I felt so bad for Charlene. She seemed defeated before she’d had a chance to live. She walked around with her head held down and her shoulders sloped and she always spoke in a low voice, so low that you had a hard time hearing her. And there was an awkwardness to her gait, as if she had been slapped one too many times.
I wished I could save her somehow but I couldn’t even save myself. I lived for the day I could escape from my mother and Bakersfield. I lived for the day I could blossom and thrive away from my mother’s scrutinizing gaze, her unreasonable expectations, and her relentless criticism. I wondered if Charlene lived for the same thing. But somehow I thought I had a better chance than Charlene did.
I was building up a wall—one that not only protected me from my mother but from everyone else. I continued playing with Linda sometimes, but I had a difficult time relating to girls my own age. They still had their innocence and talked about anticipating their first kiss. I had already done things that they could only imagine doing in the far-off future.
Because I no longer felt like a child, I took a liking to two older teens in the neighborhood. Chick and his mother lived on the other side of us and he had a basketball hoop in his front yard. I often saw him playing basketball with the neighborhood kids and I started hanging around, hoping they’d invite me to play. And one day Chick did. From that day on I hung around Chick, and soon I developed quite a crush on him.
One evening, after I’d been playing HORSE with Chick and the neighborhood boys for about a month, my mother called me into our little dining room and told me to sit down. I could tell by the stern look on her face that what she had to say wasn’t going to be good.
“I don’t want you to go over to Chick’s anymore,” she said matter-of-factly.
“But why, Momma?”
“Just do as I say,” she scolded.
“But what’s wrong with me going over there?” I persisted. “Lots of kids do.”
“Well, I don’t want you to be one of them. He’d too old for you to be playing with,” she said. “And that’s final. End of discussion.”
I knew I wasn’t going to get any more information out of my mother at that point. But I was distraught. What was wrong with me going over there? I was also confused. Chick hadn’t done anything wrong to me like Steve had. So what was the problem?
Years later, I learned that Chick’s mother had come over to tell my mother she didn’t want me over there anymore. She said I was too seductive with Chick and she didn’t want her son to be accused of anything. When my mother told me this, I was shocked. By that time I’d been in therapy for years, trying to rid myself of my shame, but as soon as she told me this information it surfaced like a rotten egg. I felt so horrible that my mother had known this about me but had never said a word. She’d kept it to herself, just like all her other secrets. Didn’t she ever wonder why I had been seductive with Chick? Didn’t she wonder whether maybe I really had been sexually abused by Steve the way I said I had? Didn’t she ever make the connection?
Around this time I also befriended a young woman across the street named Cecilia. She was in her late teens and was very dark and exotic looking, so she stood out in our all-white neighborhood. I thought she was probably Mexican but I secretly hoped she was a gypsy like I’d seen in the movies.
Cecilia lived with her mother, who was seldom around, and she seemed as lonely as I was. I liked her because she treated me more like an adult than a kid. We would sit on her front porch in the evenings and she’d tell me all about her boyfriend, who was in the Army. She told me that they’d had sex and she was afraid she might be pregnant, but she didn’t want to tell her boyfriend because she didn’t want to worry him.
I got the feeling that Cecilia wouldn’t be shocked if I told her I’d been sexually abused, so I told her I had a secret and she had to promise not to tell anyone. She promised, so I told her all about it.
I unloaded my burden in an attempt to get rid of some of its poison. And maybe because I wanted to be as different from my secret-keeping mother as I could possibly be. It felt good to not have to carry around my secret. I felt a little lighter. And Cecilia didn’t seem shocked, though I could tell she felt bad for me.
After a few weeks of me hanging around Cecilia, my mother once again sat me down. This time it was to tell me to stop going over to Cecilia’s house. She didn’t make as big a deal about it as she had with Chick, but the message was basically the same: she’s too old for you. I pleaded my case but my mother stood firm.
The next time I saw Cecilia on her front porch she gave me a big smile and called me to come over. I walked up to her porch and told her I couldn’t stay—that my mother had said I couldn’t hang out with her anymore. She looked at me with suspicion and asked me why. I told her my mother said she was too old for me. But Cecilia didn’t seem to believe me.
That evening, as soon as my mother came home, there was a knock on the door. My mother answered, and as I peeked around the corner to see who it was, I saw Cecilia. She looked angry.
“For your information, I’m not a Mexican like most people around here think I am. I’m Syrian. My father came from a country called Syria. Just so you know.”
With that, she turned on her heel and stomped off. But before she did I saw tears in her eyes.
My mother turned to look at me. “What did you tell her?”
“I just told her what you said—that she was too old for me.”
She looked at me suspiciously. “You didn’t tell her anything else? Like telling her I didn’t want you over there because she was a Mexican?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said with conviction.
“I better not find out you’re lying,” she warned. Then she opened the door and walked out toward the driveway.
I waited a few minutes, then peeked out the window to see if she was going to Cecilia’s. She was.
I don’t know what was said between my mother and Cecilia, but the next time I saw Cecilia she didn’t smile and she didn’t wave.
It seemed to me that everything good was always taken away from me—Pam, Sandy, the twins, Chick, and Cecilia. And lately it seemed that whenever I found someone I liked, someone who liked me, my mother put a stop to it. I just couldn’t win. If I hung around kids my own age or younger the part of me that wanted to be in control took over and I did things that could hurt them. But if I hung around older kids that wasn’t okay either. I just couldn’t seem to find my place in the world.
chapter 18
I felt the pressure again, bearing down so hard that I had to stand still with my legs together and tighten my buttocks hard to hold it in. The strain was so great it made my legs tremble. Finally, the pressure subsided enough for me to continue playing.
It wasn’t until Linda’s mother called her in for lunch and I was forced to go home that I finally sat on the toilet. I’d held it in so long that now I was constipated. The pain was excruciating, so I distracted myself by fantasizing, a trick I’d learned early on as a way of escaping painful or scary situations. In this fantasy, I’d had an operation to cut off my belly. One clean cut and the wad of fat in my hands disappeared and I was left with a nice flat stomach like Linda’s.
There was a strong smell coming from my underwear. I looked down at the stains and realized I’d better try to find a cleaner pair in the dirty laundry. We didn’t have a washing machine, just the two stationary tubs in the back yard and a washboard. We didn’t have a clothes hamper, either, so Momma and I were in the habit of dropping our dirty clothes on the floor of our bedroom closet. They’d pile up there for weeks until Momma would be forced to sacrifice one of her precious days off to do the laundry by hand.
I pushed hard one more time and broke out in a sweat from the pain and exertion. Finally, relief. When I wiped, there was blood. I got up to wash my hands and I looked at myself in the mirror over the basin.
I hated how I looked. I hated the freckles all over my face. I hated my short hair. No matter how much I pleaded, my mothe
r still refused to take me to a beauty parlor to get my hair cut. She didn’t understand how humiliated I felt to sit at the barbershop next to the boys from my school and how much I hated being made fun of for looking like a boy.
I thought of Linda’s long, shiny ponytail and the familiar feeling of envy sank its sharp teeth into my stomach and ate its way up to my heart. I smiled at myself in the mirror; people always told me I had a nice smile. But yellow, tartar-covered teeth jeered back at me, mocking me. I took my index fingernail and scraped as much of the ugly scum off my teeth as I could. My mother had never taught me the importance of brushing my teeth. She’d bought me a toothbrush at some point, and she kept baking soda in the rust-spotted medicine cabinet, but I hated the taste so much I didn’t use it, and she never asked if I had brushed.
With one more critical glance in the mirror, I went into the kitchen and made myself one white bread, pickle, and mayonnaise sandwich after another until I was finally full. Then I sat on our rickety, vine-covered porch and watched as the birds and insects dive-bombed at the rotting apricots covering the driveway, biding my time until Linda finished her lunch and I could go back over to her house to play. I felt just as rotten as those apricots, and like just as much of a target.
All the houses in the neighborhood were nicer than our little ramshackle house tucked in behind the Hills’s house, but Linda’s house stood out like a jewel in a pile of rocks. It was a pale green, wood-framed house with white shutters and flower-beds bursting with daisies and gladiolas and chrysanthemums. Most of the lots in the neighborhood were so long that most people had a garage or work shed or a guest house in the back of their house, but the Landers just had a huge, chain-link-en-closed backyard where Linda and I usually played.
Today we decided to play spinner after lunch. We held each other’s wrists tightly, leaned the top part of our bodies back as far as we could, and began to twirl around in a circle. We spun faster and faster, giggling hysterically at the sensation. Then, without making a conscious decision to do so, I let go of Linda’s hands. She went flying across the yard and landed hard against the fence, which made her cry out in pain so loudly that her mother came running out of the house.
I stood there, paralyzed, while Linda’s mother yelled for someone to call an ambulance. I felt terrible. It was my fault that she was hurt. I stood there waiting for Linda’s mother to yell at me, but she never did.
I later learned that Linda had broken her clavicle bone, whatever that is. Her mother wouldn’t let her play with me for a long time after that.
I’d already gone through so many kids in the neighborhood, and Linda was my last chance. I missed playing with her. I also missed simply being around her, which made me feel almost normal—at least until I had to go home.
Shortly after the spinning incident, I caught one of my frequent colds. When other people caught colds they sneezed and sniffled for a while and then they felt better, but my colds immediately went to my lungs. I’d develop a deep cough that would put me out of commission for weeks at a time. And this cold was a particularly bad one. When I coughed I spit up green stuff, which Momma said was a sign that my chest was infected. I’d already missed a week of school and it didn’t look like I’d be going back anytime soon.
I’d been coughing for hours—deep, hacking coughs that shook my body and made my throat raw. Unproductive coughs, my mother called them. She’d given me some of her cough medicine with codeine, but it didn’t seem to help. It just made me feel stranger than I normally felt, as if my head wasn’t attached to my lead-weighted body. I drifted in and out of a fitful sleep, waking myself with my coughing and then, feeling exhausted, falling back to sleep and strange dreams.
At one point, I woke up and noticed that the light was on in our tiny bedroom. My mother was coming toward me with something in her hand. She looked angry. I was keeping her awake and she had to go to work in the morning. Her gray hair was standing up the way it often did when just getting out of bed. It reminded me of a movie I’d recently seen called The House on the Haunted Hill. In it a woman with white, frizzy hair rolled through the house wielding a large butcher knife and scaring the daylights out of everyone.
She was coming closer and closer with what I now saw was a cloth in her hand. She was going to suffocate me! I started screaming, “Help! Help!” at the top of my lungs and thrashing my arms and legs to ward her off.
“I’m just going to put this wet washcloth on your head to help cool you off,” she said impatiently. “You have a fever.”
But I didn’t believe her. It was a trick. She wanted me to stay still so she could murder me. I kept on kicking and screaming until she finally gave up and left me alone. I fell back to sleep, weary and on guard.
I was afraid of my mother after that. I knew she was capable of killing me at any time, especially when she was drunk. Later, when I was a teenager and had my own room, she would get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and would often wander into my room by mistake. I would tell her in my bravest voice, “Go back to bed, Mom,” but deep inside the fear remained, no matter how I fought it with logic.
Some psychotherapists might say I was afraid of my mother killing me because I had so much guilt over what I’d done to Linda, or that it was a manifestation of my own self-loathing. Those things may be true. But I also had a deep sense that my mother hated me at times, especially when I embarrassed her or kept her awake at night. And I believed that she resented having to take care of me so much that she was capable of at least contemplating murdering me. I too sometimes had overwhelming urges to hurt people, both conscious and unconscious. So I guess you can say that it takes one to know one. We both had a lot of darkness in our hearts.
Nothing that had been done to me or that I’d done to others at this point in my life compared with what was about to happen. In order to make some money, I started babysitting. I was now eleven years old and in the sixth grade, and this meant that some people thought I was old enough to watch their children.
My first job was babysitting a one-year-old boy. He’d been sleeping when I arrived, but now his parents were gone and he was crying and needed his diaper changed. I was nervous about doing it. I’d always been afraid I’d accidently stick babies with the safety pins if I changed their diapers, and now this was my first real diaper-changing experience.
When I took his diaper off I became fixated on his little penis. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Suddenly I had the overwhelming urge to suck it.
A wave of disgust rushed over me like a river of raw sewage. I was horrified with myself. I felt filthy and rotten and inhuman. I stood motionless, as if I were a statue made of stone.
Slowly the sinister impulse drained out of my body and I was left with only feelings of horrendous shame. “What’s wrong with me?” I heard myself say out loud. And silently, What kind of a monster am I?
I don’t know what stopped me from molesting that little boy, but something did. Something inside me stopped me from doing what had been done to me. Something so good or so strong that it was powerful enough to override my dark impulse. Thank God.
The fact that I hadn’t acted on that horrible impulse and molested that little boy didn’t take away the fact that I’d thought about doing it, however. In that moment I felt like I had discovered who I really was: a monster. I made a decision right then to never babysit that boy, or any boy child, again.
After Steve molested me, strange sexual feelings seemed to course through my body. I never had the urge to masturbate, but I rubbed my vagina up against doorknobs to ease the anxiety and uncomfortable feelings I had in my genitals. I convinced the twins to take off all of their clothes. I pretended to take nude pictures of Linda. I had so much envy and hatred in my heart for Linda—who was still innocent, who had a mother and a father who cared about her and protected her—that I let go of her hands and sent her flying.
But this was more than I could take. Now I was as bad as Steve. I had the same kind of sick, horrible
thoughts as a child molester. I just couldn’t seem to stop myself from thinking and doing nasty, dirty things.
My mother didn’t believe me about Steve.
Ruby hated me.
I’d lost Pamela, my closest, dearest friend.
I couldn’t fit in with kids my age and I wasn’t supposed to be around the older kids that I could relate to.
I was completely lost and alone. Not even Jesus could help me.
part three
the danger zone
“A person who has nothing to lose is the scariest person on earth.”
—Shannon L. Alder
chapter 19
I was going to be entering junior high and my new school was too far for me to walk to from Lake Street. Since my mother still didn’t have a car, it made sense for us to move again. Our new house was also a lot closer to my mother’s new job at Pipkin’s Drug Store in Hillcrest.
When I heard we’d be moving, I felt happy to be leaving Lake Street. So many bad things had happened to me there, and the entire neighborhood knew what a horrible person I was. This was going to be my chance to have a fresh start. I was going to a place where I could turn over a new leaf, a place where I could look people in the eyes.
The events of the past few years had toughened me up. We were moving too far away for Pam to walk to my house, but I now knew how to handle loss a lot better. Besides, we weren’t as close as we used to be. And I was growing more adept at steeling myself against pain and shutting down my feelings. I’d learned how to handle rejection and I even knew how to handle people looking at me like I was a monster. I just put up my wall and pretended I didn’t care what they thought. No one could hurt me anymore. Not even my mother.
Raising Myself Page 12