“For not kidnapping you.” She flipped her braids over her shoulder, then melted more butter for the icing of the cream puffs.
I would have laughed, but she said it so seriously, I didn’t.
“I should have come for you when you were a child.”
“But you did.” My voice sounded strangled. I didn’t want to think about my childhood in Aunt Lydia’s kitchen while we were making Chocolate Cream Puffs.
“I should have come and got you and kept you for good.” She whacked her spoon on the edge of the pan four times. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack.
“You tried that,” I choked out. I was thirty-four years old. Surely I was over this?
“I know I did. Damn bitch!” Lydia yelled, “Damn bitch” into the sky, then swiped a hand over her face. Lydia had come and gotten me on four different occasions unannounced and brought me to the farm. Within days the police were there, taking me back to my mother, talking to Aunt Lydia about custody, kidnapping, etc. Even my cries and pleadings made no difference back then.
“I shoulda gone to Australia with you.”
I stopped stirring the chocolate. Australia. Now that would have been nice. Kangaroos and the coral reef and clean beaches. And no boyfriends.
I pictured myself rescuing Shawn and Carrie Lynn and living in Melbourne with them. It might be my only recourse.
“At least she let me come and see you for the summer.”
“Damn bitch!” Aunt Lydia boomed again. “Your mother moved you around so much, I couldn’t always keep track of you. She knew I always wanted to know how you were, but it would be weeks or months before she’d call me.”
My heart clenched. The times in my life when I didn’t have Aunt Lydia in it, when I wasn’t getting calls from her, or gifts, or letters, had always been the worst.
It was during one of those times that Zeke, a boyfriend of my mother’s would come after me every day once my mother left for work. She would kiss him passionately in front of me, smile, tell me to stay out of Zeke’s way, and as soon as she left, Zeke would turn toward me.
It was innocent at first, and I was happy to have the attention. I thought he was kind. He brushed my hair one day, braided it the next, suggested we take a bath together, then he would massage my back later in the evening. One night his hands wandered everywhere. He told me he was massaging my whole body, that I was just to relax and enjoy it. I couldn’t have been more than nine.
The massage on my back felt good; then he started playing with my breasts, which were growing even then. I felt sick. I tried to pull away, but he pushed me back down. The next day I told him I didn’t want a massage. I landed facedown on the bed anyhow, one hand pinning me down as the other roamed all over my body and into places a man’s hand should never be on a child.
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell my mother because I knew she would blame me. Plus, Zeke told me if I complained, he would hurt my mother.
There was no one else to tell. Two decades ago, practically no one talked about sexually abusing children. For many sane, normal people, it never occurred to them to do such a thing, so it never occurred to them it was happening to other people. If someone did find out about it, they often turned away, having no clue about what to do. Now it’s different. Even in kindergarten, puppets are acting out “good touches” and “bad touches.”
But there weren’t any puppets around when Zeke’s hands were violating my tiny body. His “lovin’” as he called it, took worse and worse turns. My little body ached all the time from then on out.
I could feel Aunt Lydia’s eyes on me, one hand absentmindedly heating the butter and chocolate mixture as one more horrible memory came back in fine detail.
It was raining. As Zeke’s car was in front of our apartment when school let out, I didn’t go home. I walked back to town and went to the library. When I was sure my mother was home, I went back. Zeke’s car wasn’t there, so I used my key and entered our shabby apartment. But Zeke was hiding behind my bed. When I dropped my backpack on my desk he sprang out and grabbed me. The buttons of my shirt popped off, my skirt flew up and then he tossed me on the bed. My mother walked in within two minutes.
I know that this was a good thing because she saved me from getting raped by Zeke. But it was a horrible thing, too.
My mother was absolutely, positively furious.
At me.
“You little bitch!” she screamed. I still remember that scream of pure rage as she ran into the room. Zeke scrambled off of me while she hauled me up and slapped me across the face. “Get your own boyfriend! Leave mine alone!”
Her ranting and ravings went on and on. I was a horrible daughter, a demented girl, a selfish bitch. Zeke sat back and smiled. When she turned on him, he told her that I had seduced him, that he’d had too much to drink that day, that he really wanted my mother and wouldn’t she come back to the bedroom that second, please, so he could fuck her?
She slapped me across the face again, then slammed the door. I heard them in the next room and shoved a sock in my mouth so they wouldn’t hear me screaming. I screamed all night.
My teacher asked me the next day if I was all right, and I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t. She was so pretty and so kind, and I thought she would think I was dirty.
A few days later Zeke tried to shove his way into my room. I could feel the screams welling up in me again, so I climbed out the window and jumped. Our apartment was three floors up. I hit a tree, then landed knee-first on the pavement, which was what gave me the gaping scar that Caroline saw. Still, it was better than landing on my head.
Several women saw it happen, and the police and an ambulance were called. I enjoyed my two-day stay in the hospital. The nurses comforted me when I screamed.
Zeke saw the police and fire engines, packed up his stuff, and left my mother immediately after that. We didn’t see him again.
The Vermont State Police caught up with him when he went after the daughter of the assistant attorney general, whom he met in a video game arcade. Zeke was heading out of town on the freeway when the police boxed him in. Scrambling out of the car, he tried to run, but then he realized he was trapped and pulled a gun. The police pulled theirs, and that was the end of Zeke.
My mother and I watched the newscast together, and she cried, then glared at me. But she had a new boyfriend by then, Taryn. He didn’t like children in a sexual sense at all, but he did like porn, and he often convinced my mother to bring her friend Marie Alice over for a threesome. I couldn’t sleep when Marie Alice was over for all the noise those three made.
But at least I liked Taryn. He said good morning to me, he said good night, he bought us food, I saw him pay our bills on numerous occasions. He would often give me fifty dollars and now and then even stood up for me when my mother was screaming at me for one thing or another.
“Take it easy,” he’d tell my mother, “Take it easy. She’s just a kid.” I’d go to my bedroom and shut the door, rocking myself on my bed. If I felt a scream coming on, I’d stuff a sock in my mouth.
But Taryn never touched me. Never looked at me in a weird, creepy way.
For Christmas he gave me a new bed set—a comforter made from a quilt, with two patching pillowcases, two new pillows, and a white dust ruffle. I loved it, truly loved it, the set being the only new item I’d had in a long time. But then Taryn left when my mother dumped him for Scotty, a giant of a man who looked like a humungous fart to me, and she took the whole bed set because it reminded her of Taryn.
She burned that bed set in the fire even as I screamed at her, even as I tried to pull it out. Scotty had to hold me back while I watched the quilt quiver and roll, the pillowcases shrinking and turning into black masses in the midst of the rollicking flames.
The first night without my bed set, my sheets and blankets looked even more ripped and worn than before. I put three layers of clothes on because it was freezing and my mother was out at some bar but had told me not to turn on the heat. I huddled under
an old coat that one of my teachers had bought for me two years ago, and slept.
Scotty yelled often at me and my mother. That was when I took to leaving for school early. I had breakfast with a kind cook at school each day—Kathleen was her name. She always made sure I had enough food. Then I went to my teacher’s class and helped out in the classroom. After school I made the rounds, asking if I could help this or that teacher, lapping up every single compliment and thank-you like a starving person does food. At about five-thirty, when the last teacher left, I’d go to the library and sit and read books. Teachers and reading books in libraries saved my life.
I would eat the dinner that Kathleen the cook packed me in a sack and then head home, hoping to avoid my mother, and succeeding about half the time. As soon as I approached whichever apartment we were living in, my stomach would start to ache, the pain depending on which man was living with us at the time.
I sighed. Aunt Lydia stopped what she was doing. So did I. We faced each other across the island in her kitchen, the moonlight streaming in. “I hope you can forgive me one day,” she said.
“There’s nothing to forgive, Aunt Lydia.” And there wasn’t. When I was sixteen I moved out of the rat-infested apartment I shared with my mother, and with the help of a counselor who had endured my kind of childhood, got myself declared an emancipated minor. I qualified for almost free housing, free breakfast and lunch at school, and food stamps. I was humiliated by the help but knew there was nothing else I could do. I went to school during the day, then waitressed forty hours a week.
I didn’t have any friends. Not because people didn’t try. The kids at my high school were nice to me in that they left me alone. But when you have been through what I went through, and you feel dirty from all the men who have grabbed at you and run their hands all over your body, and a mother who regularly ranted and raved in alcoholic stupors, and you’re almost always hungry and worried, and your mind feels like it’s snapping, well, that puts a damper, shall we say, on how well you’re able to maintain friendships with people.
I was in the business of surviving. I bought used clothes. I cut coupons. I saved all the waitressing money I could because I was always petrified there would be an emergency and I would have no money for food. The fear of hunger stalked me, and I began to put on weight. Frankly, for a while I felt better. The weight meant I was eating. The eating meant there was food. Regular food.
But soon I was depressed by the weight gain, believing I was the size of a silo.
I channeled that frustration into school and received straight As. I literally worked until I fell asleep at night over my books during the first few months of my emancipation. Which left no time for thinking about anything else.
Why would I want to think too much, anyhow? I had a mother who had signed me away to the state. She had given me away. No tears, no apologies, nothing. I was a nothing.
And although I had to admit after living on my own for a few months that being able to return to a safe home, a place where there would be no creepy men with sweaty hands and heavy bodies, no rampaging mother telling me how bad I was, no dirtiness and no chaos, was appealing, the fact that my mother didn’t want me, and would go to such lengths to rid herself of me, was still a stupendous blow.
I could have gone to Aunt Lydia—in fact she pleaded with me to come to Oregon on a weekly basis, but I wanted to stay in the school I was in. I had been there for two years by then, and I liked the other kids and the teachers. I had the impression that as a group they had decided to look out for me. Furniture arrived for my apartment as soon as I moved in. Boxes of food. Clothing. A new backpack with tons of school supplies every fall. Christmas presents. They cared.
I graduated and received a full-ride scholarship to a prestigious college because I studied obsessively to keep my mother out of my head and nailed the SAT. “Have you got two brains in that head of yours?” my counselor had asked me, shaking her head over my score. “Maybe three? Anyone ever tell you that you’re brilliant?”
I spent the summer with Aunt Lydia and tried to think and be and pretend I was a normal person like everyone else, then flew back to Boston with this admonition from her: A woman’s estrogen is her strength. Capture that estrogen, embrace it, flow with it. Be your estrogen. You rule, Julia, girl, and I adore you.
At college I felt much like how an aardvark would feel among peacocks. I was fat, not stylish, not sired from a monied daddy with a salesman-like laugh, and I had never been on a yacht. Plus I still had all my secrets. The secrets kept me apart from the other girls—girls who partied really hard and slept around like you wouldn’t believe, but you knew they would turn into proper society ladies the second they left campus.
“I’m going to have all the sex I can now,” one gal told me, “because when I’m married I’m going to have to stick with that one penis. Do you think I can do that, Julia? Stick with only one penis? For fifty years?”
I told her that was a difficult question to answer.
She nodded. “I think I might have to have a couple of penises on the side, Julia. They’ll be my ‘secret penises,’ so to speak. For pleasure and fun and relief from the one-penis-per-married-girl rule.”
Still, the girls were generally nice in an offhand way, even as they often studied me as one might a science experiment in which purple organisms are growing. And they loved my chocolate treats. They could not figure out why I took so many classes, and they thought that my waitressing was “quaint.”
“It’s spectacular that you’re getting to know the lower classes, Jules,” my roommate, Tabitha, said. “Spectacular. And it will look good on your résumé. Like you really can be counted on to know how to relate to poor people. You know—worked your way through school, that sort of thing. It’s a smashingly good idea, although so dull, isn’t it? Working, I mean.”
I got fatter in college as I dealt with a lot of issues with my mother and my childhood and didn’t date. In fact, men scared and often repulsed me. I went through a period of wondering if I was gay but figured I wasn’t. I simply didn’t want a man around me. Not that there were any men at my door anyhow.
After getting my art degree, I took a job at an art gallery with the help of one of my instructors and later had the grand privilege of meeting Robert.
I looked over at Aunt Lydia. She wiped both hands across her eyes, smearing chocolate right across her cheek. Aunt Lydia hardly ever cried. Of the two of us, I was definitely the Queen of Tears. For long moments, we both stood there. Sometimes things in life are so painful nobody can speak, so I sang what I was thinking, low and husky. “I neeeedddd your love…I wannnntttt your looovvve,” I sang and sang until Lydia laughed and then sang with me. We took a minute to dance around the kitchen, our hands waving in the air, and then we got back to work under the white light of the moon.
13
When I left the library the next day Shawn and Carrie Lynn’s mother, Brandy, was waiting for me. She was about twenty-six years old, caked in makeup, and sporting stringy blond hair. She was appallingly thin, had several open sores on her face, and her hands shook. A maniacal smile was plastered on her face like one of those haunting clown dolls.
“Who you think you are?” she spat out, the smile still there. She scratched her back with both hands, up and down, up and down.
“Mrs. Coleman—”
“I ain’t no Mrs. Coleman, bitch, and you quit calling the police on my family.” She held Shawn firmly by the arm as Carrie Lynn cowered behind her brother, gripping his hand. Shawn’s eyes were firmly on the ground. “You don’t know shit about what’s going on, so stay out of my business—you got that, girl?”
I looked at her. Didn’t move, didn’t nod. No, I didn’t get that, ‘girl.’
I wanted to say, “But do you ‘get’ your son’s bruises? What about Carrie Lynn’s? Do you get that she’s scared to death of you? Do you get that they’re starving? Do you ‘get’ that your children’s clothes are dirty?”
But I didn’
t say anything like that. I knew that woman like the back of my hand. She was my mother, reincarnated with a drug problem.
“I’m sorry,” I said, so contrite. “I think you have the wrong person about that police-calling business. I didn’t call the police. I do Story Hour at the library with the children. That’s it.”
“You’re telling me you didn’t call the police?” Her eyes were narrow, like slits of hate.
“No, I didn’t. Why would I call the police?” I opened up my eyes real wide and tried to look as innocent as possible.
“’Cause you’re the only adult that spends time with them. Shawn and Carrie Lynn are always going to the stupid library with that old hag inside.”
“Well, it wasn’t me. What did you say your name was?” I extended my hand and shook hers. Her hands felt like ice, and I could feel the tremor. Sheesh. What was this woman on?
“I’m Brandy Wilshire. Me and the kids don’t got the same last name. They’re stuck with their retard fathers’ names the sons of a bitchs’ cows.”
I wanted to slap her, to shake her, but instead I smiled. Above all, I wanted to help her children. “I’m glad you stopped by.” I said it like I thought she was a concerned parent and it was so sweet of her to say hello to the local librarian. “I’ve been wanting to tell you what a smart boy and girl you have.”
That stopped Brandy in her tracks. The smile even dropped. She looked better when she didn’t smile. She had hardly any teeth on the top row. I couldn’t see the bottom. “What?”
“Shawn and Carrie Lynn. They are so smart.”
“Well that sure as hell ain’t what Shawn’s teachers have said. This kid is dumber than a board!”
“Oh no!” I wanted to tear her eyelashes out. What a bitch. But I smiled. “He’s bright! So bright. He’s learned to read! He can memorize anything. He never forgets what he learns….” I went on and on, standing right there on the library steps. And then I launched into Carrie Lynn’s intellect. Bright. Incredible reader. Advanced for her age. Wonderful listener.