The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [16]
Those are the more exotic episodes. In the early days of her disorder, Malinda was either entirely uncommunicative or violently obsessed with the only other female in the house: Wensdae.
“Art had it easy with my mom,” Wensdae says. “She doted on him and went after me. I got all of it.”
The first incident Wensdae recalls came on the eve of a school dance when she was twelve, not that long after the leprechaun incident. It was her first dance, and like any girl that age she was eager to look her best. She put on lipstick, did her hair up, and wore a skirt. When she came out and asked her mother how she looked, Malinda told her she looked like “a dirty little whore.” She then proceeded to grab Wensdae by her hair, punch her in the face, and tow her back to the bathroom. There, she forced her daughter to sit on the toilet while she took out scissors and cut off all of the girl’s hair. By the time Malinda was finished, Wensdae looked like a concentration-camp inmate.
“You could see it coming with my ma,” says Art. “She’d start chain-smoking and staying to herself. That could last a day or two, and if you couldn’t get her to take the lithium, it was best to get away from the house.”
That’s what Art usually did. He’d go to McGuane Park or hang out with the SDs and hope that by the time he came home Malinda would be asleep. On some occasions he even crushed up lithium pills and spiked his mother’s drinks. But most of the time Wensdae was left alone with Mother Hyde.
By the time she was fourteen, Wensdae had discovered her own escape: “wicky sticks”—marijuana joints laced with PCP and dipped in embalming fluid. Wickies were cheap and popular in the neighborhood, and the intense, brightly hallucinogenic high they provided was an instant, if temporary, vacation from the oppression of Malinda’s rages, and the dread that, somehow, there really was something wrong with her, something that had caused everything to end up the way it was. “The wicky sticks were so fun. Everybody in the neighborhood did them. I didn’t think they could hurt me, and if you do them in moderation they don’t. But I didn’t know what moderation meant when I discovered them.”
One night in 1989 Wendz overdosed and went into seizures. She was rushed to the hospital, then later admitted into a rehab unit. Although she completed the program, her battle with addiction, and the conditional underpinnings that supported it, was just beginning.
ONE OF THE WAYS Wensdae coped with Malinda’s episodes was to visit the house of her best friend, Karen Magers, who lived a few blocks away. No stranger to hardship herself, Magers had never known her father, a traveling musician from Mexico. Her mother, who was Bridgeport Irish, had been killed by a drunk driver when she was five, and her uncle had taken her in, doing the best he could to raise her on a nursing home attendant’s salary. Though they had very little themselves, the Magerses fed and even clothed Wensdae, sometimes for days, until Malinda emerged from the storms of her delusions. “I don’t know why, but it was Wensdae who always bore the brunt of her mom’s episodes,” says Magers. “I remember one time she accused Wendz of dressing like a tart, then burned all of her clothes. She came over in tears, and I had to give her some of my clothes.”
The two girls were inseparable, and spent most of their free time at the Assembly