I believed him. I remembered how Ruby had called him “the crazy Indian.” I wasn’t about to tell.
After my root beer float, he walked me into the room where my mother and I slept. He tucked me in, gave me a kiss on the lips, and said good night. I’d never had a man tuck me in before; in fact, I couldn’t remember my mother ever doing that. I had a sense that it would probably feel nice to have someone who really cared about me do that, but something about the way Steve did it made me feel afraid. I didn’t like how close to my neck his hands were when he tucked in the blanket.
Steve followed the same routine every night he babysat me— first the bath, then taking me to his bed and doing dirty, ugly things, then the root beer float, then the warning, and finally putting me in my bed.
In addition to working at night, my mother and Ruby sometimes had to work on the weekends, which meant I was left with Steve all day. On one of those days, Steve took me to the auto garage where he worked and introduced me to the other men as his niece. He seemed proud of me, and this made me feel a little proud of myself.
Another Saturday, he took me to a rock store and told me I could have any rock I wanted. I chose a shiny piece of lead.
These gestures left me confused. On the one hand Steve treated me like he cared about me, the way Uncle Forrest and Uncle Frank had done. But on the other hand I knew he was using me. I knew he just pretended to like me in order to get what he wanted from me. And I knew he was dangerous.
I’m not sure how long we stayed at Ruby’s, but I don’t think it was more than a month. During that time I became more and more withdrawn from my mother and from Ruby. I felt so ashamed I couldn’t look either one of them in the eyes. I was afraid they would find out what was happening and would hate me. My mother would hate me because once again I was being bad. Ruby would hate me because of what I was doing with her husband.
Since we’d come back to Bakersfield, I’d been looking forward to seeing Pam again, but now I felt so bad about myself I didn’t think Pam would like me anymore. I was afraid she would see inside me and notice that I’d become evil.
Before the sexual abuse, I was the kind of child who minded her mother, or at least tried to—a little girl who could “be good” and sit alone in the yard for hours looking through encyclopedias or entertaining myself by imagining I was in the jungle with all the wild animals. I was the kind of child who pretended I was a servant to a queen while I happily cleaned house for my mother, who didn’t mind sitting on the front porch waiting for my mother to come home, and loved the time I spent with my mother curled up in bed reading Spoon River Anthology.
What happened in that dark and dangerous room transformed me from a child into some kind of freak of nature—a kind of adult-child. I no longer had a child’s curiosity and innocence. Those things had been stolen from me. In their place were horrible feelings of shame—a feeling of being ugly and dirty and vile. In their place were disgusting images of ugly body parts, foul smells, and confusing sexual feelings I didn’t understand or know how to manage. I couldn’t see a jar of Vaseline without becoming extremely anxious and I couldn’t be around auto mechanics or garages without feeling like I was going to throw up.
The abuse also created a huge wedge between my mother and me. The closeness I’d felt toward her in Ceres disappeared behind my curtain of shame. Although Steve had frightened me into silence, in some ways he hadn’t needed to. I felt so bad about myself that I didn’t want my mother to know what I had done. All my life she’d seen me as a bad child and a troublemaker, but in Ceres she had begun to change her opinion of me. I had been such a good girl, taking care of myself while she was out selling cosmetics, cleaning up the house, waiting patiently on the front porch for her to come home, and “going without,” as she called it, and never complaining. If she knew what I had done with Steve, she would once again hate me, I was sure of it.
Because I felt so ashamed and guilty and dirty, I stayed away from my mother. Once I had welcomed the occasional times when she let me put my head on her lap while she stroked my hair, but now I kept my distance.
To make things even worse, I also felt I had betrayed Ruby in allowing Steve to do those dirty things to me in their bedroom. For years, Ruby had been the one adult in my life who was kind to me, who seemed to genuinely want to spend time with me. And now I had repaid her kindness with betrayal and deception. Steve had told me he loved me and we were going to get married when I grew up; I felt like I had stolen her husband. What kind of a person was I?
chapter 14
Momma got a full-time job at a local drugstore selling cosmetics and so, after about a month of staying with Ruby and Steve, we were able to move from Ruby’s to our own little house. It was only a few blocks away and it was even on the same street—Lake Street—but it seemed a long way away. In fact, in my mind the three blocks that separated our two houses seemed to be covered with a large black cloud, almost making the section of Lake Street that Ruby and Steve lived on invisible to me.
Just before we moved to our own house, Sandy—the cat I loved, the cat who’d kept me company when I was home alone all day in Ceres—was found dead in the backyard. I cried and cried. Momma tried to console me but I pushed her away.
No one seemed to understand why she died. Steve said that sometimes animals just die like that—for no apparent reason— and that we should never feel like we own a pet. He said animals belong to themselves, just like people do. I didn’t know what he meant, exactly, but it sounded right to me.
Years later I’d discover that sexual perpetrators often kill pets, or at least threaten to do so, in order to keep their victims from telling about the abuse. It was only then that I realized Steve probably killed Sandy as a warning to me about what would happen if I told anyone.
I felt so relieved to be out of Ruby’s house. Not just because I was away from Steve but because I was away from Ruby as well. I no longer had to face her every day—no longer had to face what I had done to her.
I tried to make all that had happened in Ruby’s house disappear, and I was fairly successful. Some of it vanished immediately—in the moment—as I left my body to deal with the atrocities that were happening to it on its own, like a sergeant deserting his troops in the midst of battle. What was left in my consciousness, I shoved to the back of my mind as quickly as it emerged. So I wasn’t haunted by memories as much as I was haunted by troubling, weird thoughts and behaviors. I started picking at my fingers until they bled and I developed the strange practice of rolling up the inside of white bread slices into balls and then eating them. I also became obsessed with penises. Whenever I saw a man I focused on his genital region, trying to see the outline of his penis.
I was permanently changed. The nine-year-old who had arrived back in Bakersfield stronger and more confident than she had ever been in her life; the child who had been buoyed up by the kindness of Uncle Frank, Aunt Opal, Mrs. Maynard, the cookie lady, and Mrs. Green; the child who had been encouraged, respected, and, most important, not continually shamed had been knocked down once again.
I walked around in a daze, as if I was sleepwalking. I remember Momma enrolling me in school again—the same school I’d been to from kindergarten through the third grade, Horace Mann Elementary. It was about five blocks away, on the other side of Niles Street, the busy street we had lived on at Ruby’s court. I remember that my teacher’s name was Miss Peterson and everyone loved her. And even though I was coming into the class halfway through the year, there were many familiar faces, including Pam’s.
But I don’t remember much from that time period and I couldn’t feel anything, not even joy at seeing Pam once again. And Pam seemed to be as different as I was. I didn’t know what had happened to her since I saw her last but it seemed like she might have experienced something bad too. Or maybe it was just that she couldn’t afford to really connect with me this second time around for fear of losing me all over again.
I still went to her house after school and on some Saturdays, but I s
uddenly felt too old for dolls and stuffed animals and too claustrophobic to stay in her bedroom. Where once it had seemed like our safe house, it now felt more like a prison. Her bedroom had always been rather dark but suddenly the darkness felt dangerous and reminded me too much of Steve and Ruby’s bedroom. And I felt so overwhelmed by my own pain that I couldn’t afford to take in Pam’s pain as well. I had to block it out—and I’m sure Pam must have felt the difference in me. I was behind a wall that even she couldn’t penetrate.
I needed to be out in the open, where dark and ugly things couldn’t happen without someone seeing them—out in the open, where there was lots of room to breathe. So we went outside to Pam’s gigantic backyard and I showed her how to be a horse, galloping and whinnying around the yard. I decided it was better to be a horse. Being a human was just too painful. Horses were free, horses were strong. Horses were also bigger and faster than humans, so even when a human tried to bother them they could get away. I’d seen a movie once that showed a man trying to capture a horse. He made a lasso from a rope and threw the lasso at the horse, hoping to get it around its neck. After many tries he finally succeeded, but the second the rope went over its head the horse reared up on its hind legs and almost trampled the man—who immediately backed off. Yup, it was better to be a horse than a human.
I hated the little house we moved to from Ruby and Steve’s. It was behind another house where an old couple lived—Mr. and Mrs. Hill. Their house, like most of the houses on the block, was a cute little pastel-colored modern stucco house with a manicured yard lined with rose bushes. Our house, in contrast, was a rundown, ramshackle wooden house that looked more like a shed than a home. I felt ashamed to live there, and it just added to the overwhelming shame I already felt.
It was dark inside, with old linoleum floors throughout— floors you could never wash clean no matter how many times you mopped. The kitchen sink was so stained that you couldn’t make it look good no matter how much you scrubbed. Just like I couldn’t get my body clean no matter how many baths I took. And it only had one bedroom, so once again my mother and I had to sleep together.
In Ceres, sleeping with my mother had been fun. It had felt cozy and loving, and had helped to fill up the emptiness I felt inside from so many years of yearning for closeness with her— from so many years wanting her touch, her embrace, or even her proximity. Now being close to her, especially in the dark, felt suffocating and scary. I wasn’t comfortable being physically close to anyone. It felt overwhelming and it often brought up feelings inside me that I didn’t like. So I learned to shield my body from my mother’s energy, turning my back to her and moving as close to the edge of the bed as I could.
It was in that dark bedroom that I once again felt the feelings I’d experienced in Steve and Ruby’s bedroom. At night, as I tried to go to sleep, I felt the ceiling pressing down on me and then rising up again. I felt the walls closing in and then expanding.
It was in that dark bedroom that I had uncomfortable feelings in my groin—so uncomfortable that I had to sidle up to the door knob and press it against my vulva in order to get some relief. And it was in that dark bedroom that I would lie down on the dirty clothes that my mother piled on the floor of the closet. It was there that I felt comfortable, there that I felt at home among all the other dirty, soiled things.
One day, after we had been at our new place for a couple of weeks, June, my mother’s old friend from Thrifty’s came over. I heard a “yoo hoo!” as she rapped against our screen door. She was carrying a large sack of groceries.
“Hi, Beverly. Your mother isn’t home, is she?”
Before I could answer she was on to the next question: “I’ll bet you’re hungry, aren’t you? Well, I brought you some groceries since you are a growing girl!”
She pushed past me, went into our small kitchen, and put the bag on the counter.
“I’ll let you unpack the bag. I’ve got to go.”
And with that she was out the door. She couldn’t seem to get away fast enough.
I couldn’t wait to see what was in the bag. It turned out to be filled with things my mother could never afford to buy, like peanut butter and jelly and sourdough bread—my favorite. There was a package of chicken—the cut up kind, not the cheap little whole chickens my mother bought once in a while. And there was fruit— bananas, oranges, and peaches. The only fruit we ever had were the apricots growing on the tree outside. There were also vegetables—some I’d never seen before, like broccoli and asparagus. To my mother, vegetables meant a salad made with sliced tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers drenched in vinegar. Which I hated.
I immediately made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It tasted so good that I had to make another one. It was half eaten when my mother walked in the door.
“Momma, look at what June brought us!” I exclaimed, my mouth full of sandwich.
Momma took one look at the food spread out all over the counter and said, “Put all that back in the bag immediately!”
“But, Momma—”
“Do it!” she yelled.
Then she was out the door. We didn’t have a phone, so when we wanted to call anyone we had to use the Hills’s phone; I assumed she was going there so she could call June.
I stuffed the rest of my sandwich in my mouth and proceeded to put all the groceries back in the bag. In a few minutes, my mother came back and announced, “I called June and told her to come pick up those damn groceries. I told her I’m no charity case. I don’t even want to see her, so you give her the bag when she comes.”
When June came, I met her at the door with the groceries. I could barely look her in the face I was so embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” was all I could say.
June looked at me sweetly and said, “I’m sorry too, kid.”
That was the last time I ever saw June. My mother was good at cutting people out of her life.
After that I started hating my mother. I’d been angry at her many times, but this was different. This was beyond anger. This was out-and-out hatred. The closeness and sweetness I’d felt toward her during our time in Ceres had disappeared and in its place was a feeling of rage.
I hated her because she was so proud she couldn’t accept groceries from a well-meaning friend—food we actually needed. When she’d worked at Thrifty’s, she and June had made commissions on the cosmetics they sold, but at her new job she didn’t. She was just living on her wages and we were barely getting by.
I also hated her for humiliating such a good friend. And for not giving June a second chance. It reminded me of how close to the edge I always was—how she was capable of cutting me out of her life in the same way she had June.
My mother’s action seemed cruel and selfish to me. Cruel to punish June for just trying to be a good friend. Cruel to take food away from me when we had so little in the house. And selfish because she was only thinking of herself and her stupid pride. Mostly, I hated her pride. Maybe because I didn’t have any left. I would do anything for anyone if they were kind to me.
And I hated her because she hadn’t seemed to notice that I’d changed so much since we’d come back to Bakersfield. Because she didn’t notice that I was sick all the time or that I had sores all over my legs. Because when I fainted in the hot sun while waiting in the lunch line at school, which happened often, I felt I had to lie to the school nurse when she asked if I’d had breakfast.
I also hated my mother because I knew she wouldn’t believe me if I told her about Steve. Either that or she would blame me.
Mostly, though, I hated her because I hated myself.
I saw Steve only once after we moved away. He drove me to the river one afternoon in his old red pickup. I hung my arm out the window, letting it glide up and down in the wind like a bird. It gave me a feeling of freedom, even though I felt trapped sitting next to Steve.
When Steve asked my mother if he could pick me up to take me to the river, she had seemed happy that he wanted to spend time with me. But she
didn’t ask me if I wanted to go and I didn’t know how to tell her I didn’t.
I felt frightened sitting there next to him. I knew there would be a price to pay for this outing. But I seldom got to ride in a car and hardly ever got out of town to the country, so I focused all my attention on the land and the foothills and the trees as we sped past them. I inhaled the smells of fresh air and sagebrush and listened to the sounds of calling birds and the distant rush of the river as we approached.
Steve had two inner tubes in the back of the truck. He carried the tubes down to the swiftly moving river and plopped me inside one of them. I was scared but excited at the same time. He jumped into the other tube and we rushed down the river, over small waterfalls, circling around in whirlpools and finally ending up where the river dwindled into a creek.
Then came the long walk back to the truck, but I was high on the thrill of the ride. I felt happy, really happy, a feeling I seldom ever felt. There was no mother there to criticize me. I didn’t have to be careful to not embarrass Momma and I didn’t have to worry about what other people thought. I was free to be myself.
But my feeling of freedom was short-lived. When we got back to the truck I started wiping the sand out of my crotch with my towel, and Steve yelled at me, “Don’t do that in public! Somebody will see you.”
I was surprised by his reaction. I didn’t understand what the big deal was. After all, he’d told me I should never be ashamed of my naked body—that it was a beautiful thing. Now he was angry with me for wiping the sand out of my crotch. I was confused but I did what he told me to do.
A few weeks later, my mother had to take me to the doctor. I had a bladder infection. The doctor told my mother that somehow sand had gotten way up inside my vagina. My mother never asked me how that could have happened. Of course, looking back on it now it was either Steve’s fingers or his penis that had pushed the sand up there. I don’t remember anything about what happened. As was always the case, I had disappeared while he did those things to me.
Raising Myself Page 9