The Chaos Addict

by Robert Crowl

Dad’s presence had dwindled since the start of Junior year. Mama drank more and more to compensate as if she thought it could join them by way of ritual. She’d still wake me from his recliner, begging more booze from the fridge, and I’d answer. But now, her thin grasping hands left me heavier where these trips used to give me merciful purpose. I’d begun to dread seeing her that way: barely able to lift her head from the recliner, the muscles in her neck more gaunt, arterial, her skin yellow and sagging in the TV’s dappling flicker. I feared Dad's chair would swallow her completely leaving me and my sisters destitute.

In Dad’s whiskey-wake, Mama wasted no time finding new things to rescue. Her first was a tragi-couple named Sandra and Dwayne who lived a few blocks down from us, in a cramped single story like ours. We came to know them because my sister, Veronica, hung out with their daughter, Becky—a chubby girl whose earned cynicism mirrored Veronica’s. Our visits to their house seeded innocent enough: video games and dolls while Sandra and Mama prattled nearby; over time, familiar cracks slithered their builder-beige walls.

For starters, Sandra was obese, wide hips that seemed to orbit her planetary waist and thighs. Her amorphous body moved constantly when she walked which required intense force and labored focus, especially when the act of rising from her chair resembled a rocket launch in preparation, in gathering power. She sweated incessantly, clear pearls beading her upper lip like jewels. Her hair was dark, and she had a soft smile that could harden in a second if one of her daughters failed to listen or hold their mouth right.

I didn’t mind Sandra. She never spoke cross to me, and I liked being out of our house which bustled with Dad’s ghost. It was her husband I hated.

Dwayne scooted around in a jet-black mullet, like Dad’s, that fell over his wife-beater t-shirt, its fraying seam angled over the waist of white-kneed Wranglers. When we visited, he’d stumble around choking the neck of a Budweiser, walking as if his Cowboy boots were filled with cement. And in Dad’s fashion, he liked to belch theatrically out of his goateed mouth filling the air with a stench that picked at the scab of running booze for Mama. He had two expressions, scowling or sneering, and I always felt on edge when he was home, my eyes tracking him like a lit fuse. Some nights, he’d get drunk and hit on Mama: sauntering up, rubbing his ribbed stomach, and stretching his burly forearm against a door jamb like some redneck model. He’d whisper in Mama’s ear, but she’d shake her head and scold him for trying to seduce her in front of his wife.

Most nights, the sun sank parallel to Sandra and Dwayne’s tolerance of each other, the dwindling light queuing their howling and clawing like suburban werewolves. When this happened, Dwayne would storm in, lit by one of Sandra’s failings. Slurring his speech, he’d spill grievances at her, but Sandra, not one to play the victim, would heft herself into his face. It would all culminate in them vomiting each other’s flaws until the veins in Dwayne’s farmer’s tanned neck shivered and Sandra’s legs shook for the weight they’d been holding.

When they fought this way, I felt reinserted into Mama and Dad’s brawling, so my body would make itself a fence between them and us—Pavlovian choreographies wired into my brain like beaten trails. I wasn’t the only one still a victim of their training: Mama would throw herself in front of Sandra, acting as referee before ushering Dwayne to his corner. Other times, she’d order Sandra and her daughters into our car as if she could rewrite her own story through theirs.

I both hated and felt proud in Mama’s heroics, smiling at how she stood taller than Dwayne who’d poke her chin and tell her to mind her own business. A part of me agreed with him despite my compassion for Sandra. I had no idea why Mama needed to get involved in other people’s drama. Didn’t she have enough at home? It was like she craved it. Or maybe Dwayne’s sour breath was a tripwire: another way for Mama to feel close to Dad, or to feel powerful without him.

The whole soap opera came to a head when Sandra rang Mama begging for a place to stay after Dwayne left her black and blue before passing out and wetting himself in the front yard. Mama, desperate for a fellow victim, shouldered heaven and Earth to bring Sandra and her two daughters into our already cramped house. Their boxes and trash bags of clothes took up residence in our dining room next to Mama’s projects which left our brimming dining table—our sacred meeting place—eclipsed with junk. Seeing their baggage alongside ours made it hard for me to breathe, so I steered clear of that room while they were with us.

Another reason I hated having them there was that they reflected our own incompleteness and disorder back at us, past and present, their residence dredging up 16 years of nomadic leanness. Every time Sandra asked Mama for money, my stomach growled and my skull itched. Like us, their patriarch was missing like a gaping wound, and like us, they were eking by. Mama had already started dusting off her speeches of rationing groceries, a speech that replayed in my head each time Sandra or her daughters came out of our kitchen crinkling and chewing.

If that wasn’t enough, Sandra and her daughter’s obesity shined a light on Veronica’s weight—a thing Mama had been desperate to control for years. A couple weeks after they moved in with us, I dragged in from school to find Mama, Becky, and Veronica doing aerobics in our living room. Mama—always a twig of a woman—screamed at the two chubby middle schoolers to get their knees higher. On the TV in front of them, an aerobics program played: a gaggle of spandexed twenty-somethings with vivid crotches and flat stomachs—Soap-Opera Moms, as Mama called them—wore headbands that matched their leotards. They curled and hoisted colorful, petite weights and easy smiles, nothing like the faces trying to keep up in our living room. Veronica’s cheeks, for example, were crimson, and she panted like she resented the air’s gravity acting against her, and Becky looked on the verge of crumpling into the carpet.

Sandra sat in Dad’s recliner smiling and clapping, her hips spilling onto its armrests; she perched on the chair’s edge so that her gut hung between her spread thighs like a Kangaroo pouch. Her shorts showed the purple veins crawling her calves, but her face still possessed a shred of lingering youth as she rocked back into peals of laughter anytime Mama cursed the wailing girls to go faster. I began to laugh with her, enjoying Veronica’s tortured face.

“Mom, I need a water break,” Veronica gasped, forehead spitting sweat.

“Oh, come on. Move your fat ass. You’ll get a water break when you’ve earned it.” Mama’s thin legs sprung under her, her knees hitting her palms.

“Seriously, Mom, I feel sick,” Veronica stopped marching and put her hands on her knees as if the room were spinning.

Her back flexed and swelled for air as she slithered onto the carpet and laid there, sprawled out like a starfish. Mama quit marching, wiped her lip with a t-shirt-hooked thumb, and stood over Veronica.

“Do you want to die?” Mama yelled.

Veronica’s eyes shot open. “No, Mom, God! What are you even talking about?”

“You’ve got to lose this weight or you’re asking for a heart attack. Don’t believe me? Ask your grandfather. The man had a dozen strokes, and you saw how that turned out.” Mama’s eyes flashed, and she drilled the air above Veronica’s face. “I’m trying to save your goddamn life!”

Instead of sparking her off the carpet, Veronica’s glazed face broke, and she began to cry under the lash of Mama’s tongue and the room’s myriad eyes. Gathering herself from the floor, she ran to her room sobbing, brown ponytail whipping any chasing pity behind her. Her door slammed, but Mama’s face was still tight and unforgiving as she plopped on the couch and rubbed her temples.

Looking around, I wondered how much of Mama’s lecture had been instigated by her fear that Sandra’s fate would be Veronica’s. I also felt guilty that Becky and Sandra had to endure Mama’s speech, their discomfort clear in their inability to meet my or Mama’s eyes.

A few weeks later, I parked my bike in the garage and pulled the door closed to muffled screaming, Mama’s unmistakable voice cueing my heart to trade its petty pace for one more urgent. I wondered if Dad was making his inevitable plea to move back in, something I both longed for and dreaded. I ran toward the noise only to find her screaming at Sandra in our entryway. On the couch, Sandra’s daughters sat staring at their hands.

“I can’t believe this, after everything I’ve done,” Mama’s righteous voice fractured, trailing off.

Sandra’s balloon of a body seemed to deflate under the prick of Mama’s fingernail.

“I want you out of my fucking house, now!” Mama said.

“But we have nowhere to go, Mary. Please!” Sandra interlaced her plump fingers at Mama.

“Not my problem. You can leave your shit here until you find a place, and don’t worry about me stealing anything. Unlike you, I have a fucking soul,” Mama’s body looked deflated.

Sandra waddled toward the couch. “Come on, girls,” she said, gathering them into her massive bosom before ushering them out the door which Mama slammed at their backs.

She collapsed into the recliner and mashed her hot eyes into her hands. She lifted her face and stared at her palms as if the mascara smears were Rorschach inkblots through which she could divine how she’d gotten here. Veronica wandered out into the living room, and her and I, too big to squeeze into Dad's chair anymore, took up awkward residence around Mama, draping ourselves on the arm rests or at her feet. She wrung her eyes and told us what had happened: Sandra has been stealing from us for weeks. Apparently, she’d stolen and pawned some of Mama’s antique jewelry and Veronica’s diamond ring; she’d even stolen some checks and forged Mama's name, draining our bank account. While I fumed, Mama cried, and my sisters and I took turns rubbing her back. Her sobs were desperate and infantile, and tears ran into her mouth. I couldn’t stop wondering if she liked the saltiness. As I listened, my insides hardened, and I decided we were cursed. While I wished violence for Sandra, a part of me was angry at Mama too. After all, she’d brought Sandra’s mess into ours, compounding our storm by hitching us to Dwayne and Sandra’s thundercloud. 

BIO: Rob Crowl is a professor of composition, literary studies, and creative writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas. He earned his MFA from the University of Texas at El Paso and his BA at the University of Alabama. His writing has appeared in Passengers Journal and the West Trade Review, and he lives in Georgetown, Texas with his wife and two children.

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