parents’ friends had finally gone home. Mom emptied out the ashtrays and cleaned the kitchen. Dad put the dog out back and locked the house. We all said goodnight and climbed into bed.

Sometimes at night when I couldn’t sleep, I would read with a miniature flashlight under my covers. This was one of those nights. Whatever I was reading must have been so interesting because I lost track of time and when I finally checked it was 3 am. The hum of the air conditioning had stopped and the house was silent, except for a faint ticking of the clock. I began to turn the pages quietly in fear of making noise and getting my flashlight taken away. Every few minutes I became incredibly hot under the blankets and I would turn off the flashlight and come up for a breath of air.

It was during one of those breaks that everything began to change. It started with a long squeak, then another, and another. I held my breath and stared wide-eyed through the crack in the door. I waited, trembling. And then suddenly a dark shadow began to grow through the crack. And there it was: a leg. A long slender spider-like leg reaching far out and landing tip-toed on the carpet in front of my door. Following the leg came what looked like an arched stomach, and then finally, what I identified as my brother’s pumpkin-shaped head.

I’d never seen my brother so delicate and graceful. He reminded me of a ballerina with the legs of a spider. Like the daddy long legs spider I had once captured, my brother knew every little crack in the floorboards and once he passed by my room, he got down the stairs in silence, with only a sliver of moonlight coming in through the windows to guide him.

The following day, I spent hours walking around upstairs getting to know the floors with my feet. Unfortunately, right outside of my room, the floor was full of creaky spaces and it seemed impossible to leave quietly. But if I wanted to meet up with boys outside of school and have something to talk about on Mondays, other than the usual bullshit I that had to sit through on Sunday, like how crazy the new medicine is making him; I had to find a way out.

It began through my bedroom window on the second floor of the house. My window didn’t have a screen, so I could just open it, climb out, walk to the edge of the roof, and jump down onto grass. During the first attempt, I landed on my back and laid stiff in the grass nearly paralyzed and afraid to call for help. But that didn’t stop me. The second time went better. After landing on the grass I stood up, itched my entire body and began walking down the street to a friend’s. I remember how good it felt just breathing in the open night air, I felt high and free, like the time and space between me and the rest of the world was finally closing up. I was now interacting with it in whatever way I wanted. That perfect night slowly turned in to a regular thing for me. I started feeling invincible, like there wasn’t a person in the world smart enough to stop me. And this became my first love. I became completely obsessed with sneaking around and breaking any rules I felt I could get away with.

What began through a window, moved on through back doors and then school gates. I felt the need to make up for all the time that I had lost in my room with Bagel by hanging out any chance that I had, which meant sneaking out of school with friends to get high and talk shit. Then I began sneaking out of church to smoke cigarettes in the woods. Then while sitting on a log one day in the woods beside the church I hated intensely, I contemplated sneaking behind my secret boyfriend’s back, because if I could fool my parents, then I could fool a 15 year old boy.
Breaking rules made me feel much smarter than everyone else. It became a game to me and playing it felt, so good. Next thing I knew I was stealing money from my parents’ wallets regularly. It didn’t stop there; I began sneaking clothes and jewelry into my purse in dressing rooms and to be completely honest, I was good.

It was junior year now and I still had not been caught. I had been smoking for three years and had a boyfriend for two, my parents seemed to be completely unaware of both. This probably explains my favorite movie character, the deeply secretive, Margot from The Royal Tenenbaums. By then I had stolen thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes, a homecoming dress my mom told me was too expensive and too skanky to buy, jewelry, bags overflowing with makeup I had never even used, shoes, purses, CD’s and, of course the money I stole from my dad almost weekly. By then, everyone around me had been caught by their parents, and this caused them to stop stealing and to start judging. Being a good thief was simply no longer a good quality. So I stopped bragging to everyone about the merchandise I had just jammed in my purse and kept it to myself because this year, no one wanted to know. My once praised-upon talent had now become a dirty little secret.

By the end of my senior year, lying and stealing started to make me embarrassed and in turn began to make me feel cheated, again. Feeling cheated is exactly what I had been running away from, but somehow, I began feeling it all over again. It might sound odd to have wished my parents caught me and taught me a lesson like everyone else’s parents did. But really, I did.

I started to wonder how someone who noticed drops of blue of paint on my tiny fingernails or if a mini powdered doughnut was missing from the box, didn’t notice all the rips in my clothing where I tore out the sensors in dressing rooms. Or how I always had on new, un-scuffed shoes when the only time he ever bought me any was when my foot could no longer fit into old ones. I didn’t understand how he never even asked where all the jewelry I wore came from, or how I got all the CD’s I listen to every day. He never once bothered to ask. This made me feel worse than all of the times I had gotten in-trouble for mundane things in the past, because at least then, I felt like he was trying to be a good parent who just maybe cared too much. But this realization of the things he chose to notice just made me feel sick. He was simply using me to take out his all of his frustration and it had nothing to do with me.

I began to notice that he only wanted me up at 9 on the weekends so that by the time he woke up the house would be clean and his breakfast would be ready. That maybe a car, a phone and a boyfriend aren’t actually terrible things but he just didn’t care enough to waste the money or time to teach me how to deal with them. That the TV, computer and his food wasn’t bad, more that he just didn’t want to share. And that hanging out with friends out of school wasn’t bad either, that maybe he just didn’t want me to see that other family’s didn’t work the same way and raise a fit.

I think my mother knew about my obsession though, I saw it in her eyes when she would ask me where my new clothes came from and I would give her the same line “Not mine, girl from school let me borrow it.” She noticed the rips, but just looked at them and never said anything.
I think she never said anything because she knew how hard it was living with Daddy and felt guilty for it. But who knows, maybe she had a nasty little secret too. Maybe we all do. Maybe we all feel a little bit cheated and a bit fucked over and the only way to get rid of that feeling is to cheat a bit ourselves. Cheat someone so we don‘t feel so lonely and so terrible about our own lives and all of the ugly little webs we secretly weave.

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