Looking for Cassandra Jane (The Second Chances Novels) (6 page)

I’m quite sure my cheeks were just blazing, and I think I must’ve had real tears in my eyes (even though I’d become quite adept at holding back tears by then). Oh, maybe I was being overly melodramatic, or maybe I was missing my grandma. Or maybe it was simply the result of being thirteen and a half and the way everything in my life just suddenly seemed sadder and worse and more hopeless then ever before. But I’ll never forget the humiliation I bore on that gray afternoon in early February. And I think something inside of me just snapped during that long walk across town.

Somehow my daddy, without a cent in his pocket, had managed to secure us a tiny, furnished two-room hovel in a shabby apartment complex on Main Street directly across from Masterson Motors, where Daddy felt certain he would be able to get his old job back. Actually, I think the place was more like a motel, because the tenants seemed to come and go weekly, but I believe they called the place “The Manor Apartments,” which seemed slightly ridiculous. Daddy kindly let me have the one and only bedroom and he slept on the couch. The nasty place smelled like old cigarette butts, bad booze, and God only knew what else. I hated it there.

And I suppose that’s when I began to go truly wrong. That must’ve been about the time when those words from my daddy started to ring true in me. Because that’s when I first began to believe that I really did have “the devil in me” after all. And the funny thing was, my daddy was staying true to his word back in those days. Why, he did manage to get his job back at Masterson Motors, and he did stay on the wagon, for a while at least. So I really couldn’t blame my actions and misbehaving on him or his drinking. Well, not directly anyway.

Five

M
y grandma liked funny sayings
,
and she seemed to have one for just about everything. When I was younger, I actually thought she’d been making all this stuff up as she went along. I later learned they were simply colloquialisms (which is a fancy word for funny sayings). One of these funny sayings stayed with me for many years, because for whatever reason, I thought she was talking about me. My grandma used to say, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” And while I didn’t know exactly what it meant back then, I somehow knew it had to do with me. But I could never quite tell if it was good or bad or somewhere in between.

Being generally insecure, as time passed I naturally began to assume it was bad. I reckoned I was the twig, and it seemed no big secret that I was getting fairly well bent up by all my unfortunate circumstances with my daddy and his drinking ways. So I figured by the time I grew up I’d probably be one twisted-up, good-for-nothing, crooked old tree. And if you ask me, that wasn’t a very hopeful picture, so I tried not to think about it too much. Especially when it seemed I was getting more and more bent with each passing day.

It’s not as if things went immediately bad for me (at least not so as anyone might notice) but inside me—deep down, in this secret, hidden, tucked-away place—everything just started to change after my grandma died. I suspect the only thing that kept me from changing right off the bat was her memory and those promises I’d made shortly before she died. But unfortunately, those restraints only lasted about six months, during which time I started getting as hard on the inside as I already was on the outside (or so I tried to convince myself at the time). Looking back, I can see how things might’ve gone better for me right then—except that I was in something of a trap—the trap of believing I was nothing.

I didn’t start smoking cigarettes until the end of seventh grade. It wasn’t hard to get money from my daddy back then since he was still on the wagon and pulling in some pretty wages from old man Masterson by selling those used cars. Besides that, it was easy to lay a guilt trip on him. He was always ripe for the picking, and I picked him as much as I could, while I could, that is. I figured he owed me.

Because of my impoverished lifestyle while living with Grandma, I had learned how to shop thrift stores—and I soon discovered that thrift-store finds, combined with my own natural creative ability of sewing on colorful beads and tapestry braiding, resulted in some pretty cool threads. Especially back in 1968, when patchwork jeans and smock tops made from old linens were the epitome of fashion chic. Well, for the cool, that is (or so I told myself). Square people like Sally Roberts still settled for crispy store-bought clothes—probably from places like JCPenney or Montgomery Ward.

And so in a strange sort of way, I became somewhat hip in our little podunk town (‘course, it took them a few years to figure this out). I tried to put on an air of confidence, and on a good day I imagined myself to be a
trendsetter with attitude.

It was that same spring of 1968 that I pressured my daddy into getting me a used guitar and shelling out twenty bucks a pop for guitar lessons. (Amazing what guilt can do to a man.) Every week I walked over to Fourth Street to be tutored by Pete Jackson (who just happened to be the coolest musician at Brookdale High and the first person I ever met who actually smoked marijuana). And right there in his parents’ two-car garage (thickly insulated for acoustics, he explained) Pete would teach me a few new chords each week. He also told me I had real musical talent. And I suspect if he hadn’t already had a girlfriend who liked dropping in on him, unannounced, he might’ve even hit on me. Or so I liked to think. So, in some ways, Cass Maxwell was sitting on top of the world. In a matter of speaking, that is. She just didn’t know it.

I turned fourteen in August of 1968, and I know for a fact that that is when I first acquired my own “reputation.” I suspect it originated with my private guitar lessons with Pete and the way I often hung around to hear his band practice afterwards. And it didn’t hurt that I wore the shortest miniskirts in town (only allowed due to the endless guilt trips I habitually tossed at my daddy and the turning up of my waistband when I was out of his sight) or that I had “developed” and required more than just a training bra. I think my long mane of black hair may have turned a few heads as well.

The funny thing is, I didn’t fully realize this at the time. It’s only in retrospect that I have truly begun to understand such things. To be honest, at the time I mostly saw myself as a social reject who wore secondhand clothes and had a nose that was overly large for her face (of course by then I had started to idolize the likes of Cher, Joan Baez, and rocker Janis Joplin—for whom I also grieved deeply a couple years later when she overdosed on drugs). Suffice it to say that, at the time, in 1968, a lot of these things went right over my head.

When Pete’s friend Kurt Laurence asked me out I flippantly agreed, but at the same time I felt completely terrified. Why, I was only fourteen. I knew that good girls didn’t date at that tender age (especially not boys who were going to be seniors in high school!). But I had that tough exterior so polished by then that I’m sure Kurt never suspected what was truly going on inside me. In fact, I doubt he even knew that I was only fourteen.

As I recall, we went to a drive-in movie, although I can’t remember what was playing. My memory is somewhat blurred due to the fact that Kurt smoked a joint, or maybe two, in his ’64 Ford Mustang. He offered me a drag, but for some reason I still can’t quite put my finger on, I declined. Nonetheless I believe his secondhand smoke most assuredly affected me, at least somewhat. Unfortunately for Kurt, it didn’t affect me enough to get him what he wanted. And when he dropped me off at home (we were living in a little rental house on Oak Street by then) he seemed a little put out. Needless to say, Kurt didn’t ask me out again. But that certainly didn’t mean that he told any of his buddies that our date was a failure. No, of course not. What seventeen-year-old boy would admit such a thing?

My daddy wasn’t overly thrilled that I had gone out with a high-school boy, and it was about this time that I began to fear my guilt trips were wearing a little thin on him. So in an effort to preserve what was actually turning into a somewhat tolerable lifestyle, I decided to lighten up on him a bit and, in essence, clean up my act.

As it turned out my behavior (whether good or bad) had little effect on his, because he eventually fell off of the wagon anyway. His first plunge occurred late that fall. I was in ninth grade and acting somewhat mature and responsible at the time. But as a result of his drinking, I soon returned to my old ways of creeping around, sneaking in late after he’d passed out on the couch, and trying to remain invisible to avoid any unnecessary unpleasantness. But I knew I was living on borrowed time. I needed a better survival solution, or at least a friend I could turn to in a time of need.

By then Joey Divers was little more than a far-off childhood memory for me, and besides he was already in high school—another world, it seemed. I longed to be in high school too. I felt I was too mature for the shallow superficiality of junior high, where girls like Sally Roberts and Cindy Shelton lived for “game days” when they got to wear their blue-and-yellow cheerleading uniforms and bounce down the halls like celebrities who owned the school (which, in most ways, they did).

I felt there must be something more to life than popularity and cliques, and certainly I
wanted
something more. Or so I tried to make myself believe. I suppose in all honesty this might’ve simply been my way of protecting my constantly wounded ego. Because if the truth had been known (and believe me, I would rather have been tortured and died a thousand deaths than to admit this back then) I secretly longed to be one of them. And I knew I could’ve pulled it off, too, if only they’d have given me the chance—which would never have happened in a billion years.

Sometimes, when I was alone and safe from prying eyes, I would imagine myself actually dressed like them, talking like them, going home to a ranch-style house like the ones they lived in, with a patio and barbecue in the backyard, and where two parents lived—and maybe they even fought from time to time (I mean I wasn’t completely delusional) but in my fantasy my parents would always make up and then take us all out for ice cream afterwards. Sometimes I’d get really carried away with my fantasy and pick out furniture for the living room, the kind of clothes my make-believe mama would wear, and even my bedroom, which was sometimes pink with a canopy bed but more often pale blue with an eyelet bedspread and matching curtains. But like I said I would’ve rather had my eyes plucked out than to admit this to anyone.

It was just after Halloween when my daddy fell off the wagon.

And surprisingly, it didn’t seem all that bad—at least not at first. The next day he kind of apologized, then told me that it was no big deal. “I can control myself with alcohol,” he explained from where he sat on the sofa, bent over, holding his throbbing head between his still trembling hands. “It’s not like it used to be, Cassandra, I promise you. I’m in control now and I’ll only drink socially.”

I think I almost believed him, and I suppose in some ways this made me feel less guilty for the way I’d been manipulating him so much. Still, I worried what would happen if he went back to his old ways and drunken rages. Because you just never can tell with a drunk. It’s best to just stay on your guard.

So I was back to tiptoeing around so as not to upset him in any way, and I got and installed a lock on my bedroom door. Still, I never felt completely safe in my house.

I even briefly considered the possibility of going back to Aunt Myrtle and begging her to take me in, although I suspected that she was involved with “some man” just then, since I’d noticed a large blue Buick parked out behind her house where not too many could see it, and on something of a regular basis, too. Naturally, I was well aware of her “philandering ways,” as my grandma used to say to Aunt Myrtle when she thought I was well out of earshot. (I had to look up the word but discovered it had to do with illicit love affairs.) Now why anyone would want an illicit or any other sort of love affair with my old Aunt Myrtle was one of the great mysteries of life, but having seen a number of cars parked in the back of her house over the years, I suspected my grandma had her pegged just about right.

So, anyway, it didn’t seem that Aunt Myrtle could offer much of a haven if my daddy suddenly decided to go off the deep end and become violent again. I grew greatly troubled trying to think what I might do if this were to happen, and as a result it became somewhat difficult to concentrate at school, but I tried just the same.

I’d heard about kids going into foster homes, and in some ways that almost seemed preferable to being beaten, but what if the foster parents were square and conservative and made me start wearing my skirts down to my knees? I’d seen girls like that in school. They walked around clutching their notebooks tightly to their chests with their shoulders slumped over, eyes cast downwards. Why, they looked downright miserable to me. And at this stage of my life I felt fairly certain they had it even worse than me. (Of course time would prove me wrong on this, as well as many other things.)

The bottom line for me was, at that stage of life, I felt too old and too grown-up to be treated like a child again. I’d seen too much of the seamy side of life. And I was used to my own independence and didn’t particularly want anyone telling me what to do or how to do it well, that was, unless I might possibly find that perfect suburban family (the one from my fantasy) but I was smart enough to know that wasn’t a reality-based dream. Not for me, anyway.

Finally, I came up with a plan. I decided I should try very hard to make a friend (and I knew I couldn’t be picky) who might be willing to take me in, at least temporarily, should a crisis arise.