Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35711173-20180624062817

I was thinking of posting this under Mental Illness.

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When I was growing up, we lived in a small house near Diamond Head in Honolulu. My father was an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii. Mutti, as she insisted we call her, was a stay at home housewife.

We lived in a working-class neighborhood that was otherwise all Japanese. I think I was the only blonde haired, blue eyed kid in Kaimuki Intermediate. We weren’t rich, but Hawaii was home for my sister Marlene and me.

Maybe I was too young to think about whether or not Mutti was happy. Everything had always just been that way. I knew she was unhappy about her weight and went to different doctors so she could get enough diet pills. I could read the labels on her pill bottles, but I didn’t know what Valium, Phenobarbital, Tofranil, and dextroamphetamine were.

There were things that Mutti said that should have told me that something was very wrong. She talked about how the neighbor next door was tapping our phone lines. I had always believed that what she said must be true. I used to watch Old Man Tanigawa feeding his chickens. I wanted to I ask him why he was tapping our phone line. The more I watched him, the more he looked like an old man that spoke broken English and only wanted to feed his chickens.

At dinner on Good Friday, Dad announced “I have arranged for three interviews in California. I’ll be flying out on the third of June and coming back on the fifteenth.” I didn’t want to move. This house was our home. I looked at Marlene. She looked as sad as I felt.

“The move will be good for the family,” he said.

We knew what that meant. Dad blamed Hawaii. He thought that Mutti was going Rock Happy. That’s when a Haole, a Caucasian, began to go mentals because they thought the island was too small or something. He thought everything would be fine if we moved back to the mainland.

Things got worse right after Dad flew out. It was the first day of Summer School. It was horrible enough to be stuck with math when everyone else was swimming or surfing. But when I walked home from school to the front yard, I saw pieces of our books. The crosses from the house lay around in pieces. The beads from our rosaries were scattered. My cassock and surplice were in shreds. What was I going to do at Church on Sunday?

Mutti was sitting on the couch with Fang, her cat. Fang was the meanest cat I ever knew. If you got near her, she would take a slice out of you, and the harder you tried to get away the more of you would be left behind. Mutti petted the cat and stared at the radio. It was playing the news. I don’t think she even noticed me come in.

I sat down at the kitchen table. “Mutti, what happened.”

“Israel was attacked. They are being wiped off the map. I must make a sacrifice to save it.”

I got a soda from the fridge and pulled out my homework. Marlene was in the kitchen doing the dishes. She looked frightened. I think she’d been crying. I knew how much she loved that rosary. She got it for her first communion. Pope John had blessed it.

Mutti walked in carrying Fang and sat down. “You know he is gone now.”

I looked up at her. “Yes.”

“Now is the time to have our revenge on him.”

Marlene turned off the water in the sink. We looked at each other. “It is?”

“Yes. I can kill you both. Then I will kill myself. What else can we do? He has flown back to the mainland and abandoned us. I must give a pure and freely given offering to God, like when Abraham sacrificed Isaac on Mount Moriah.”

I always hated that story. “But God let Isaac live.”

“But this must be a pure offering in righteousness. You both have to be willing and have faith, like Isaac. I will bind your hands and feet and plunge the knife in you.”

“I don’t want to die,” Marlene said, terror in her eyes.

“I don’t want to die either,” I said.

Then Mutti got up, furious. “You are not worthy.” She and Fang went back to the couch and the radio.

We both breathed a sigh of relief. Marlene silently turned back on the dishwater and furiously scrubbed away. I focused on my homework. That seemed the safest thing under the circumstances. When I was through with my homework, I did all the odd-numbered problems in the section. I looked into the kitchen. It was spotless, mopped and scrubbed. Marlene looked tired. She deserved to be.

She cautiously went into the living room. “Mutti, may I please go over to Reiko’s house?” Reiko was a girl living a few houses down.

“What about the laundry?”

“All washed and hung.”

“And the ironing?”

“All done. See?” Marlene pointed to the pile of neatly ironed clothes on the kitchen table.

Mutti’s brow wrinkled. “I need you to clean up the front yard.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, closing my book and standing up.

“But you need to do your homework.”

“Done a long time ago. I have just been studying.”

A news flash about the war came on the radio. Mutti focused on that. I got some old grocery sacks for the trash out front.

“Thanks,” Marlene said as to me as she opened the back door to go to Reiko’s.

“Just don’t burn dinner.”

I went out front and started working. As I picked up the mess, Danny from school skateboarded by and shouted: “Yo maddah go Kaneohe.”

Was she going to become a patient in the state mental hospital? “Ainokea wat you tink,” I shouted back. I was angry at him for saying it and angrier at myself for believing it.

The big things like torn up pictures of the Saints and cassock shreds were easy to find, and they were beyond salvaging. But I lay down in the crabgrass to find the parts of Marlene’s rosary. As I searched, Fang made the most horrible noises I had ever heard. I hated that monster but this sounded like Satan himself was pulling her apart. Then it stopped completely.

Marlene returned a couple of hours later. She looked at me down on the ground. “All I am missing are two small beads and one big one from your rosary. We can put it back together again.”

“It will never be the same.”

“No, but it will be the best it can be.”

She skipped up the six little steps that led to the front door and went into the house. I kept on searching. A minute or two later, she screamed and ran out. “Oh, it’s awful! Mutti and Fang are dead.”

I got up. “What are you saying?”

She began to cry and to hit herself in the face. I had to grab her hands to make her stop. “I can’t. I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Get down on the ground. Search for the other beads. You can find them. Don’t think about anything else.” I went inside. Fang’s head sat on the toilet tank. Mutti was lying in the bathtub dressed in a Mumu with a rum bottle and her pill bottles by her, all empty. She had slashed her wrists. Her dead eyes stared blankly at the wall. I closed the door, dialed Operator on the phone and asked for the police.

When I went outside, Marlene was still searching. “Did you see,” she asked through her tears.

I nodded. “Yes.” What I never, ever told her was that I had seen it before she came home. I went into the bathroom. Fang was already dead, and Mother was in the tub. I was going to scream, but then Mother’s eyes opened and looked at me. I just closed the door then as I had now.

I loved her.

I hated her.

I loved her.

I hated her.

I just wanted her dead. 