Wiggle Room

        They never found the heads. That’s what I was thinking when Connie, the real estate agent opened the closet door and said, “The upstairs hall closet is very large”.

         “Yes, very,” I said flatly.

         I was also thinking, no shit, that closet was my personal suite when I was twelve. 

Looking into the long narrow closet, I saw that the old wallpaper had been painted over and the floors tiled in vinyl squares made to resemble marble. The loose board in the back would now be sealed, entombing the heads in the cardboard box beneath the floor.

        I remembered that day it all went down. My twin sister had pissed me off for some reason. Perhaps because she had insisted that it was my turn to do the dishes. Or maybe she had just looked at me funny.

        “Take a look at how the bathroom has been remodeled” Connie said, bringing me back.

It wasn’t the same mildewed, towel-strewn place that had once served our big family. New porcelain and tile glittered everywhere. Even the door had been replaced. Gone was the two panel wood door with the large skeleton keyhole that served as my first window to female anatomy. 

        I nodded politely at Connie, trying to decide whether her dated, spiky, hair was dyed platinum, or was naturally bright silver. She waited for me to comment before we proceeded, so I said, “I like what they’ve done with the tub enclosure.”

        Connie gave a half smile and led me to the bedroom on the other side of the hallway, the room that had been shared by my two sisters. Again, it was another strange room. There was a bright cheery feel from the combination of new pastel paint and light fabrics. My little sister’s cot and my twin sister’s single bed were replaced by a queen sized four-poster bed, covered in the stuffed animals that belong to the new girl sleeping in this room.   

        My mind again went back to that day when I was twelve, and I went looking through this room to see what I could mess with to get even with my sister. I remembered the four Barbie dolls laid out neatly on my twin sister’s bed with their teased plastic hair and polyester pants suits. Then I saw myself hunkering in the back of the big closet, tearing the heads off the dolls in the glare of a 100 watt light bulb, relishing the popping sound made when the golden heads were released from the voluptuous plastic bodies. Then I recall running the headless bodies back to her room and hurrying back to the closet to avoid being caught. I squeezed past the rack of Nana’s old housecoats, boxes and other junk to the few square feet that I’d claimed, and began experimenting with the heads. A head seemed to fit nicely on the tip of my little finger, so I began some imaginative hand puppet theater. Eventually I became bored with the heads and placed them in a small cardboard box along with my matches and flammable liquids. I placed the box under the loose floorboards and waited for my sister to come home. 

        That closet had been my safe place, a quiet corner where I could sit studying the instructions from a disposed box of Tampax for hours without being discovered. In fact, on one noisy evening, I tested this by crawling to the end of the closet and lying under a pile of coats waiting to be missed and hear, “where’s Mark?” When that never happened after several hours, I eventually came stumbling out of that steamy, mothball reeking place, knowing then my place in the world.   

        Connie led me to my parents’ old bedroom saying, “The open house is really over now, but since you seem interested, we’ll finish the upstairs tour”.

        “Thank you so much”, I said. “You seem to know so much about this house. Can you tell me why the current owners are selling?”

        “They’ve been here ten years and love the place, but can’t keep up with their balloon mortgage since rates started going up. It’s something we see a lot,” she said with authority.

        “Do you know anything about the owners that might have been here about twenty-five years or so ago?” I asked casually. 

        “No, we don’t normally know about earlier owners,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

        “Nothing, really. I thought I might have known those people,” I said, thinking about how my family had changed since then - the hospitals, deaths, births and divorce. At that point I almost said to her, wait, that’s not the truth. I grew up in this house. When I saw the open house notice in the paper I just had to come and see it again. But I couldn’t do it. Seeing that closet again had turned me back into an embarrassed twelve year old, feeling stupid for even being there.

        Flashing back to the closet on that day, I recalled how I’d heard my sister climb the squeaky stairs after coming home from school. Then the sound of her bedroom door opening and how she screamed my name so loud my baby nephew started crying and Nana had to turn the sound up on Another World. For what seemed like hours I’d heard the upset escalate from the safety of my closet. My mom came up to see what was going on. I could hear the muffled accusations from my sister, then my little sister and brother came up to join the ruckus. I could tell they were ganging up on me, telling my mom that I was definitely the culprit. Eventually the four of them went through the house looking for me, starting in the basement, my other hideout. It was then that I finally heard them say “where’s Mark”?

        Then my dad came home and all hell broke loose. “What the hell is going on here!” I heard him bellow, as my twin sister wailed and the others snitched on me. This was even before he’d taken off his hat and had his first boilermaker.

        Sitting in the back of the closet, rocking back and forth humming to myself, I realized I was totally screwed. My window for returning the heads without major consequences had passed. 

        “Connie, can I ask a strange question?” I said with sudden clarity, after coming back to the present. “Can I please have a few minutes alone to go through the upstairs again?”

        She looked at me suspiciously, checked her watch and said,”I have to go downstairs and collect my paperwork. You have five minutes.”

        “Thank you” I said as she walked down the stairs, her pumps quietly leading the way on the newly carpeted treads.

I headed for the closet and turned on the light. A fluorescent tube slowly brightened the clean space. Kneeling in the back of the closet I oriented myself, determined where the doll heads should be, and removed a small Swiss Army knife from my pocket. With the small, sharp blade of the knife, I probed between the tiles and found an edge that could be pried up. Full of adrenalin, I worked the blade under the tile and carefully peeled it off the old pine boards. After removing two of the tiles I found the loose board and saw that it still hadn’t been nailed down. I pulled the loose board away, exposing the secret chamber.

        Then I saw myself standing in front of my father. It was late on the night of the incident, and I’d snuck from my closet after hours of waiting for the house settle for the night. I slowly crept into my bedroom to find my father sitting at the lone wooden chair in his white tee shirt, thumbing the newspaper. He looked up at me and calmly said, “You care to tell me why you’re upsetting the entire house with your nonsense?”

        I looked at him blankly and said, “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play games with me, boy”, he said, his calm fading quickly. “You’ll need to fix the dolls and apologize to your sister if you want to avoid a grounding.”

        “I’ve been at Larry’s house tonight doing homework”, I insisted.

It went back and forth like that with my dad getting more furious with each of my denials. Since I hadn’t been caught in the act, I reasoned, I had a little room to maneuver. But it only served to make me a liar in my father’s eyes on top of everything else.

        Though he seemed to let the incident go soon afterwards, I always felt that night had soured his trust in me. At some point afterwards the joy of looking at those lonely doll heads in their box dissipated, and I let them rest for good. But that lie festered in me until one day the chance to clean it up with him was gone. 

        That dark history was in mind when I pulled the dusty box from the hole, not knowing what I was planning to do. I opened the lid and found no doll heads inside. Instead, there was a note in my father’s hand that simply said,

        ‘It’s OK. I was a boy once too.’





                                 

                                          The End