Gemma McCarthy was sick of the bullshit. Ok, it wasn’t bullshit. No, actually, it was. Her friends and the parenting books she didn’t read confirmed (in her head) that what she was experiencing was totally normal sibling fighting. At least, this is what she told herself instead of pulling out her carefully frosted hair (this was the 90s.) She tried to block out the yelling from the upstairs bathroom as she carefully layered the three different shades of Clinique eyeshadow that the woman behind the counter at Lord & Taylor had so carefully instructed her on how to apply. She pulled her lid to the side. When did it start to feel like drawing on water? And whose fault was that?
As if answering her silent question, the shriek of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Simone, rang through the thin walls.
“BEN GET OUT OF HERE. I HAVE TO DO MY BANGS.”
Simone was now into her second month of high school and taking her haircare very seriously. Gemma had lost her patience with her daughter on the way to their grocery shopping trip to Big Y that weekend when Simone took twenty-two minutes in the shampoo aisle, unable to pick out the correct conditioner for her hair type.
“The thing is, it feels dry right after I wash it but then oily by the night. So, am I ‘combination?’” Simone put down the Pantene Pro-V and picked up the purple Aussie bottle. Gemma watched her daughter study the label intently.
She better bring this concentration to her English homework, was all she could think. Gemma was tired; really, really tired. She’d been on-call, as an OB-GYN, delivering babies every night that week, and was on approximately zero hours of sleep. Big Y was not exactly on her dream list of places to be that rainy afternoon.
“Just pick one where you like the smell,” was the best advice she could give Simone. Gemma didn’t remember being so obsessed with her products when she was her daughter’s age. But the regularly scheduled interruption of every TV show with women faking ostentatious orgasms for Herbal Essences's hair products had definitely wormed their way into Simone’s brain.
“Yes. YES. YES!!!!” The bombshells would scream through the television speakers. It was as good an advertising campaign as Gemma had ever seen. Truth be told, she did avoid eye contact with both of her children when it popped on.
Gemma pushed her cart past the rows, and rows, of plastic bottles.
“I’m going to the deli to get cold cuts. Meet me at checkout.” But before she could get over to the counter to order her turkey, Ben, her son, sixteen and now towering above her, bounded down the aisle, knocking over Simone like an oversized puppy.
“BEN!” Simone yelled at her brother at the top of her adolescent lungs.
“Don’t get girly shampoo. I don’t need to smell like a flower shop.”
“MOM!” Gemma could not believe that she had to mediate this level of nonsense. They were teenagers. They were supposed to be more reasonable than toddlers… right?
“Ben, get your own shampoo. I’m serious, Simone, hurry it up.” Ben grabbed the green bottle of Herbal Essence from his sister and tossed it in the cart.
“If this is what girls like to smell, then that’s how I’m gonna smell!” Gemma’s exhausted mind briefly flashed to the woman in the commercial, lathering her long, brunette locks in an outdoor shower, heaving and moaning. She made a note to tell her husband that another ‘birds and the bees’ talk was probably necessary. Parenting at this age was so full of contradiction. Sometimes, (and, if she were being honest, kind of a lot lately,) her kids acted so immature, so obnoxiously childish, especially around each other, that she felt like not much had changed with them since grade school. Other times she was making a mental note to have a very adult conversation with them. It was a lot.
Exiting Big Y with a cart full of groceries that Ben and his friends would most likely devour within the next 24 hours and four different bottles of shampoo, Gemma screamed at Ben not to get hit by a Nissan Pathfinder. Again, like a 175-pound toddler. He trailed his mother and sister, his head buried in a new comic book that he’d surreptitiously thrown onto the conveyor belt at checkout. It was nearing Halloween and both teens were on a mission to find something both fun and “adult” to do.
“Look at this!” he yelled to Simone. That’s how they were. Maybe that’s how all teenage brothers and sisters were. One minute, they could be WWE wrestling and hurling insults at each other, and a second later, they’d both have their heads buried in the same stupid magazine.
“NO WAY BEN. DON’T YOU DARE.” Simone wailed. Gemma was too tired to be curious about whatever her son was doing to piss off her daughter. Simone wasn’t having the easiest time, these days. Puberty seemed to have descended all at once on her only daughter. She’d grown at least three inches since school let out in June. Maybe four. Gemma had taken her bra shopping twice over the summer and again in September. Poor Simone was just trying to play catch-up with both her body and her brother.
“MOM!” she yelled, sounding a lot more like a four-year-old than a fourteen-year-old. “DO NOT LET HIM BUY THIS.”
Gemma unloaded the paper bags into the trunk of her hatchback. The kids helped without being asked. She tried to remember this as a parenting win. But she had no interest in getting involved in this stupid argument. Before she could tell them to cut it out, Simone shoved the magazine into her mother’s face. Gemma was so, so tired. What she really wanted was to get home, throw on her sweatpants, and pass out to the soothing sound of General Hospital. Instead, she found herself staring at an ad for the world’s creepiest ventriloquist dummy.
It was one of those faces that looked like it had been carved from wood, more at home on a haunted Vaudeville stage in the 1930s than anywhere in Massachusetts in 1996. Its painted-on brows, exaggerated eyes, and unhinged jaw looked like it could climb directly into your soul and wreak absolute havoc there. She was just about to chastise Simone for overreacting when she felt herself physically repulsed by the image.
“Ben, you don’t need this,” Gemma tried to calmly shoo the page out of her face. Ben grabbed the magazine.
“I do. It’s part of my Halloween costume,” Ben declared as if he’d been thinking about purchasing this very ventriloquist dummy for ages and hadn’t just stumbled upon it mere seconds ago. His mind was set. It probably didn’t hurt that just showing Simone the picture made her shriek.
A week and a half later, the package arrived for Ben from a warehouse in Long Island, New York. And that’s when the mayhem started.
Much to Ben’s delight, the dummy was bigger, creepier, and much more realistic than advertised. Simone’s reaction to the thing was as outsized as its bulbous nose.
“Get it out of here!” she would yell, walking into the computer nook to do her homework. The nook was an attractive feature of the house, a small space that Gemma and her husband had fallen in love with at first sight. In between the two kid’s rooms, at the top of the landing, she’d put in two desks, one with a family computer. It was the perfect place to direct Ben and Simone to get their homework done before they locked themselves in their rooms. There was no door, it was more of a loft, really, and the setup allowed the parents to keep an eye on their son and daughter in the evenings. But all was not well in the homework nook.
Ben had taken to leaving Charlie, as he’d named the dummy, on the reading chair in the corner. He would never have admitted it as a six-foot-tall, sixteen-year-old guy, but the thing creeped him out too. He didn’t like waking up in the middle of the night and seeing Charlie sitting on the floor, staring at him with his menacing eyes and torturous smile. So, the wooden man was relegated to the homework room.
“He’s helping me with World History,” Ben would throw at Simone. The only thing that made keeping Charlie around worth his own discomfort was how miserable Charlie’s presence made his sister.
“You should get along with him, you’re both… dummies.”
Ben doubled over, cracking himself up while Simone yelled downstairs to her parents to stop Ben’s shit. Gemma was over it. It seemed like every expectant mother in town had decided to deliver their babies back to back to back this month and she was exhausted to the point of borderline insanity. Charlie had only been a member of the household for three days and Gemma was already fed up with hearing about him. She stormed upstairs, much like she’d done when they were both young children, fighting over Leggos or Barbie/GI Joe wars.
“Stop it!” she yelled to her teenagers. Why? She asked herself. They would stop when they were good and ready. There wasn’t much she could do. She could threaten to forbid Ben from having his friends over. But, well, could she? The truth was, as much of an imposition as it was to have a house full of high school junior boys in her basement, she felt way more comfortable when she knew exactly where Ben was. She could threaten not to take Simone to her girlfriend’s house to watch Beverly Hills, 90210, but if she were being honest, she was so happy that her shy, introverted daughter had finally made some friends that she wasn’t going to get in the way of Simone having her small social life.
Stomping up the stairs, hoping there was something left in her that could still scare her children into behaving, she worried about no longer having any kind of leash over them. How were you supposed to punish teenagers? Before she could dive any deeper into this question, she got to the top of the landing and saw what was causing the commotion: Charlie had been thrown onto the old loveseat in the computer room. His head tilted to the side and his arms laid on the cushions as if he were begging to give the world’s most horrifying hug.
“GET IT OUT OF HERE!”
Her daughter’s yell caught her eardrums off guard. Gemma briefly wondered if Simone was capable of any other volume than screaming her freaking head off.
Gemma stomped over to the offending doll, grabbing his heavy, wooden body. He weighed much more than she expected. And then something caught her eye. No one, not even her husband would have noticed it. There’s mother’s intuition. And then there’s something else. The way a mom who has known her child every day of their life knows: and this is… their fearful face.
It only lasted a second. Not even a second. A millionth of a millionth of a second. But Gemma saw it. The flash across Ben’s eyes. He didn’t want that creepy ass doll in his room either. Out of frustration, exhaustion, and some real annoyance, Gemma could have laughed. But that wouldn’t have fixed anything. She maintained her even- but-slightly-pissed-off voice.
“Get. Your. Homework. Done. And no TV. Tomorrow, Ben, you set your alarm for 30 minutes earlier to give Simone the bathroom. And that is FINAL.”
The next morning, everything ran perfectly smoothly. We’re lying. It did not. There was yelling and screaming, door slamming and breakfasts not eaten. As Gemma waved goodbye to her awful children, standing in her bathrobe on the chilly October morning, she wondered how normal her situation was. She felt like she needed to get through to both of them, to wake them up, to get their attention, and to remind them who exactly was in charge of their household. Pouring herself a steaming cup of coffee, Gemma sat down at the kitchen table. Maybe she should have actually read the parenting books. This shit was hard.
That evening, neither Simone nor Ben had any interest in going upstairs and getting their work done. Gemma’s husband had had a long day at work and was buried in a Sam Adams and a newspaper in front of the muted television in the living room. His grade of parental help hovered just over a D.
“That’s IT!” she yelled at Ben and Simone who were now arguing over the last brownie. “GO UPSTAIRS.”
Both kids threw her a look that conveyed their disappointment at being born and went to trudge up the stairs to wade through the homework that felt like cruel and unusual punishment.
Ben flicked the switch on the wall. Nothing happened.
“The light bulb went out,” he announced to the house, offering no solution on his end like all teenagers in the 90s were wont to do.
“Your father will fix it,” Gemma called back. Her husband didn’t look up from his paper.
The stairs creaked under the weight of the growing teens. Gemma kept her eyes glued to them. Ben walked over to the corner table on the landing and turned on the desk light.
The sheer terror in his scream was alarming enough to alert the neighbors. Simone followed right behind, yelling many decibels above her usual volume. This was the first time in Gemma’s memory that those two had been on the same page about anything. The screaming was enough to shake their dad from his happy place.
“What the hell is going on?” He put down his beer and paper and joined Gemma at the bottom of the stairs.
“I have no idea,” said Gemma with absolutely no conviction. Because she did.
In the corner of the computer nook sat Charlie. Someone had expertly used a Sharpie to carefully draw down the center of his eyebrows, creating a very effective and terrifying face. His wooden hand had been affixed to a knife which was raised above his head, a red substance splattered around his body as if there had already been more than one victim and he was looking for another. Under the dim flicker of the desk lamp, it was an image that would have made M. Night Shyamalan salivate. But at the house on Maple Lane, one day before Halloween, it was an image that the McCarthy siblings would remember for the rest of their lives.
“What- what is going on?” Simone whispered. Gemma didn’t remember the last time she’d heard her daughter speak that quietly.
Ben was not happy. Ben was embarrassed. He looked at his dad, then his sister, then Charlie, and then his mom… because, well, his mom was laughing.
Gemma hadn’t thought that she would be able to scare the shit out of her kids. She thought the scene would, at best, startle them, maybe make them pause their fighting for eleven seconds. Instead, she’d managed to get their attention on an almost profound level.
“This is stupid,” muttered Ben who wouldn’t admit how much it had scared him until he was well into his forties.
“Huh,” conceded the dad who went down to his paper.
“Homework. No fighting. Set your alarm,” was all that Gemma felt she needed to say. She turned on her heel and went back down the stairs to replace the bulb that she had removed earlier in the day.
Simone and Ben just stared at each other. Then, silently, went to their desks and started their homework.
The next morning, Ben was up and out of the bathroom before Simone was even out of bed. And Charlie was gone. The mess was cleaned up, and the dummy disappeared. Ben didn’t ask about him and picked a different Halloween costume. But Charlie never left.
Gemma packed him away in the basement and would pull him out a half dozen times over the years to scare the shit out of her kids when they were being assholes. This is a tactic that may or may not have been in a parenting book. She wouldn’t know. She never read any of them.
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