by Julie Barton
With each hit or kick, Clay yelled obscenities like “Fucking bitch! I’m going to fucking rip your head off!” I saw the top left panel of the door splinter first, and then the whole thing came off its hinges. The door split from the doorjamb and drifted inward, landing with a barely perceptible thud onto my lime-green carpet. A tree falling in the forest. He lunged at me on my white wicker bed with the eyelet sheets, punching my arms, pinning me down, and adjusting his fist so his middle knuckle stuck out as he punched the same spot over and over again. I slid down, my head pressed so hard against the flowered wallpaper that one ear began to ring. My hair snagged on the wicker headboard.
I couldn’t push him away. He was over six feet tall at thirteen years old, and overweight. “Get off me!” I screamed and pushed, but my strength was one-third of his.
He spat in my eyes before standing up. “You’re lucky I didn’t kill you,” he said. “Because I could, you know.” I sat up on my bed, trying to look defiant, patting down my tangled hair. He faked another punch that landed inches from my face. I flinched, my hands pushing out into the air, reaching nothing. When I opened my eyes, he was walking away.
I don’t know where Clay went after the fight. Maybe he was hiding because my fallen bedroom door was proof of his rage. I tiptoed past his bedroom then sprinted down the long hallway to my parents’ room. “Mom!” I screamed, as soon as I heard the swish of a drawer opening in her bedroom. “Clay broke my door! My whole entire door! He knocked it down!”
She was peeling off dirty gardening clothes. Each autumn, she spent entire weekends raking up every fallen leaf on our three acres. She had a thin film of sweat on her face. Flecks of dirt and leaves clung to her skin and hair. “Just stay away from him,” she sighed. She took a towel and held it to her face, pulling in a deep breath. My mother hated our fighting. She didn’t understand it and couldn’t make us stop.
I didn’t say anything else. I sat on her bed while she undressed in silence and stepped into her bathroom’s powder-blue-tiled shower. I borrowed a nail clipper from my dad’s nightstand and began trimming my toenails, careful not to leave the cuttings on their flowered comforter.
Later, when Clay left for a friend’s house and it was safe to return to my bedroom, I found my door still lying on the carpet like a fallen soldier that had tried but failed to protect me. As I maneuvered to step over the split open wood, something caught my eye. Jagged graffiti was scrawled on my doorjamb: “Loser,” “Lesbian,” “Whore,” and “Everyone Hates You.” I gasped. I was upset that he’d written these words, but more terrified that someone might see them. Because what Clay thought about me, I thought about myself. He was older, stronger, smarter. I had no proof of anything else, and I feared that my parents and friends would see the graffiti and agree with him. I grabbed an eraser from my desk but couldn’t rub away the words. Clay had written in pen and with such pressure that the letters were carved into the wood.
PARTIAL ECLIPSE, NEW YORK CITY
APRIL 17, 1996
My mom stood in my doorway, and the sight of her was the only thing that made sense: her light-blue eyes, her small, industrious hands, her smell so familiar, like coffee, bed sheets, and perfume. She hugged me, squeezed tight, but I was too weak to return the gesture.
“How are you?” she said, holding me at the small of my back. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I need to lie down,” I said, turning away. I limped down the stairs to the bed. She put her purse on the floor and followed me.
“Can you tell me what happened?” she said, sitting on the edge of my mattress.
“Not really.” I got under the covers, still wearing only a towel. The overhead lights hurt my eyes so I kept them closed. “I’m just so, so tired.”
I was tired, but also terrified. I knew that something had happened, but all I could think about was that I did not know what I was going to do with my life. I’d be back in Ohio, in my parents’ house, with no job, no boyfriend, no prospects, no friends, no future.
“Okay, honey,” she said. “You sleep.”
“Okay,” I said, noting a whisper of relief that I wasn’t alone before falling into the fainting sleep.
When I awoke, my apartment smelled like coffee, something I didn’t drink. I squinted and saw my mom trying to sponge-clean my bathroom as quietly as possible. When I shifted, she put down the coffee and cleaning supplies and came to me. She sat on the mattress’s edge, like she had so many times when I was a child, and she pushed the hair away from my face, behind my ear. With that small gesture, my chin quivered and tears came.
“You’ve been asleep for three hours,” she said. “I’ve already started packing your things. You need to go tell your boss you’re leaving.” She gave me a smile and then turned back to work on the bathroom.
My mom is always smiling. She’s only five feet, four inches tall but truly capable of pretty much any physical task. I’ve seen her rip out entire bushes with four-foot deep roots using only her pink-garden-gloved hands. I’ve seen her hack a snake in half with a hoe. I’ve watched her, for years, mow her own multi-acre lawn with a John Deere tractor mower—her long hair pushed inside a baseball cap. She’s not afraid to get dirt under her fingernails, but she also likes to put on a dress and go to a party. Her brown hair has always been long, at least a few inches past her shoulders. She’s got periwinkle-blue eyes and was the college homecoming queen at the football game at which my father caught the winning touchdown. She wears perfume almost daily, Estée Lauder’s Knowing. That smell, to me, is unconditional love. And even though things were moving fast, I knew that if I followed her simple directions, she would take care of me. Things might even be okay.
The thing was, this was 1996. Mental illness wasn’t much talked about then. My parents had no idea what major clinical depression was, nor did I. Bad days? Sure. In a rough patch? Of course. But something medically wrong? We were going to have to find our way to that diagnosis by letting the blackness come way, way too close to our doorstep.
With my mother’s help, I managed to get up and get dressed. I took a cab to SoHo to tell my boss I was quitting. I felt like I was walking on rubber bands, but I made it. It was 3 p.m. when I wandered quietly into the office after missing a day and a half of work. My boss greeted me with a glance that read “Where on earth have you been?” I tried to calmly explain that I was quitting, but instead I burst into hysterical sobs saying, “Something’s happened. I need to leave. I have to go. I’m leaving New York.”
He had no idea what to say except, “Okay. Calm down.” I left ten minutes later after a cursory explanation of my desk and files, apologizing through tears.
I rode the subway back uptown. I took the train because hailing a cab seemed too difficult a task. Again, I imagined that every subway passenger found my flaws repulsive: my pimples, my damaged hair and tear-streaked cheeks. Except this time, I decided to look up. I took an inventory of these people, knowing that I would not ride the subway again for a very long time. Everyone was frowning. Connection, that thing I was longing for so desperately, was forbidden in Manhattan’s underground. It was as if we were all different ions bouncing around, too negatively charged to connect in any way. Long ago, my mind had turned the anonymity and disconnection of the subway inward. The thoughts chimed in: Why would anyone want to look at you anyway? You’re awful and stupid and your face is hideous.
The train screeched to a stop at 86th Street and I slid sideways through the barely opened doors. I kept my head down and walked back to my apartment wishing I could fall into the concrete and melt away. My thoughts veered dark again: Just step out into the street into the path of that yellow cab. It’ll be so easy. You’ll be knocked out and won’t feel anything. But I knew my mom was waiting for me.
When I rounded the corner onto 82nd Street, I saw that she had packed my entire apartment and somehow managed to drag my crappy furniture out to the sidewalk for passersby to tak
e. Leave it to my small but formidable mother to figure out a way to pack an entire apartment, including a bunny in a cage, into a car in one short afternoon. I walked inside and there was nothing left, just a few dust balls, wires, and the burnt pot in the kitchen. I wanted to sit down on that floor and weep. But my mom grabbed my hand, twisted the doorknob so it would lock, tossed the keys on the floor, and heaved the door shut.
We walked down the steps to her car, double-parked and already running. “Hop in,” she said, holding me by my waist. “We’ll be home soon.”
I climbed into her car in slow motion. She reclined the passenger seat of the SUV and buckled me in as I cried. She didn’t ask what was wrong. She just pushed my hair behind my ear in the way that made me feel like a child again, safe in bed with the trees and deer and moon outside my room to protect me. Tears dripped into my ears and down my neck as we drove out of Manhattan. I was asleep before we left the city.
Here’s part of why my road to despair is confusing: most of the time, my parents showed up. If I had a crisis at school, my dad would drop his papers, leave work, and race to find me. That happened once in high school after I failed a French exam. After I called him in tears, my dad sped to my school, picked me up, and took me out for doughnuts and chocolate milk, reminding me that my grade on a dumb French test would not dictate my future. And when I was seventeen, after I lost my virginity and was convinced I was pregnant, my mom took me to the drugstore to buy the right kind of test after the cheaper test I’d bought yielded a positive result. Throughout the whole ordeal, she was calm, kind, and understanding. I remember her holding my hand.
These were, by many measures, phenomenal parents. So why hadn’t they helped when it came to the violent fights between their children? I still don’t know the answer to this question. I have many theories, but the fact is that even the most wonderful, caring, kind, well-meaning parents can make mistakes. Theirs was a mistake of inattention. It was a crime of omission. I guess they just didn’t know how.
• • •
At four days old, a puppy is still in complete darkness. His eyes haven’t opened, his range of movement is small, his only goal warmth and food. He fights his siblings to get to his mother’s belly and then follows his nose to an unoccupied teat. When he finds it, he pulls with all his might, yanking and clawing in an effort to stimulate milk. His mama’s nipples are reddened, stretched to ten times their normal size, swollen, and full. But she knows that her puppies need her. They need endless love and care from their mother, and they bark and bite and scratch her until they exhaust themselves. Of course the mother tolerates almost all of it. She’ll lie with her eyes closed, her vulnerable abdomen exposed, breathing fast and hard but keeping perfectly still so her fragile little babies can get what they need to grow up and survive in the world. Much of it is instinct; the rest is pure love.
WANING MAGIC, OHIO
1984
As a child, I talked to trees. I had a best-friend tree, a century-old beech that I’d named “Alice.” If you’d asked me when I was eight, I would’ve told you that Alice was like my great-grandma. She loved me most of all. She wanted me to visit every day. She talked to me kindly. She left me presents: five happy ladybugs, a monarch circling her trunk. She told me not to worry, that everything would be okay.
I spent whole days wandering alone through the farmland near our house. I’d pack a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a paper bag, then cut through the Killians’ yard across the street and slip under the stretched-out barbed-wire fence. Once I got under that fence, there was nothing but cornfields, forests, farmland, and safety.
Just past the first cornfield to the right, tucked away as if forgotten, sat Lehman’s Pond, a tiny body of water brimming with wildlife: frogs, fish, snakes, birds, snails, bugs. There was an old abandoned barn there, or maybe it was a field worker’s house. It sat nearly over the pond, stood two stories tall, though one whole wall had fallen off exposing the rotting stairway and flimsy construction. Parts of the wood were still painted red and white. I could sit in the barn with my feet dangling off the rotting floor and my toes would touch the pond’s water. For hours I would read, nap, skip rocks, or catch frogs.
Next to Lehman’s Pond lived a grove of tall pine trees planted in four rows. Those trees, at least fifty years old, created this magical outdoor room with branches for a ceiling and a pine needle carpet that muted all the sounds of the forest. If I sat there long enough, quiet enough, I could hear nothing—and everything. I could hear a bird landing on a branch. I could hear a leaf fall to the ground. A hummingbird passing through sounded like the turn of a speeding bicycle wheel.
Once, after sitting for some time, I heard the hoof-fall crackle of a mama deer wandering through with her fawn. When she noticed me, she froze, a dark black eye sparkling. She led her fawn around me, not ten feet from my scabby knees, toward the pond for a sip of water. Her fawn’s legs were impossibly thin, the white spots on his back still prominent. His little tail flitted to attention. His hooves were barely the size of a tube of Chapstick. He watched me warily as he crossed the pine grove. Then, in the clearing, he stopped. We locked eyes for what seemed like an eternity. Something passed between us. Something that I decided was magical. I believed then that I could talk to him. He understood me. Animals understood me. The thought was enormously comforting. I had an ally. The fawn turned and caught up with his mama, and they jumped into the rows of corn and out of sight.
I wasn’t yet ten years old, and I felt so connected to the land, to the trees, to the animals passing by. I considered myself one of them—part of nature’s tribe, the people of the woods, the birds, the frogs, the moon, the deer, the owls, our family dog. They were my companions, my reliable source of solace.
In the winter, there was no one to play with on quiet weekends but Alice. When it was too cold to go out and be with her, I worried. One particularly frigid winter afternoon, I watched Alice swaying in the icy blast of a snowstorm. I imagined what it would be like to have my fingers exposed, fifty feet high, all winter long. Such an existence would be too awful; I needed to do something.
I pulled two of my baby blankets out of my closet and went to the garage and pulled on my snow boots. Outside I had to blink to keep my eyelashes from sticking with freeze. I struggled with the blankets but managed to snag the fabric on her bark and walk around her trunk. I tied two corners of the blankets together then safety-pinned the other side. She looked like she was wearing a too-small apron, but I wrapped my arms around her anyway. “I hope this helps, Alice,” I whispered. “Spring will come soon.” I patted her and ran back inside.
For days, I paused in the dining room, watching her from inside the house, her blankets soon crusted with ice. While I huddled under several layers of blankets at night, I feared that the sound of the wind or the crackling of branches was the beginning of Alice’s demise. If she fell, she wouldn’t crush our house, but the tips of her branches might graze the windows, as if to try to grasp us, to ask us to save her, even though she knew there was nothing we could do as she fell to her death.
MEN, KENYON COLLEGE & NEW YORK CITY
WINTERS 1994 AND 1995
If my conflicted relationship with my brother cracked the foundation of my self-worth, my New York boyfriend, Will, was the final invasion of termites that left the whole structure condemned. I met him at an apartment party when I was a junior in college. He was a senior with a goatee and a long brown ponytail: not my type at all. I was into extra-handsome bad boys, rugged-looking men who didn’t talk much and would take me home and have their way with me. Aloof men were good. Men who blew off their girlfriends for fraternity brothers were no problem for me. Men who wanted sex and lots of it but then ignored me in the cafeteria were fine. Men were men; I expected desertion and mistreatment.
At this party, Will sat next to me as a group of about six of us played poker. His voice was sexy, deep, and resounding, but I wasn’t into the sensi
tive ponytail look. Which is why it was odd when I leaned my elbow on his leg to grab a card from the table and felt an electric connection. We looked at each other; we’d both felt the jolt.
A few days later I ran into Will at the bookstore. I didn’t recognize him in the sobering light of day. He was skinny, six feet tall, and probably weighed less than me. His pants practically fell off when he stood up to say hello.
“Hey, Julie. I’ve been looking for you. Want to go to the Philander’s Phling with me?”
I laughed, sure he was joking. Who invites a girl to a dance in college? The look on his face told me this was no joke, and I was an asshole.
“Oh!” I said. “Uh, okay.”
“Great,” he said. “I’ll meet you outside of Peirce Hall at 9 p.m. sharp. Saturday. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, walking away. I waved, cursing myself for not thinking of a quick excuse.
Philander Chase was the founder of Kenyon College. His namesake party was an annual dance held in an effort to beat the February (Phebruary) blahs. Dorks and dweebs made plans to go to Philander’s Phling. Cool kids showed up half wasted and underdressed. I wanted to identify in the latter camp, but I couldn’t be rude. So I put on an old strapless black dress with a ruffle around the knee that I’d worn to countless dances in high school and showed up at 9 p.m., shivering in high heels and panty hose in the dark of an Ohio winter night.
My friends thought it was good that I was branching out. They were tired of me pining for my ex-boyfriend, Brian, the boy I’d dated from the first month of my freshman year on and off through my junior year. I loved him in that first-love kind of way, the desperate, once-in-a-lifetime bliss of falling for someone for the very first time. But as far as my friends were concerned, Brian had treated me with such disrespect that they could not make sense of why I would pine for him. Our relationship was passionate and dysfunctional. We exchanged handwritten letters with tearstains blurring the words. He was a beautiful boy: green eyes with straight dark hair, a state champion runner, six feet tall with shoulders twice as wide as mine. His legs were long and lean, and his attention to me was inconsistent and intoxicating. There were cheating scandals both during our relationship and after we’d broken up. We’d see each other at a party and fall into bed again, just for a night. I’d pray that in the morning he would confess his undying love, say our breakup was the biggest regret of his life. But in the harsh light of day, he’d say, “You should probably just go.”