On the surface, my mother seems wholesome and maternal. She’s a great cook. She grows roses. Her houseplants are always thriving. She decorates her living room in an innovative-yet-tasteful style featuring things found in corners at flea markets.
She even, through sheer force of will and despite our best efforts to the contrary, has managed to shape my brother and I into fully-functioning adults with good table manners.
So of course, like all apparently well-rounded and sunny people whose houseplants never die, my mother harbors a dark side –less “June Cleaver”, more “Leatherface”. Namely, she takes a seriously twisted delight in waiting until her adult-and-well-mannered children have let down their guard, and then scaring them into a state of terror so acute that they almost piss their pants.
This is becoming a real problem, since my family’s yearly vacation always takes place in the near-deserted wilderness of coastal Maine. For as long as we’ve been going, the Maine vacation has meant an 8-hour road trip that culminates in long, drawn-out minutes of nighttime driving through thick forest on tiny, winding roads – roads which are spotted, probably due to special New England Legislation to Promote Unnecessary Creepiness, with ghostly little cemeteries that crop up out of the darkness every few hundred yards. The result, as the car’s headlights illuminate crumbling gravestones scattered like crooked teeth in the unkempt grass, is that a lot of time on the approach to our vacation home is spent thinking about and/or discussing death. (Because that’s what vacation is all about, right?)
So, the year that my brother and I were 12 and 18, as we drove past one of these graveyards, Mom looked back at us. “That graveyard is haunted, you know.”
“It is?” we said.
“Yes,” she said. “By the ghost of the Shoreline Road.”
She lowered her voice to a near-whisper. “It’s a sad story. He was a young man, only a bit older than you. He was hit by a car on the side of the road. He died right there, and they buried him in that cemetery.”
We looked out at the cemetery, aghast.
My mother said, “People who live on this side of the lake say that they can hear him in the night, crying out, and sometimes,” she said, and she lowered her voice even more, so that we leaned forward straining to hear, “sometimes he’s been seen, dragging his broken body through the forest AND OH MY GOD THERE HE IS!!!!!!!!!!!!”
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!” my brother and I screamed, as my mother slammed on the brakes and we fell, terrified, off the bench seats of our minivan and onto the floor. My heart was pounding a mile a minute as I looked around wildly for the ghost. My brother was covering his head and looked like he was about to cry.
My parents were both laughing hysterically.
“What the hell?” I said, staring at them as my heart rate slowly returned to normal.
“Haaaa!” my mother yowled. “I can’t believe you fell for it! You should have seen your faces!”
Over the years Mom has improved her game, upping the psychological ante in what appears to be a full-fledged campaign of total mind-fuckery designed to scare us so badly that we actually shit in our pants. In 2003, we found an absolutely horrifying mask for sale at a local flea market. It looked like a genetic cross between a gorilla and a wild dog, with a mangled face and one enormous, staring, bloodshot eye positioned over a mouth full of sharp teeth.
If I hadn’t spotted the mask first, I probably would have been punked by it later that night. But as it stood, I became a part of Mom’s twisted gameplan. My brother and his friends were being housed in a cabin in the woods, about 50 yards from the main house. My job, according to my mother, was to put on the mask and hide in the cabin until they went to bed, then jump out from the dark as soon as the door was opened.
Scary, but not enough for Mom. Once we’d snuck into the sleeping house, she kept getting new ideas about how best to execute the plan so that it would “be scarier” – as if a slavering, shrieking gorilla-thing launching itself out of a darkened cabin in the middle of the pitch-black woods wasn’t really that frightening.
“Hide up in the loft,” she said. “It’ll be scarier.”
And then, “When they come in, I think you should make some growling noises, so it’s really scary.”
Sitting in the dark in the cabin’s sleeping loft, peering through the mask’s eye-hole into the inky blackness, I started to get nervous. It was really dark. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear much, and forget about my brother, I was starting to scare myself.
“Mom, I’m starting to freak out up here,” I hissed. “Are they coming?”
“Hang on,” she said, “I’ve got one more idea.”
“Mom!”
“Trust me, this will make it really, really, really really scary.”
And then, and I swear I am not making this up, she disconnected the lights.
Minutes later, my brother and his friends entered the cabin armed with nothing but flashlights and tried to turn on the lights. Nothing happened. They stood in the dark. And, as requested, I growled.
Since I was wearing the mask, I can only imagine what it was like to see it looming out of the dark, illuminated by the flashlight’s weak glow.
They all spotted me at the same time.
Screaming ensued.
Minutes later, my mother stopped laughing hysterically long enough to reconnect the lights.
“Oh my God,” she gasped, “You should have seen your faces!!!”
In response to years of this, now that my brother and I are both adults, we’ve adopted an extra measure of caution during vacations. The house is surrounded by forest that probably houses bears, cougars, and scary Appalachian mountain men with shotguns and a thirst for blood, but I don’t worry about them, because I’m too busy worrying that I’ll enter a dark room and my mom will be hiding in it. But being cautious has worked pretty well, well enough that we’re still able to sleep in those creepy little cabins. This year, Brad and I stayed in one while my brother stayed in the other. One night before bed, as we were all brushing our teeth at the sink, my mother wandered in.
“You know, I was just thinking,” she said.
“What?” we said.
“I was thinking,” she said, “that this would be a really bad place to be if we were attacked by zombies.”
“What?” my brother said, whipping around so fast that toothpaste foam flew from his mouth in all directions. I, paralyzed by an imagination suddenly run wild with images of zombie invasion, had stopped in mid-brush and was drooling all over my shirt.
“Well, for one, there’s so much glass,” Mom said, gesturing at the picture windows and skylights.
We stared at her.
“Oh, and the doors aren’t very secure… you know, for keeping out zombies.” She paused. “I mean, if we happened to be attacked by them.”
My brother looked at me with something like panic, then turned back to my mother, who was smiling brightly at us. She said, “Well anyway, it was just something I was thinking about. Goodnight!”
And then she walked back out.
Leaving us alone, to go sleep in tiny dark cabins in the woods.
“Oh my God,” my brother said. “How can she be so sick?”
As the vacation drew to a close, and no zombies attacked,we started to feel secure; we let down our guard, indulged in vacation leisure-time activities like hiking and biking and kayaking. We consumed massive amounts of beer and potato chips. We played Scrabble. We went to a county fair, where my brother beat the odds at a midway booth and won the grand prize: an enormous, faux-tiger blanket with a big stuffed head, complete with teeth and glass eyeballs.
On our last night, driving en masse to a lobster shack, the topic of my mother’s penchant for scaring us came up.
“This year was the worst,” said my brother. “Coming in right before we went to bed with that shit about zombies.”
“I didn’t think it was all that scary,” my mother said.
“You didn’t think it was scary to talk about zombie attacks when we were all about to go sleep in tiny, unsecured cabins in the middle of pitch-black woods?”
“Oh,” she said.
“I think the gorilla thing was the worst, actually,” I suggested. “At least this year we didn’t have anything like that.”
There were general nods and murmurs of agreement. My mother shifted in her seat.
“Well,” she said. We all looked at her.
“What?” someone asked.
“Well, since it’s our last night and there’s no way to do it, I may as well tell you.”
“Tell us what?”
“Kat, you know how Noah won that tiger thing at the fair? With the stuffed head and the glass eyes?”
“Yes?”
“I was going to put it in your bed.”
