If At First You Don't Succeed -- You Suck it Up And Try Again

For years, I've been trying to write about my life. A cohesive writing; something that's readable and makes sense. I have a story that needs to be told, and I'm striving mightily to tell it. But I always get stuck. I've tried a thousand different ways: from the beginning, from 18 backward, in poems, in essays. I think this is partly because I'm my own worst editor: if it just doesn't sound right to me, I won't keep it. If I'm afraid to have mis-remembered something, I discard the whole deal and start again. But recently I've learned the benefits of stream-of consciousness writing -- word vomit, if you will. And so I have begun to try, try again.

It is important to me that someone read these efforts. I need outside acknowledgement, confirmation that I am a good and believable person. So I'm going to post the latest effort here, in installments, and I'd like to ask you guys a favor: hold me accountable. I don't mean threaten me at knife-point if I don't cough up the next part, but if you don't see something from the "project" at least once a month, remind me that you haven't seen anything. School is coming up again so I'll be busy, but hopefully not too busy to type out a section. I apologize if some parts of this will sound childish or garbled; I'll fix it later, when I get the whole thing out of my head and onto the page. Vomit first, clean later.

So without any further rambling, here is the first section of my new effort. (Sorry; no title yet)

Part One

I am a master of words. I can tell this story. I know I can. If you can put up with installments, with fits and starts, with time unaccounted for, then I will share it with you. I am a master of words; I can tell this story.

Boyleston, IN. A blink-and-you-miss-it place. A place so small, you can stand right in the middle of it and look for it for hours. It shares a post office with Frankfort, the nearest town of any size. In the 1980s, Boyleston was a handful of houses and mobile homes, a hog farm, and the railroad. I can’t imagine things have changed that much.

I lived in a brown-and-white doublewide trailer with my family: my father Dale, my mother Michelle, and my baby brother Matthew. I was three, four years old, maybe on into five. Going back that far causes time to unspool and get tangled up. I can’t always tell what was what and what was when. All I know is, I try my best to remember things right.

There are so many snatches of memory from Boyleston. My best friend Jimmy, who lived in one of the trailers next door. He was maybe a few years older than me, but we played together all the time. I had a sandbox that was actually a discarded truck tire. We’d take out our buckets and shovels out and build sandcastles and sand cities and sand roads. One time, Jimmy kicked my castle over just as I had gotten it absolutely perfect. It made me so mad, I scooped up a bucket of sand and dumped the whole thing over his head.

I remember my puppy, too. My Uncle Jeff got him for me when Matthew was born so I wouldn’t feel too jealous or left out of things. He was just a mutt, a little black and white dog of indistinguishable heritage. I hugged him and loved him and named him Muttonhead.

Don’t ask where I got that name. I have no idea. It just came to me out of the blue while I was standing next to my mother’s hospital bed looking at my new brother, all wrapped up in a green receiving blanket, and thinking instead of my very own puppy. Who cares about a brother when you have a puppy?

My mother could not bring herself to call the dog by its given name. She referred to it as “Dog.” Unfortunately, “Dog” loved to dig holes. Our yard had a brown picket fence around it. He was always digging around that fence, trying to get out into the bigger world. One day, he succeeded – and his blissful freedom was cut short by vehicular dog homicide. I was devastated. I missed that little mongrel puppy for years. I’d sigh for him, mope, announce desolately to no one in particular: “I miss Muttonhead.” He was my friend, and I had loved him.

Another thing I remember about Boyleston was the storm. I remember the shrill scream of the Emergency Broadcast System on the TV. I remember the colors swirling on the screen. I remember my mother swaddling Matt in a blanket and throwing him over her shoulder, reaching for me with her free hand. “Come on, Tiffy. We have to go to Aunt Cindy’s house right now.”

My Aunt Cindy and Uncle Jeff lived across from us in a big, pistachio-green house behind an unpainted wooden fence. The fastest way to get there was to cut across a small field of high grass and then cross the one-way street that ran right past their front porch. The day of the storm, the whole world looked closed off. It was like the sky ended at the tree line and there was nothing else in the universe aside from the brooding tornado. Everything was deathly still when we stepped out onto the porch. The sky was lead-gray and yellow; the clouds had ominous black edges. We stepped across the driveway and into the field, and then God screamed.

The wind came from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It assaulted us from all sides, drove my hair into my face so I couldn’t see, and carried my voice away soundless when I tried to cry out. My mother began to run. “Hurry!” she screamed. “Hurry, Tiffany!”

But I could not keep up. I tried so hard, but my little four year-old legs in their high plastic braces did not have what it took for running. I was dragged along behind my mother, my feet catching on the uneven ground and twisting in the tall grass and weeds. “Stop!” I was crying, “Stop! Wait!” I could barely hear my own distress over the howl of the wind.

And then my mother was gone. She let go of my hand. She just let go. She hefted Matthew up higher in her arms and took off through the field as fast as she could run, screaming over her shoulder for me to hurry, hurry. I was alone in the storm. The grass bent and tossed. I was so, so small under the press of the sky. For a moment I saw myself standing there as if I were watching from behind: a small, stooped girl in the maw of a storm. Then I opened up my mouth and began to wail.

I screamed and keened. I cried out for my mother with all the voice I could muster. She didn’t look back. She left me: an abandonment of the broken child to save the whole one. There was nothing to do then but walk. Walk toward the green house behind the fence, and hope I would get there.

I shut the storm out of my head. The wind dulled to a far-away roar. The dry, whipping sound of the grass in anguish ceased. There was only the piece of ground in front of me and the whiteness of my shoes. I trained my eyes on my feet as I pressed forward: step, step, step. Time stopped. Step, step, step. I was lost to everything but the white flash of my shoes. When I felt them hit pavement, I was surprised. I crossed the street, still watching my shoes. I made my way onto the porch of the house, still watching my shoes. I was still staring at my shoes when an arm issued forth from behind the front door and snatched me inside to safety.

As a teenager, I went back to Boyleston for a visit. I saw the same row of doublewides that had always been there. I saw my aunt and uncle’s house, remodeled by then but still the same reassuring shape jutting up against the sky. And I saw the field. I was stunned by how small it seemed to my older self. A dozen strides and I could cross it, no problem. At four years old, it had been its own continent. An infinite expanse of isolation. A loneliness that never ended.

It is too obvious a parallel, perhaps, for me to say that the storm served as an omen of how the next fourteen years of my life would be. But as far as parallels go, it is more than apt. It is perfect. Soon enough I would learn that my life was a brooding storm, and that if I wanted to get through it I’d have to put one foot in front of the other and walk it alone. And so I did. I watched my shoes and kept on walking.

The beatings began in Boyleston. I remember the first one so vividly that it could’ve happened yesterday, or last week, or last month, or at the very most last year. The realization that the whole nightmare took place 21 years ago will always vaguely baffle me, no matter how often it occurs. Trauma has a timeless quality: days pass, but trauma stays the same. It stays fixed in place. Even if time erodes some words, some details, the trauma itself does not budge. It stays where it is, and eventually you learn to look past it, to pile other memories up around it to avoid having to look at it all the time.

I suppose abuse was inevitable where I was concerned. My mother and father both had home lives that can only be described as chaotic. My mother’s biological father abandoned his family soon after she was born. The man she grew up with, the one she called Dad, wasn’t the nicest guy: he shoved and slapped and screamed. But she loved him fiercely, endlessly, and when he died I think she just came unmoored. I was less than two months old when it happened. He worked for a tree trimming company, and there was an accident involving the bucket truck. I barely know the details; I never knew Doyle. Somewhere there is a single photograph of him holding me, looking down at the white-swaddled bundle in his big hands. He had dark hair and was very tan. I could not see his face in the picture, and I’m not sure I ever have: photos of him were never very forthcoming for some reason. Maybe he just hated having his picture taken. I do remember making trips to the cemetery when I was little so my mother could lay flowers on his grave. For years, she did it at least once every month. She picked them fresh: daffodils or daisies, tied them neatly with string, and put them at the foot of his stone. She’d stand with her head down and shield her eyes behind sunglasses so my brother and I couldn’t see her crying, and back in the car she’d sit motionless and stare out the windshield at nothing for a long time before she ever started the engine.

Her grief wasn’t the only thing that turned her into what she became, surely, but I can’t fully explain it. Perhaps there was some deep sickness resting dormant in her head, and as time went by it came awake and made itself more and more known. Having a baby at sixteen certainly didn’t help matters. Having a premature baby who would turn out to be permanently disabled definitely didn’t.

My parents were married less than a month before I was born. The story of their wedding sickens me. My father’s parents are very conservatively religious. Biblical literalists. Zealots in the worst sense of the word. When my grandfather found out his son had gotten a girl pregnant, he swore on every holy thing he could think of that he would not have a bastard grandchild, and so my parents were married in the living room of my grandparents’ home. There was no ceremony, no flower girls, no best man or maid of honor: none of the things a young girl dreams about when she thinks of her wedding day. There was just a preacher and a Bible and my mother in a dress the very color of shame.

My grandfather forbade his daughter-in-law to wear white at her wedding. White was the color virgin brides wore, and it was evident from the mound of her belly that she was no virgin. Instead she had to wear crimson – the mark of a harlot. When I grew old enough to flip through the family albums and fully understand everything that dress stood for, an angry fist clenched up inside me and I had to press my hand to my mouth to quell the nausea that threatened to empty my gut of everything I had ever eaten in my life. I was so ashamed. I thought it was all my fault that my mother had suffered such a terrible humiliation: if I hadn’t been born, she would have been so much happier. My existence messed up everything.

Coming from parents that would shame their daughter-in-law before God and man for all of time, it isn’t surprising that my father turned out the way he did – or his siblings either, for that matter. My father has five sisters and two brothers. Of the eight, all three boys became alcoholics.  Two of the brood -- whether by choice or necessity I can't claim to know --  live with their spouses and children in trailers behind my grandparents’ house. Only four of the girls got away "clean" – moved away from home, got married, had their own children. My biological family as a whole is insular, cloistered: the kind of mess you see in your head when you picture a catfight on the Jerry Springer Show. Dysfunction turned on its head and spun like a top.

And so, the abuse.