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.