Scene From Childhood Bedroom
by Colleen Maynard
Post-pizza and Pepsi, we’re high off reams of “The Brady Bunch” and “Boy meets World.” It’s the last July we’ll get away with nightgowns. Mel’s is white with ruffles and embroidered roses. Amy’s is Minnie Mouse. My hand-me-down, the one with the patchwork of brown squares (“the seventies,” I brag) perfectly matches Amy’s couch. The mustard colored bodice has a row of plastic buttons that knob my sternum. I don’t have anything else yet to knob my bodice. We pretend-sleep on the couch while Nick at Night drones on, now “I Dream of Jeanie,” now “Munsters.” I haven’t adhered to a set of rebellions yet. This feels bad in a delicious way.
We traipse upstairs to stage-whisper light as a feather, stiff as a board. Or, house quiet and parents asleep, we barefoot it into the country dark. It’s the kind of night that spools out from the depths of the woods. We scuff over the driveway but stop when we see the slow blinking lights at the edge of the pasture. It is a vector where something wild happened, like when they took Mel’s horse Blue away and she cried from the window, but then for an awful fast minute Blue busted out of the moving trailer, galloping down the road and toward the house before she was tethered by four men and walked slowly back to the truck. Later those places look different. We never spoke of it again, self-conscious of our inability to determine fact from fantasy.
Around this time I compulsively begin assigning friends' homes as sets for the gruesome events in my paperback mysteries. Are these now places of trauma? Mel’s parents get divorced. Amy’s older sister tortures her, but it’s a fair exchange for coveted teenage wisdom. My friends bloom by aid of steady Sega and VH1-drips in their bedrooms. I have six channels on a shared family 9” and parents who fight behind closed doors. My friends stop wearing nightgowns and start giving blowjobs. I sit in their bedrooms watching Pop-Up Videos while they talk on the handset, learning I am weird and dull, never telling them I've seen things here they wouldn’t believe.
Musical
Us girls are in love with Sarah Brightman’s Christine, so this summer we’re doing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Greatest Hits, baby. We murmer-sing under our breaths all the time, practicing at-the-park-at-the-pool-while-walking-home-while-loading-the-dishwasher. In the woods we scream. We push upon our hearts to imagine how Christine felt upon learning of her lover Raoul’s homicide. In the basement at home we’ve assigned a full stage for our rigorous choreography. Kim and I sashay to the pool table center-stage, mirroring each other like a Phillip Glass mirage. There will be timesteps, the shuffle-felap-heel-dig. There will be slow-mo jumping jacks, because how else to get the eerily beautiful than doing snow-angels in the air? Ted gets all the dude roles, duh, or does sound and lighting under his stagename, Jed. Three-year-old Caitlin’s too old and fidgety to be Baby Jesus. We trade out Jesus for Lead Princess.
With a bag of baking flour we transform another suitcase in another hall into a crouched girl-child who sings about growing up but not fitting in. We are comfortable with and yet push back against the Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals our parents spoon-fed us. Ted’s begun playing the Beatles. I’m just getting into boy bands. Our inspiration boards are still full of 1950s Motown, queer ‘70s Brooklyn cued by Diana Ross in The Wiz, and early ‘80s psychedelic “Sesame Street” skits. To tamper the multi-generational curse of blood-deep-bone-deep nostalgia, we test what our determined bodies can do with all this sentiment. We work and werk and WORK. Princess Caitlin grips her sparkly Where’s Waldo? wand as she shimmies through our disco finale “Jesus Christ Superstar” and we’re proud that at such a young age she shows such sass.
To counteract the worry I’m working too hard on something my classmates will laugh at, I dance harder. When the fear I’m not working as hard as I could comes up, as it often does, I pull air into my lungs and steady my spine: as the oldest sister, my example must be fierce. I undulate from the washing machine to the ironing board. The can spotlights that Jed rigged to swivel with us make our sequined scarves blast magenta beams into the dark corners of the basement. If I know how I felt when I lassoed the steps together, does it count if no one else watched?
About the Author:
Colleen Maynard's work has appeared in matchbook, Monkeybicycle, NANO Fiction, and SAND Journal Berlin. Colleen was selected for the research exhibition collaborative 'Visual Pathology' with University of Texas Medical Branch and Galveston Art Center in 2018, and awarded a 2019 'Let Creativity Happen' grant from Houston Arts Alliance and the City of Houston. She studied writing and painting at the Kansas City Art Institute and illustration at Illinois Natural History Survey.
About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:
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