by Eileen Slifer
An Illustrated Short Story Written February 4, 2006 based on recollections of a true event
“Life is like a movie in which you get to play the part in a scene just once, experiencing the sequence of events with all its sights, sounds, and subtleties in moments of time, leaving you nothing but mental and emotional replay for years to come.”
That I was a particularly clever or devious child I would not describe myself as such. I wasn’t typically “ornery”–for the most part my bouts of bad could most obviously be attributed as a reaction to my mentally ill mother, with whom I held a deep aversion and lacked even the semblance of any kind of normal bond.
I was a plain child, lived a very sheltered existence and was probably quite boring of a personality. I never laughed a lot or had much of a sense of humor, I usually didn’t get things other kids would talk and joke about. I took everything very seriously. I was not popular and had a small circle of friends. I was teased a lot, especially as the daughter of “crazy old Mrs. Slifer.” I learned from a young age to join with the kids in the neighborhood who would constantly talk about how crazy she was and pull pranks on her. But up until this day I only verbally talked about her or called her the names they called her–I had never pranked her the way the other kids did.
She was paranoid…seriously paranoid. She spent huge amounts of time taking notes on all the neighbors and making files on them for the FBI. She put up Venetian blinds all around the house and cut little slits in the drapes to spy out of. The kids could see her peeking out of them for hours on end and they were relentless in providing stimuli for her paranoia. They would throw rotten tomatoes and eggs and rocks at the house, soap the windows, string toilet paper in the bushes and leave frogs in her mailbox. Mischief night was the worst, but stuff went on throughout the year. One of their favorite things to do was to have a “rodeo” in front of her house, as she would call it. Several kids would ride their bikes around in circles in the street, over and over, until it would drive her crazy and she’d come out to chase them away or would call the police. I guess that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that everyone is not out to get you.
The kids would yell stuff at her, stand on the sidewalk and make faces, or run up in her yard just to annoy her. There was a boy across the street, Randy Wilson, whom she was particularly paranoid about. She had a thing about establishing property boundaries and would put stakes up and position other objects and shrubbery around the yard to keep people away. She made my dad chop down all the normal landscaping–trees and bushes in which people might hide–and she then replaced them with random saplings and tiny ornamental plants that would be strategically positioned in the yard.
There was a meaning to everything–a certain bush that was placed exactly three feet and four and a half inches from the property line and half way up the yard, to oddly placed plants that were a certain color or placed in certain other relationship to the property markers and other plants. Who knows, all I ever understood was that my father was furious and disgusted but she was so relentless that he’d be out there chopping things down and digging holes wherever she told him just to be able to sleep at night. One of the most embarrassing of these yard embellishments were the flat concrete patio blocks that she made my father place every few feet all along the property line. The kids would tease me that there were tombstones in our yard. And they loved to stand on the neighbor’s side with their toes a quarter inch from the line, every so often sliding their foot over the boundary for a moment. I would say it drove her insane but she already was. It was a torment she couldn’t cope with–it kept her glued to the window and away from most every other normal activity of daily living.
You must understand that she was “at war” with the next door neighbors and wanted to make sure that they didn’t cut any of her grass. She was under the delusion that they were trying to steal a few inches of her property by establishing regular maintenance such as grass cutting. The war with these neighbors actually started because they built a carport which my mother claimed encroached 6 inches closer to her property than it legally should have. Shortly before she died, over thirty years later, she was still rambling on about that carport and how all her relationship problems with me were the result of problems in the neighborhood which arose from their encroachment.
I was the only child of a grossly mismatched couple who had been married fifteen years before I was born. My father was 49 when I was born and my mother was 39. She had mental issues before I was born, but they increasingly worsened after my birth and throughout the remainder of her life. All this to say that I don’t know what came over me on that summer day, what possessed me to do what I did…
It was late afternoon and my father was at work and my mother gone as well. Usually she’d force me to ride around with her while she went on endless and pointless “errands,” but this day she let me stay with my friends to play. I was probably around ten or twelve years old if I were to guess…Anna, Sue, Stacie and I were making mud pies in the Huegal’s backyard, an activity we rarely did and even at the time I thought I was too old for.
But I think we were all bored that day and thus got into this child’s play. I remember we were becoming very elaborate in the process and Stacie went in to get plastic bags so we could extrude the mud into cake topping decorations. We filled the bags with the mud mixture, cut a hole in the corner and began extruding.
Maybe it was that I had never extruded real cake decoration before and was somehow fascinated with this pseudo process, or maybe it was that my mind was just plain diabolical. I remember saying that it looked like dog poop. The other girls laughed and we kept messing around with the stuff… “Eeeoowwooo…that’s disgusting! Yeah…isn’t this gross? It looks just like dog poop!!”
As I said, something very dark must have overtaken me, because a lightbulb suddenly went off in my mind. Dog poop! Yeah! Dog poop!! Oh my gosh, I can create authentic looking dog poop!!!
“Hey,” I said, “Why don’t we go up to my house and put a pile of this ‘dog poop’ on my mom’s front steps? She’ll think it’s real! Come on, let’s go do it…” I was beside myself with the image of it in my head.
Stacie said, “No way, I’m not going to do that. You know how mad she’d get? What if she gets back when we’re there?” Susie agreed. Probably Anna did too, but I was determined and empowered over this impulsively evil mission and I managed to persuade Anna to come with me. I probably said we’d be quick about it before she got home.
So up we went with our bags of mud. As I recall, we were only going to do a little bit on the porch. We made an authentic looking pile or two and we were just dying– “OH MY GOSH, SHE IS GOING TO FREAK OUT!!” This was just too much, we were laughing like crazy.
“Well, let’s go…” Anna must have said.
Maybe from a young age I had a problem with the “less is more” concept. At any rate, I was just getting warmed up. “No, let’s do some more!” I said to Anna. I had totally lost my senses…I was an immortal…the fear of God was totally removed from my reality…I was propelled by a vision of a new and brighter day…or something like that…
Anna was nervous, but I think my confidence overrode any sense of reason that remained. We proceeded to create piles and piles…lined all up and down her driveway and in circular patterns at the top end. A pile on each step going up to the small porch…we may have even put one on the railing…I can only imagine what a horrible act we perpetrated that day!
Just as we were finishing up (as though there would have been a finishing point…I think we just kept going back for more mud, which Stacie and Susie were working on for us, a true-life conspiracy!) my father came home.
Now my father calmed his nerves by chewing Red Man tobacco and this day was no different. He walked up the driveway and the engineer in him must have been surveying all these piles. He asked what we were doing and we told him. His mouth was full of tobacco and he had this horrible look of amusement on his face. In typical “Jimmy Stewart” fashion he could have broken out in uncontrollable laughter but he was just beside himself with restraint. I remember him shaking his head with his smirking mouthful of tobacco and saying seventeen simple words to me that I must have been too brain dead to comprehend: “You’d better clean this up or you’re going to have hell to pay when she gets home.” There you go, I guess I was warned. But he too was amused. It was funny. I think…
I always remember him calling her “she” or “her”….not “your mother” or anything else respectful…just “she.”
Well, I didn’t clean it up. Anna went off and I went inside and soon thereafter “she” came home. Now the more I think on this the less I’m sure how the dialogue must have gone or what led to what…how the concept of a pack of wild dogs was introduced I am unsure. Perhaps she concluded it or maybe I even introduced the idea to her somehow. All I remember is that she was yelling at my dad that someone had brought a pack of wild dogs on her property and they had “shit” all over it and she was going to call the police.
The police! I hadn’t thought of this, although I should have known such an act might have unending consequences…
I was getting nervous. My mother went across the street and got Mrs. Wilson out and showed her all the piles. I saw them standing out in the street talking and I went over to them. My mother was telling her that she was going to call the police. I guess this would have been a reasonable response to a pack of perverted, wild dogs who had pooped in circles on her driveway. I must have been sweating although it wasn’t from the summer heat. I finally said, “Don’t call the police! I did it!”
I remember Mrs. Wilson looking at me and saying, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” And my mother, after clearly establishing that yes indeed I did it, telling me to get the hell inside the house. I went in.
I hear her coming into the room and she is mad as a hornet. I know there is no escaping her wrath, it will only be a matter of time before she finds me in this closet. I try to be as quiet as possible although I am so nervous I find myself quietly trying to muffle my own giggles. Nothing is funny–I am terrified of her impending tirade– but I am for the moment removed from the reality until it comes upon me. I guess I am so removed that something is striking me as funny, me being in a closet hiding from her. I hear her shouting “Where are you?” She opens the closet and I hear her harsh voice, “Get your little ass out of there missy, I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget!”
She has a belt in her hand and she starts trying to pull me out of the closet. Then the fight begins. I shout at her to leave me alone and she cracks the belt across my legs. It stings. I scream and kick at her and try to get to the bedroom door unsuccessfully. She is repeatedly cracking me with the belt and I am crying and begging her to stop. I try to block it with my hands and they feel the sting. She is yelling, “I’ll whip your little ass until it bleeds!” I continue to do whatever I can to defend myself and hurt her back. I am crying hard and screaming “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you…”
She starts into her verbal tirade at me. “How dare you raise hell in the neighborhood against me and destroy public relations. I almost called the police! Whose idea was this? Come on, tell me now! Who put you up to this? Did you do it alone?” I am terrified, I don’t dare say that any of my friends were in on this or I will never be able to see them again.
“I did it, it was all my idea!” I scream hysterically. That was the truth anyway. But I didn’t dare tell her that Anna was with me.
“God damn it to hell! You little devil, you! “ She continues to hold the belt up over me, perhaps cracking me a few more times. She continues her harsh tirade and tells me, “You are out of control! Do you know what they do with girls like you? The police take them and put them in homes for delinquents until they are 18! They never see their family again! That’s what I might have to do with you. Have you ever heard of that Ferris School for boys? They have one for girls too and they put them away! I should call the police on you now! You should be taken away and put up for adoption! We’re going to have to find a foster home for you. You’ve made me the laughingstock of the neighborhood. Damn you child!!!!”
By now she is calling for my father, “Rodney, get in here now and give this girl the medicine she deserves! She needs a good beating right from your hand!” I am terrified. I can’t remember my father ever laying a hand on me–why he would just say one quiet negative word to me and I’d want to cry. I was in total fear of his rejection, I always tried to do what he told me and never, ever displease him. That would be a fate worse than death. But my mother was another story. I hated her and everything about her. I fought against her continually.
I am screaming at her to go away and leave me alone and am crying hysterically. I scream, “I hate you! I hate you! You are the worst mother in the world! I wish I were never born! I am going to kill myself!” I fling myself on the bed and put my face into the pillow. She commands me to stop and tries to pull me up. We fight back and forth and I keep putting my face in the pillow. Finally she gets the pillow away from me and I tell her that I will just hold my breath until I die. I begin.
I don’t fully recall the sequence of this drama. It is a blur of impressions involving a belt cracking on me; scathing verbal tirades, threats and profanity; physical altercation; and my hysterical crying and threats of self-harm. She was directing 100% of her fury toward me and I hated her 100%. And to add to my emotional state I had actually done something bad to provoke her this time. Even Mrs. Wilson had told me, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
I don’t know how long this all went on, but I do know that at some point my father stepped in and did something I rarely recall him ever doing, if not at all. He came into the room and strongly approached her with his hand up as if he were going to hit her, and he said, “That’s enough, Margaret, lay off of her now!”
Now the scene took a new twist and it became something between the two of them. I don’t remember if I stayed in the room or if I went and sat just outside. I remember that I could not stop crying and I could not breathe right. Every breath seemed sudden and sharp and was followed by a tumult of gasps as if I couldn’t fully exhale. I couldn’t make it stop. I could not calm myself down from whatever emotional state I was in.
I remember them arguing and my father talking real sternly to her. She said to him, “That girl is threatening to kill herself. She is out of control! Just look what she did out there! She needs a good beating from you!”
He said to her, “You are the one around here that needs a good beating! You need to stop all this talk about foster care. This is the kind of thing that if you don’t stop will cause her real problems when she grows up and maybe even drive her to suicide! You’ve got to lay off of her! Get out of here you God damned son-of-a-bitch, get out of here now!”
She said harshly to him , “Rodney, you’ve got to straighten that girl out!” He said, “I’ll talk to her, you just get out of here.” Somehow she left and my father came to me. He said, “You know how she is, you can’t be doing stuff like this. Now get a hold of yourself and calm down.”
“I c…an’t…,” I cried, continuing to not be able to breathe right. I kept crying and saying, “I…ca..n’..t st…st..op, I c…an’t br..ea..the…” My father kept telling me, “Yes, you can, just calm yourself down now. Breathe deep. Just calm yourself down and keep taking deep breaths. It’s over, she’s gone now. You’ve got to get a hold of yourself now.” He sat with me until I started breathing more normally and was starting to calm down. Then he told me to go put cold water on my face and come help him make dinner.
“Just stay clear of her tonight,” he said.
I guess a story like this would not qualify as authentic neighborhood folklore did it not converge with multiple versions of the event among those who had been involved. It is over thirty years later and I decide to call my childhood friends to see how my memories line up with theirs. My biggest fear is that they will not have the slightest idea what I am referring to.
Life is like a movie in which you get to play the part in a scene just once, experiencing the sequence of events with all its sights, sounds, and subtleties in moments of time, leaving you nothing but mental and emotional replay for years to come. In my recollection of this dirty, dastardly doggie-doo drama, I was the comedic, evil mastermind of this plot which I could only convince my friend Anna to help me carry out. She and I single-handedly perpetrated the ultimate prank on my mother and I martyred full blame.
And in my initial memories, my father did not discipline me over this. Yet as I read and re-read my story–I am suddenly thinking that perhaps there was only one time…and I have a terrible feeling that maybe this was it. Perhaps twenty years ago I might have recounted this personal folklore as the only time he ever spanked me, but now twenty years later the legend I have created of him in my mind wouldn’t permit me to remember it this way. That he too may have spanked me that day is such a traumatic, guilt-producing, depressing possibility! Why didn’t I initially think it this way? Perhaps the reason I couldn’t calm down was because he spanked me too! But maybe he only did it to satisfy her, and probably he barely tapped me. And I really doubt he would have used a belt. Maybe he just held his hand over me too and I cried even more. Or maybe he held his hand over me and threatened to spank me if I didn’t calm down! Perhaps he didn’t think what I did was so horrible–and I know he thought it was funny–but his only recourse at that point was to act as a referee and try to settle us both down. Such a variety of possibilities–I am becoming less and less certain. Perhaps even my initial story is in fact the way it went.
I do remember his stern statements to my mother and am associating them with this drama…what precisely happened can never be determined. But I know what was typical–the swearing at me and between them, the repeated threats to put me in a foster home because I was “out of control–her control”–and the sense of emotional guilt, anger and confusion that she elicited in me. Perhaps even my father’s responses were confusing to me at the time. So my story is my best, educated guess at how it would have gone, coupled with some pretty clear memories.
No doubt I was in on it, and no doubt my mother was beyond furious. Anna only remembers putting the mud in bags out in the street and cheering as cars ran them over…this only vaguely sticks in my mind as one thing we may have done that day. As we talked and I began to tell her the story as I remembered it, she laughed and said this would have tormented my mother. She remembers that my mother was very paranoid about dogs pooping in her yard. Anna says she would walk her dog and my mother would come out to tell her to make sure he didn’t poop in her yard. She informed her that she was collecting samples to send to the FBI and would find out whose dog was doing it. Anna does not recall the mud incident, but she does describe my mother’s paranoia to the tee. Oddly, when I mention Mrs. Wilson to Anna she says, “Who was she??” I remind her of Randy, Joe and JR but she has no memory of them.
My friend Stacie, however, was quick to recall other aspects of this long ago summer day. I ask her if she remembers the time we made mud pies…and right away she says she does and “weren’t we making doggie doo??” I mention that Anna couldn’t remember it, nor could she remember the Wilsons. Of course Stacie remembers the Wilsons…right off she says that it was Randy, she and I that were in on it! It was a true-life conspiracy of the most vile kind. Just imagine…Mrs. Slifer’s own daughter involved with the notorious Randy Wilson in a thick plot against her. We had a regular old “poo factory” going down at Stacie’s house, with Randy rolling them up to look dried and the three of us (not Anna) going back and forth to my mother’s house. Stacie said we had them in the grass, on the driveway, and going up the steps. She claims my dad put an end to it and made us hose it down, but perhaps that was something later. In my mind, his amusement, coupled with words which at the least contained the phrase “you are going to have hell to pay when she gets home,” are indelible in my mind.
Stacie said that I wasn’t a problem child, but my mother viewed me as such. She says that something had pushed me that day…that she recalls me being really angry at my mother for something. Otherwise she says I probably wouldn’t have done such a thing.
That night at the family dinner table, Stacie remembers telling her parents what we had done. She says that were appalled that we had done such a thing to my mother but they could not stop laughing. They knew as well as I that it was the perfect torment for her. And as they rightfully enjoyed the utter amusement of the drama, two doors down the “problem child” was sticking close to her father for the evening.
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I was inspired in part to attempt this creative work and self-therapy by the 1992 work of Jan Oxenberg and her amazing creative storytelling through art, interview, verbal expression and movie making of the documentary Thank You and Good Night. I highly recommend those interested in life stories and art to watch this film – if you can somehow still find it! Here is the trailer.
For those interested, I have uploaded the work I created in 2006 to this YouTube link (Part I is some groundwork audio-visual creation giving a sense of my early homelife with my mother that better expresses, directly, the context of my short story and Part II is my own reading aloud – I was 43 years old at that time – with audio-visual images, of the story above – Crime and Punishment of the Problem Child. If you wish to skip or fast-forward to my read-aloud, it begins at minute 1:16:49):
Thank You For Reading
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