Mellie: A Story of Vinyl and Candy

By S Sawyer

Mellie: A Story of Vinyl and Candy is a powerful and riveting novel that shines light on the dark side of the 1990s rave culture and party drugs, of love and music, of glitter and bruises, of survival and defeat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781682228791

Book preview

Epilogue

CHAPTER 1 – SPLITTING INNOCENCE

Innocence- we are born wrapped tightly, securely in a blanket of innocence. Despite the circumstances of the life we are delivered into, we are still cloaked in fine downy white purity. And then somewhere along our path we are tainted. When did that happen to me? When was that milky innocence lost to me? This question has plagued me year after year, stalking after me well into adulthood. After all, I wonder, isn’t it the loss of that pureness that sculpts us into the person we eventually become? Is our freewill of who we would have chosen to be destroyed the precise moment that innocence ends?

Locked away in my office upstairs, barely illuminated by a dim lit lamp, I take a long sip of Pinot and swallow it down with a Xanax pill, while pouring over old journals I dug up earlier today out of the attic. Along with the Xanax and the Pinot, I swallow down what I have become…a woman who has perfected that I’m fantastic smile to the rest of the world all the while fighting against the mounting urge to bleed out in a bathtub, an alcohol dependent, benzo popping, mother and wife striving to keep at bay the persistent anxiety and panic attacks and rapid mood swings, or also known as Bipolar Disorder the good doctor kindly informed me today.

I remember the beginning of the end, not the exact moment, but the events leading up to the end. They are relived and replayed, haunting me in my new life. Poisoning me. The answer is there in my diaries, and in my current state of mania, one of many states, I am determined to find it. Because I know there was a time I was good. I was pure. A time when my life was a sweet as my Mamaw’s sugary pecan pie. A time before I became the bitter pecan better left rotting on the ground.

Another glass of wine down and I pick up a miniature lavender book. There is a unicorn rearing up on the front and an old rusty clasp keeping it bound together. I open it up to yellowing pages and read.

September 1990

Dear Diary,

Mamaw took me to get mint chocolate chip ice cream after church today. My favorite! Then she painted my fingernails and told me stories about when she was a girl my age. She tells the best stories. I love my Mamaw very much. Write back later.

December 1990

Dear Diary,

I’m so so excited! I just got the best Christmas present ever. Santa Claus put a baby in Mama’s belly. I get to be a big sister soon.

Scowling at the empty wine bottle, I close the diary and stumble down to the kitchen to find another, careful not to wake up the girls or Elliot. My sweet husband, Elliot Malloy. In the three years we have been together, he has always tried so hard to understand me, loving me through the good days and bad. I do have good days. The days that I cycle up and don’t have to pretend at being happy. Those precious few days when happiness is a real feeling, and I can breathe without the weight of an anvil pressing in on my chest threatening to crack it wide open.

Back upstairs I pick up another tiny book. This one is a pastel pink with a fluffy white kitten curled up in a wicker basket on the cover, and like the first one, it is also adorned with a worn out rusty clasp. I flip to the first page.

June 1991

Dear Diary,

Daddy carried me fishing off the bank down at the spillway, while Mama stayed home with baby Becca. I loved it being just the two of us! He taught me how to put the worm on the hook all by myself. It was kind of gross. We only caught a few baby fish, so we threw them back in the water. Going to bed now, goodnight.

April 1992

Dear Diary,

Mama took me shopping and bought me a pretty new dress for Easter Sunday. She even let me pick out a pretty white hat with white gloves to match it. I can’t wait for church. I have the best mama in the whole world!

In these childish entries is the innocence I speak of. I can remember those moments as if I was this girl only yesterday. I am so close to her in these words that I feel I can almost reach out and catch the hem of her dress as she sprints barefoot through glossy green grass hunting for painted eggs to collect in her basket. If I could, I would whisper in her ear, Stay here. Don’t go forward. Just stay here. I reach for a third book, this one not as babyish and is a little thicker than the first two.

September 2, 1994

Dear Diary,

Our brand new house is almost finished, and I can’t wait to move in. My friends from school live right down the road, so that means I can ride my bike to their house now! Oh, and I just found out today that Ian Walker, the boy I was helping in English last year in the fifth grade, is my next door neighbor. I think he is really cute, but I’m too scared to tell him. We got in trouble the other day for borrowing tools from the men building our house. We weren’t stealing them. We just needed them to build a fort back in the woods behind his house. Anyways, gotta go. Mama is calling me. I will write again soon!

Ah yes, I remember that. It was such a great time. The whole family was excited about our brand new house being built in the back of Cherokee Lakes, a beautiful up and coming subdivision that boasted a large picturesque lake in the center of a thick wooded scenery scattered with brand new houses. It never once registered with me how hard my parents had been working and saving up for years to move us into this area. I didn’t have a clue that my parents were trying to give me and Becca what they didn’t have growing up. Money meant nothing to me then. Why should it? At eleven years old, I was just thrilled to finally be living in the same neighborhood as all of my friends from school. I just knew that we lived in a tiny blue house, and we were moving in to a huge brick house.

September 14, 1994

Dear Diary,

I really don’t mean to be a brat, but I hate it! Mama did my whole room in pink! Why? I said blue! And she was so happy about the way it looked, too. So I couldn’t tell her it was the ugliest bedroom ever. Like an old lady room. She was so clueless as to why I hated it. Does she know me at all? I despise pink! And that blanket! Oh my God that ugly blanket she bought me as a gift for the room! And to think I have to spend the rest of my life in that stupid room! I gotta go.

Such a silly thing to think about now. Lord, I was furious with that woman. I remember it clearly. I found Mama studying paint samples at our hand-me-down kitchen table given to us by her sister-in-law. Strands of blond hair falling in her face. And she looked up at me with vibrant brown eyes. The planning of this rosy red brick house was her dream finally coming true.

Mellie, how would you like to pick out the paint color for the walls in your bedroom? Any color you want. Then we can find a bedroom set to match it, she said.

Really, Mama? I squealed with delight at being included in the final decorating process of my new room, and also, at getting my own room. No more sharing a cramped space with my little sister, Becca. No more of all her babyish things crowding my personal area. No more pink.

Well, I’m thinking a pale blue. Like baby blue. I told her.

Hmmm she mused pretending to think hard about it. Yes, I can see that. I think baby blue would be a very pretty color for your room, sweetheart.

She kissed me on the top of the head and turned her attention back to the house plans. A week later came the great gift.

And I’m sure she meant well, but Mama found that God awful blanket with the matching sheet set while shopping at Dillard’s a week or so after promising me I could decorate my own room. It was thick and heavy comforter, cream in color and decorated with faint pink roses running along green vines. Somehow she had convinced herself that I would love it as much as she did.

The first day I walked into my brand new room and saw that the walls were pink, and I mean pink like someone vomited up Pepto Bismol all over them, and I saw the ancient full size bed from her childhood with the tall wooden headboard and footboard engraved with yellow roses topped with that creamy comforter that had the same color Pepto Bismol pink flowers all over it. It was all I could do not to cry. It all seems hilarious to me now. I imagine my girls write similar things about me in their own diaries. I skim towards the end of the book.

May 10, 1998

I don’t want this. Please God, please, I promise I will be good. I will pray every night I swear. Just don’t let my parents split up.

Water stains dot the page from old tears from so many years ago. This is where it starts. This is where my childish innocence starts to split. At this particular moment it is a hairline crack, a tiny fracture. This is when I first discovered my life was not my Mamaw’s pecan pie and that grownups were as clueless as children.

I have to write this all down. God help me, I have to get it all out of me as I remember it. From then up until this very moment that I sit here sipping on this glass of wine, I have to transcribe the events as I remember them. I need another bottle. It’s going to be a long night.

CHAPTER 2- SEVERED

April 1998

Sitting outside beneath my window, I ran my fingers through the damp blades of grass. Ian Walker, the boy from down the street, was sitting beside me chewing on a weed. Ian was much more to me, though, than just the boy on my street. He was my partner in crime and had been my best friend ever since the 5th grade. It was getting late, and the street light, our signal to come inside had been lit up for a while. But we sat there, neither one of us in too much of a hurry to move from our spots.

Ian spat the weed out. Why you being so quiet tonight?

My parents got into a big fight after supper, I confided in him.

He shrugged his bony shoulders on his lanky frame, My parents fight all the time, Mellie. That’s what parents do, I guess. And he picked another weed from the grass to chew on.

No, I said, shaking my head. Not my parents. I’ve never heard them fight, not really. Not like that. I think they are getting a divorce, I whispered to him.

Why was I whispering? Maybe I thought if I spoke the words any louder what I was afraid of happening would cement into a hard reality. And I couldn’t accept the thought of it. I didn’t know a single person with divorced parents. It wasn’t something that was a part of the world I lived in. Whole families, that’s all I knew. Embarrassed, I rubbed at my eyes with the back of my hand. I didn’t want Ian to see me cry.

I think you are just overreacting, Mellie. I’ve been coming around your house for a while now, and your parents seem pretty normal to me. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

Maybe…maybe you’re right. I hesitated. Can you keep a secret, Ian?

Sure.

I mean it. You can’t tell a soul. Especially not your mom, because then she would call and tell my mom.

Okay, okay, just tell me.

So my dad has been on the computer a lot lately. Like all the time. Anyways, I walked up behind him one day, and he got super mad. Made a big deal about privacy and stuff while trying to shut down the computer really quick. But I saw what he was doing.

What? Looking up dirty stuff? Ian snickered. You should see the magazines I found in my dad’s closet.

Eww, NO, I exclaimed, punching him in the arm. But no, it was definitely worse than that. He was talking to a woman. And before he could turn it off, I saw that she asked when they would see each other again.

Holy shit, are you gonna tell your mom?

No. I don’t know. Maybe she knows. Maybe that’s what they were fighting about. What do you think would happen if my parents got divorced?

He gave another shrug and picked at the grass. I don’t know. I knew a girl from my math class who had divorced parents, and she only got to see her dad every other weekend. She hated it.

I couldn’t stop them. Those stupid tears slid down my face. And my best friend, that skinny auburn headed boy who for years had been my fort building partner, my go-cart racer, my mud war opponent, and my first kiss behind a tree, stayed right there beside me holding my hand until we finally had to go inside.

Over the next few weeks I noticed an enormous shift in the atmosphere in our house. My parents had resorted to giving each other the silent treatment, unless being forced to engage in conversation through me and my little sister Becca. The tension that was shrouded around them was suffocating, but me and Becca just kept pretending like we didn’t notice. If we didn’t notice then everything would work itself out.

A loud thump against the wall made me drop the book I was reading. I crept over to my door, scared to open it, so I just hovered beside it. Another crash against the wall followed by the sound of shattering glass. I heard Mama screaming, Why are you doing this to us, Dave. Have you completely lost your mind?

Then I heard the sound of the front door slamming, and my dad’s truck cranking up. I ran to my window to peep out the blinds. His headlights shone back at me. But he didn’t leave, he just sat there. After what seemed like an eternity, he turned off the truck, and with a heavy walk he made his way back to the house.

I heard Mama cry when Dad came back inside. And I heard a broken I love you from her.

Let’s go to bed, Jenene. He said.

And I heard nothing else.

That following Friday Mama and Dad sat us down. And with stony faces they said they had something important to talk about with us. They were separating. I noticed Dad already had a bag packed sitting by the door. The air whooshed out of my lungs, and I sat there like a coward too stunned to speak. I needed words, needed to say something, but none came to me. Seven year old Becca was the one to act, running past Dad and out the front door to his truck. I followed out behind Mama and Dad and watched as Becca had completely lost it.

She had climbed up in Dad’s truck and was sitting in the driver’s seat. She had a hold of the steering wheel clutching it tight with her little hands. With a tear stained, splotchy red face, she