Food, Cats, and Being Lazy

Chapter Six

My upbringing hadn’t always been candles and fancy Easter dinners. A lot of people seemed to be under the impression that the Finnegan’s always had money, but that wasn’t the truth. My mom flaunted her wealth, sure, but she didn’t always have any to flaunt.

My dad was raised poorer than poor. He had to share a bedroom with his siblings in a small house just outside of Boston. My mom’s parents had sort of abandoned her, so she grew up with her grandparents in a small house in the same town. They met through a mutual friend when my mom was eighteen, and my dad was twenty-one. They didn’t start dating until a few years later when she was twenty-one, and he was twenty-four. He took her to the movies for their first date and didn’t want her to know he was living out of his car.

It’s hard to see how my mom would have found appealing about him. It’s not that I didn’t think my dad was great and that she obviously loved him. It’s just now my mom had money, and that’s the mom I knew. It was hard for me to imagine a time when she had nothing and had fallen in love with a man who had even less. Maybe it was the freedom he offered her. The idea of living in his car and traveling together. He could take her away from Boston and the family she hated so much. And he just saw a beautiful girl who loved him even though he couldn’t afford to take care of her.

My mom ended up helping my dad get a better job. They got their own small shabby apartment together and got married within a year of their first date. They had a courtroom ceremony. Just the two of them. Some people would call that an elopement. Either way, I think they were happier back then. They had money problems, but they had each other.

Paige was born exactly nine months after they got married, and that’s probably when the problems started. My mom always wanted to be a family person. Due to the fact that her parents had kind of walked out on her. She wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and have the firsthand experience of raising her kids. My dad wanted to work, of course, and it was hard to pay for a three-person family on one income. And then I came along almost exactly a year after Paige was born. So with two kids and a wife at home, my dad could never afford to be there for us. We never saw him.

When I was little, we lived in a really crappy neighborhood. I’d seen some nicer houses in the area, but that’s where the old people lived. Ours was kind of the s**t of the s**t. Paige and I wore clothes that never fit and had had either belonged to strange cousins or thrift stores. And we never had any toys of our own. Just whatever we got from the dollar store or stole from other people’s yards.

That was probably when Paige and I were the closest, though. She was older than me, but not by much. I looked up to her a lot. She could tell me to do anything, and I would do it. She could make me believe whatever she wanted. We were inseparable outside of school, and we were trouble makers.

Whenever we were bad my mom would say, “I’m going to tell your dad when he gets home!” and we would cower in fear of the strange man we didn’t really know. My dad never gave us a reason to be afraid of him. It was just that he was mysterious, and we didn’t know anything about him except that he worked. We only saw him briefly on evenings when he would be home before bedtime. And sometimes on weekends when he wasn’t trying to scrounge up extra money by washing cars or shoveling snow.

The thing about my dad is that he’s brilliant. He had a lot of ideas. I think that’s what my mom saw in him. His ambition and intelligence. He just didn’t get a head start on life like most people. His family couldn’t help him get into college. They could barely afford to feed him. And he spent so much of his youth taking care of his family instead of focusing on good grades and scholarships. He wanted to make sure it never happened to us. And even though we had some hard times, I can honestly say we never went hungry.

Even though I thought my mom was shallow, she stuck by him all those years. She believed in him and all of his ideas. One day it finally paid off. My dad sold a pitch to an advertising company in Boston. It was just a small little pitch. Considering everything he does now, the money he made from it wasn’t very much at all. But we might as well have won the lottery. Our parents celebrated by buying us new clothes and our own toys. We had food to eat for a month. Our electricity didn’t even get shut off.

The company that bought my dad’s pitch decided they liked his ideas enough to take him on full time. He quit his crappy little construction job and went to work immediately in an office in downtown Boston. Then the money began to pour in. They were going to tap my dad of all his ideas, but he seemed to have an endless supply. And it didn’t take long before the company found him invaluable and gave him more money to prevent him from running off to someone else.

In some ways, things hadn’t changed at all. I still didn’t know my dad very well. He was still a man I only saw briefly on evenings and holidays. He spent his weekends golfing with his friends or doing house repairs. In other ways, our lives were completely different. We moved into a house in the suburbs where we had our own separate bedrooms. We had clothes that were purchased just for us in just the right sizes. There was always food in the kitchen, and I couldn’t even remember the last time we went without electricity. And I’m pretty sure it was because of a snowstorm and not lack of payment. And then my dad turned on the generator, so it lasted a total of five minutes.

But I lost my family when we gained all that money. We were closer when we were poor. I remember us sitting at our little plastic table on couch cushions telling my father about my day. He would always smile and nod politely as if what we’d gotten into was the most amusing story he’d ever heard. As if it mattered to him that we’d saved a kitten from a drain and uncovered a worm farm in our neighbor’s yard. Now he hardly said hello in passing. He was always working so that my mom could stay home, and we could have the things we wanted.

My mom liked to pretend she’d never been poor in her life. She only associated with rich people and she hired gardeners and bought only the finest clothes. I think the money went to her head. And honestly I think the only reason my dad put up with it was because she had been there all those years when he had nothing to give her in return.

My sister was the worst. She loved money. I remember the first time we got new school clothes just for us. Our mom took us to the mall and let us pick out three outfits and a new pair of shoes. Nowadays our parents handed over two hundred bucks and told us to have fun. Back then it was a family thing. Well, sans my dad. But the three of us went into this store in the mall we thought had fancy (discounted) clothes. We bought three new outfits each and got to pick them out ourselves. I remember Paige complaining because the shoes she wanted were just ten dollars over our limit. My mom tried so hard to reason with her that we couldn’t afford the shoes. She threw a tantrum and refused to buy anything else.

I didn’t understand why Paige had acted that way just for a pair of shoes. I’ll be honest; I liked the money too. I’m not perfect. There have been times in my life where I’ve thrown a tantrum because I couldn’t get what I wanted. But that usually only ever happened when I was told I couldn’t have candy before dinner. This was a new side of Paige that I’d never seen before. But my mother had been so crushed that she couldn’t give her what she wanted. So she saved up and bought the shoes the following weekend when my dad got his next paycheck. Ever since then Paige had always gotten what she wanted. And when we started school that next year she was no longer my friend. She was better than me because her shoes cost a whole ten dollars more than mine.

My brother Phillip had been born just before my dad’s big pitch. So he never really knew what it was like to be poor. As soon as we could afford to move, my parents took us out of town so that my mom could hide from her past, and my dad could be closer to work. We eventually moved into our current house because my mom just had to have it. Then we became this family divided.

I’m not going to pretend for one second that I’m the only person in my family that’s humble and doesn’t like the money. I liked the money a lot. I loved when my parents started buying us our own toys, and we could pick out our own clothes. I remember gloating at school when my parents finally got new cars and we moved into a house made out of brick and plaster instead of plywood and aluminum. I had selfish tendencies, and I also had the habit of not appreciating what I had because I’d grown accustomed to getting what I wanted.

And at that moment, I wanted a haircut. It’s a dumb thing to want. Most people could just be like, “Hey, mom. I want to get my hair cut.” I had to get a formal referral from my mother to take to my father for confirmation. I was not happy about it. I was nervous. I stepped into the living room where my mom was going over her candle sales and watching her soap operas.

“Hey, mom,” I said. She absentmindedly looked up. Her hair was pin straight again and pulled out of her face on the sides. She was wearing a thin blue cardigan and beige capri pants. I kid you not; this woman had been raised dirt poor. But you couldn’t tell. Not anymore. There was even a string of pearls around her neck.

“What, sweetie?” she asked as if she couldn’t care less about what I had to say.

“I was wondering if I could get my hair cut this weekend.” She went back to her paperwork.

“You just had it trimmed a few weeks ago.”

“I know, but I want to cut it this time. Length wise, I mean.”

“How short do you want to go?” This was the hard part. My mom could settle for a decrease in size if it were reasonable and hardly noticeable. I wanted to chop it all off. It was naturally thick, curly, and unruly. It grew outwards most of the time, and when it was wet, it reached the center of my back. It was the wild mane of a poodle lion. I wanted to get rid of it so I could spend less time trying to brush it all out every morning.

“Um—I was thinking like—a bit above my shoulders.”

“Honey, if your hair goes that short it will stick straight up. And it’s pretty the way that it is.” She was lying. She always complained about my hair being too wild. And she always got mad at me for never using the hair straightener she bought me for Christmas.

“I know,” I said. “But it’s just that summer is coming up, and I’d like to take some of it off.” I was being vague because I was planning on telling the hairdresser I wanted it all gone. She sighed. “And—I was even thinking—if it’s shorter—I might start using my hair straightener.” She smiled then, and I knew that I’d struck the right chord.

“I’ll think about it,” she decided.

I figured that was as lucky as I was going to get for the time being. I’d just have to remind her again to show her I was serious.

My mom eventually decided that a bit of length wouldn’t be too bad. Plus, she was going to get her nails done anyway. So she got the money from my dad and dropped me off at the salon Lara’s mom worked at. I was elated that she was letting me go by myself. I told Lara’s mom that I wanted my hair cut to just above my ears. She said that I would look like a poodle since my hair was so curly. I told her I didn’t care. So she promised to thin it out and straighten it, so it didn’t poof straight up into the sky.

You would not believe the look on my mom’s face when I stepped out of that salon later. My hair was exactly what I wanted. And since Lara’s mom had taken the time to straighten it, it looked really cute. Though, I was probably never going to straighten it again. But my mom’s eyes bugged out of her head, and I saw one of them twitch as she tried to compose herself.

“What have you done?” she asked with an eerily calm tone.

“I might have—taken off a bit too much,” I said.

“What did you tell her?” I sighed. I knew if I lied and said she hacked off more than I wanted, my mom would burst through the door and chew Lara’s mom out. And I didn’t want that because she was a nice lady and did exactly what I told her to do even though she didn’t recommend it. Plus, Lara would never forgive me and she was my only friend.

“I asked her to cut it this short,” I explained. Her eye twitched again.

“Why?” I shrugged.

“I wanted to be different.”

“You look like a boy, Piper.” I shrugged again.

“I don’t mind.” She closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose, and took three very measured breaths.

“You wonder why I keep such a tight leash, Piper. You ask me to loosen it just a bit, and this is what you do the first chance you get. And yet you continue to wonder,” she was muttering to herself.

“I just wanted a change, mom. I like it.”

“You look like a dork. And if you don’t keep it straightened you’re going to look like Art Garfunkel.” I shrugged again.

“I don’t know who that is,” I replied. “And it’s not like anyone pays any attention to me anyway.” She turned toward the car.

“God, this is a disaster,” she said. I followed along in disappointment.