by Ninie Hammon
“ … that I don’t even know about.”
“Karen said dealing with childhood abuse was a two-step process. First, you have to face what happened—in your case, remember what happened. And then you have to come to terms with that reality.”
“One, two, badda bing, badda boom.”
“I didn’t mean to make it sound like I thought it was easy. I know it’s not. It could take years of psychotherapy to work through issues like these.” He stopped, knew he was about to drip water into hot grease. “Anne, you shouldn’t be going at this on your own. You need professional help.”
Now there’s a novel suggestion.
“Why? What’s the worst that could happen? I’ll remember everything, and it will be horrible. You think it will be any less horrible to remember if I’m lying on some shrink’s couch? Seeing the images of some man …" I shuddered and couldn’t finish the sentence. “Remembering is going to be an indescribably awful experience no matter where or when it happens.”
“The worst that can happen? You want worst case scenario? Karen said sexuality is the nuclear material of the human psyche. If it wasn’t just Windy, if whatever happened to you was sexual, too … Anne, some women suffer a complete mental breakdown.”
He was looking at the skinny, Christmas-ornament-fragile woman in front of him and surely thinking if ever there was a prime candidate for mental collapse, she was it.
“What choice do I have? Do I just go back to my life drawing children’s art with eyes peering out of it?” He didn’t get it and I didn’t bother to explain. “I’ve come too far. The only way out of this tunnel is through it.”
I was already in the closet. Unless I grabbed the Boogie Man and dragged him out into the light, I’d have to stay there in the purple dark forever.
“Anne, will you just talk to her?” His concern was coming out as exasperation, and I couldn’t blame him. “Maybe not Karen, but someone who specializes in this kind of thing. Just once? What have you got to lose? Like you say, what’s the worst that could happen?”
There was silence, but he refused to break it, just let it get uncomfortable.
“OK, maybe. If it means so much to you, Dusty, I’ll think about it. But I’m not making any promises.”
“I’ll call Karen and get the names of a couple of people she recommends. She’s gone for a long weekend, but should be back in her office Tuesday or Wednesday. A good psychiatrist can get at the truth a lot quicker than you can on your own.” There was relief in his voice. “They have ways to help you remember.”
I’ve got ways, too. Her name’s Bobo.
Bobo was awake when I got home. She’d been to bed, but she was up again, wandering around. All the downstairs lights were on.
Light at night; dark in the daytime—go figure.
She was in the kitchen, nibbling at a sandwich. I guess you could call it a sandwich. There were two pieces of bread but there was nothing in between. She had lit the Yankee candle she’d placed on the kitchen windowsill the day I brought the three of them home, and it sent out a pleasant vanilla fragrance. The second candle sat in the middle of the sideboard in the dining room, and the third rested on the parlor mantel. She kept them all lit most of the time, said she liked the smell, though I’m sure she wouldn’t have known they had a smell if I hadn’t told her.
On the way home in Dusty’s car, I’d hit a wall. Exhausted. Hammered by one emotional blow after another, beginning with Bobo telling me my mother was an alcoholic and my little brother had suffered alcohol brain damage.
Was it only this morning? Seems like weeks ago.
I’d managed to compartmentalize the information. Using Scarlet O’Hara as my psychic role model, I shoved all the really bad stuff into an I’ll-think-about-that-tomorrow trunk, and sat down on the lid. But when I saw Bobo there with her robe on wrong side out, everything that happened in Dusty’s office reared up and knocked me off the trunk.
“Bobo, I need to talk to you.”
I sat down in the chair next to her and should have realized right then it was a lost cause. She had that vague look she got when she went on trips with Edgar. But there was such an urgency in me I didn’t care. With reckless abandon, I reached out and squeezed the soap.
“Did somebody abuse Windy and me when we were little?”
“There’s not much chicken left. I need to go out and get that red hen that’s not laying and wring her neck.”
“Bobo, listen to me. Look at me!” I realized I was almost shouting, but I did get her attention.
“I’m looking.” She focused on me. “You got a red spot on that pretty blue sweater. Looks like taco sauce.”
“Bobo, I gave the pictures out of the attic to Dusty.”
“The short guy in the uniform?”
He’s not short!
“Yeah, the sheriff, and he had the artwork analyzed by a child psychologist. The shrink said the pictures showed that Windy and I were being abused. Were we? Did you see it?”
“Well, you got your little butts tanned ever' now and then if that’s what you mean.”
“Abuse Bobo! Some man—men!—were … doing things to Windy when she was at her mother’s house and—”
“She’d come here all tore up, wettin’ and messin’ her pants, but Susan didn’t have no sympathy a’tall for the poor little thing.”
“Bobo, it wasn’t just at her mother’s. Something was happening here, too.”
“What was happening here?”
“I don’t know! That’s why I’m asking you.” I was shouting; Bobo was bewildered. “Something happened to me here. Maybe a man … Jericho or a neighbor …"
I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. And what were the words anyway? Abused? Molested? Sexually assaulted?
“Maybe Jericho … abused me. Or maybe I saw him—or somebody else—abuse Windy. But something horrible happened. It either happened to me or I saw it. I have to know what it was.”
Bobo looked away. Her raspy voice was so soft I could barely hear her. “Wasn’t Jericho. He didn’t do nothing. Why do you have to go digging 'round—?”
“If I don’t, I’ll go nuts.” I wasn’t shouting anymore. I was screaming. “The shrink said so. A complete mental collapse. If I can’t work through all this, resolve it, I’ll have some kind of breakdown. You have to tell me!”
Bobo’s eyes were open so wide the white showed around the twin wells of murky blue staring out at me from the bottom of sunken hollows of wrinkles. And I suddenly realized I’d taken her thin shoulders in my hands and was about to shake her! I instantly let go, horrified, stepped back and collapsed in the chair.
“Oh, Bobo, I’m sorry.” My voice was an anguished croak. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Game over. I’m done.
I had to go to bed, get some sleep, deal with all this in the morning. I got up and started out of the kitchen, Bobo’s voice trailing after me.
“You all scart you’re going to have a mental collapse—’pears to me you done had one.”
Maybe she was right.
Chapter 13
I stretched out on the patchwork quilt covering the feather mattress on my bed. Lay on my back, arms spread, just to rest for a few minutes so I could summon the strength to get up, put on my nightgown, brush my …
I opened my eyes. It was morning. I was lying where I’d fallen, a soldier clipped by a sniper.
I undressed and stood for a long time in a hot shower. The water turned my skin scarlet. I let it run into my face, and the steam seemed to clear my head. I was ashamed and embarrassed by my behavior the previous night. I slipped into jeans and a chambray shirt and went downstairs looking for Bobo. Julia wouldn’t be here today so it was just the two of us. I was glad. I needed some time alone with Bobo to apologize, to make it up to her for what I’d said and done.
She was not in the kitchen; I could hear her out back with the chickens. But she had set my breakfast out for me. Grape Nuts in a cereal bowl, sugar already sprinkled on top, and a
small glass of orange juice. My eyes filled with tears. I bet she didn’t even remember that I came home raving like a lunatic last night, screamed in her face and grabbed her.
I’d just finished my cereal when Bobo came in with a metal bucket full of eggs. She was limping a little today. Either the arthritis in her hip was bothering her or her shoes were on the wrong feet.
“Can I get you some cereal, Bobo?”
“You know I can’t chew that kitty litter.”
Kitty litter. Bad sign.
“No, I mean some Rice Krispies. I’d be glad to pour you some.”
“I ain’t eating cereal this morning 'cause there’s not any cereal fit to eat in the house. Besides, the milk’s blinky.”
Why would Bobo care about the milk? The milk was always going bad. She’d drink it with clots in it the size of Greenland if Julia and I didn’t pour it out.
Bad milk explained why my cereal had tasted funny, but I could come up with no explanation for why she set cereal out for me in the first place if she knew the milk was sour.
“Well, thanks for getting my breakfast ready for me,” I tried to sound as conciliatory as possible. “That was sweet of you, Bobo.”
She stopped putting the eggs in the little trays in the refrigerator, turned and looked at me.
“You ain’t making no more sense this morning than you was last night.”
“About last night. Bobo, I’m sorry for what I said and did. I really am. I was just on overload, too much to process, Mama’s drinking, those pictures.”
“Pictures? What pictures?”
I sighed.
“Anyway, I apologize for how I acted. I don’t have any excuse.”
“Aw, don’t worry about it. You’s just having a mental breakdown, that’s all.”
I burst out laughing. Bobo was a riot! I laughed so hard I got tears in my eyes.
“What so funny 'bout going crazy?”
She said the line absolutely deadpan, like she really meant it, and I doubled over in my chair howling. I kept laughing until my sides ached and I was out of breath. But as soon as I started to wind down, it hit me again and I roared.
Bobo stood there staring at me, and the look on her face …
That put me totally over the top! I literally fell out of the chair in hysterics and rolled around on the floor laughing. The stitch in my side hurt worse than the time I had appendicitis, but I couldn’t stop laughing. I just went on and on. I could barely catch my breath I was laughing so hard. Tears ran down my face.
After a while, it was not even funny anymore. But I kept laughing anyway. I was exhausted. I ached from the effort, but I couldn’t stop. It was like when you’re so cold that your teeth are chattering and you can’t make them stop even when you clench your jaws together as tight as you can. I just kept laughing and laughing and laughing.
Then, I shifted some kind of gear and disengaged, like clipping the string and letting the balloons float free. The laughter was still happening, but it was happening to the person on the outside while I was on the inside watching.
I was sitting in a tall chair, a kid’s high chair without the tray, in a room so wide I couldn’t see the walls, and I was looking out the two big windows of my eyes. The room was bouncing around because the body I was inside was shaking and rolling around on the floor, and I had to hold tight to the arms of the chair or I’d get knocked off.
I looked down and I couldn’t see the floor beneath the chair. Its legs were so tall the floor was too far away to see. Was that how the world below looked to Jack when he got to the top of the beanstalk?
“Fee. Fie. Foe. Fum.”
The voice echoed in the huge room. Rumbled. Roared. And I could see the sound. Not just hear it, I could see it! It was orange, the color of a pumpkin. A jack-o-lantern.
A hideous carved-out face appeared in the orange color, was the orange color. It had triangle eyes, a triangle nose and triangle teeth, jagged teeth. It leered at me; the teeth as razor sharp as Bobo’s prized butcher knife. Then the sound and the face turned red, the color of—
“Fee. Fie. Foe. Fum! I smell the blood of a little blonde girl.”
The color/sound/face swirled around and around me, faster and faster, the inside walls of a tornado, sucking up darkness from below until it was no longer red, but black, the color of …
I had to get down off that chair because it was coming for me, Black Death was coming for me!
The chair was swaying back and forth like a palm tree in the wind. But there were no steps, no ladder, just the four spindly legs. I turned around in the seat, braced myself against the sway of the chair and tried to grab hold of one of the legs and shinny down it. But it was perfectly smooth, as smooth as a marble, as smooth as the doorknob on the closet where the Boogie Man lived.
Too smooth. I couldn’t get a grip, couldn’t hold on.
Suddenly, I was falling down through the darkness. Like those people who jumped out of the buildings in New York. Falling and screaming.
The ground was coming up at me fast, getting bigger and bigger. I tried to back up, to cringe away, but I was falling, with nothing to grab hold of.
Closer. Closer.
Noooo!
SPLAT!
I slammed down with a sickening, squishy thunk into the body rolling around on the floor laughing, crashed into it with a force that hurt in every nerve, bone and sinew. That body was my body again and that was where the pain was coming from.
The body was drenched in sweat.
Wet hair was plastered to its forehead.
My nose was bleeding, blood poured down my chin. I was crying from the agony in my chest and sides, but the cry came out my mouth as a gruff croak, a bark of laughter.
I continued to laugh, gasping for breath. To lie there in torment, laughing. And slowly, the world went mercifully dark.
I smelled Mentholatum, heard a husky voice, singing softly. Bobo. I kept my eyes closed and listened. I didn’t want to move because I hurt all over. My head was in her lap, and she was wiping the blood off my face with a damp cloth and smoothing my hair back as she sang.
“There’s a long ole trail …”
“Bobo?”
She jumped, looked down at me apprehensively.
“Anne? Oh, sweet Annie, are you back, Sugar? I was scart you wasn’t never comin’ back.”
It was a long time before I was able to piece together reality. Bobo said I started laughing at something she said and then kept laughing— nonstop from nine o’clock until almost noon The last half hour I was curled up in a ball whimpering. She had gotten down on the floor beside me—84 years old and she was sitting on the hard linoleum floor!—and put my head in her lap. She thought I was dying.
Eventually, I was able to get up off the kitchen floor and stagger to the couch in the parlor; I’d never make it all the way upstairs to my bed. Every muscle in my body, particularly my abdomen and diaphragm, was a strained, throbbing agony.
Bobo propped me on pillows, brought me a cup of hot tea and asked if I wanted ice water, too, for my raw throat. She was hovering over me like Mama used to do when I was sick. That made me want to cry, but it would hurt too bad to cry.
“Bobo, sit down. I’m OK, really. Please sit down.”
She perched on the edge of the couch at my feet.
“What was wrong with you?”
“I don’t know.” And I didn’t. Nothing made any sense. First, I scream at Bobo, grab her, want to shake her. Then I go completely psychotic for almost three hours.
“You said last night that if you couldn’t remember what happened in this house when you was a little girl, you was going to go crazy.”
Was that it? Was I having a mental breakdown? If I was crazy, how would I know it? Maybe I did need to go talk to that friend of Dusty’s. I’d believed all my life that if I wasn’t crazy going into a shrink’s office, I’d sure as Jackson be crazy coming out. But maybe all my life I’d been wrong.
Bobo scooted up a little on the cou
ch, and I moved over to give her room, gasping at the pain even that little movement caused. She took my hand and patted it.
“I thought you was gonna die.” There were tears in her eyes. “If me telling you what I know’ll stop you from going crazy, I’ll tell you whatever I can, I promise. I won’t keep nothin’ from you.”
When she blinked, tears spilled down her cheek, and she reached up and wiped them away with her gnarled fingers.
“It ain’t no good getting old. I catch sight of myself sometimes in the mirror and I think, ‘Who is that old witch?’” She turned her rheumy eyes on me. “See, inside, I’m still me. That me in here,” she tapped her temple with a bent finger, “she knows all the secrets. But sometimes she ain’t there. Sometimes, she’s gone off somewhere and I can’t find her. I figure I know how it’ll end. One of these days, she’s just going to leave and not come back.”
I knew that now was the prime moment. Bobo was lucid and she was willing. I believed she really would tell me anything I wanted to know, if she could locate the required information in the jumbled file cabinets of her mind.
But I just couldn’t go there. I might lose the opportunity forever, but I couldn’t face one more horror—one more my mother’s a drunk, one more Windy was sexually assaulted! One more binge of hysterical laughter. Not today.
“Bobo, I can’t talk about that stuff right now. I wish … I just can’t. I need to rest. Take a nap.” I closed my eyes and fell into an exhausted sleep.
Chapter 14
I doddered around the house the next day more slowly than Bobo, my chest and diaphragm muscles protesting every movement. An afternoon on the couch and a reasonably good night’s sleep had helped, but I still hurt.
Even so, I was determined not to be a wimp. The pieces-parts of an Ikea storage closet still littered the studio floor, and I had resolved to assemble the thing or die in the attempt.
Right after lunch, I made my way slowly up the stairs to the studio, closed the door firmly behind me and hobbled over to Petey’s cage. It sat beside the back stairs door on an ugly little table I’d snagged out of the attic.