by Michelle Tea
I had blood on my face, blood on my neck; the earring had been ripped forward all the way through the lobe, leaving me not with a tiny piercing but with a large jagged hole. My mother tried to ask me what happened, tried to wipe off the blood, but I was sobbing and my nose and mouth filled with mucous and I started to hiccup and I couldn’t say much except “Todd hurt me.”
There was a knock at the door. My mother went to answer it, and I could hear the voice of Todd’s mother; she was yelling, and she had Todd with her. I ran to the pantry and hid in the very lowest cupboard and pulled the sliding hollow door shut behind me, cowering in the dark. I could hear Cindy telling my mother the story of what happened; she made Todd pull down his pants to show a red mark from the jump rope. My mother listened and then said, “Well, my kid has her ear ripped half off, and bite marks on her face.” My mother didn’t sound angry, just stiff and formal, as if this comment was the end of the discussion, the bill is in the mail, good-bye. She was good friends with this woman, whose daughter was my best friend. We went places together, to the zoo, inner tubing, camping on the coast.
After Cindy left, my mother slid the pantry door open. “Come out,” she said, and she didn’t sound happy.
“Next time,” she said, “you have to hit back.”
It’s easy enough to break the rules when you are too poor to feed your family but not poor enough to receive government benefits, when you’re a family living on a boy-man’s salary for delivering newspapers or pumping gas or part-time work in the forest.
THE WOMEN IN MY FAMILY HIT BACK. SOMETIMES THEY HIT FIRST. Not usually in a provocative way, not to start a fight—but in the middle of a fight, when the rage over some enormous transgression boiled over. It’s easy enough to break the rules when you live not only in poverty, but in the lowest dregs of working poverty, too poor to feed your family but not poor enough to receive government benefits, when you’re a family living on a boy-man’s salary for delivering newspapers or pumping gas or part-time work in the forest. Often, there would be an argument over something the boy-man bought. A model car, a magazine, tickets to a movie, a special treat—and that money should have gone toward a loaf of bread. They would argue, then scream, and the boy-man would have a shaking tantrum. These men, even the violent ones, were just boys who broke the rules. If a fight started in the car, it usually ended with the man dropped off on the side of the road, kicked out to walk home or bum a ride off a stranger.
But sometimes, someone would raise a hand and hit. Then they would fall on each other, stand back up, fall back down, go waltzing around the room in a macabre dance of violence (but they did not know how to waltz, so perhaps it was a square dance, a do-si-do), while I sat in the crackly green reclining chair and watched Westerns on television.
Nobody hit me, not even as a measure of discipline. My cousins were cuffed routinely; someone was always threatening to cut a switch; smacks fell down like rain. But I was absolutely protected within this family, because my mother would not let anyone touch me, and because I was a bleeder. My nosebleeds were frequent and copious—I could soak a towel or fill the sink basin just from riding in a car or reading too long or falling asleep in an awkward position. If I felt sad, I coughed up blood. Growing up, I was usually sick, curled up with a blanket and an infected organ, ear, throat—recuperating perpetually, watching television and reading books. People had fights, they hit each other, and I was never touched.
I saw fights between my Aunt Louisa, the baby of the family, a teenager still with short hair and David Bowie T-shirts, and her husband, my favorite, who drove a VW van and wore purple high-top sneakers with plaid bell-bottoms. His parents had a lake cabin, an impossible luxury, and we used to float around the lake on inner tubes, lazily stroking the murky water, and then climb up the steep stairs to the A-frame cabin where three boys spent summers in a perfect—sitcom-perfect, like Hazel or Father Knows Best—childhood. Aunt Louisa used the baby’s diaper bag to hide their stash of drugs, and I know that when they broke up, someone hit someone else, and my aunt’s eardrum was punctured, but it was never clear to me why my now ex-uncle was the bad guy. He always seemed so nice, and my aunt, well, there was the story about the time she wouldn’t stop kicking one of her sisters in the car and the car went in a ditch and they ended up pummeling each other in the middle of a busy road.
It was understood, though never discussed, that the habitual, reflexive violence in our family was an expression of strength, that we were not abused but merely querulous. We were the strong ones, the victorious, and the women in the family were to be honored for their ability to fight. The women whispered about the new bride’s younger sister, Susie, who had married a man with a moustache and mean eyes. He hit Susie and she just put her hands across her eyes, crying. Susie showed up with bruises on her arms, black eyes, and a big pregnant belly. My mother and her sisters said that if she couldn’t protect herself she should leave, or, failing that, kill him; they nodded and agreed that they would never let a man get away with that shit.
When her baby was still in diapers she was pregnant again and she tried to leave, but the man broke down the door and beat Susie up, left her bleeding on the floor, took his son, and disappeared forever.
Some fights were so legendary, discussed so often, it was easy to imagine you had been a witness even if you weren’t born yet when the event occurred. My Aunt Signe, my mother’s oldest sister, had a wretched husband, the worst kind of bad imaginable. She had a good job as a secretary in the shipyard, and one day in the middle of an argument he swept up all of her work clothes and took them outside. He threw the clothes in their muddy driveway and then drove back and forth over them with his car. When he came back inside he was laughing and he picked up a bottle of wine and raised it to his lips for a drink. She smacked that bottle into his mouth, shattering teeth and glass—bone and blood and glass and wine spilling forward across the kitchen table as he screamed.
One day they had a fight about dog food and he hit her and she grabbed a knife and chased him out of the house. He ran down the driveway and she got in her station wagon and knocked him down and drove over him, grinding him into the mud and gravel, just like he had driven over her beige pantsuits, permanent-press skirts, blouses with ruffled collars.
It didn’t kill him; we believed he was too wicked to die. We whispered, “Too bad she didn’t use the truck” as he passed through the dining room on his way to torment someone in the living room, hobbling on crutches, stinking of motor oil and whiskey. Of course, my aunt would have gone to prison, which would have been bad, because she was the respectable one, with a nice hairdo and a job in the shipyard, and she was smart and funny.
ONE BRIGHT, SUNNY DAY I WAS DRIVING ACROSS THE TACOMA Narrows Bridge, Mt. Rainier on the horizon and sailboats far below. I was wearing an electric-blue mini-dress. My hair was long and blond, held back with a chiffon scarf, and my legs were covered with laddered tights, black boots to my knees. I had a boyfriend of rare beauty sitting next to me, and we were driving to Seattle to see a band called Pure Joy.
I reached out to change the radio station and he smacked my hand away. Without pause for thought, my hand curled into a fist and my arm jerked back, up, and with vicious force connected with the face of this pretty boy. Without forethought or planning, without losing control of the car hurtling at fifty miles per hour over a high bridge, I hit him as hard as I could. He held both hands to his face. His voice was muffled and he started to cry. “You broke my nose,” he said.
This was neither the first nor the worst of our many fights. After the episode on the bridge, I would like to say, that was the end, the moment, the signifier. But my courage, the purest and most valiant part of me, did not match my wisdom. I tried to break up with him after a while, and I told him we had broken up, but he didn’t believe me. More important, I had broken one of the most important rules of those who practice domestic violence: I hit above the neck. The arm that struck the blow would have to pay. After that day on the b
ridge, every time we fought, he grabbed my wrist, twisted, shoved—shoved my elbow into a wall with a dull thud, or punched the lee of the joint with a sharp pop. On cold mornings or when the season changes, my arm gets numb, and sometimes there is a flash along the nerve that runs between the smallest finger and the elbow, reminding me of those teenage games.
We were in love, and it was a passionate and enormous love, and the dialectic of our family lives (for his mirrored my own) never taught us how to act any differently, to restrain ourselves, to enjoy the quiet things in life. He touched my scars and said that I was beautiful. We were young and reckless and the sex was good and the laughs were fine and it was delightful, addictive, to be alive.
We broke up eventually out of boredom, because we wanted to kiss other people. My teenage love saga ended with a different boy, years later, an honorable boy inevitably corrupted by the reality of life in a hard poor town and the dangers that befall children when their mothers are not vigilant in protecting them, body and soul. This story ends with a 9-mm handgun held at my right temple, as I looked into the eyes of a boy who would never have hit me. This was our contract, we had figured out that much: He would never hit me, nor would I touch him in anger.
But we were both damaged by our short, fast lives and the inescapable events that brought us to this particular clean moment, standing in a shabby white kitchen of a dank basement apartment, dirty dishes on the counter, school papers scattered everywhere.
In a different kind of story he would be portrayed as shaking with rage, flushed with power, blustering and roiling with emotion. But in real life he was steady and determined, the barrel of the gun pressing against my skin an admonition, a benediction; and I neither doubted his intent nor his ability and willingness to act.
He would argue, “But you had a knife,” and this is true. I had a good knife, a sharp and lethal knife, pressed to his belly, and knew how to use it. Even if I couldn’t survive this fight, I could inflict damage.
I looked at his round young face, pale and freckled, at his brown eyes as he decided exactly when to pull the trigger, and remembered all the other moments of rage, the other fights I had won or lost, and felt a despair deep as any mountain lake. I thought, “This can be the end of all the fighting, it would be so easy.” Simply being alive had been such a terrible war of attrition, I had survived by a narrow margin, and I could have chosen to do so many other things with my hard-won victory. I could have traveled, or learned to sing, could have done anything in the world, and I had chosen this boy and this moment. I had used up all of myself and ended up no more than a mile from my childhood home. I was just on the far side of the same forest. The rage emptied out of me and I was calm. “Put it down,” I said quietly, and I continued looking into the madness of his eyes until his eyelids fluttered and closed, and he stepped away.
ALL OF THE PEOPLE IN THESE STORIES MANAGED TO GROW UP AND settle down and stay together, and eventually, to stop fighting, and still love each other. Or they chose death. But even with the example of many long marriages, fractious but no longer violent, or the wretched uncle eventually tamed and consigned to a wheelchair, or the honest and simple suicides and murders, I could not or would not move beyond the moment with the gun at my temple. That was the end of a specific relationship, but also the end of my rage. It was the last fight.
I walked away from my lover, my family. I stepped out of the diorama, tore up the placard, walked away from the box that contained the scenes of battle. I moved away and started over with a new identity; with a new family; with scores of friends, chosen carefully.
One of my young friends was confiding in me recently about her problems with her lover, and wanted advice, or at least a little perspective. I shrugged and said, “Maybe you should date someone who had a happy childhood.” This is advice I inflicted on myself after the fighting stopped, and ten years of decency has proved worth the effort (and just as exciting). It is not easy, it is in fact harder, to be vulnerable, to be kind.
I’m still attracted to damaged people, the grown-up children of violence, the people who keep secrets and show off lies.
I’m still attracted to damaged people, the grown-up children of violence, the people who keep secrets and show off lies. But I keep them at a certain safe distance, and politely decline to play. I have a strict and repressive code of conduct for myself, and I will not fight, nor debate, nor will I even speak to people who might cause me to fall again, to take that reckless, thoughtless slide down into rage.
Those of us who grew up fighting know one another without telling these stories; we can smell it, maybe, or perhaps see it in the way a hand rests on a table. Maybe we hold our bodies differently; maybe the secret crosses our faces before we even know that we have given it away. I do not consciously try to convey information with my body, but I’ve never been panhandled or harassed on the street. Nobody has ever asked me out on a date or flirted with me in a social setting. I can walk through a large crowd and people move swiftly out of my way.
In this adult life I have had only two opportunities to fight. The first happened several years ago, on a dark night with no moon or stars, a cold night. I had put my baby into the back of the car, buckled the car seat, and was about to get in when I sensed danger. I turned around and a man had materialized, not near the car, but actually standing within the curve of the door. He reached out with both arms and I pulled back my fist and he saw, through the scrim of light from the car, the expression on my face. He pulled his hands back, held them in front of his face, jumped back a foot, stumbled, and apologized before running away into the darkness.
Another day, a dry autumn day, I arrived home with my children and unlocked the door. The living room looked strange; something was missing, and I could see through a doorway that my study had been searched; clothes I had left stacked on the desk were strewn across the floor, wires pulled out of the wall. Standing in the living room I could see that the back door was still locked. I sent the children back outside. I grabbed the nearest possible weapon, a large metal flashlight, and ran up the stairs. My only thought was to find and hurt the person who had invaded my home, who might have hurt us. It wasn’t until I had checked all the closets and stood next to the broken window, the route of entry and escape, that I realized what a foolish choice I had made. My instinct was not to get help, but rather to attack.
This is my meditative discipline: a constant wakeful awareness of danger. My blood contains the secrets, the knowledge of hospital corridors and the threat of injury. I can only offer the most obvious lesson I have learned: that anger feeds rage and rage breeds violence and that people who allow anger to dwell in their bodies and minds perpetuate the cycle. But I’m not didactic about it; I’m not testifying. I don’t really care enough to convince anyone to change. Life is complicated, and if I hadn’t known how to defend myself, I would not have survived. I just want to keep my small family safe and to stay here, laughing, until it is time to go.
SCHOLARSHIP BABY
LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA
“You got one ticket to ride, kid. Don’t blow it.”
—my mother
I BLEW IT.
Scholarship baby, ticket-to-ride holder, geto supastar, grassroots intellectual: So much of who I am is about being my mother’s exceptional daughter. Is about getting my first scholarship at age eight.
Proposition 21/2 cut taxes and destroyed Massachusetts’s public school system, all the teachers under age fifty got fired, and my mama had me in the admissions office of the local one-horse K–12 private school before I could blink. Her voice changed in there, just the way it did when the phone company was on the line. I was so bright and exceptional, so different. She wore her best Filene’s Basement and smiled just right. I got in and stayed till I was eighteen, and it worked; I’d rocked my way to three APs and a $25,000 scholarship to NYU. I was the smart kid in big brown plastic glasses and factory-outlet shoes. I was not gonna be a hairdresser on black beauties like my cousins. Ma
ybe we were back in Wormtown ’cause it was the only place my mother could afford a house, but she was gonna keep snapping at me whenever I said “Wuh-stah,” and keep buying the best secondhand cars she could afford.
But what happens when you don’t grow up to bust outta your hometown into the stars? When you’re the one who gets away, but you don’t? ’Cause if you fuck up your one chance, that’s it. Right?
I’M IN TORONTO, I’M TWENTY-THREE. THERE’S A NATIONAL BORDER between me and my family for a reason. And I am not the lawyer or doctor my parents dreamed was going to cement the deal. I’m still on a visitor’s visa and can’t access the free health care we’d dream about back home. We knew folks who’d drive up to Montreal and scam free prescriptions for Seldane meds from the clinics, but that was before welfare reform, tip lines, and photos on the health cards. I’m sick. I’m in a fucked-up house that has a back yard but is under the power lines and by the tracks. I can’t afford rent or food. I’m working under the table. Make no long-distance calls so the phone won’t be cut off. Use my eyes and smile and voice to make Immigration like me. I’m passing as a slumming, middle-class college kid who’s breezy about the rent to my landlady. I listen to the train chugging by. Walk everywhere. Start eating meat again—for one more dollar, shwarma goes farther than falafel. I don’t use social services. Not gonna look good if I get called for that interview. I’ve got one shot.
“Our generation’s screwed,” this boy I met on the fifty-dollar Toronto–Montréal van said. “We all grew up thinking nobody was gonna ever make money.”