Emily Monkey

The walker became a semi-permanent fixture. The one I finally ended up with was an orthopedic walker with red rubber grips that opened in the front so that instead of pushing it, I stood in the frame and pulled it along on its four very noisy little wheels. That thing clattered and clacked like a freight train. We took home a gait belt, too. Long after I didn’t need these things anymore, they hung on the wall in our basement and later in our garage, side by side. My father wanted them there, to keep as mementos. Every so often he’d look at me, and then he’d look at the walker and the gait belt, and then he’d look back at me and grin and ruffle my hair: his way of saying he was proud of me without actually saying it. He never was very good with words or emotions, but he was great at tokens of affection.

The first of these tokens I ever remember getting from him was a little stuffed gorilla I named Emily Monkey. Just like that, too: Emily Monkey. I always had to say both names. Emily Monkey came from a truck stop my father frequented on his out-of state runs. I was three when I got her, all dressed up in little flowered panties and a matching bonnet with a plastic pacifier in her mouth. She quickly became my favorite toy, the one I carried everywhere during every waking moment and slept with at night. When Matt was little, he had a blankie. When I was little, I had Emily Monkey – that is, I had Emily Monkey until the night I lost her at Chuck E. Cheese sometime after my fourth birthday.

To say that I was bereft does not even begin to cover it. When I realized Emily Monkey was gone, I bawled. My grief was bottomless. Without Emily Monkey, the world could not go on. I cried until I started to hyperventilate. Driven to desperation by the magnitude of my distress, my father – who, as I’ve said, was never very good with words – came up with what is perhaps the most brilliant confabulation he has told to this day: he convinced me that my beloved gorilla had simply gone to visit her grandmother, and that she’d be back in no time.

It took a lot of fast talking, but I eventually bought this version of events. I brooded. I was angry at Emily Monkey for not telling me goodbye, but I desperately wanted her to return home. As soon as he possibly could, my father went back to the truck stop where he’d bought the first Emily Monkey and purchased a replacement. “Look who came home!” he cried, and handed her into my already-grabbing hands. For a moment I was ecstatic – and then I paused. Wait. This couldn’t be Emily Monkey; her clothes were the wrong color. I questioned my father accusingly, and he tapped out his reserve of creativity with a song-and-dance about how she had simply gotten new clothes: after all, didn’t I always get new clothes every time I visited my grandmother? After a moment’s thought, I was satisfied with this. I carried on with my life blithely believing that the body double Emily Monkey was the same one I had lost that night at Chuck E. Cheese, and no one ever told me any differently till I was a teenager. It’s one of my favorite stories, now: my quiet, reserved father spinning a fairy tale to soothe his little girl, and giving it a happy ending.

Then there was the playhouse. As far as gestures of affection go, the playhouse was the coup de grace. He built it while I was in rehab, with the help of his brother Scott: a little wooden house with a roofed porch, a real door, and little wooden shutters on both windows. It was only one small room, but when he picked me up and carried me inside so I could see it from every angle, I swear to all the angels that thing was a palace. He even let me declare it a brother-free zone for a few weeks so I could enjoy it in peace. (And with the particular brand of sadism typical between siblings, I enjoyed denying Matt entry just a little too much. He busted out a shutter with his whiffle bat to get back at me.)

There were other, smaller things as time went on, most of them pertaining to making it just a tad easier for me to live with a disability. My father believed in raising a tough kid, and he did, but he also knew when I might need help. He kept a milk crate in the back of his pickup so I could stand on it to climb in more easily. When he built a new porch onto our third house, he made a set of three little stairs next to one of the support posts so I could get up and down in relative safety. After I fell in the shower one night, he bought me a bench.

Maybe these things seem normal, like things anyone would do for their child, but my father was the only one of my parents to do them, so to me they were special. My mother didn’t believe in helping me at all. When Dale built the stairs for the porch, she set her potted plants on them so they could not be used. When he got me the shower bench, she threw such a fit about it that he actually had to stop what he was doing every night when it came time for me to shower so he could watch and be sure she was letting me use it. He said, “What do you want her to do? Break her neck? You leave the girl be, and I mean it,” but she never did unless he was standing right there with her. When I first got that bench I was delighted that I could shower without having to worry about hurting myself, but the nightly ritual of carrying it around the corner from the utility room to set it in the tub under my mother’s hateful glare and my father’s arms-crossed, guardian pose cut me so deep that I was soon ashamed of it – ashamed of needing it at all. It became another token of my wrongness, my inherent badness, my disgusting and pathetic self.

It was so easy to feel that way around my mother – wrong, bad, disgusting, pathetic. She delighted, in fact, in finding new ways to make me hate myself. Words were her greatest weapon; she could hurt me more with words than she could with any beating, no matter how severe. I was garbage, she said. Useless. A piss-ant. A disgrace to every person on the planet. I was nasty and vile. Looking at me turned her stomach. I was a maggot, an ass wipe, a piece of shit. I’d never amount to anything. I was so stupid, she was surprised I knew how to breathe. I should be sorry I had ever been born. She should’ve thrown me away the first chance she got. When I was a teenager, she used my body image against me: “Mr. Brown can moo, can you? Moo for me, cow.” “You’re not exactly skinny, now are you?” Every time I reached for a snack, she’d snort like a pig. While I dressed after a shower, she’d sing nasty little ditties through the bathroom door about what a huge, wallowing whale I was. She was relentless. I alternated between wanting to cut out her tongue and feed it to her and believing her with a reluctant but all-encompassing shame.

The worst of the nasty, sharp-edged vitriol that spewed forth from my mother’s mouth began after rehab was over and I’d come home for good. At that point a daily regimen of strengthening exercises was called for that would continue nearly every day for a decade, until the morning I told her – through ragged, rattling breath and a mouthful of blood – to get the hell out of my room and not to come back unless she wanted me to kill her. I was so desperate by then that I didn’t care about what kind of punishment this ultimatum might incur: some part of me knew that if she lunged for me, I’d fight her till one of us was dead. She must have seen it in my eyes. She laughed and told me that without her I’d be in a wheelchair before the year was out, but she left and did not return the next morning, or ever again.

When I was seven, though, the hell had just begun. My mother was bent on perfection in all things, but especially in me. She despised my weakness. She despised my brokenness. She despised everything I was, and that became undeniably clear during morning exercises.

Everything had to be absolutely right. Never mind that I was doing the daily exercises because I was disabled, because I was not strong: if I was lunging and did not point my foot in the right direction, she’d make me do it ten extra times. If I was squatting and didn’t go down what she deemed to be far enough, she made me do squats till I was screaming with the pain. If I staggered or fell, I had to start the repetitions over from the beginning. It was the same with stand-ups – going from kneeling to standing without help. If I lost my balance and touched my hands to the floor, I had to do stand-ups again and again and again. Some mornings I did up to 150 of them, when I was only supposed to do three on each leg. One day I got so tired that I lost my footing and careened sideways into the bookshelf with such force that it fell on me, leaving me trapped under six tiers of oak and a few hundred books and begging for rescue. Several times I staggered into the sliding closet door so hard that it came completely off the track and tented over me.

It didn’t take long for my mother to start bringing “enforcers” into the room. My father’s belt; a  factory slat of the kind we used as kindling in our woodstove because my uncle worked at a furniture factory and had endless access to reject chair and table legs. These long, thick, weapons were fierce. They drove splinters into my skin and brought pain that could curdle my blood in a millisecond. It only took one strike with a slat like that to make me wish I were dead. Picking my bruised, welted, bloody body up off the floor after a beating with one of those was tantamount to trying to climb out of my own grave.

Sometimes I think I actually did climb up out of my own grave. Morning after morning, I evaded death by a few inches, a few seconds, a few breaths. I don’t know what to call it. Luck? Divine providence? All I knew was that long after I wanted to die, long after I silently began pleading with God to let me die and then actively begging my mother to kill me and end my suffering, I kept on blinking and breathing and eating and sleeping and being undeniably alive. So many of those mornings have run together into one long, endless horror of color and sound and the taste and smell of blood.

When I was seven, eight, nine, and on into my teens, until the day I ordered her to leave, my mother would seize me by the shoulders and beat my head against the floor until I became insensate, or wrap her hands around my throat and squeeze until my eyes rolled back in a faint. She’d bloody my nose or bust my lip and then hit me again if I had the nerve to bleed on the rug; twist my arms behind my back until I thought they would break. She’d coil her fingers close to my scalp and drag me back and forth across the room by my long hair while I screamed and screamed. She’d draw her hand back and strike me hard across the face, first removing my glasses and flinging them across the room because she knew it terrified me more not to be able to see. They broke so often, I had to start carrying them to the school secretary’s office every morning before the bell rang and taping them together. The excuses I gave were always the same. If there was a mark on my face, I was to say that I had fallen and smashed my glasses against the floor. If there was no mark, I was to say I had sat on them or stepped on them. No matter what, I could not tell the truth: my mother made it very clear that she would kill me slowly and painfully if I ever dared tell what really happened.

At one point in my life, not too long ago, actually, I wondered why no one ever put two and two together. If I were the school secretary and a kid came to me three days out of five holding her broken glasses and asking for Scotch tape, I’d get suspicious. If I were a teacher and one of my students came to class with her good eye blackened and swollen shut, weaving drunkenly and bumping into corners, my eyebrows would hit my hairline. If I saw one of my students sitting at lunch carefully tearing her sandwich to bits and chewing it delicately around a busted lip, I’d ask the child questions --  but none of the people in my daily life ever made so much as a peep. I used to think their silence meant they were thick: thick as in stupid, dull-witted, cognitively impaired. Now I am aware of a worse truth, which is that they knew. They probably knew or at least suspected all along, and kept quiet because it’s easier to hold your tongue than it is to risk disapproval. For this I continued to suffer, on and on and on.