Thursday, September 29, 2011

Freaky Little Tribesmen


I was always immensely relieved when Sweetheart climbed into bed with me. I was more afraid of the dark at that point in my life than I had ever been. I spent so many of my days in the dark that I should have been used to it, but I never adjusted. There was something about nighttime darkness that made it extra scary, more frightening than even the basement was. In the nighttime darkness, the house was quiet except for the box fans that rattled in the summer to keep the house cool. My old fear of being abandoned resurfaced, and I’d watch the doorway for hours to make sure my family wouldn’t sneak away and leave me using all that noise for cover. That they would never simply drop their home and all their belongings just to get away from me hardly even entered my head as a glimmer of an idea: if I was as horrible as my mother said, why wouldn’t they want to leave? My greatest fear was waking up one morning to find the beds empty and everyone gone, never to be found again.
My paranoia manufactured other dangers, too: bad men in the doorway that would swarm me and cut my throat if I closed my eyes; creatures under the bed waiting to grab me by the arm and drag me down to eat me up if I slept too close to the edge; phantoms in the corners that would swoop down to strangle me if I fell asleep. I became convinced that there was someone waiting outside my window with a rifle to shoot me dead if I moved. Somehow I got the idea that bullets could not go through blankets, so I wrapped myself up so tightly I could barely catch a breath. Even in the summer I huddled under a comforter, sweating till I was limp and sick. Only my head poked out, eyes roving the room in endless circuits: doorway, corners, closet, window, back to the doorway.
I’d have curled up at the foot of the bed to hide if I had been able, but this was prevented by medical equipment: after my surgery, I spent several months wearing what I called “night braces.” They were two thick sleeves that went from the thigh to right below the knee and buckled tight with a row of Velcro straps up the front. Once I had strapped them on, I slid my legs into two grooves carved one into each side of a blue foam block, and then I secured my legs to this block with thick strips of foam that went up along the sides and fastened to the top. The purpose of the block was to hold my legs wide enough apart to stretch the muscles I’d had fixed in my hips, and the two individual braces prevented me from bending my knees to ease the pull. It was a horridly uncomfortable arrangement. My muscles hurt. My legs itched. The foam block was as high and unyielding as a mountain; I couldn’t have rolled over if I’d wanted to, not without first removing the block and then strapping it back on. I was a huge bump in the bed. I was an easy target. I practically screamed: “I’m here! Right here! Come and kill me!”
I hardly ever slept. I was so thoroughly exhausted, I began falling asleep at school.
I was in the second grade by then. My teacher was a pleasant, bespectacled older woman named Mrs. Stevens. When I’d nod off at my desk with my head pillowed on my forearm, she’d let me sleep. Several times she even stayed inside with me at recess so she wouldn’t have to rouse me. I’d wake in the afternoon when the other children came marching back in, and dutifully resume my lessons. That’s pretty much all I remember about the second grade: sleeping. I was just so tired, that whole year. So very tired.
I didn’t have a lot of friends in primary school – it’s hard to make friends when you’re asleep. It’s also hard to make friends when you’re visibly different, like I was. A pronounced limp, high leg braces, a special padded chair, even a physical therapist who came to the school once a week and took me off into a private room to undo all my kinks and smooth out all my aches and pains – to my peers, these things screamed out, This girl is a capital-F freak! I was marked. Branded. The majority of my classmates teased me mercilessly. When I walked down the hall, kids would quack at me. They hid my library books. They laughed about me behind their hands. Sometimes, one of them would decide to keep me trapped inside the bathroom during a class break and guard the door until I cried, or purposely block my entrance into the only free stall until the teacher called us to line up. I’d have to hold my bladder till I could hardly stand it and then get scolded for asking for a restroom pass when I had just been to the restroom not twenty minutes before. And I hardly ever got to play anything fun when I did go to recess – nobody wanted me on their kickball or softball team because I would make them lose. If I joined in a game of Tag, I was unceasingly It. The little brats would taunt me by coming just within reach and then leaping out of the way seconds before I touched them, jeering and pulling ugly faces. It hurt me so much that eventually I stopped trying to play and sat off by myself, reading a book.
Enter my fellow freaks. I don’t mean to offend any of them by saying that – a few of them are my very good friends to this day. But when you put the limping kid, the God-obsessed kid, the WWF wrestling fanatic with a particular liking for off-color jokes and the girl who has always secretly desired to be a cat into the same little group and plop them down on an elementary school playground, what you get is that band of weirdoes on the bottom of the social totem pole. Over time we acquired other drifting, outcast souls: transfer students, band geeks, kids who couldn’t break into the It crowd because they were overweight or liked the wrong boys or had the wrong clothes or a multitude of other social sins as determined by the ruling-class kids, the kids with all the power, the kids who dominated the hallways and the playground and the classroom and had some unspoken permission to make everyone else’s life miserable. The Haves and the Have-Nots have always existed in this manner, in every school that’s ever been, anywhere in the world. We were the Have-Nots; it was that simple. But what we did have was each other, and we stuck together – a little tribe of castaways making ourselves at home in the borderlands.
I don’t remember precisely when Danielle became my best friend. I know it wasn’t anytime during that second grade year, when I could barely stay awake long enough to account for my presence at roll call, but I know it happened. Certainly we were close by the time we hit the seventh grade, and by sophomore year we were practically joined at the hip in the particular way that adolescent girls bond, with equal parts of love and jealousy and a loyalty so solid it is very nearly fierce.
Danielle helped me have some semblance of an ordinary adolescent’s life. On sleepovers at her house, we’d smack each other’s hands in a bowl of cheddar popcorn and laugh over stupid movies till we cried. One night in early Spring, when the snow had scarcely melted off the grass, we put on bikinis and rigged the water hose to the porch as a sprinkler, then took turns dashing through the spray. Our giddy screaming turned to narratives of steamy porn-film shower scenes, complete with slurping, kissing noises. When we finally trooped back inside, throats raw from laughter, covered in grass clippings because the lawn had been mowed that morning and pocked with goose bumps, Danielle’s mother revealed that she had taped the entire thing from the second-floor balcony. Scandalized, we made off with the evidence. We vowed to destroy it. While we sat there on the bed with the tape between us, trying to figure out what to do with it, it occurred to us that we simply could not banish it without watching it at least once. So we did. And then we watched it again, and then again, and then again, till we had seen it so much we could quote one another. We giggled and kicked and shrieked. We swore eternal embarrassment. Then we decided to keep it, and Danielle probably still has it to this day.
Dani snuck me out when I wasn’t supposed to be out, just to keep me sane. On the relatively few nights I was permitted to stay with her, my mother would order me to stay at the house and not go anywhere else, period. No fast food. No Blockbuster. No drives for the hell of it. Danielle decided this was bullshit. Against my fear of being caught, I’d go out with her to a nearby playground and we’d play on the swings and climb all over the equipment like little kids. She’d take me to Wal-Mart to buy things I needed that my mother wouldn’t let me have, like Icy-Hot and Poise, and then keep them in her car and bring me a short-term supply every morning at school. One night, she dragged me to the theater a few towns over to see Monsters, Inc.
I only say “dragged” because I was paranoid of being found out. I wanted to go to the movie, if only to rebel, to do something I wasn’t supposed to do: I was seventeen and had never been to a mall or a theater or an ice cream place with a group of friends. I went only to their houses; that was it – and it was rare. When my friends got together I had to stay home, chafing under a load of chores like Cinderella before the ball. Going to a movie just to go, just because I wanted to and I could, was an absolutely exotic idea to me. You could’ve put me on a plane to Calcutta and I would have felt exactly the same way I did at the prospect of walking into a theater with Danielle: excited. Elated. Terrified.
I had lived my life so haunted by the way my mother seemed to know everything I ever did, thought, or dreamed about doing without ever being told that I was half-convinced she was omniscient. I couldn’t shake the idea that she would somehow sense my disobedience, that she would know about it the second I stepped out the door. Then she’d call to check on my whereabouts, and Danielle’s mother would tell her we’d gone to the movies – after which I’d never be allowed to leave the house again for as long as I lived, a consequence preceded by violent and possibly bloody punishment. My fear of this scenario had a life of its own. I almost didn’t go. I almost begged my best friend not to insist upon going anywhere public with me, ever. But in the end, rebellion won: I wanted a life too, damn it. I wanted a little freedom. And if I had to pay for it with my skin, so be it – I’d pay. We went to the movie.
It was exhilarating. I felt so alive. To say that sitting in a stadium seat staring at a screen made me feel alive sounds absolutely pathetic. But there I was, at a movie with my best friend, pointing and laughing and whispering and fighting over popcorn – I was doing those things. Me. I was out. I had slipped my leash. I was giddy with excitement; the world felt bigger, I felt taller, I thought that if I took a breath deep enough, I could suck up every atom of possibility that had ever existed. I almost felt detached from myself, as if nothing about that night could possibly really be happening and I was watching someone else have fun. That night, a rebel was born: if this is freedom, give me more.
In so many ways, that little taste of what it felt like to be untethered made the next year so much harder for me than it would have been otherwise, because I just couldn’t fathom giving it up. Forcing myself to submit to perfect obedience and the same old fear and helplessness I had always walked under almost tore me apart after that. But it was worth it, too, because it showed me what I could have instead of terror and helplessness and depression. It made life outside of those things real. It gave me something to live for, something to leave for. Way back in second grade, I never dreamed that I’d ever get out. The days ahead of me all looked the same. The days behind me all looked the same. I didn’t really know that there was anything else for me. I certainly never thought that sneaking out to a children’s movie would give me a reason to keep fighting, and that it would all come about because I was accepted into a group of misfit kids on a playground one day when I was eight. The universe works its magic well.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Let me Call You Sweetheart


She came because I wished for her; I still believe that. I wished for her with all my might. I prayed for her, and hoped for her; I asked God for a friend and he sent her to me.
She appeared out of nowhere one summer day. I came around the corner of the house and there she was, curled up on the front porch like she owned the property: a cat. As far as appearances go, she was nondescript. She was just a gray tabby, a little on the runty side. Her fur was dull with hunger, and when she moved, I could see her ribs. But she was mine. She was for me; I knew it down in the deepest part of my very bones. She was for me, and I was for her. We were for each other.
I screeched to a halt when I first spotted her. She was like some kind of angel, too good to be true. I was terrified I’d scare her away. She slowly blinked open her green-yellow eyes and looked straight at me. She closed them again; she was not afraid. She made no move to leave. I approached her with deference and caution, holding out my hand:
“Kitty, kitty, kitty?”
My voice was a whisper full of hope. There was so much hope in me right then, I could’ve lifted off the ground and gone sailing through the air. She opened her eyes again and sniffed my fingers. I held perfectly still. Inside I was begging for this to be real: Please, please, please, please! Inside, I was squirming and hopping with nerves. Outwardly, though, I was so calm and careful that I may never in my life be able to match the level of self-control I was showing. And then she licked me.
Maybe I had Cheetos on my fingers. Maybe I still smelled like lunch. I don’t remember. All I know is that she licked me, rasping her little sandpapery tongue over my skin. She licked my fingers; she licked my palm. She stood up and butted her head under my hand: Are you going to pet me, or not? As I scratched between her ears, I thought I would weep with joy. Then I saw how thin she was, how prominent her ribcage through her short fur. Her belly was a high, tight lump that meant kittens, but I didn’t know that at the time, and it wouldn’t have mattered to me anyway. When I looked at that cat, I didn’t see a rangy, pesky stray who would soon produce more rangy, pesky strays, as some others might have. I saw an absolute miracle: a beautiful little miracle who happened to be quite hungry.
I set out to remedy this immediately. As luck would have it my mother was in absentia at that precise moment (memory fails to tell me where), and I was able to clatter into the house without reserve. “Stay right there!” I said over my shoulder as the storm door came to behind me. I hurried, darting my eyes around the kitchen for something a cat would like to eat. I opened the fridge and found a pot of chili sitting covered on the shelf. Fetching a small plastic margarine bowl from the cabinet, I peeled back the aluminum foil and picked out several chunks of cold hamburger. Then I dashed back outside and set the bowl at the little cat’s feet.
After a cautionary sniff, she began to eat in fast, thankful gulps. I watched as she made the meat disappear without a trace and then licked the tomato juice from the bottom of the bowl. When she looked to me for more I brought it, this time with a small bowl of water as well. I spilled most of the water on my way to present it to her, but there was enough left for her to slake her thirst. She finished her meal and began to wash herself primly, as if suddenly realizing she had not been much of a lady in her haste to eat.
 After hiding both bowls in the tall grass next to the house (evidence of illegal chili-thieving to be disposed of later), I crawled up onto the porch and stretched out on my belly. Chin in hands, I watched the cat. She watched me back. We silently regarded one another over six inches of rough concrete. I telegraphed thoughts across the space: I promise to feed you. I promise to play with you. I promise to always love you, if only you’ll stay. Please stay. I need you. And the little gray cat stayed, because she needed me, too.

I named her Sweetheart. Though technically she was thought of as the entire family’s cat, she knew herself as wholly mine. We were thick as thieves. She kept me company in the darkness of the basement, content to lie curled in my lap for hours at a time. She purred at a hundred-thousand decibels and licked my hands and face like a puppy. If I ventured outside alone to play or to go to the Daffodil House, she followed right beside me. When school came into session she led the foray down the hill to the bus stop each morning and was waiting there every afternoon when I returned, fastidiously smoothing her fur or washing her face. With the utmost in longsuffering patience, she let me fasten her into frilly doll dresses and push her around the yard in a toy carriage. She brought me gifts of the hunt: beheaded squirrels, gutted moles, poor, mutilated starlings and robins. I’d find them at the bottom of the basement stairs with macabre regularity. That I never wanted to eat them rather offended her feline sensibilities. She’d glare at me accusingly when I rejected her bloody little presents, as if to say: This is a perfectly good dead thing; I can’t believe you aren’t going to at least play with it a little. Then she’d pick it up and trot off somewhere to eat it herself.
I knew that she hunted. We fed her dry food, but it was cheap, sawdust-like stuff. She much preferred a nice, juicy lizard or a mouse, or even, on occasion, an exceptionally large grasshopper. She got so good at stalking and dispatching prey that it was a wonder she had ever been starving: she should have been nice and sleek and entirely feral. But then, if that had been the case, we two would never have found one another.
I let her hunt as long as I didn’t have to watch her kill. Of course I knew about the food chain: one creature eats another creature eats another creature; the cycle of life and death. I knew that the hamburger on my plate had once been a cow, that the venison in my stew had once been a deer, etcetera. As a country kid, I had seen plenty of dead things by the time Sweetie came along sometime around my ninth summer, but I didn’t like to watch them die, and I didn’t like to watch them be gnawed on and disemboweled. Of course, once or twice I had to kill something myself out of mercy: if my little huntress brought me something that was still twitching, I put it out of its misery with a shovel. But death and dismemberment turned my stomach, so I made her keep it out of sight. I didn’t let her stalk anything in front of me; I’d chase the target off with a shout. If I caught her playing with her food – tossing and catching it, or letting it run and then recapturing it – I made her pick it up and take it somewhere else. This kind of discretion became a learned behavior after a while: she’d leave me and pad off into the brush, and then come back a little while later licking her whiskers and resume her guarding or playing or on-my-lap napping without first showing off a grizzled little corpse or a twisted bird’s foot minus its owner. But she never stopped leaving me “gifts.”
In due time, Sweetheart gave birth to two tiny kittens: a double of herself my mother called Olivia, and a little solid-gray tomcat named Oliver. I was fascinated with them because, well, they were kittens and I was a little girl, but they never took to me like Sweetheart did. Olivia was devoted to my mother, and Oliver was your typical cat’s cat, pretty much devoted entirely to himself. Every so often they’d let me pet them or spend a few minutes on my lap, but I was just another standard human to them: as far as they were concerned, there was absolutely nothing remarkable about me. It was Sweetie who took care of me. She was my four-legged shadow, my confidante, my protector. I didn’t have to be afraid of basement beasts anymore: Sweetie would take care of them. I had someone to talk to, someone to sing to – every song is more comforting when you sing it to your best friend. I split my lunches with her, too. She loved peanut butter, barbecue potato chips, Cheez Whiz, and Andy Capp’s Hot Fries. We shared and shared alike: I took a chip and gave Sweetie a chip; I tore off the crust of my sandwiches and left plenty of peanut butter between for her. She wasn’t allowed upstairs, but sometimes at night I’d leave the basement door ajar and she’d slip through and join me in bed, curling up against my ribcage under the covers. When the sky began to lighten outside the window she’d take her leave, quietly going back the way she had come. The early cat gets the bird.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Basements and Beggars


The abuse began to leak out of morning therapy sessions and into other parts of my life. As long as I was in the same house as my mother, I was not safe. Ever. She’d blister my hands in hot skillets. She’d punch me in the belly and steal all my air. She’d even force me to fall to the floor and do push-ups until I dropped from exhaustion. One day, she pushed me down the basement stairs.
I was coming up. She met me in the hallway as I hit the landing. I don’t remember what we were fighting about; we fought so much it’s impossible to remember all the manufactured, petty, totally useless reasons behind all the fighting. We were shouting about something, though – I was ten or eleven by then, old enough to bite back when I was bitten and angry enough to go straight for the throat. I made some kind of smartass retort, and she reached out with both hands and shoved me backward as hard as she could.
I had a hold on the railing, but I lost it when I started to tip. I scrambled madly to regain my footing, to grab hold of something, anything, but it was no use – I went down. My back hit. My face hit. My ribs, my knees: I tumbled in a mad pinwheel down thirteen open-backed wooden stairs, hit the concrete at the bottom, rolled, crashed into the washing machine, and lay staring into the darkness.
Snatches, then: being carried up the stairs. The couch. My beloved “My Little Pony” sleeping bag. Weeping. Shouting. Pain. Exhaustion. Fighting sleep. Surrendering to it. And somehow, yet again, swimming up from some dark place to find myself still alive. Cruelly, unceasingly alive.

(Break)

I stayed out of sight as much as possible. This was fairly easy during the school year, but in the summer it became much harder to disappear. I tried playing outside, but playing outside made me thirsty, and being thirsty meant I’d have to go inside for a drink. I got the idea to drink from the spigot at the side of the house, but my mother put a stop to it as soon as she caught me. I did quiet things: I played in my playhouse, or sat between the roots of the big oak and watched ants crawl up and down the trunk. I stood by the turkey’s pen and watched him watching me with his little beady eye full of captive resentment. I fed the rabbits so much clover the poor things almost popped open. I was very lonely.
This is not to say that I never played. I did. There were days when my mother was in a relatively stable mood, or at least courting enough denial to pretend that I did not exist, and on those days Matthew and I played together for hours at a time. He loved to ride his bike and build ramps out of concrete blocks and plywood. He was Evil Knievel, he said, and I was Evil Knievel’s mother, so it was my job to cheer from the sidelines and then dash over and doctor him up when he “wiped out.” He’d smash a pop can to his front tire for a motor and then engineer spectacular crashes so I could run to the rescue wailing in dismay and fix him up for his next death-defying stunt. A few times he actually, honestly hurt himself, and he’d run off to the house crying for Mommy, but that was rare. He was quite good at fake-crashing.   
He had a set of play handcuffs, and with these we played Cops and Robbers with zeal. The robber was always named Joe. We had a routine: when the cop was hauling the robber off to jail (the support post in the basement) the cop would say, “Say goodbye, Joe,” and smartass Joe would reply with “Goodbye, Joe.” We thought this was hilariously clever.
Once the robber was safely secured in the lockup – or handcuffed to it, in our case – the cop had free license to taunt him mercilessly. Poor Joe would be slandered and maligned until he got hopping mad and broke free from jail with a roar, and then he’d chase the cop and shoot him dead. But that was never the end: the cop then turned into a ghost and haunted Joe, who was eventually driven insane and died very dramatically, clutching his heart and sticking out his tongue. Curtain. Act Two: same thing, with the roles reversed. We’d play till the in-jail taunting of Joe turned real and we really did get mad at each other, then quarrel ourselves out and move on. We’d take turns sitting on the rope swing and twisting around and around till the rope burned our hands, then letting go and whipping in such tight, fast circles we had to close our eyes to keep from puking. We’d play on the swing set and pretend to be sled dogs racing across the snow in Alaska, stalk and capture lizards and grasshoppers lurking in the tall grass next to the back door, goof off with powdered gypsum till it caked in our eyebrows and in the corners of our mouths and the creases of our clothes and came off us in clouds when we moved. One year Matt got a 4-in-1 game table for Christmas, and after that we’d play air hockey in the basement and jam to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album for hours on end. Mom would fix us those little Tostino’s pizzas for lunch, and the day would be grand.
But there always, always came days that were not so grand. Days that were bad, or partway decent, or days that were downright awful. Somehow I developed the ability to tell what kind of day it would be before I even clambered out of bed. I sensed the tension. I was so tuned in to my mother’s moods that I could almost smell the bad ones, the dangerous ones, hanging in the air. On those days, I did not play. On those days, I was very, very quiet and made a conscious effort not to be seen.
The basement was a natural place to hide. It was dark. Dank. Unfinished, with a bare concrete floor and cinderblock walls. Since it was not sealed, and since the house was not quite level, water sluiced in every time it rained and made vast, ankle-deep pools out of one whole side. The air was heavy with the smell of mildew. When Matt was there, or Daddy, it was a fun place for games and singing. But shut off the lights and wait in the shadows, and the basement became scary: mice skittered along the walls. Lizards splashed in the puddles. Once I found a snake swimming there, a long, green whip curling its way through the water. I swallowed my scream so as not to blow my cover.
My mother was afraid of the basement when it was dark like that. So was I, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, and I needed to be unreachable. And so I watched. I learned. I noted that finding a lizard in the mop bucket or a cricket in the pocket of Matt’s jeans turned my mother white and squeamish. I took notice of the inordinate amount of mousetraps she set. I came to the realization that she would only carry the laundry down to the washing machine if the lights were on or the outside door was open, and then I wheedled my father into showing me which switch in the fuse box would kill the electricity to the basement in a split second. If my mother was afraid of a dark basement, then I would keep it dark. If my mother was afraid of critters, I’d let the damn things in: I crawled around in the dry corners and under my father’s work bench and sprung all the mousetraps I could find. It was no game, any of it: it was survival, and as such I took it very seriously.
I created a dungeon. My fear of my mother was greater than my fear of the dark, cloying air and the nameless squeaks and shrieks and splashes, so I closed myself off in one horror to avoid a worse one. I had one consolation: there was at least a little light from a small, dirty window set up high in the wall, level with the ground outside. It made a shaft of weak, watery gray that at least enabled me to see my hands and enough of the floor to know whether some bloodthirsty creature was sneaking up on me. Into this light I pulled a wicker-back rocking chair with ornate willow runners that had come from the estate of my father’s Aunt Helen. It made quiet little creaks and pops when I rocked that soothed me.
On my mother’s bad days, I’d creep out of bed in the mornings and dress quietly. I’d take my shoes and braces in my hand and make the three steps across the hall to the basement door, ease it open just enough to slip through, close it soundlessly, and then feel my way down the stairs in a sitting position, free hand searching out the edge of every stair before I made a move. On the bottom step, I’d put on my foot and leg gear by feel while my weak eyes adjusted to the darkness as much as they could. I’d shuffle my way across the concrete floor to the island of light with the chair in it and from there into the darkness on the other side to search out the fuse box. I’d run my fingers blindly up the switches, counting: One, two, three … and flip the third one up from the bottom on the left into the ‘off’ position, POP! The sound always seemed like a gunshot to me, so loud it made me wince, sure that the entire world had heard it and it would cause an avalanche that would send the whole house crashing down around my head. I always waited a few seconds to make sure this would not actually happen before returning to the rocking chair. I’d settle myself in and rock and rock while the darkness tried to invade my little gray space and God-knows-what ran back and forth across the floor.
Fear and loneliness clung to me like cobwebs. My hands always shook grasping the curved arms of the rocking chair. I’d whisper a litany: You’re okay; she can’t hurt you; she won’t come down; there are no monsters; it’s only the dark; you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay…” Down there in the prison I had made for myself, I whispered and rocked and quietly sang.
The only songs I could ever think of to send forth into the basement were the hymns I had learned from my grandmother. She had a handful of beloved favorites – she hummed “Farther Along” while she was rocking grandbabies to sleep, sang “The Unclouded Day” while she hung out the wash, and baked to “Where the Roses Never Fade” and “Beulah Land.” I sang these from memory:
Oh Beulah Land, Sweet Beulah Land,
As on thy highest Mount I stand,
I look away across the sea,
Where mansions are prepared for me,
And view the shining glory-shore,
My Heav’n, my home, forevermore.

My mother had a routine on summer days, and I learned it by listening. I judged the time by the noises I heard coming from the ceiling over my head: footsteps as she crossed to the kitchen for a glass of tea and then to the couch to read a book; afternoon soaps and then the soundtrack to one of two movies she watched over and over again when I was a child – The Last of the Mohicans or Silence of the Lambs. The latter was one of her favorite books, too, and often she fell asleep on the couch with it splayed upside-down beside her, that awful moth and those terrified eyes staring out from the cover and my father’s belt coiled next to it like a cobra. On her bad days she waited for me – for a movement, for a glimpse, for a sound. She waited, and then she pounced.
Sometimes I could not escape going upstairs. I’d get too thirsty to stand it or too hungry to ignore it or have to pee too badly to hold it any longer. I timed my breaks as astutely as possible, listening for a certain number of heartbeats of silence that would indicate she had nodded off reading, or for the swell of music or bit of dialogue in one of her movies that came at a certain point after she had generally fallen asleep. If I misjudged it and she happened to be awake, she was usually too riveted to the television screen or to Hannibal Lector on the pages of that book to do any more than snarl and wave me away. Usually.
Quiet has never been one of my strong points, at least not when I’m walking: most of my time on two feet is not so much walking as it is a series of controlled falls. I’m almost like a toddler that way: get off the couch and reach for the bookshelf; let go of the bookshelf and reach for the wall; let go of the wall and reach for the bathroom door; let go of the door and reach for the sink. I could go for longer stretches between “stations” when I was younger, and I didn’t need to reach and grasp so much as simply bump to slow my momentum or change my direction (kind of like a pinball) but there was always the chance that I’d wake her up, especially when I had to pass her to get to the kitchen. I might accidentally scuff a foot against the floor. One of the straps on my braces might come undone with a growl of worn-out Velcro. Venturing upstairs was always a gamble, like trying to climb over a sleeping bear without rousing it.
To make it less frightening, I used to pretend that going upstairs was an episode of Tom and Jerry. I, of course, was Jerry, and my mother was Tom, and all I had to do was get past her without waking her up, at which point I could go back to my hole and enjoy the spoils of my cunning. With painstaking care, I’d sneak through the eternal expanse of the living room, navigate the treacherous booby-trap that was the dining room and all its damn chairs, and cross the threshold into the kitchen. Victory number one. I’d filch an empty plastic bottle and a pull-up cap from the cabinet next to the sink, fill it with Kool-Aid, and set the pitcher back in the fridge. Victory number two. Then I’d look for something to eat: the end of a bag of chips to slide into the long front pocket of my shirt if I had such a shirt on that day, or the heels of a loaf of bread and a swipe of peanut butter. Victory number three.
If I made it to this point in the game, chances were I’d make it all the way to the end and come out on top. Sometimes I had a close call: I’d fumble and drop a plastic bottle, or the silverware drawer would clatter as I was reaching for a butter knife. My mother would jerk into consciousness and bark out, “Hey!,” and I’d be left standing frozen at the kitchen counter trying to judge whether or not I could get to the back door, unlock it, and make it down the stairs quickly enough to avoid being caught. I’d stand stock-still, holding my breath, squelching the pulse in my veins, forcing myself not to blink, until she decided it was her sleepy mind playing tricks or gave up caring and let her nap reclaim her. Then I’d let my frozen body thaw and set out on the last leg of the journey: sneaking back past her again.
I never tried to use the back door unless I was absolutely desperate to escape. Both the inside door and the storm door shrieked like phantoms in a funhouse, and if the storm door was locked, I was doubly screwed: I’ve never had a lot of manual dexterity or fine motor control, and the tiny lock on the handle was difficult for me to pop free. My best bet for remaining unscathed was to go back the way I had come.
It didn’t always work. Best bets are hardly ever entirely foolproof; they just have better odds than the alternative. Sometimes, I went all-in and I lost – because sometimes, my mother wasn’t asleep when I tried to go back through. She’d pretend to be asleep: her eyes would be closed, her cheek would be cushioned on her forearm, her long hair would be hanging off the arm of the couch with the ends brushing the floor, as usual, but she’d be lying in wait to ambush me. I’d get almost to the hallway, so close to the basement door I could practically feel the knob turning under my hand, and her eyes would pop open like she was some kind of possessed doll.
“Gotcha.”
My heart always plummeted so fast, it could’ve left my body through the soles of my feet and gone crashing through the floor, and it wouldn’t have made any difference in the way I felt. I’d stand there staring at my doomed hands full of illegal plunder and will the boards and beams to part just wide enough for me to fall through and then close over my head like water, sealing me in the safety of the darkness I had left. This never happened, of course. When I was caught, I was caught. That was it.
And so began  ritualized begging.
As far as punishments went, the begging ritual was by far the most humiliating. Being forced to get on my knees and say aloud that I was worthless and useless and that I deserved to die served its intended purpose: it made me feel like a worm. Like pond scum. Like dog shit. Like an amoeba. Worse than an amoeba: it made me feel like an intestinal parasite. It made me feel like something far worse than absolutely nothing at all.
I had permanent bruises on my knees for years. The hardwood hurt with a vengeance. The longer I had to play the penitent, the deeper the ache went into my bones – and ritualized begging was not an expedient process. That would have shown mercy, and my mother had none.
I had to clasp my hands. I had a script: “I know I’m a horrible person and I deserve to die, but please don’t kill me, Mommy. Please don’t kill me. I promise I’ll be good. I swear. Just please let me live.”
It was so often too much for me to bear, being stripped of humanity like that. It cut me straight through to the marrow and out the other side. I hated it so much, I’d beg not to be made to beg: I poured every ounce of sincerity I could possibly muster into trying to convince my mother not to make me say such horrible things about myself, to let me crawl away and know them privately. It never worked. It just made her more and more angry. Her face would deepen to a red that was very nearly purple. Spittle would fly from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes would go cold, calculating, and inhuman. Those eyes told the truth: she wanted me dead.  She wanted me dead, and she was teetering on the edge of killing me with her bare hands and a leather belt.
I always told myself not to cry, not to ever, ever cry, but I just couldn’t help it. Terror, shame, the way my hands itched to grab her by the shoulders and scream her name to see if she would snap out of it because I just wanted my Mommy; I would do anything just to have my Mommy hold me and rock me and love me and tell me I was precious and good – all this culminated in a helplessness that shattered my little heart to pieces. I always cried. I cried desperately, breathlessly, and shielded my face with my hands as the belt lashed my cheek, my ear, the crown of my head.
When it was over, I did crawl away. Or I ran, lurching down into the basement or out the front door. The gray fog of shock and depression would leach into the edges of my vision; my post-ritual brain craved sunlight to drive it away. In the basement I’d pull and tug at the sliding door until I could slip through, frantic to find light, sure that if I didn’t, I would die. There was something primal in how I acted; I lost my power of conscious thought and followed the urge to move, move, move. I’d often come back to myself and find that I’d been wandering in circles around the backyard for I never knew how long, just blindly moving my feet. I’d stop mid-stride and wonder how I had come to be where I was. It always took my muddled brain a few minutes to pull everything together.
Invariably, then, I’d head for the wide-mown path that led out of the yard, curved around the corner, and found a break in the trees perfect for looking out on the abandoned house next to the highway, which I came to call the Daffodil House.
It mattered little whether the flowers were actually in season. I sought the place out specially when they were, and drank up all that bright yellow with an enraptured, unblinking stare, but I went for the house, too, and for the stretch of highway beyond it that I could imagine racing away on, going and going and going to the end of the world and never coming back. There was a stump just off the path that made a perfect seat, and I’d situate myself there and think and imagine and wander away in my head until I gradually became aware that I had shored myself up again, that I could feel my feet on the ground and my hands on the wood and that somehow, someway, I could go on being a girl and being solid and real and alive.
 This was never a conscious process. It simply happened while I was sitting there, appearing as inexorably as Time marching on. The resilience that keeps people alive in situations like the one I lived in is still a mystery to me. I am truly amazed by the things the human mind can withstand, and by the ways it protects itself. It protects itself so well that sometimes it can’t stop protecting itself: any victim of severe or repeated trauma will tell you that long after the danger has passed, often even years later, the mind and the body remember and continue in the ways of instinct and survival – sleeping with the lights on, perhaps, or curled up at the foot of the bed in order to disappear from view; diving for cover at the sound of a car backfiring or a string of firecrackers going off. The line between instinct and learned behavior blurs until there is barely any distinction, or at least not a distinction that matters – it’s all survival, so it’s all the same. The mind does what it knows to do until it can be trained in something else, which, compared to survival, is inconsequential and thus frequently takes a very, very long time to achieve. Part of me fears that the terror I’ve been schooled in will never completely go away, that I’ll always be scared of or bothered by something that ties directly back to my old life and to the little girl I used to be, sitting on a stump gazing down at the Daffodil House and dreaming of escape. Strong indeed are the things that shape us.
On the days I was victorious in my sneaking, I could go back to the basement and eat without fear. The hours would continue on unbroken by violence as I rocked and sang, which was a blessing, to be certain, but there was something lacking in my relief, something vital missing from my safety: there was no one to keep me company. I was consistently alone. Isolation carved a pit of sadness in my belly that could not be filled by any song. Long after I was too old for them, I had imaginary friends – characters from books I read, mostly. I brought them to life and conversed with them. Mary and Laura Ingalls. An antique doll named Hitty from a novel by Rachel Field. Ramona Quimby. Sometimes even Bambi, straight from the pages of Bambi: A Deer in the Woods, folded up next to the rocker with his long, spindly legs. But even these imaginings did not entirely fill the void. They weren’t real, and part of me always remained aware of that. I couldn’t touch them. I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hold them. In so many ways, I was still desperately lonely.