The next thing I remember is being dragged out the door. My mother was screaming, snarling at me, for doing something she said I knew I was not allowed to do. I tried to remind her that I had asked, tried to get her to remember. She would not listen. As I bumped over the threshold, I looked to Cindy for help. She just stood there mute, staring at me without saying a word. Her face had gone white as paste.
Across the porch we went, across the road, into the field. I was crying by then, pleading with my mother to understand, apologizing for I knew not what. I had never seen her that angry. I knew in my gut that something was very, very wrong.
I begged her to slow down because she was hurting my wrist and shoulder towing me behind her so quickly. She snarled that a sore arm was the least of my problems. At this my fear soared to new heights, and I began to wail in earnest. I was so scared that my ears buzzed. We came to the trailer, and she wrenched open the door and tossed me inside. I landed on the floor in a heap. Then she had me by the arm again, and she dragged me across the room to the closet and slammed it open wide. She began to rifle through the wire hangers; they banged and clanged and made a din that makes me wince to this day. She drew forth my father’s leather belt and looped it in her fist.
I had never been whipped before. I didn’t know what she was going to do till the belt sliced across my thighs. The shock of it froze my vocal cords. Then she was beating me as hard as she could, bringing the belt down so hard it whistled through the air before making contact with my body. I tried to get away, but she held me firmly by the arm. I began to scream and struggle; she kept her hold and beat me around in circles, turning as I did so she could always deliver a blow.
It went on forever. The air grew boiling hot. My throat was ragged with screaming. My entire body burned in pain. I saw red; I saw white. My skin welted and split. My knees buckled, and she dangled me halfway off the floor and kept beating me
Even after the belt stopped coming down, I continued to scream. I had no control over it – it ripped out of me of its own volition, broken only by the times I paused to drag in a breath of air that scorched my lungs. My mother dragged me down the hallway and threw me into my bedroom. I landed far from the door, facedown on the carpet. She said something I couldn’t quite hear, probably an order to shut up. The door slammed. The trailer shook.
I have no concept of how long I laid there. Eventually my screaming turned to sobbing. Then the sobbing ebbed into exhausted silence. Nose to the carpet, I felt the pain of my split skin and the fire still burning in my legs. My throat was sore. My eyes were swollen to tiny slits, my face caked with salt. I moved my head. It was so heavy. My temples pounded. I saw a Raggedy Ann doll on the floor that had fallen off the bedpost when the door slammed. I wanted it, tried to reach for it, but I was lying on my arm and it had gone numb. I remained in place. I could not blink. I could hear myself breathing, the air wheezing in and out of my lungs with a sound that would have alarmed me if I had been capable of any more fear. Time dragged on and on. I watched the doll. I closed my eyes. I fell asleep.
We moved away from Boyleston the Spring after I turned five. We went back to French Lick, where I spent the rest of my childhood and where the majority of my family lived: all my grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. It was 1990. I started Kindergarten that year, at Springs Valley Elementary: I remember the particular smell of the school, the hoard of butterflies in my belly on the first day. I was so nervous, I thought I was going to lift off the ground and go floating through the air.
I was in Mrs. Purkhiser’s class. I learned the days of the week song and how to count to 100 and how to spell my name. I made a plaque with my handprints in blue paint with a rhyme underneath. All the usual Kindergarten stuff. We lived on Plum Street at the time, in a house that was a tanning salon last time I saw it. A lot of things happened there, good things and bad things. After the move, my father took a job with a locally based trucking company and started coming home at night. He’d let me stay up past my bedtime to cuddle with him in his chair in the living room and watch American Gladiators. We had a tiny TV and didn’t get cable till a little later, so the picture was grainy and black-and-white and it danced so you could hardly see. I didn’t really care. I just liked being folded up next to my Daddy, smelling the diesel fuel and Brut aftershave on his clothes and his skin. He made me feel safe; he was so big and solid and comforting.
When I was a little girl, I thought my father was a god. He was the strongest, bravest person in the whole wide world. He could do no wrong. I adored him – I loved it when he’d swoop me up into the air and sit me on his shoulders and carry me around up high, walking under trees so I had to press my face into the crown of his head, giggling. I loved the way he always lifted me down the stairs or over rough terrain and set me back on my feet with, “Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.” He’d let me wear his sunglasses and walk around balancing me on the tops of his boots. I wanted to be everywhere he was, all the time. I wanted to grow up to be just like him.
That changed of course, and I’ll get to why in due time, but some of my sweetest memories from my early childhood are of my Daddy: the smell of him, the sound of him, the feel of his hands holding my ankles and my arms around his neck. Even when he started drinking more and more and spending more and more time at the garage where he worked when he wasn’t making runs, I forgave him all the missed time and the beer on his breath and loved him in the wholehearted way of a child. I was devoted.
My mother was a different story. I didn’t actively hate her at that point in time, but I was definitely afraid of her. Everything I did for her, I did to keep her happy – after that first beating in Boyleston, something was set loose inside her that could not be contained. She shouted more. She slapped more. I developed a habit of flinching away from her if she made any sudden movements, throwing my hands up to protect my face. I became obsessed with finding ways to appease her: I tried to do my homework without making any mistakes, I brushed her hair until it shone, I picked her flowers from the yard and put them in water as a surprise. And sometimes it worked. I’d put all my barrettes in her long, auburn hair and she’d run to the mirror and ooh and ah like she’d just stepped out of a salon in Paris. I’d bring her a fistful of wilted dandelions in a plastic cup and she’d treat them like a dozen roses. Those times, I was happy and she was happy and things couldn’t be better. But inevitably, I’d do something wrong at some point – fail to sound out a word, pull her hair when I was brushing it, get grass stains on the white canvas shoes she was always making me wear -- and she’d snap. She could lay me out faster than I could blink: one minute I’d be sitting next to her on the couch, and the next thing I knew I’d be sprawled out on the floor nursing a bloody nose.
Understandably enough, all the tension turned me into a very fearful child. I became afraid of the dark. I started having nightmares: a giant spider was at the foot of my bed and was trying to eat me, a man in a black cape with red eyes and no face was coming to bury me alive. When the lights went out, every shadowy shape became a threat. I probably had the neatest room of any five-year old on the planet: before bedtime I’d drag everything I could move into the playroom and shut the door on it. I didn’t even leave a balled-up sock on the floor. At every settling sound the house made, I’d practically stop breathing.
I also developed a pervasive fear of being abandoned. I was convinced everyone I loved was going to walk out on me and leave me all alone forever. My mother exploited this mercilessly: she threatened to walk away and leave me in the middle of the night, told me no one would come to take care of me and that I would die without anything to eat. She told me over and over again that no one really cared about me, that she only put up with me because it was her job and that if she quit, someone would come and lock me away and then forget about me, and I’d never be loved by anybody ever again. She said it so often, I started to believe it. It became the one thing of which I was most terrified in all that I knew of the world. And then, one day, my terror came to life.
When I was in Kindergarten, the school bus picked me up in front of my house every morning and dropped me about half a block away on the after-school route, at a church on the corner. My mother and Matthew were always there to get me and walk me home. Until they weren’t. The doors to bus number Seven creaked open and there was no one on the church steps to greet me. I stood in front of the bus for a moment, confused. Apparently the driver had not been adequately trained in the discipline of not leaving a five year-old alone on a street corner regardless of the circumstances, because when I insisted that Mommy was probably just running late – putting on a brave face, as I usually did when things went wrong – he pulled away and I was by myself.
** Fear not, my friends. Better times are coming. A lot of the writing I did today was actually fun.**(But you should be aware that I'm backlogging you now; I've written 23 pages in the last few days. What can I say? I have nothing else to do.)
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