Energy Crisis
'American' Part 1: Scrambling | Chapter 3
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2003-2008
For five years after my parents separated, they played a game of ping pong with me, a willing and smiling participant. One day, I would sleep at my mom’s house, so cavernous that I would curl my arms around her waist at every given opportunity, afraid of the emptiness on the second floor while we were on the first, afraid of the emptiness in the dining room while we were in the kitchen. I was petrified of being left alone, only occasionally stumbling into the living room at the peak of daylight, and only going to my own room as my mom sat at the desk in her adjoining office. My room was pink and purple with paper fairies lining the walls. My friends at public school thought I lived like a princess, but I quietly envied that most of them shared their beds with a sibling.
The next night I would sleep at my dad’s “house,” which was typically whatever property he was fixing up at the time. He had no real furniture and his room contained a space heater and the two cots my siblings used for summer camp - and I don’t mean the nostalgic sleep-away camps of Wes Anderson films and suburban woodlands alike, I mean Bible bootcamp in the field behind our church, where my siblings found bleak refuge in open-air party-tents-turned-barracks.
Dad and I slept in sleeping bags on the cots; they were about two feet wide, and yet my dad still woke up to me crawling into his sleeping bag every night, seeking protection from whatever nightmare my creative young mind had concocted that night. Even fifteen years later, visiting Dad from college, I had a dream that a sorority on campus decided to sacrifice me to Satan. My dad woke up to me running up the stairs to his room and burrowing under the covers of his bed, or rather, his bare mattress, which was laying frameless on the floor between piles of unopened mail.
The next night, I’d be back at Mom’s house, and the following, again at Dad’s, conveniently located one block downhill. It was a masterfully chaotic balance. It was never the most reasonable system, but I don’t think I was capable of going more than a day without either parent; if I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t bring myself to believe they were alive.
For years into my adulthood, I had to regularly rearrange my room or sleep with my head at the foot of the bed to maintain some semblance of constant change. My siblings were too old for the ping pong game - or, more likely, too aware. I was the sole currency exchanged between these estranged countries.
I had no favorite. Mom would tell me stories about when she was a little girl and run her fingers through my hair until I fell asleep. She also expected a certain level of independence from me - to clean up after myself, or to get myself a snack if I was hungry. But with Dad, I got to live with his bachelor freedom, which more closely resembled a lost monk who has forgotten what money is. I didn’t have to clean up, because there was nothing to clean. We could eat beans for dinner every night (shamelessly my favorite food, then and now), and he always brought me breakfast in bed so I didn’t have to leave the warmth of the covers. In Mom’s house I looked like a princess, but in Dad’s house I acted like one.
Neither house had the heat turned high in the winter, despite the tundraic deluge of the Central New York Snow Belt. It was the era of the energy crisis, news channels cycling clips of people crying at gas pumps. Gas inflation and Britney’s bald head were shaking the whole country to the core. Despite the dismal era and its unwelcome effects, a cold house proved the most efficient way to bring a family together. With everyone huddled up in the one room with a space heater, it was the optimal conditions for me, a love leech.