Raising Myself

by Beverly Engel

  I could hear the tall policeman talking to Sue as I dialed the number.

  “Ma’am, we need to tell you what happened. Do you think you’re up to hearing it?”

  I heard Sue say yes, she wanted to know. But at the moment her attention was on me as I dialed the phone.

  I told Glenn what had happened and he said he’d be right over, then I rushed to the couch so I could hear the story.

  “Your mother was murdered,” the tall one said. “She was beaten and raped with a broom handle and left to die in a cotton field.”

  The words were shocking, frightening, horrifying. An image of Sue’s mother being raped with the broom handle entered my mind like an intruder and stayed there. And then a flashback of Harvey holding the wrench in his hand, threatening me with it, flooded my mind and I went away.

  I don’t know how much time went by before I heard Sue’s voice, which seemed far, far away. “Thank you officers,” she was saying.

  The shorter policeman handed Sue his card and told her she could call any time. He told her that someone would be contacting her so that she could go down to identify the body.

  Sue came and sat on the couch beside me. We just sat in silence for I don’t know how long. I hoped she felt me next to her, supporting her in my mind, because I couldn’t move or do anything else.

  Suddenly Glenn was through the front door and grabbing Sue up in his arms and saying, “Oh honey, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m here now. You’re going to be okay. I’m with you.”

  I took in Glenn’s words as if he was talking to me. I started to feel my body again. I was able to get up to make room for him to sit next to Sue on the couch. I was able to once again feel Sue’s pain, to put my focus back on her.

  I didn’t see much of Sue after that. I wanted to do anything I could to help her but when I did see her, her pain was just too overwhelming for both of us. I didn’t know how to act around her. I was afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. And Sue seemed to have disappeared behind a wall of her own. I understood her need to protect herself—from her pain and her aloneness and her shame about the circumstances of her moth-er’s death. I was happy she had Glenn.

  Becoming friends with Sue had been my way of trying to put a distance between myself and all the dangerous and criminal elements on Janice Drive. She was so down to earth and eager to create a different kind of life than what she saw around her, and I thought we could do it together, support each other in escaping our dark pasts. But instead, Sue’s life brought even more trauma and darkness into my life. Now I had three images haunting me: Steve’s ugly, dirty penis; Harvey threatening me with the wrench; and Sue’s mother being raped with a broom handle.

  chapter 24

  I don’t know why I started shoplifting. I just suddenly had the urge to do it one day when I was at W. T. Grants, a department store near Hillcrest. I often went there to look at lipsticks, nail polish, and makeup. I didn’t have any money, so I just looked. I picked up one lipstick after another and tested the color on my hand, like my mother did when she was working with customers. Then I went over to the nail polish section and looked at those colors. They enthralled me. Nail colors like blue and green and purple were popular at the time, and I became mesmerized by them the same way I had when I used to look at pictures of precious jewels in my encyclopedia.

  Then one day I felt compelled to put a bottle of nail polish in my purse and walk out without paying for it. I was terrified of getting caught and soon my heart began pounding hard in my chest. I could hardly breathe. I felt dizzy. But as soon as I opened the front doors and was safely outside, I felt another feeling. A feeling of exhilaration. A feeling of power. A feeling of triumph. These feelings were so powerful that they blocked out the memory of any fear I’d felt. They blocked out any sense that what I was doing was wrong. From that day on, I was hooked. I started going to Grant’s every Sunday while my mother slept in.

  I always showed Pat and Patricia all the things I’d stolen, and one Sunday they both asked to go with me. Pat’s parents had given her permission to go since they trusted me, and Patricia’s mother was delighted that I wanted to spend time with her daughter.

  During the long walk to Grants, I taught them all my tricks. I told them how to look nonchalant and how to make sure no one was watching them when they took something. I suggested they take only one item the first time, just to get used to it. Before we went into the store, we split up so no one would figure out we were together.

  I was the first one to walk out the front door, my purse filled with lipstick and nail polish. I felt the familiar dizziness and pounding of my heart and was anticipating the thrill of victory as I reached outside. But this time I felt the hand of someone on my shoulder and heard the words, “Stop right there young lady.”

  It felt like someone had thrust a cold steel spike into my spine. I froze in my tracks. I’d been caught. My body started shaking all over and I thought I was going to pass out. When I turned around, I saw a big man wearing a white shirt and tie. He grabbed me by the collar and pulled me aside. I could barely breathe and my mind started racing. Oh my God, I’m going to jail. My mother is going to kill me.

  When first Pat and then Patricia followed me out, they were grabbed as well. I could tell by the looks on their faces that they were as terrified as I was. I knew it was my fault they were in this predicament, and shame flooded over me. But mostly I was terrified about what my mother was going to do to me when she found out what I’d done.

  The big man turned out to be a store detective. He directed the three of us into a back room of the store and told us to empty our purses as another man, the store manager, looked on. Lipsticks and nail polish of all colors came tumbling out.

  The store manager didn’t yell at us but he might as well have. He looked at us with contempt as he lectured us: “Who do you think you are? This is my store. You hoodlums have no right stealing from me. How would you like it if I came into your house and took your things?”

  I hadn’t thought of it like that.

  Then the store manager told the detective to call the police. He looked back at us and I thought he was going to begin lecturing us again but instead he just said, “I can have you locked up in juvenile hall for this.”

  I’d heard about “juvie”—a lot of kids on Janice Drive talked about it. I’d heard it was a terrible place with mean guards and even meaner bullies, “bull dykes” who raped young, innocent girls as soon as they came in.

  As soon as the cops got there, the store manager told us, scowling, that we could never come into his store again—for the rest of our lives—and that if he ever saw us again he’d have us arrested. The cops walked us to a police car waiting outside and put us all in the backseat. Pat, Patricia, and I didn’t say a word to each other or even look at one another. I expected the cops to head downtown but instead they headed toward my house.

  The cops and the people at Grants had treated me like I was a real criminal, and I felt like one. But in spite of all my bravado and rage against adults—specifically, authority figures—I was only twelve years old. As much as I acted like an adult, I was just a kid, and I was scared to death.

  I felt humiliated when the cop car pulled into our driveway. I imagined everyone in the neighborhood was watching me as the cop opened up the back door of the car and escorted me to our front door.

  The fallout with my mom was bad enough whenever I disobeyed her, but humiliating her like this was the worst sin I could commit. To have a cop car deliver me home for all the neighbors to see—to shame her in this way—was unforgivable.

  I really didn’t know if I’d survive it. I knew I was in for a beating at the very least. I’d suspected my mother wanted to kill me since I was nine, and there were times I’d thought she was capable of doing it. If she wasn’t going to kill me, she was finally going to do what she had threatened to do all my life when I was bad: send me away to the dreaded convent.

  The look on my mother’s face when she
opened the front door to find me flanked by two cops confirmed all my worst fears. She looked at me with absolute hatred and contempt. That look said it all: I hate you. This is the last straw. I want you out of my life. Now you’ve done it—I can never trust you again. I can never love you again. I never want to look at your face again. You’ve humiliated me for the last time.

  I had broken the most important rule: “Don’t do anything to shame or humiliate me.” I knew she could never forgive me for this. She’d somehow been able to bounce back from the other times she’d caught me acting out or disobeying her. Even the time I fell asleep by mistake at Linda’s house and she’d awakened to find my bed empty hadn’t been as bad at this. That time, she was so enraged with me when I got home in the morning she used a switch from our apricot tree to beat me in the front yard in front of everyone. I guess she wanted to humiliate me like I had humiliated her so many times.

  But this was different. This involved the police, the authorities. My mother respected those who were in power, unlike me. She looked up to those in charge, imbuing them with some sort of special power. She became almost childlike in the presence of authority. And here I had gone and disrespected those very authorities.

  As soon as the police left, she started in on me.

  “What possessed you to do such a thing?”

  “What is wrong with you? Are you crazy?”

  “This isn’t the way I raised you!”

  “How am I going to show my face in this neighborhood again?”

  Then came the strap. I don’t know where it came from. It hurt a lot more than the switch. Now she really meant business.

  “Don’t think you are too old to get a whipping,” she snarled as she started striking me on my back, legs, and arms.

  I couldn’t help but try to avoid her strikes. My body moved away automatically. But I knew enough to not try to run away. I told myself I deserved this whipping and I was going to take as much of it as I could.

  She laid into me with all her rage, all her hurt, all her determination. Maybe she thought she was going to beat the bad out of me. Even though I was nearly as tall as she was and probably weighed a good ten pounds more than her by that point, I was no match for her. She was insane with rage as she slapped that strap against my bare legs, my behind, and my arms, too, when I held them out to protect myself. I couldn’t get away from that strap. It was everywhere. The strikes stung so much and came with such ferocity that I tripped and fell down several times. But, as quickly as I fell, I scrambled up again to avoid having my mother tower over me with that look of rage on her face. That look hurt as much as the strap did.

  Once her anger subsided, my mother ordered, “Go to your room and don’t come out until I tell you to.”

  I felt relieved to be in my room—away from her rage, away from the dark look in her eyes. I lay down on my bed and started to cry. I hadn’t cried in a long, long time. I thought I had given it up, cast it aside like I’d cast aside my dolls and other childhood things. But lying in my room, with my mother seething and humiliated out in the living room, I felt small again.

  After a while, my mother opened my bedroom door and said with an unusual harshness to her tone, “I’m going to the store. Don’t you dare leave this house, do you understand?”

  I looked up at her. “Yes, I understand.”

  I heard her rustling around and then the front door slammed. I immediately felt relieved. But in an instant, panic set in. What if she goes through my drawers and finds all the other things I’ve stolen? She’ll kill me. The thoughts were so loud in my head that for an instant I wondered whether I’d actually said them out loud.

  I immediately jumped out of bed and rushed to the kitchen for a large paper bag. I ran back into my room and opened one drawer then the next, scooping nail polish bottles and lipsticks and mascara and all the other makeup I’d collected into the paper bag until all the drawers were emptied. That done, I went to the front door and looked out. I knew she couldn’t have gone to the store and come back by this time but I took extra caution, making sure she wasn’t anywhere around, perhaps talking to a neighbor. The coast seemed clear. I went out the back door and headed for the incinerator in the back lot. I got a stick and moved the ashes into high peaks along the edge of the incinerator before dumping my stash in the center. Then I pushed the ashes back over all my booty until it was completely hidden.

  I ran back into the house, put the paper bag exactly where I’d found it, and returned to my room. I had a hard time catching my breath, partly from rushing around and partly because of the terror the thought of getting caught with all that contraband inspired in me.

  I lay back down on my bed and I vowed to be good. I vowed to turn over a new leaf. I promised God I would never get into trouble again—never humiliate my mother, never risk her wrath again.

  chapter 25

  Years later, I was with a group of high school friends when someone came up with the idea of stealing stuff from a liquor store. I told them I was out and left the store and waited for them in the car. I didn’t care what they thought; I didn’t care that they called me chicken and made fun of me for days.

  You might say I had been “scared straight”—or, as my mother would say, that I had “straightened up.” But there was more to it. Much like the incident with the little boy I’d babysat a few years earlier, the shoplifting incident had given me a glimpse of a part of myself that I abhorred, and I didn’t want that part of me to take over.

  I knew right from wrong. I knew it wasn’t okay to steal. But somehow my anger and pain and especially my shame had taken over and compelled me to do it.

  I felt especially bad about the fact that I had gotten Patricia and Pat in trouble. The police had informed my mother that I was the ringleader and they were right. Patricia was younger than me and she trusted me. She would have done anything I told her to do just to be around me. It reminded me of how I’d felt about Peter. And Steve. She didn’t have anyone else to watch over her but me, and I had let her down. Pat was a little older than me but she had been sheltered all her life. I had a lot more experience in the world than she did. I’d let her down too.

  I knew I still had a good part of me—the part of me who cared for other people, the part of me who still teared up every time I heard the siren of an ambulance or fire truck. There was even still a part of me who believed in Jesus, even though he hadn’t saved me from my mother or Steve or Harvey.

  Even though I was shocked by my own behavior, even though it felt like it was someone else who had stolen those lipsticks and nail polishes, the truth was it was me. I had to admit to myself that there was a part of me that didn’t care about what was right or wrong, that didn’t care if I hurt other people or took their things. And there was a part of me that didn’t care what happened to me.

  I did still care about my mother, however—something I was surprised to discover. I thought I had stopped caring about what she thought or felt. I thought I had stopped trying to please her. But I found that I cared about the fact that she had been so humiliated by my behavior. I cared that she could still get that angry with me. And I cared that she didn’t throw me away once and for all, like all the other garbage.

  My mother had moved us to a dangerous place, a place where there was no protection, no safety. A place where the people around me didn’t seem to follow the normal rules of society. Left to my own devices, I had fallen into the landmines and traps all around me and been further wounded and maimed. But instead of giving up, crawling away to some corner to lick my wounds, I had risen up and pretended I wasn’t wounded. I’d joined my attackers in their goal of taking down the society that had rejected them, banished them.

  Once again I had come dangerously close to going over the edge. Unlike my compulsion to molest the little boy, this time I had actually acted on my dark impulses. My only consolation was that I hadn’t crossed over into becoming a “criminal” yet. I hadn’t been arrested and put into juvenile hall. I knew I was lucky
to have been saved from that fate. Had that happened, I surely wouldn’t have found my way back. I was bound and determined to not waste my second chance.

  For weeks after the shoplifting incident, my mother stopped talking to me. I became invisible to her; she looked right through me, just like she had when I was a little girl and she was angry with me. And just like I had when I was younger, I started a campaign to win her back. I started staying home more and cleaning the house. I studied harder at school so I would get good grades. And I stopped hanging out with the more dangerous people in the neighborhood.

  After a few weeks of the silent treatment, I begged my mother to forgive me. But she just looked at me like I was some kind of bizarre creature she had never seen before. Her look seemed to say, Who are you? Why are you standing in front of me like this? I don’t know you.

  And of course, she didn’t know me. She had never really known me. Even before the cops brought me home from Grants, she’d only had her distorted perception of me, her idea that I was some kind of bad seed. Now, her belief had been confirmed and she seemed to have given up on me entirely. She talked about sending me away to a convent, her old stand-by. But even that threat didn’t seem to hold the same power it once had, for her or for me.

  It seemed that she was at a loss as to what to do with me. She grew not only silent but depressed. She started drinking more and she seemed to be having a difficult time sleeping. I’d hear her crying in the middle of the night, and when I got up to go to the bathroom I’d see her sitting in the dark, smoking a cigarette.

  Seeing my mother like that, seeing the anger and the power sucked out of her like that hurt me. I didn’t want her to be unhappy. It reminded me of all the times I’d heard her crying when I was little. My heart had gone out to her then and it went out to her now. It made me want to be a good girl again. It made me want to please her and make her happy. I hadn’t felt like that for a long, long time.