All We Knew But Couldn't Say

by Joanne Vannicola

  I pulled my socks off and put them in my bag with my shoes and walked along the concrete barefoot. It was a hot morning, and the road and sidewalks were spotted with sticky soda, wads of gum, little tuffs of grass poking through the cracks, discarded cigarette butts, and broken glass. The concrete was warm beneath my feet.

  My mother always said things like “Don’t touch the stove burners” and “Look before you cross the road.” I didn’t understand how getting burned or touching the edge of a sharp knife could hurt more than being kicked on my bare-skinned legs by my father.

  I continued to walk along the path to school and came across a pile of broken green glass.

  I stared at the bottle in shards below me and decided to walk through it, gently, as if walking on thin ice, my arms outstretched like I was on a gymnast’s beam, glass slicing into the skin under my feet. I walked on, making bloody footprints all the way to school.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MY PARENTS FINALLY divorced, and child abuse was cited as the reason.

  Living without my father was the greatest blessing. The routine of shows and performances dominated my days. There wasn’t a weeknight that wasn’t filled with dance or theatre, and I was just learning to relax at home, without the threat of violence, when the unthinkable happened — again. He came back.

  First it was for one weekend, and then another, then another, until he was with us every weekend. He wasn’t supposed to be near us according to the social services and divorce agreement. I had been secure in my new freedom and was utterly devastated and confused by his “weekend” visits. He would come and go and stayed in my mother’s bedroom at night, and it would be theirs again as if he hadn’t left. He assumed his previous role, barking orders, expecting breakfast and clean clothes, and expecting his “family” to respond to his commands during his two-day sleepovers.

  He stood over me one Sunday morning while I vacuumed and repeatedly hit me whenever I missed a spot. Then, on one of his weekend visits, I decided to rebel. I knew that he wasn’t supposed to be there, that this was a violation of the court’s order that Mother seemed fine with. It was morning, and I was expected to stay inside to sweep the furnace room and garage. I refused, screaming, “I don’t have to listen to you anymore and you are not allowed to hit me or you’re in big trouble!”

  He muttered something with his backhand up, then walked away from me. I was only nine, but had stood up to this hulking man who towered above me. It had taken a while to find my voice that day. After sitting with the broomstick in the damp, dark space of the furnace room for what felt like an eternity, I decided I would not clean. I practised what I might say over and over in my head. And when he returned to see that I hadn’t swept, he tried to threaten me, but then I found it: courage. He never tried to hit me ever again, and he knew he did not own me anymore, or maybe I finally understood that fact. But it was over.

  What hadn’t ended were his weekend sleepovers. He could not let go of what he thought was his, his right to exert power over the girls and woman he spent time with. But it was more than that. I heard them making noise behind the closed bedroom door. One afternoon, I tried to make myself scarce when they emerged. I stayed inside the house, watched cartoons in the basement. I heard Mother holler, “We’re going to go grocery shopping and to the hardware store. You be good!” It meant there would be enough time to rummage in that bedroom.

  I’m not certain why I believed I would find a clue to the strange weekend sleepovers I despised, or why my mother thought it was acceptable after the court case and the drama of exposing physical abuse. It made no sense that she, a woman who had packed up a car to escape with her children, had taken him back and then gone through an actual divorce years later only to repeat the pattern of letting him back in on weekends. But it wasn’t about safety, protecting us from violence. The courts said he needed to be removed and that he was not to come to our home, that we were to visit with him outside of the home. Breaking the rules didn’t matter.

  I went to her bedroom, the painted ballerina on the wall my only witness. I opened the closets and searched through the bedside table. I opened a wooden drawer at the bottom of a wardrobe unit to find a few dozen books and magazines hidden away. There were images of naked grown-ups and little blue reading books. When I opened them and tried to read some of the passages, words like cock stood out. It was her secret drawer. I muttered to myself in disgust and let the blue books drop back into their hiding place like garbage.

  I told Lou about my findings, tried to usher her into the room when Mother wasn’t there. She helped put the pieces of the puzzle together: that they were having sex behind those doors at night, and in the morning, or whenever the doors were closed.

  The scenario of the abused wife with children was real, only my mother was more interested in satisfying her own desires than in protecting her children. This wasn’t new. It was just more overt. Only, she never said a word in explanation, which left me constantly attempting to reorder reality so I could find solid ground. I couldn’t.

  It was hard to make sense out of abusive parents. Wasted time.

  One night we were silently eating dinner with him at our table. He lifted his backhand to demonstrate that he was going to hit our mother. He didn’t, but Lou and I looked at each other and I screamed, not out of fear, but out of rage. I grabbed my fork and knife, one in each hand, banged them on the table beside my plate, and just howled like an animal. Oddly, nothing happened. My father smirked as if it were a joke. Lou stared, and my mother ignored me for a while until she finally screamed, “That’s enough!”

  I stood and left the table. After that weekend, the sex visits ceased, and Dad never came back.

  Lou and I visited him in his basement apartment, but it was a forced visitation. He wanted to see us, though I don’t know why. At first we saw him on holidays or for family events, but by the time I turned ten, he would disappear. Years later, when we resumed minimal contact, he said Mother kept us from him. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. I don’t know, and I simply didn’t care.

  No one asked what I wanted, ever. If he had asked, I would have told him that I didn’t want to see him and I didn’t want to live with my mother, but no one ever asked me anything. I knew that both my parents were disturbed; I just didn’t know how to speak that truth. Or who to speak it to.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WE MOVED AGAIN when I was eleven. I left some of my toys and the altar to Sadie under the porch.

  We moved from a suburb of Montreal to NDG, or Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, an area with a large Italian and European immigrant population mixed in with some local French-Canadian homeowners. We rented an apartment in a house, only this time it was just my mother, Lou, and I. Diego had already left for college. The move happened in the middle of sixth grade for me, and now I was the new girl. My social life was non-existent in this place where some very hard-core Italian eleven-year-olds owned the hallways and the yard. I didn’t want to mess with them.

  I didn’t fit in, and my mother didn’t help. She sent me to school with rollers in my hair for auditions or recitals. I hid in lockers and tried to convince myself that I would be a star, that the other children were unimportant and this was the sacrifice for this unknown thing called fame. I had Big Bird and studios. I had the stage. That’s what this was for.

  But I would say no to the rollers after a particularly gruelling bullying session with the mean girl, Maria.

  “I’ll see you in the courtyard after school,” she said one day during lunch.

  I tried to run home when school was out, but the entire sixth grade encircled me. Then Maria joined me in the middle. I held my books and tried to exit the circle, but it was meant to be some sort of ritual, of children following the orders of the loudest, of the leader. “Roller-face. Idiot. Fight. Fight. Fight.” It was all I heard, the chanting. My books were pushed out of my arms and Maria’s fists went up.

  “Fight! Fight! Fight!” everyone screamed.

  Then a lone
boy broke the chain, hollering, “Leave her alone. Run!”

  It seemed a brave act for one child in the face of the mob, but it worked. His defence of me broke the curse that day. After that, I tried to remain as invisible as possible.

  But then there was my mother.

  I was embarrassed by her, by her 350 pounds, shameful of me as that was. People gawked at her as if she had a disease or were lazy. She was neither lazy nor diseased, just damaged, and her layers of body weight were the result.

  Mother always heard the classic phrases that large women were told, like “You have such a beautiful face.” She was never consoled by these backhanded compliments. They were hurtful. To her and to me.

  When children called her horrible things like “fat ass,” or when they would ask if she had eaten a house, I would scream back “Shut up!” or “Mind your own business!” Sometimes Mother and I would just pretend we didn’t hear anything. But I didn’t want her to drive me to school. It was hard enough making friends and I didn’t want to give the children additional ammunition to make fun of or bully me.

  But separating from my mother was like skinning an animal. One day, when she drove me to school, I asked her to drop me off a block away from the building. She stopped, turned the engine off, looked right into my eyes with such vulnerability and asked, “Is it because I’m fat?”

  It was.

  “No, it’s not that.… I just don’t want them to think I’m a baby. Don’t want to be dropped off by my mother. I want to seem more grown-up.”

  She never drove me again. I walked every day after that exchange and felt enormous guilt. I tried to cover, protect her feelings, but I’m not so sure she believed me. I would never do it again either, ask her to hide or not be seen; well, actually, I would ask her to go away many times as I got older, but it had nothing to do with her body size.

  My mother’s two escapes were food and me — specifically, my growing career. I had been taking acting-for-camera lessons, and she was submitting me for television and film auditions as my “manager.” My first movie was called Hard Feelings, directed by Daryl Duke, when I was eleven going on twelve. I flew to Atlanta and North Carolina, was put up in hotels, and had a taste of what an actor’s life could be like away from my hometown.

  The movie was set in the sixties, with props and clothing of the era. It was like a human version of a dollhouse, with life-sized furniture that would be swapped out depending on the scene: dining tables in place of living room couches, walls that went down and up, and interior worlds that came to life with all of us actors placed on our marks inside our make-believe house. Large cameras with rolls of 35 mm film, massive set lights, microphones, and crew — makeup, hair, wardrobe — were scattered everywhere.

  We did take after take of scenes in close-up, medium, and wide shots. It was magic, like The Wizard of Oz come to life. I bought yellow pants and my first cowboy hat with my per diem, which was the only pay I would see, because the cheques were made out to my manager, not to me. The union had yet to protect children in the seventies and eighties.

  I wore those yellow pants with pride, along with my “Kiss me, I’m Italian” T-shirt, until Mother said, “You need to work on wearing smaller pant sizes.” She had noticed my yellow pants were getting a little tight and told me I was getting big. I didn’t want her sizing me up. It took so little to humiliate me at that age (at any age), and if wearing my favourite yellow pants inspired negative commentary or her horrible gaze, then those yellow pants were better off left folded and hidden in my dresser drawer for good.

  “You’re getting fat,” my mother said another day, more directly, leaning over the couch where I was listening to Queen on the record player.

  I entered the music, raged as loud as the hard rock that bounced off the walls from the speakers. She was base. She was beneath the lowest sound I could make, an unreachable mother whose body was four times the size of mine. She was like the entire wild pack of sixth-graders circling me. I was determined to ascend somehow, to lift out and away from her clutches and her objectification of my body. Perhaps she was blurting out her innermost fears or hatred about fat. It would backfire.

  “Get away from me.” I swatted her with my hand while my body seized and stiffened on the couch. If I could have punched her I would have, but I shunned her instead.

  She stood up, wounded like a shot deer, and limped away to her bedroom.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MARTHA WAS MY drama teacher and had been for five years. She was adored by the adults and students alike. She wasn’t shy, and no discussions were off-limits. Martha had no kid filter. Conversations included theatre, productions, the Beatles, war, penises, breasts and vaginas, and sex and more sex. She was everything my mother was not. She wore scarves and turtlenecks with skirts, leg warmers, and sneakers; she had long, thick black hair and shiny eyes like buffed obsidian stones; and she chain-smoked her Rothmans cigarettes. Martha was magnetic, and I was drawn to her. Mother was, too, always extending dinner invitations or offering to make costumes for all the students. Martha founded her own theatre company.

  I was twelve years old when our family moved again, and I was in the car with Martha when we pulled into the lot outside our new building: a high-rise on a bus strip with a concrete underpass beneath the train tracks. Moving schools and apartments was becoming a habit.

  I was going to be auditioning for Juilliard, and Martha would be my coach. The two of us sat at the kitchen table with my mother, talking about New York, monologue choices, and photo sessions. This was the beginning of the triangle between Martha, Mother, and me. I didn’t know anything about Juilliard, but the idea of going to New York was exciting.

  The following morning I was barely awake, sitting at the table with my Wheaties sprinkled with sugar, when Mother entered to make an announcement. “I’ve arranged for you to have image-consultant lessons with Sylvia.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. I was twelve, barely knew I had an image, or who I was even, but the increasingly magnified attention on my body was becoming emotionally dangerous. I screamed that I would not have my image consulted with anyone, but she carried on.

  “Oh yes, you are, young lady, and she’s on her way.” My mother pointed at me, then poured herself a Coca-Cola while I ate.

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  “But why didn’t you ask me?”

  “Because you would have argued like you’re doing now.”

  I stared at her with defiance. Whatcha gonna do about it? You can’t make me do this image stuff, what! “What?”

  “Don’t you ‘what’ me, young lady, or I’ll get your father to come over here to deal with you.”

  “Fuck you, Helen.” She hated that I had started to call her by her first name, let alone that I had started swearing at her.

  “Do you think you can talk to me like that and get away with it?” Mother was agitated, shaking.

  “I’ll talk to you how I like.”

  “You watch your mouth.” Her voice broke and she turned away from me, digging dishes out of the drying rack, clinking and cracking, her fingers clenched around ceramic, reaching up to put them in cupboards while her hands shook.

  “And if someone needs their image consulted, it’s you.” I stared at her without flinching.

  “Why don’t you care about me?” she asked.

  “No one cares about you.”

  I had crossed the line, but it was too late, I couldn’t take the words back. The doorbell rang. Mother wiped her teary eyes without saying a word.

  It was the image consultant, Sylvia. She was round and she wore baggy black clothes. She dropped some books on the table; one of them was titled The History of Costumes.

  It was a long hour.

  “Did you know that the perfect size for a woman is thirty-six for the bust, twenty-six for the waist, and thirty-five inches for the hips?”

  She told me she would measure and weigh me every week as part of our “lesson
s.” The goal was to work toward the ideal size of a woman. She pulled out the yellow measuring tape that first day, while my half-eaten cereal sat on the table in front of me. She chattered on about how eating cereal was okay but sprinkling sugar on top was not, and on and on until she wrapped the tape around my rigid body to evaluate my imperfections. I sucked in my waist before she said “twenty-eight inches.”

  It confirmed how fat I was — two inches bigger than the perfect female size. I held in my breath and looked down to hide my quivering lip.

  The following week I locked myself in the bathroom as the hour passed. Sylvia got paid to sit at the kitchen table in silence, but I didn’t get measured. I lay in the tub fully dressed while Sylvia knocked on the door. She eventually left.

  I called myself names inside my head — ugly and fat — desperately wanting to get rid of something inside myself, be rid of everything inside me; not just food, but the memories of childhood, of sisters screaming or the mewl of helpless kittens being bludgeoned to death, of my mother’s obsession with me. I shook and couldn’t catch my breath, wasn’t able to control my body or mind. I dropped to the floor and rocked back and forth, overwhelmed by fear, and in that instant I was back in the kitchen where my father was pulling me off the kitchen floor by my hair with his large hands and kicking my bare skin with his Kodiak boots. I didn’t know that I was twelve and not eight, didn’t know that I was on the floor of my bathroom and not on the kitchen floor being beaten.

  Flashbacks. They were new to me. Before the age of twelve, I hadn’t experienced flashbacks, and I had no idea what they were. I believed I was going crazy. After regaining control of my breath and opening my eyes, I remembered where I was. My limbs were numb; my head and face felt disconnected from my spine. I shook my legs to regain feeling and finally stood up, aware of my surroundings.

  I paced in the washroom, wanted to scratch my skin. I did. Scratched and scratched until deep red marks appeared on my arms. I opened the medicine cabinet and found a razor, grabbed it, and thinly sliced across my wrist, producing a tiny red mark. I focused on it, sat on top of the toilet seat in a type of haze, and was calm again.