Food, Cats, and Being Lazy

My upbringing hadn’t always been candles and fancy holiday dinners. Most people were under the impression that the Finnegans always had a lot of money because my parents were really good at pretending.

My dad was raised dirt poor. He had to share a bedroom with his siblings in a small house just outside of Boston. My mom’s parents had basically abandoned her, so she grew up with her grandparents in a small humble house in the same town. They met through a mutual friend when my mom was eighteen, and my dad was twenty-one. They started dating 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 find out he was living out of his car.

I had a difficult time understanding how my mom was able to overlook this. It wasn’t that I didn’t think my dad was great or undeserving of love. It’s just that the mom who had money was kind of the only mom I knew anymore. And she was the kind of person who fussed if we got dirt under our fingernails and couldn’t let anyone see her without makeup.

It was hard for me to imagine that there was a time when she had nothing and had fallen in love with a man who had even less. Maybe it was the freedom he gave her. She got to leave her strict Irish Catholic home and live in a car with a guy who promised to buy her diamonds if he ever struck it rich. And my dad just saw a pretty good Catholic girl who loved him even though he couldn’t afford to take care of her.

Whatever it was, they made it work. My mom ended up helping him get a better job. And they were able to rent a small apartment together. They got married within a year. They did it in a courtroom. Which she was really embarrassed about and never told anyone. Either way, I think they were happier back then. They had more money problems, but they had each other.

Paige was born precisely nine months after that courtroom elopement. And that’s probably when the problems started. My mom always wanted to be a family person due to her parents walking out on her. She wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and didn’t like the idea of paying strangers to raise her kids. My dad wanted to work, and it was hard to pay for a three-person family on a retail manager’s salary. So I don’t imagine it was good news to them when they found out about me. I was born almost exactly a year after Paige. So with two kids and a wife at home, my dad couldn’t really afford to be there with us. He worked two official jobs and spent his weekend looking for extra work. So we never got to see him.

When I was little, we lived in a crappy neighborhood. There were some nicer houses in the area, but they were usually always owned by old people who could afford gardens and stuff. Ours was the shit of the shit. Paige and I wore clothes and never fit and came from random friends’ kids or thrift stores. We never had any toys of our own. Just whatever we got from the dollar store or stole from other people’s yards.

Paige and I had been as thick as thieves. She was older than me, but not by much, and I’d looked up to her. She could have told me to do anything, and I’d do it. She definitely took advantage of it. And most of those stolen toys were things she’d spotted from a neighbor’s yard and told me to grab while she played lookout. We were inseparable outside of school, and we were trouble makers.

Whenever we got in trouble, my mom would say, “I’m going to tell your dad when he gets home!” and we’d be terrified because we had no idea how he’d react. My dad had never given us a reason to be afraid of him. He was just such a mystery to us that we had no idea if he’d spank us or take away our toys or what. We only ever saw him briefly on evenings when he’d come home right before bedtime and give us both kisses on our heads. And sometimes, on weekends when he wasn’t trying to scrounge up extra cash.

But the thing about our dad is that he was brilliant. He had a lot of wild ideas, and I think that might be what my mom saw in him. He had ambition, and he was smart. He just didn’t get a good head start on life. His family couldn’t help him get into college since 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. So he wanted to make sure that never happened to us. And even though we had some pretty rough times, we never went hungry. And we were never cold. Even if it meant he was pawning a bunch of stuff to buy groceries.

Even though my mom was kind of shallow, she stuck by him all those years. She believed in him and his ideas. And one day, it finally paid off. My dad sold a pitch to an advertising company in Boston. It was just a small pitch compared to what he did now. And it wasn’t a lot of money either. But back then, it might as well have been the lottery. They celebrated by taking us out to dinner and buying us brand new clothes and toys. We had food to eat for months. Our power didn’t even get shut off.

The company that bought the pitch decided they liked my dad’s ideas enough to bring him in full-time. So he was able to quit his other jobs and move us right into Boston proper. Then the money started to pour in. They were going to tap my dad of every idea he had in his big sharp brain, but he seemed to have an endless supply and a ridiculously good set of managing skills. So it didn’t take long before the company decided he was invaluable and gave him a salary, pay raise, and tons of benefits to make sure someone didn’t steal him away.

In some ways, things didn’t really change. I still didn’t know my dad very well. He was still someone we only saw briefly on evenings and holidays. Even though he only had one job now, he was still working constantly. And even though he now had weekends off, he always went out golfing or working on house repairs because he couldn’t sit still for long.

But in other ways, our lives were completely different. We moved into a house in the suburbs first, where we finally got our own bedrooms. We had clothes we picked out just for ourselves. There was always food in the kitchen, and I couldn’t even remember the last time the power went out. And I’m pretty sure it was just because a snowstorm knocked out a line and not because of a lack of payment. And it only lasted like five minutes before my dad got the generator going.

But we were closer when we were poor. Even though we didn’t know my dad, he tried to know us. I remember the two of us sitting at a little plastic kitchen table on couch cushions, telling him about our day and what nonsense we got into in the park. He’d smile and listen politely as if we’d just told him 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 a neighbor’s yard. Now he hardly said hello in passing. He was always working so my mom could stay home and we could have what we needed.

My mom liked to pretend she’d never been poor in her life. She only associated with rich people, and she hired other people to take care of the yardwork. She didn’t hire a maid, but that’s mostly because she hated how other people cleaned. But she only bought expensive clothes and always wore at least one pair of diamond earrings at any given moment. She was still my mom, though. Still lived her whole day just taking care of us and our house. She only sold candles to give herself something to do. Even though I once heard her admit to my dad that the entire company was a pyramid scheme, but the candles smelled so good that she didn’t care. She just wanted something to do with herself.

My sister was the worst, though. She loved the 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, they just handed over two hundred bucks and told us to have fun. Back then, it was a family thing. Well, minus my dad.

The three of us went to this store in the mall that we thought had fancy discounted clothes. We bought three new outfits and got to pick them out ourselves. I remember Paige complaining because the shoes she wanted were just ten dollars over our budget. She begged me to put my own shoes back just so she could get the ones she wanted. My mom tried to reason with her because I desperately needed new shoes. But Paige threw a tantrum and refused to get anything else.

It was the first time I’d ever seen her act like that, and I didn’t understand it at the time. I’ll be honest; I did like the money. I wasn’t perfect. There were times I threw my own tantrums because I didn’t get what I wanted. But that usually only happened when I was small and couldn’t have ice cream before dinner. This was a side of Paige I’d never seen before.

But my mom had been so crushed about not being able to give Paige the shoes she wanted. So the following weekend, when my dad got paid again, she bought the shoes and gave them to Paige like a gift. I don’t know if it knocked something into her brain or what, but from that moment on, Paige realized that she could get whatever she wanted if she only cried hard enough. And my mom felt so guilty about forcing us to live in poverty for the first few years of our lives that Paige didn’t even have to learn how to fake cry. All she had to do was complain, and my mom would jump into action before the waterworks could start.

When we started school that year, she was no longer my friend. She was better than me because she wore shoes that were a whole ten dollars more than mine. She used it to make fun of me when I tried to play with her at recess. And then her friends caught on, and I was forced to be a loner even though we weren’t even in middle school yet.

My brother Phillip had been born after 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 out of our house in the suburbs, my parents took us to Boston proper so my mom could hide from her past and my dad could be closer to work. We moved into our current house because my mom just had to have it, and it was big enough for us to all have our own rooms and for my dad to have an office.

I won’t pretend for one second that I was the only person in my family who was humble and didn’t like money. I did like money. I loved it when they started buying us our own toys, and we could pick out our own clothes. I remember gloating at school when they finally got new cars, and we moved into a house made out of brick and plaster instead of plywood and aluminum.

My dad was pretty humble still too. Sometimes I’d find him out in the yard, trying to rewire something. And he’d be wearing twenty-dollar sneakers with dirt all over his jeans. And he’d give me a nod of acknowledgment and ask me to hand him a wrench or something. But then my mom would appear and complain about him not just hiring someone and how filthy he looked.

The point is, I still wanted things. And at that moment, I wanted a haircut. It was a simple thing to want. Most people could be like, “Hey, Mom. I want to get my hair cut.” But I had to get a formal referral from my mom to take to my dad for confirmation. I wasn’t happy about it. I was nervous. I stepped into the living room, where she was going over her candle sales and watching her soaps.

“Hey, Mom,” I said. She absentmindedly looked up. Her hair was pin-straight and pulled out of her face on the sides. She looked like a magazine cover. Like a younger, slightly more stylish Martha Stewart. 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. I was willing to bet my life that every single one of them was real.

“What, sweetie?” she asked as if she could 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, probably going over how much money she’d spent on this pyramid scheme. But the candles really did smell incredible.

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

“I know, but I want to get it cut 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 length if it was reasonable and hardly noticeable.

I wanted to chop it all off. It was naturally thick, curly, and unruly. It grew outwards instead of down, and when it was wet, it reached the center of my back. It was a wild mane like a poodle lion. I wanted to get rid of it, so I could spend less time on it in the morning. Plus, pixie cuts were in, and I thought they looked cute.

Never mind the fact that they were always on straight-haired girls. I could work with it.

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

“Honey, if your hair goes that short, it’ll stick straight up. And it’s pretty the way it is.” She was lying. She always complained about my hair being too wild. And she got mad at me for never using the hair straightener she got 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 had to be sneaky about it. She wouldn’t let me if she knew I was planning on chopping off most of it. She sighed, so I quickly said the one thing I knew would win her over. “I think having it shorter will make it easier to use my hair straightener.” She smiled then, and I knew I’d won.

“I’ll think about it,” she decided.

I figured that was as good as it was going to get for the moment. I’d just have to remind her to show her I was serious, and then she’d approach the subject to my dad.

She eventually decided that a bit of length wouldn’t be too bad. Plus, she had an appointment to get her nails done anyway. So it worked out perfectly. She got the money from my dad and dropped me off at the salon Laura’s sister worked at. I was elated that she was letting me go by myself.

Laura’s sister was the exact opposite of her. She had spikey blue hair and rainbow eye makeup. I wanted to be her. But when I told her what I wanted to do with my hair, she looked reluctant. She said that it might not look good curly, but when I told her I planned to straighten it, she caved.

She styled it for me, and I felt cute and powerful when I left the salon. I was cool. I had a pixie cut. I couldn’t dye it pink yet. And I didn’t have any rainbow makeup. But I felt cool. Until I saw my mom’s face when she was waiting for me in the car. I slid into the passenger seat. Her eyes bugged out of her head, and I was pretty sure one of them twitched as she tried to compose herself.

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

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

“What did you ask for?” 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 her out. And she was a nice lady and did exactly what I told her to even though she said it wouldn’t look good. Plus, Laura would never forgive me, and she was my only friend.

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

“Why?” I shrugged.

“I wanted to try something different. Pixie cuts are in.”

“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 deep 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. Yet you continue to wonder,” she was muttering to herself.

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

“It looks cute when it’s straightened. But what are you going to do when it curls again? I know you aren’t going to straighten it. You’re going to look like Art Garfunkel.”

“I don’t know who that is,” I replied. “And it’s not like anyone notices me anyway.” She began to pull out of the parking space.

“This is a disaster,” she said. And all of my joy evaporated. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t just be happy for me for once. It was just hair. It wasn’t that big of a deal.