In turn, my mother would have said the following:
I learned in my formative years to be codependent and so never truly developed the tenor of my own voice. I tell myself I am helping a broken man. What I’m really doing is finding someone to validate my low self-esteem, then imprinting that dysfunction onto the next generation. I fill up this void with fancy, attractive possessions. I found a man who can give us things. Don’t you all want nice things? I realize that when you children finally escape this house, you will not know what it means to sleep through the night without fear. You will not know what it means to love from a place of absolute self-possession. It will be up to you later to decide if and how you will learn these skills on your own. As for me, I will allow all this to lay the groundwork for me to live a smaller life than I ever wanted for myself or for my children. I can’t face my own pain. I can’t face that my inaction to make a better choice, the right choice, has led to the harm of myself and my children. It is true that I should have left . . . And yet, I choose to stay here now in spite of it all. Be well, my children, be well.
Here is what I would have said to both of them:
Speak these truths aloud, for it is only in silence that horror can persist. The courage to call a thing by its true name galvanizes the human spirit to address it. If that condition serves one’s desires, it will be embraced with a full heart. If it is destructive to one’s path, it will be deliberately dismantled over time.
And so it was that instead of facing the truth of our demons, my family went on in silence year after year, our days routinely punctuated by bursts of violence. After an argument over something mundane—who had misplaced the car keys, who would pick up the girls after school—my father threw punches at my mother. Over time, my brother, John, whom my classmates regarded as if he were a part-time print model and part-time professional athlete, grew into a muscular man of five foot ten with the physical power to intervene. My father was just shorter than the average American male, and fat: It was his emotional instability and not his build that was intimidating. John would pull my father off my mother and then the two men would begin to tussle.
Once, in my early teenage years, I flung myself into an argument that my father and my brother were having in an effort to protect John, but as I was just five feet tall and weighed not even one hundred pounds, I grossly misgauged my strength. When a punch careened against my arm, I was thrown back onto the floor. My mother screamed for me to move out of the way and for my father to stop. John then flipped atop my father to wrestle him into submission, every muscle in his young body pinning the madman to the floor. I scooted back and ran to my room for some type of weapon. Could I use a book or one of my larger troll dolls to pummel my father? What if I missed him and hit my brother? What if that gave the monster the advantage and then none of us would be safe? Yes, I thought about calling the police, but in that neighborhood, you didn’t call the police on your own family.
With the final DC home, house number three, we had arrived on the “Gold Coast.” Areas colloquially referred to as the Gold and Platinum Coasts of Washington, DC, were so named because they were historically home to Washington’s black elite. I landed there in the fourth grade with a new status, at a new private school for girls, the National Cathedral School. Like all elites, we didn’t expose our private, upper-middle-class shame to the public sphere. Why would we have? After all, we had worked too hard to get here to risk a crack in the fragile façade that fronted our legitimacy. All elites knew the code: Take your pills with your cocktail, use your cosmetics to cover the blemishes and bruises, clean up quickly, whatever it takes so you can present a smiling, perfectly coiffed and clad self to the world.
I broke this code of privilege only once. I was a tween when, one Saturday afternoon, I fled the melee in the second-floor master bedroom where my teenage brother was fighting my father to protect my mother and as my mother was fighting my father on the periphery to defend my brother, and my sister was somewhere unidentifiable but not visibly in the fray. I ran downstairs to the phone docked on the wall outside the kitchen. Tucked in the dark where no one would see me, I desperately dialed.
I heard: “Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”
“I’m at home. We’re not safe. My father is hitting my mother. He’s fighting with my brother. We’re not safe here!” I whispered into the phone.
“Where are you located?” the voice asked.
I looked around and, with my hand over my mouth, stealthily told them where I was calling from and what was happening.
“We’ll send a unit right out to you,” the operator said.
“Please, please hurry,” I begged before hanging up.
I ran upstairs to my parents’ room. As my father and brother fought and my mother swatted my father with her shoe, I managed to yell out, “I’ve called the police. They’re on their way!”
This was my leverage. The beating stopped, but the threats continued to fly. My father threatened to have my brother arrested. My mother retorted that she would never allow such a thing and that it was my father who should be arrested.
They were still arguing when the doorbell rang. I ran downstairs to open the front door. Two male DC police officers were standing there. They adjusted their gaze down from the iron grate peephole to see a little girl framed in the doorway. One officer had a hand on his holster; the other officer stood with his arms crossed. As if in stereo, they fired off rounds of questions at me.
“Did anyone here call nine-one-one?”
“What seems to be the problem?”
“Is there a disturbance here?”
“We received a call about a domestic dispute.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but standing on the doorstep looking out into my quiet, placid neighborhood, I found the answers hard, so hard, to utter. I saw the police car parked on the street in front of my house. I wondered if the Fraziers, next door, were home. I wondered if Sammy, my crush who lived around the corner, would ride by on his bike and see the police car and me with my side ponytail and favorite striped dress. At least I was well dressed, I thought, for my unexpected guests and any unsuspecting onlookers.
“Miss,” the police officer on the left said, jolting me back to attention. “Did you call the police?”
It was as if he had asked me to recite the complete value of pi. I could have given him a basic idea of its beginning, but I had no idea in what order it unfolded and no clue about how it might end. I could feel my breathing accelerate as I thought about what I might say, but then the adults rushed to the door, whisking me aside.
I stood in the corner of the foyer as my mother, brother, and father spoke to the police. As far as I could hear, each of them was frantically interjecting his or her version of the story. Emboldened by the police presence, my sister and I chimed in to corroborate our team’s account.
The police listened quietly and with little patience. Finally, they said, “Well, if you all want to stay with your stories, we’ll just have to arrest you both,” indicating both my father and brother.
I could feel my sister’s heart sink with my own. How had these officers parsed the blame to dismantle justice in this way? How did my father’s account equal the collective account of us four? How had my call yielded their indifference instead of assistance, which was yet another punishing blow?
My mother spoke up right away, her voice filled with dread. “No, no, no, I don’t want my son arrested”—and because she couldn’t risk my brother being jailed, she then said she didn’t want to press any charges against my father, either.
And that was the end of the police involvement. The two officers looked at my parents and, without saying anything else, turned and went back to their cruiser.
After they left, I realized that there really wasn’t anyone we could turn to. There was no law here. No help. When assessing the danger, the police had not differentiated between
my father and my brother. They had not asked me or my sister if we were safe. Without so much as a verbal censure to my father, they had simply abandoned a woman and her children to a clear danger in their house.
Worse perhaps, I had broken the code of how “good” families behave, only to find that traditional avenues would neither protect nor serve me.
We never spoke of the 911 call—no one ever mentioned it—and I never dialed those three numbers again. When my parents fought—and they continued to—I just prayed to my angel that it would all end well one day. And one gorgeous fall day years later, it did end—in a way. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that on that gorgeous fall day to come, I was able to see a way out.
Years after I called the police, the usual battle was raging as I cowered in my room, contemplating, once again, what I might use as a weapon to protect myself and my family against my father. Then I heard someone leave the house, the door slamming shut. My father had stormed upstairs and thrown clothes in a bag. He then got his car keys and left the house without saying a word, driving away for what all of us hoped would be forever but collectively knew would be for only a few days.
I hesitantly emerged into the hallway. My mother stood there holding my brother’s hand; he was bleeding from a deep wound in his left thumb. Our father had bitten him while John had had him pinned to the floor.
As my mother ripped the hem of John’s frayed shirt to fashion a makeshift tourniquet to stop the bleeding, I couldn’t help but wonder: What kind of animal bites a fellow human being, his own son, like this?
Amid the chaos, we pressed on with the other versions of our lives. My mother needed to drive my sister to a friend’s birthday party. Since I had recently obtained my learner’s permit, I volunteered to take my brother to the closest ER we could think of, a ten-minute drive away, in Silver Spring. My mother agreed, and the four of us dispersed in two cars.
As I drove my burnished tan Corolla, it was hard to avoid staring at the bandaged hand resting in my brother’s lap. When we arrived at the hospital, I followed the red arrows to the circular driveway for the emergency department drop-off area. My brother had to reach across his lap with his uninjured hand to liberate himself from the seat belt before getting out of the car.
I watched him start the long walk toward the fluorescent lights beckoning from the ER and then I drove around to the hospital parking lot. I parked and got out of the car, huddling into my sweater as I took note of the majestic maple and elm trees beside the stoic pines that remained forever green along the path toward the imposing gray high-rise. I belted my sweater and headed inside. In stark contrast to the chill of the bright white ER lights, the hospital entrance was warm and dark.
It was quiet inside, and I saw no one walking the shiny linoleum floors. I found my brother in the waiting room filling out some forms, and I took a seat next to him. An older man sat at the other end of the room, his hair disheveled and his skin creased from what even at my young age looked like a lifetime of hard living. He had pulled his heavy brown trench coat over him as he slept in the unyielding waiting room chair, his head bobbing with each big-bellied breath. For long moments at a time he would stop breathing altogether, and I found myself watching anxiously until he took another breath. I figured that if the next one didn’t come, at least he was in an ER.
A young man was sitting in a chair toward the middle of the room with his discharge papers, an inhaler, and a bottle of medicine. He kept looking out toward the parking lot, and I gathered he was waiting for a ride. The ER doors slid open, and a father hurried in carrying his little girl, who had a nasty gash on her leg just below the hem of her purple dress.
All of us were there, I realized, because we were damaged in some way. Wounded. Broken.
A few minutes later, my brother was called into the inner recesses of the ER. I watched him disappear into a triage area and then out of view. I settled in for the wait.
Flashing lights and high-pitched beeps pierced the lull, announcing the arrival of an ambulance backing up to the ER doors. The vehicle parked, and then the crew proceeded to unload a portly older man lying on a gurney. A medic held up a bag of fluid that dripped into the man’s arm. He secured it to a metal pole and then continued to pump air into a tube that went into the man’s mouth. Another medic performed compressions on the man’s chest, but the man did not move, save for the intermittent involuntary jerking of his body in time with the thrusts to his chest. At one point, an ashen arm dangled off the gurney as they rushed the patient into the emergency department.
Moments later, what appeared to be a family flooded into the waiting room: Women and men came in crying, asking about their father, husband, son. The clerk at the intake desk quietly asked them to wait. I picked up a magazine and tried not to stare as wounded people came in, nurses arrived to call out names, patients walked or were wheeled into rooms, and curtains closed around their beds. The wounded little girl, the old man, the family—the whole gamut of life seemed to be converging in this space.
All of us sat there waiting, nervously averting our eyes from one another. At one point, a burgundy car pulled up outside and the young man with the inhaler and discharge papers exclaimed, “Finally! Thank God!” gathered his belongings, and rushed for the door. The old man under the overcoat, who I decided must be homeless, continued to sleep. The family members, still crying, eventually were ushered into an interior room. The little girl with the gash on her leg skipped out, hand in hand with her father, wearing a brand-new pink Band-Aid and clutching a lollipop; she was smiling as if she’d just been to the circus.
I glanced at my watch: It had been slightly over an hour and there was still no sign of my brother. Later, the family of the man who’d arrived by ambulance came out one by one, arm in arm, shaking their heads and wringing their hands. As they headed out into the night, there was talk of arrangements and who would call Aunt Jo.
Now it was just me and the Sleeper. Dusk set in as I continued to wait. Finally, my brother emerged, his hand bandaged in thick white gauze. He was ready to go.
“How is everything?” I asked
“Fine. They just did an X-ray and cleaned it up. I have to have it checked in a couple of days to make sure it’s healing all right. They said something about how they could only put a couple of stitches since it’s a bad bite wound, and I have to take these antibiotics.”
As my brother and I left the ER, I marveled at the place, one of bright lights and dark hallways, a place so quiet and yet so throbbing with life. I marveled at how a little girl could be carried in cut and crying and then skip out laughing; at how a bloodied brother could reappear with stitches in his repaired hand; at how the family of a man who had presumably been fine that morning could manage to leave without him to start a new stage of their lives, one in which he would play no part; at how the man without a home could find somewhere to rest until he, too, would have to go back outside to figure out the rest of his day, the rest of his life; at how all of us had converged in these hallowed halls for a chance to reveal our wounds, to offer up our hurt and our pain to be eased. If my brother’s body could be patched up, then certainly, in its own time, his spirit could mend, too. If we looked, if we named the problem, identified and examined it, then there was the opportunity to fix it, the chance for us to walk out under the stoic pines healed, or on our way to being so.
On the drive home, my brother and I assumed our usual silence. The city at dusk was cloaked in shadows, and the full moon played mischief among the clouds. I pulled my Toyota into our driveway behind my mother’s Lincoln Town Car and alongside my brother’s sports car. We went into the house, and John headed up to his room and turned on his music—this time A Tribe Called Quest. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of orange juice, then sat at the kitchen table and thought about how I wanted to leave this haunted house and fix people. I figured that if I could find stillness in this chaos, if I could find love be
yond this violence, if I could heal these layers of wounds, then I would be the doctor in my own emergency room. That would be my offering to the world, to myself. Unlike in the war zone that was my childhood, I would be in control of that space, providing relief or at least a reprieve to those who called out for help. I would see to it that there was shelter in the spaces of which I was the guardian. The formless angel with a voice as clear as my own had told me the secret many years ago. Let it be so.
TWO
Dr. Harper: The View from Here
It wasn’t at all how I had pictured graduation from my emergency medicine residency at Mercy Hospital in the South Bronx would be, but it certainly was a blistering end. I sat near the aisle, next to my mother, who was next to my stepfather. I had told my brother and sister not to bother with the trip. I figured my sister would be busy with her obligations as an army lieutenant. I assumed that my brother would be preoccupied with his family or with landscaping his new home. That’s what I told myself. The truth was closer to my not wanting them to see me like this. I didn’t want witnesses there to confirm that this had really happened, that this celebration I had looked forward to for the last four years of medical school, and then during the four years of residency, felt more like a funeral. There was a noticeable absence by my side, where I had always imagined my husband would have stood.
Husband. The word cut like a slur.
Ex-husband was more accurate. The last time I spent time with Dan was in May, in our twelve-hundred-square-foot, two-bedroom prewar co-op in the South Bronx. Our marriage was unmistakably over, but we had continued cohabitating because my move to Pennsylvania was still more than one month away, just after graduation. (Neither Dan nor I had the money for another place at that time with the sale of our co-op still pending.)
The Beauty in Breaking Page 2