Pleasureville, KY

            by Caitlin Morrissey

 

The day I turned eighteen was the day I moved out. Having survived eighteen long years with my parents, sixteen of which were also spent with my grandma, I considered myself lucky to be alive. I thought that my best chance of survival and a normal life was to get out as soon as possible. However, I think the boat to normality had sailed seventeen years and 364 days ago, so basically I was like all the raccoons my daddy had swerved to run over on the highway: screwed.

 

            I was born and raised in Pleasureville, Kentucky—a town with 869 people, 82 of which happened to be related to me. I was the last of six children, and the only girl. My older brothers, Billy Ray, Bobby Joe, Daryl, Bubba and Toad, were not too excited when they found out I was a girl.

“Wut’s that, Momma?” Bubba, who was 4 years old, said the day I was brought home from our next-door neighbor, Shelby Ann’s house. She had delivered all of my momma’s children and had been known to say “All’s you need is sum rubber gloves and hard liquor- it’s easy as pie!” She was also known for burning down her kitchen and half of her living room two different times while making Thanksgiving dinner.

“Well, Bubba,” my momma responded, “it’s a baby girl. It’s your new sister, Daisy Rae.”

“I don’t like girls,” Bubba said, and spit on the ground before walking away.

 

For the first thirteen years of my life, we lived in a trailer park just outside of the parking lot at K-Mart. At least we were outside of the parking lot according to my momma, but both the K-Mart manager and the police agreed that we were well inside. My momma wouldn’t listen to them even when they showed her that our trailer was on top of ten painted parking spaces reserved for employees. She didn’t even let it bother her when they told her that they would tow our trailer if we didn’t move. When the truck came, our trailer broke in half when they tried to tow it away. After that happened, they left us alone, and my momma said, “That thar’s the workins of our Lord and Savior!”  For the next three years we had cardboard walls where the trailer was split and there was a plank that connected the kitchen to the bedroom. I fell off the plank over twenty times and broke my left leg twice.

I shared a room with Daryl, Bobby Joe and three dogs. We had one bed and a mattress on the ground, and always fought over who would have to sleep with Tiffany, the dog who could not control her bowels. “She jus need sum lovin, y’all,” my daddy would say. “Jus don’t feed her any beans!” We had competitions to choose who slept where, but because the competitions were usually who could spit seeds the farthest or who could shoot the most cans off the fence, I, the youngest and weakest, almost always lost and spent most nights with a handkerchief wrapped around my nose and mouth.

 

When I was two, my grandma moved in. She was 43 and was missing all but three teeth. She spent most of her days on our front porch in a rocking chair spitting chewing tobacco and reading The Economist. At night she would come inside and eat supper. Every time she opened her mouth to shove in a forkful of peas or piece of fried chicken, my brothers and I would all gasp as we caught a glimpse of her three-toothed gums coated with a solid inch of her tar-like tobacco. Once we dared Toad to ask grandma why her mouth was so black. “God damn Yanks teechin yew younguns all sorts a non-cents!” she rambled. “Wut is yew cryin bout now? God damn Yanks make yew cra-zee!”

By the time she was done, Toad had fallen asleep at the table and my daddy had to carry him out into the fort and he and Billy Ray had made while their room was under construction. In reality, the dogs had taken over every surface of their room and my daddy said he didn’t have the heart to move them out. “They luk so peaceful in thar, it would break ma hart ta make them sleep outsade,” he said. The next day, after the fort was attacked by raccoons, my momma insisted that my daddy let Billy Ray and Toad come back inside. I still remember my daddy crying as he brought the dogs, including his favorite, Bud, outside. I even heard him whisper in Bud’s ear, “Cra-zee woman. She don’t even know a coonhound from her ass!”

 

When I turned nine, my daddy decided that it would be a good time for me to start school. Little did he know, I had already taught myself to read from all the old Playboy magazines he left around the house. On the first day of school, I walked into the Kindergarten classroom a head taller than all of the other kids. The teacher, who was also shorter than me, spent that fist day holding up flashcards with colors on them.

“Wut’s this colar?” she asked, holding up a flashcard with an orange box on it,

“Arange! Arange!” all the kids screamed.

“That’s right! Yew’s is so smart!” she said.

“Um, missus? Isn’t that color called orange? Cause it starts with an ‘O’?” I asked.

“Oh Daisy,” she sighed, “it’s arange. Arange. It starts with a ‘A.’ But it’s okay,” she said, reaching up to pat my head, “not all of us culd be as smart as me, cus I’m the teachar.”

I went home that night and told my daddy that I didn’t want to go back to school. “I’m so praud of yew,” he told me. “Yew know yew don’t need school to know nothing. Hell, I didn’t even go to school and luk at how much I know!” From the other room I could hear my grandma start up on of her episodes. “Praise Lord Jesus Christ!” she started yelling, “Goddamn Yanks don’t know wut the hell theys talkin bout! Praise the Lord ma girl don’t want no Yanks! Praise Jesus cus them Yanks is cra-zee! Praise Jesus Christ!”

 

Pleasureville got very hot in the summer. The humidity stuck to your skin like a hot wet blanket, and the sun was constantly beating down on you. Sometimes Daryl and I would walk across the parking lot to the K-Mart—the only place in town with air-conditioning. When we got to the entrance, Daryl would always make me stand back. “Luk at wut I culd do!” he would say, and stomped down on the black rubber mat. The door swung open. “I culd do magic, Daisy!” I knew that he couldn’t really do magic because I saw lots of people making the doors swing open like that, but I kept my mouth closed because contradicting Daryl meant a dead leg or a punch in the arm.

The minute we stepped into the K-Mart, we were hit with the icy blast from the air conditioner. Our sweaty bodies were instantly chilled, and we set off for our favorite aisles. I went to the bookrack, where I spent hours reading books by Jackie Collins. Daryl always went off to look at the guns. One day, after the manager told me and my stinking brother to go home back to our goddamn trailer that is really on his parking lot, damn it, I went to the gun display to get Daryl. He wasn’t there, so I started looking down each aisle. I finally saw him, crouched down with his back to me. I began to walk, prepared to jump out and scare him.

“Boo!’ I shouted.

He jumped up, his face as white as a ghost. “Goddamn it Daisy Rae! Wut the hell was yew thinking? Git out of here!”

“We have to go, Daryl,” I laughed. “The manager told me we had to go home.”

“Stop laughin. Jus leave, Daisy! Git home!” His face had now turned a bright shade of pink. I noticed that he was holding a book behind his back, and I grabbed it from him.

“ ‘Rachel Ray’s 30 Minute Meals,’ ” I read. His face was now as red as a tomato. “You like this?”

“Shut up! Git out, Daisy! And don’t ever tell Daddy, or I’ll kill you in your sleep.” He dropped the book and walked out of the aisle. I picked it up, and opened it to the page that was dog-eared. It read: “How to make the best crème brulee and be the envy of all your friends.” 

 

Since I wasn’t going to school any more, I spent the majority of my time in the trailer park down the road where most of my cousins lived. We ran around chasing the dogs for most of the day, sometimes, if we were lucky, we got to chase a raccoon or a squirrel.

One day I was walking around, when I heard some screaming and shouting coming from a nearby trailer. I decided that it was worth investigating, and made my way over to a window. I peered through the sheet of plastic and saw a woman yelling at a man. She opened up the refrigerator and threw a can of beers at his head, but because I had seen my momma do this to my daddy, I figured it was ok. He didn’t move, so she kept screaming and yelling, throwing more and more beer at him. Finally, she picked up a frying pan and started running towards him. This got him moving, and soon he sprinted out of the house, with her following close behind, the frying pan held above her head.

“Git out! Git! I can’t believe I walked in on yew and that woman Mabeleyne! Don’t come back here never!” she screamed and slammed the door of the trailer so hard that it fell off its hinges. Terrified by her anger, I ran away too and bumped into the man she was yelling at.

“That woman is cra-zee!” he said. “At least she didn’t find out about me and her sister!” he chuckled, and winked at me before running off.

 

One summer, my family decided to pack up the trailers and go on a vacation. We all piled into my daddy’s pick up truck and set out on the highway. We could either bring all the dogs or our luggage, and of course my daddy picked the dogs. “It didn’t never hurt no one to wear tha same clothes fer a few days!” he said. Us kids were piled into the back seat of the truck with four of the dogs, and had to take turns holding them. I got stuck with Tiffany.

No one really had any idea where we were going, but my daddy said, “We need ta see the world! It don’t matter if we have a plan, alls we need is this here truck.” We drove for two and a half miles before our engine gave out.

“Well, I guess we culd set up camp here for the night,” my momma said, as she got out of the truck. “Look! There’s a K-Mart jus down the road!”

“But momma, I need to use bathroom,” Toad said.

“Yew don’t need no bathroom. Jus go anywhere! We’re in the great outdoors,” my daddy said. Toad walked for about ten feet and then pulled down his pants. “That’s ma boy,” my daddy said, and opened up a can of beer he had gotten from the cooler.

After two days my daddy fixed the truck. He cut a hole in the ground in front of the back seats, big enough for two people to stand side by side. To start up the truck, he had Billy Ray and Daryl jump into the hole and start running. Once we gained momentum, Toad and I would pull them up and into the seats, and my daddy turned on the ignition.

 We set out on the road again, this time for about four miles, before my grandma had one of her episodes.

“Oh that’s them Goddamn Yanks!” she shouted, pointing at a car that was driving past us. “They’s gonna cum and git us, yew see! They’s gunna cut our throats, oh Lord Jesus Christ!” Billy Rae, who was sitting next to my grandma, told her to be quiet, which just set her off again. Twenty minuets later she hadn’t stopped, so my daddy pulled the truck over.

“Momma, yew gotta stop that. We’s tryin’ ta have a vacation!”

“I don’t want no damn vacation! Vacations is fa Yanks!” she screamed at him.

“Momma, if yew don’t stop, we’ll leave yew here. Jus be quiet and git back in.”

“Leave me! Leave me! Lord Jesus leave me here. I don’t want no vacation.”

“Fine. I’ll drop yew off at the next stop,” my daddy said and got back in the truck. Two miles down the road, we left my grandma outside of a place with a glowing sign that read “V  ca   cy.”

 

I was fifteen when I finally went back to school. I had been learning a lot from reading my grandma’s old magazines, but I was tired of hearing her episodes, which were happening more and more frequently. On the first day, I met a really cute boy who asked if we could be study partners. For three weeks we studied every day after school on the playground that was also the reception area for the funeral house that was right next door to the school. One day, during an especially rowdy reception, Carl and I decided to go back to my trailer. One thing led to another, but the last thing on our minds was our history paper. Suddenly the front door swung open.

“What in the hell in goin on in here!” my momma shouted.

“Praise the Lord Jesus Christ! Godamn Yanks is been in here, teechin yew kids bad thangs! Jesus Christ! Holy Lord!” my grandma shouted.

“Momma! Grandma! Get out!” I screamed, jumping to my feet and covering myself with a sheet. “What are you doin home?”

“Well, Jesus, Daisy Rae, I didn’t know yew’d be bringin boys home! Who is he? I can’t see him,” she said. I slowly moved aside, opening up their view, and got ready to introduce Carl.

“Holy Lord!” my grandma shouted.

“Praise God! Daisy, that’s Carl, your cousin!”

I don’t remember anything else from that moment because I passed out. From then on, I didn’t get involved with any boys from my town, and I dropped out of school again, just so I wouldn’t have to look at Carl. I figured my grandma’s episodes weren’t that bad after all.

 

Three years later, I moved out. I had enough of family “vacations,” stinky dogs and people who said “arange.” I was moving on to a totally new life, void of anything from my past. I worked hard at loosing my accent, and applied to as many internships as I could find that were more than one hundred miles from Pleasureville, which I figured would be as far as any of my family members would ever travel. After getting accepted to many different programs, I decided on the one I liked the best. I took an internship with a company in Chicago that specialized in the economics and product placement at K-Mart.