The Secret, Violent History of My Childhood Home

My mother had a thing for open houses. For years, every month or so, she dressed my brother and me in our “nice” clothes (purchased with the MasterCard she hid from my father, the shopping bags hidden in the trunk of her car until after my father fell asleep), combed our hair, scrubbed our faces—even that stubborn spot behind our ears—and drove us in her gold Cougar to model home showings.

On one particularly bright spring Saturday (tulips were arranged in a vase on the entryway table where the realtor had fanned out her business cards), we visited a three-story model home overlooking the Long Island Sound. The realtor was a svelte women in pearls and lipstick and sheer pantyhose who smelled of face powder and seemed so elegant next to my mother who had always been obese—a fact that got my brother and I teased at school.

The realtor called my mother Mrs. Fierro, a deference I imagined my mother relished since she worked each day behind the counter of the failing gift shop my parents ran because my Italian father couldn’t speak English and had two choices—work manual labor or be his own boss. The realtor was, I remember thinking, the same kind of woman who came into the shop after a manicure at the nearby salon, asked my handsome Mediterranean-dark father if he wouldn’t mind being a doll, and open her purse so she didn’t smudge her nails. I stocked shelves at the store after school and had to bite my tongue each time I witnessed this request that seemed both flirtatious and condescending. I wonder if, perhaps, I enjoyed watching the realtor dote on Mrs. Fierro even more than my mother.

My brother and I flew up the model home’s pristine stairways, careful not to touch the freshly painted white walls. We claimed our future bedrooms. This one is mine! I call dibs on the big room! Forgetting, for a moment, that the perfect house would never be our home.

The model house had recessed lighting (no dusty lampshades), wide windows with a view of white-capped waves (no mustard-yellow drapery dampening the sunlight), and polished wood floors (our own house was covered in a shag rug that devoured any toy smaller than a Lincoln Log)—all the markers of a wealth. I had learned these during visits to my new schoolfriends’ homes in the months since we’d moved to the affluent town on the North Shore of Long Island, the “Gold Coast,” with its white-shingled Colonials, pink clay cliffs, and picturesque lighthouses.

I watched my mother carefully, fearful she’d give us away. Was her coral lipstick askew? Her working class-Queens accent too obvious? She had worn her best dress—the black-and-white plaid she’d bought on sale at Lane Bryant (she called it The Chubby Shop). It was the dress she wore to Back to School Night each year to impress our teachers and she was still pretty, especially when she smiled, but she was, always had been, always would be, fat (a word that was forbidden in our house), unlike the tennis-toned mothers of my classmates with their Lilly Pulitzer shifts and two-piece Talbots pantsuits.

Although we had only lived in the new town for less than a year, I had studied my new friends’ parents and their immaculately decorated homes that seemed straight out of Town and Country. I had absorbed details with an acute focus, as if it was material I’d be tested on later. Plaids and florals, it seemed, could go together if one had enough blue blood coursing through one’s veins. But everything else—jewelry (silver was preferred over gaudy gold), hairstyle (straight and bobbed, never curly)—should be modest. Reserved. Surely, my mother’s permed and teased hair, shellacked with Aquanet, was a dead giveaway that we did not belong, I thought as I listened to my mother ask questions about the school district, the private beach association membership, even haggle a bit over the sale price—questions she knew the answers to since we were already living in that same school district, in a house that no one else wanted to live in. Even as I imagined my dollhouse set up next to the picture window in the model home’s bedroom, I knew we had no business here.

Less than a year earlier, my parents had begged, borrowed, and worked themselves into poor health to buy an abandoned house on a Gatsby-esque islet, moving us from a land-locked working class town to one populated by investment bankers, heirs and heiresses, and generations of Ivy League graduates—an idyllic island once home to the estate of Marshall Field. A town where my brother and I went to a public school filled with the children of wealthy elites whose pedigree, my parents’ hoped, would rub off on us, allow us to transcend class, and, perhaps, I now imagine them thinking, erase my parents’ own origins. The 14th wealthiest town in America, my mother would quote often, though less so after the true history of our house surfaced.

A different realtor, one with a sailor’s tan, a silver bob, and a diamond tennis bracelet, had shown my parents the abandoned house and explained how the seller was eager to make a deal. The wife had died and her teenage sons had gone wild (drugs, partying)—so wild that the mourning husband had left the boys and the house. It was a “fixer-upper” the realtor said.

My father, capable of fixing anything—a broken tool, a leaking pipe (he had even, on occasion, rewired faulty electrical lines) did his best to fix our new house. He rented a dumpster and filled it with bag after bag of trash—empty beer cans, soiled blankets and sheets, and who knows what else; my parents kept the sordid details from me. He sanded and varnished the wood floors scarred by cigarette burns and carved with slurs and anarchy signs. He filled the holes the teens had punched in the walls—and the holes they’d made outside the bedroom windows where he found baggies of drugs. He covered the walls with coat after coat of paint, but a hundred coats couldn’t have covered the huge red lips—KISS—one of the boys had painted across the wall of the room that would become my own pink bedroom. My father positioned my tall white dresser against that wall and it covered most of the lascivious graffiti. He replaced broken window glass and rehung doors and fixed the broken front steps with used nails he had torn from old wood he’d found in the trash outside a construction site.

We had found a home, and although it was nothing like the model houses my mother had taught my brother and I to dream of, we loved it. Thick woods circled the house like a wall—we couldn’t see our neighbors, or they us—and on summer nights, the hum of the crickets and whisper of the sea breeze through the trees lulled us to sleep. It was a child’s paradise with endless overgrown trails to get lost in (my brother and I took turns playing Indiana Jones and his sidekick) and a beach within walking distance where we caught hermit crabs and collected mussels for my mother to add to her marinara.

And the best part, for me, were the shelves and shelves of dusty paperback novels the previous owners had abandoned in the basement. My father had driven us to the public library every Saturday for as long as I could remember where I’d check out armfuls of books, but this unearthed treasure trove of abandoned books was all mine. My first library. An unconventional library for an almost ten-year-old girl, sure, with genres that ranged from Romance (a whole shelf of books by Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins) to Horror (Stephen King’s The Stand, Rosemary’s Baby, books by Dean Koontz and Peter Straub, and Psycho, which I read in a single terrifying afternoon) to perspective-altering books like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Johnny Get Your Gun, along with a shelf of classics like Gone With the Wind and Virginia Woolf’s time-traveling Orlando. They were books filled with violence, sex, unbridled ambition and revenge, and my face prickled with heat during many an inappropriate scene.

I knew, somehow, that the books had belonged to the dead woman. Or maybe I wanted to believe that she had passed them on to me, lived on through each of my reads. I felt her with me in the damp basement—a cool breath of air on the back of my neck, a creak on the uneven stairs. And instead of feeling fear—I was a hyper-imaginative child and terrified of the dark—I felt comforted.

Now, I cannot decide if it was the dead woman or the books that comforted me more. Many of the books were filled with female heroines—women who started off as “damsels in distress” before finding their courage and fighting back. I’d read and reread the books the librarians had handed me. A few led by feisty girl protagonists like Laura in Little House on the Prairie, and Anne of Green Gables, but most were led by poor little lost girls, like the protagonists of Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and The Little Princess. Never had I imagined heroines like Ayla in The Clan of the Cave Bear, Agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, Morgaine in The Mists of Avalon, and all the women—villains and victims—in V.C. Andrews’ contemporary gothic melodramas. I wanted to read about girls who fought back, and there were many times, like when the kids at school teased me about my father’s accent or my mother’s fatness, when I wished I had Charlene “Charlie” McGee’s pyrokinetic gift for starting fires.

My mother loved the house as well, marveled at the number of rooms—four bedrooms and a studio where my father kept his canvases and oil paints and the stereo on which he played Italian operas. Eventually she stopped ushering my brother and I to weekend model home showings, stopped searching for our dream house.

We had lived in our new home less than a year, not a day going by that I didn’t spend a few hours in the basement reading her books, as I’d come to think of them, when a neighbor finally told my parents the real story. The woman of the house had killed herself. Had tried several times in fact—first, stabbing herself in the kitchen. Second, cutting her wrists in the master bedroom bath. Finally, successfully, jumping from the upper story window with the longest drop—my bedroom window.

Of course, my parents did not tell me the truth, not until I was grown and had left home for college. But I felt the change. I heard my parents arguing late into the night for weeks, months, behind their locked bedroom door. My father hung crucifixes in every room of the house and created a shrine on the fireplace mantel with statues of the Madonna, St. Francis, and blessed palm leaves he arranged in the shape of a cross. One afternoon, a priest rang the doorbell and spent hours blessing every room in the house. My father had always been superstitious and was raised in a world without doctors or medicine, where olive oil and a prayer treated migraines, indigestion and fevers; where rituals (he wore a red coral cornetto amulet on the same chain as his crucifix) protected a person from il malocchio, the evil eye. When I caught him sprinkling droplets of holy water over the brown shag carpet of the TV room and saw the look of terror on his face, I knew something was wrong.

My mother had changed as well. The visits to the model homes resumed. My brother made a fuss, and so it was just the two of us—my mother and I dressed as if we were going to church, or a baby shower, or to a fancy luncheon as some of my wealthier schoolfriends did with their mothers on weekends. We make-believe house-shopped every few months, my mother playing her role as convincingly as ever.

She told me the truth the summer after my freshman year of college, the last summer I would spend at home. My bedroom never felt the same after that. I did not believe in ghosts but, still, I remember thinking the flit-flit of the Gypsy Moths’ wings (there was an infestation that summer) against my bedroom’s window screen was her, returned from the grave. I tried to comfort myself thinking of her books—I had taken good care of them, after all.

Nearly 30 years later, I am not much different than my mother was—living in a community where we can barely make the exorbitant rent (the idea of purchasing a home is a fantasy) so my children can go to a good public school, and so my son, who has special needs, can get the services he requires. I can blend in more easily than my parents, having grown up with all the privileges they’d hoped I’d have: a private university degree I’ll be paying off for most of the rest of my life; a sixth sense for how wealthy people talk, dress, act, decorate their homes; an understanding of the nuanced hierarchy of social class that informs my daily performance.

I dream of finding my own model home. Not the immaculate ones we visited when I was a child but a fixer-upper with a basement that I will fill with books, some of which are hers. I’ve kept my inheritance—my first and most treasured library. The yellowed pages smell of mildew. The covers are warped by moisture, and time. But I won’t abandon those books. I’ve been carrying her books from state to state, apartment to apartment, all this time.