Pickles

“I really hate pickles. I hate pickles more than anything in this world. In eighth grade, I would find them on my sandwich at lunch after I specifically asked the lunch lady for a sandwich with no pickles. Throwing the whole sandwich away seemed like my only option at that point and I would go all day without any other food. Accidentally eating a pickle ruins my whole day.

            Pickles in a jar, freshly made pickles, or even just cucumbers make me physically ill; I can’t even stomach the thought of buying them. I know that I’m 28 now, and that I should probably just get the hell over it, but I can’t. Mom loved pickles.

            You see, when I was in the 5^th grade, I loved pickles just like mom. I wanted to be just like her and eat my sandwiches with the same wide-toothed grin. She loved them so much she could just eat them out of the jar with a fork. She would even freeze the juice from the pickles into popsicles and eat them that way.

            “You should never waste a single bit of the pickle,” she would say to me.

            I always followed her every move since I was an even smaller child. My first steps were steps that followed hers. I always had that connection with my mom. My dad would joke that I was actually a girl because I was such a “momma’s boy.” I think he was secretly just mad I didn’t enjoy trucks and guns like he did, though.

            Dad has always been quite the opposite of me, loud, politically outspoken, drunk, and clumsy. He wasn’t necessarily the best role model either. He was almost always in some sort of fight with his family members, crashing his vehicles from driving drunk or looking at his phones, and most importantly berating mom. He always had something negative to say about what she was doing or how she looked.

            I can actually remember the first time he made a comment on how she was visiting her own mother too much, and that she was not spending enough time with him. She was eating a pickle popsicle when he came storming through the front door, the daily newspaper in his right hand and a wrapped fist on his left. I’m pretty sure he punched a wall a week before if I remember correctly, but that’s beside the point.

            “Well, why are y’all sitting pretty on the couch when there’s no dinner in the oven?”

            He started yelling about how she didn’t have dinner ready for him as soon as he got home. He called her lazy and ungrateful that he had been out all day “working” so that she could afford those pickles. The smell of alcohol tainted his clothes and breath; I could smell it from my seat on the worn-out couch.

            Mom never really said much back to him in front of me. I think she knew it upset me to see them fighting, so she held her tongue. I could tell his behavior bothered, if not embarrassed her. I think she knew what kind of trauma it would leave on me in the long run, since her family wasn’t the best either.

            Her mom and dad got divorced when she was 13 years old, which was well old enough for her to remember the screaming and punching and threatening that ended their marriage. 15 years down the drain all because Grandpa couldn’t get sober. When he drank, he got violent. The cycle always continues.

            I didn’t stop liking pickles until my 8^th grade year. I had a best friend named Ian. He would always come over when my dad was working nights and we would have fun with my mom, playing board games and snacking all night. My mom and Ian got so close, mom had him just call her by her real first name, Vicky. She hated the way “Mrs. Brooks” sounded anyways. She probably even resented the last name too.

            Ian helped me keep my head on straight. Although we were just kids, he helped me remember that there was more in the world than my abusive father. I don’t even think I realized how much of an impact Ian had on me until the day that he told me he was moving away to Colorado with his family.

            And just like that, my world started crashing down. His dad got a job offer there and it would be a huge raise for him. Of course, I didn’t understand why the hell that mattered at the time.

            “Your whole life is here! You can’t go!”

            But he could, and he would. I spent the next three weeks in a dream-like state. My teen-aged brain couldn’t process the fact that Ian was his own person with his own family. He was my anchor for so long that I forgot how bad my home life had actually got.

            Mom was starting to get tired of dad’s drunk shenanigans and she eventually started talking back to him. It didn’t start getting physical until we got the news.

            Ian moved up to Colorado and was doing great, so great that his family decided to throw a backyard, house-warming party. He was riding four-wheelers with his cousins when he hit a huge hill and flipped. He got crushed between the rocky hill and the vehicle and passed away.

            I will never forget the second that my mom told me. I was sitting at the table watching Disney and eating a pickle from the jar with a fork when my mom got a call. I thought nothing of it and continued watching, until she gasped and started crying. Thank god dad wasn’t home, or he would have bullied her for crying over a kid she had only known for less than a year. She got off the phone, with who I soon found out was Ian’s mom, to tell me that Ian had passed away.

            The bitter, vinegary taste of the pickles began to pierce into my cheeks and tastebuds, and I began to cry. I gagged and sobbed into mom’s chest until no more tears could come from my eyes. The worst part was I couldn’t even go to the funeral because it was set to be in Colorado, and we couldn’t afford to go all the way there. I went to bed wondering what I had done in order to deserve this life. Why I deserved for my best friend, my anchor, to be taken away not once, but twice. I couldn’t even fathom that he was actually dead.

            But he was, and there was no escaping that when I returned to school the next day to guidance counselors and therapists alike roaming the halls. They made the announcement that a former student, Ian, had passed away. Everyone who knew we were friends had something to say to me. It didn’t help that I couldn’t have even gone home or stayed home because mom and dad were both working that day. I ate my lunch alone that day because it was usually me and Ian at the table. I packed a chicken sandwich with pickles, but I couldn’t even stomach the salty pickles that cursed the sandwich. I went hungry the rest of the day.

            That morning before school mom didn’t seem right; she seemed tired and her eyes were bloodshot. She had been up all night crying because she knew that Ian’s death crushed me.

            My dad didn’t react well to the news either, I found out later from mom. Except instead of being upset that a child was dead, he was more upset that mom was upset about it. He was apparently jealous that she seemed to care more about a child dying than she cared for him at the time. This snapped mom back into a new reality, the reality in which her husband was finally the bad guy. So, from that point on, she began to fight and argue back to his drunken rants.

            I tried so hard not to listen to their fights from that point on. Hearing my mom scream in pain or cry for help broke me more than anything I had experienced before, including Ian’s death. The little flicker behind mom’s eyes was gone, and instead I could find it behind dad’s eyes, but only when he was two beers into the night. She stopped showering as often, never cooked for me or dad, and kept forgetting little things. She even stopped eating her pickles all together. He mental ability to converse began declining and she was never motivated to do anything, all because when she did do something dad would insult or demean her. It all came down to that one night when we were watching a movie, well, I was watching the movie. Mom was half asleep beside me on the couch when dad got home from what would be his last day at work.

            Before my 8^th grade year, mom would have been munching on some pickles and engaging with the movie on screen. Instead, she was slumped over in dirty clothes and greasy hair. Dad walked through the door and immediately began ragging on her appearance.

            “Hm, would you look at that, Justin, I think we have rats in the house”

            Mom woke up just enough to spout, “Well, you don’t look too good yourself either.”

            The rage engulfed dad’s face and his cheeks turned bright red. I sat awkwardly waiting for the yelling to begin, and it did.

            That night I didn’t get any sleep for school. I listened to mom and dad scream and cuss until it was four in the morning. When I heard one last bang around 4:34am and then it was silent, I knew something was really wrong. I was scared, though. You can’t expect a 15-year-old boy to really understand what is happening in that situation. I rejoiced in the silence, still slightly worried, and fell asleep just in time to get 30 minutes of shut eye before my alarm went off. But when I opened my eyes to slam my hand to the snooze button, the house was still eerily silent.

            I guess I just assumed that they both worked that day and that’s why it was so quiet, but I would soon learn that a very unfortunate scene had taken place. There, in my parent’s disheveled room, was my mother. A bullet hole to the chest and stomach. It didn’t take me very long to find dad in their bathroom with not much left to his head and the gun in his hand. My entire body went numb, and I don’t remember much after that.

            The next thing I remember was sitting in the back of the cop car until Grandma could come take me. The lights from the cop cars illuminated the block like the inside of a house party and the yellow crime scene tape was stung out across our front gate. The front gate that would never be opened again by any of us.

            It’s funny, trauma can do so many different things to different people, but the most comical part in this is that I still cannot eat pickles. I know that it has been 13 years, but I cannot even stomach the thought of them. I have tried and tried to eat them again. I thought that maybe it would help me feel closer to mom again, but I can’t. And that’s why I can never eat pickles ever again.”

My coworkers looked at me with this information swirling around in their minds. I could tell in their eyes that they were processing what I had just told them.

“Dude, I don’t like pickles because they’re too salty.”