I was so afraid of getting into trouble if I went back to the streets that I stayed home all summer and watched TV all day—becoming more and more depressed in the process. When I’d been on the streets, I was at least active and engaged with other people, which kept my loneliness at bay. But being home all day by myself, I became overwhelmed with loneliness and boredom. I dealt with these feelings—or rather, didn’t deal with them—by turning to food. Food became my comfort, my entertainment, my escape from pain and painful memories. And it was a way to suffocate the rage inside me.
I hated the things that had happened to me and how those experiences had made me feel, and so I hated the world. My innocence had been stolen from me—twice—and that made me feel justified in stealing from the “men,” the authority figures who’d taken advantage of me. Steve and Harvey hadn’t treated me like a human being with feelings, so to me men weren’t real people with real feelings. In my mind, all stores were owned by men—in fact, everything was owned by men. So stealing from W. T. Grants was like stealing from all the men who had hurt me.
But I’d really heard that store manager when he asked me how I’d feel if someone came into my house and stole my things. I knew I would feel terrible. And I saw how upset he was. I realized he had been hurt by my actions.
Because I didn’t feel loved, or even worthy of love, I’d begun to lose my ability to have compassion or empathy for others. No one seemed to care about me or what happened to me. So I’d stopped caring about anyone else. But that store manager had helped me to realize that my actions did have consequences— not only for me but for others.
Being picked up by the police didn’t “cure” me. But it did create a major shift inside me. I became afraid of my anger. I didn’t want to get in trouble because of it anymore. But my rage and pain didn’t just go away, so I started acting it out in another way—against myself. I started stuffing food down my throat in an attempt to quiet the fury inside me. I ate so much my stomach hurt. I ate so much I almost passed out from exhaustion.
Usually we only had eggs, bread, potatoes, and beans, so it was always quantity over quality. During the day, I would eat one fried egg sandwich or egg salad sandwich after another. There was seldom, if ever, any lunch meat or meat of any kind in our house. There were no vegetables or fruit. So my diet was made up mostly of starch. I was constantly bloated; my stomach protruded as if I were pregnant. I was lethargic and fuzzy-headed and felt like a walking zombie most of the time. I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t think. I could barely move. But at least I wasn’t getting into trouble.
part four
looking for myself
“Unless we learn to know ourselves, we run the danger of destroying ourselves.”
—Ja A. Jahannes, WordSong Poets
chapter 26
Toward the end of that summer, my mother moved us once again. I was going to be entering high school in the fall, and the neighborhood was closer to my school. She’d also gotten a better job at Brock’s Department Store in downtown Bakers-field, and the bus ride from our new place would be much shorter for her. Although she never spoke of it, I think she felt so humiliated by my behavior on Janice Drive that she welcomed a reason to move.
Just like it had been when we left Lake Street, escaping the country slums of Janice Drive felt like another chance for me to start over. I’d humiliated myself and my mother with my shop-lifting fiasco, but the truth was I didn’t really care all that much what any of those people thought of me. I was just relieved to get away from the neighborhood with all its bad memories and bad influences. I hoped Brown Street would save me from myself.
We brought Cubby with us, but he skidded and faltered on the hardwood floors, and then, after one night of being confined to the house, ran away the first chance he got. I was devastated. We checked the pound, but to no avail. A few days later, my mother heard from the owners of Friendly’s Market that Cubby had managed to find his way clear across town, back to Janice Drive. The lady told my mother that one night Cubby had barked and barked so long they’d finally checked out what was going on and found that someone was trying to rob their store. She assured my mother that they would feed Cubby and watch out for him; after all, he’d watched out for them.
“If Cubby wants to be back on Janice Drive that badly, he should be allowed to stay there,” my mother said, and I agreed with her.
Cubby had been a thief just like me—a chip off the old block, so to speak. Almost every day, back on Janice Drive, I’d find a new flip-flop, house slipper, or other shoe on our back porch—an offering of sorts. But Cubby had redeemed himself by saving Friendly’s Market from being robbed. I hoped I’d have the chance to redeem myself with my mother by proving to her that I had changed.
The apartments we moved to were the nicest we’d ever lived in, and so was the area. It was an older section of town, full of Victorian houses inhabited mostly by retired couples, a far cry from the criminal- and animal-infested streets of Janice Drive. Our complex consisted of five Spanish-style stucco apartments laid out in a squared-off U shape, similar to Ruby’s court, and the landlord even kept up the small grass area in front of the apartments. I wasn’t as ashamed when people drove me home, and Mom said the place had class. This helped us to regain some of our pride.
Mom was making good commissions at Brock’s on the ultra-expensive line of cosmetics she was selling, Alexandra de Markoff. I was amazed that anybody would spend $100 on a bottle of makeup. I imagined how many new school clothes I could buy with $100 and I resented these women for spending that much money on something that seemed so frivolous. But Mom explained, “Some of those farmers and ranchers around Bakersfield are raking in the dough. Their wives, with their weather-beaten faces, will pay anything to look better.”
I started high school with the same kids I had known in grammar school—kids I had more in common with, kids who weren’t always getting into trouble like the ones on Janice Drive. The problem was that, since I had gone to a different junior high school, I felt like the new kid at school.
During my first week of school, I saw Pam in the halls. I hadn’t seen her or talked to her in two years. She was walking hand-in-hand with a boy who seemed to be as shy and dark as Pam was. They both looked like they wished they could disappear.
My heart raced with joy as my eyes met with Pam’s. But I was shocked with what I saw—or rather, what I didn’t see. I saw a look of recognition in her eyes but there was something missing, something I can’t quite describe. I smiled at her and she smiled back but it was clear that we were miles away from each other. We passed each other without saying a word—all that passed between us was a nod.
I felt sad that Pam and I had grown so far apart that we couldn’t even stop to talk to one another in the halls. I wondered how and where she had met this boy, who seemed so much like her, and I was glad she had him.
I also saw Charlene. By now, her mother had renamed her Cherie. Charlene was embarrassed by the new name but her mother thought it was more sexy and sophisticated. I went over to her house after school a couple of times that year, but she was so overloaded with schoolwork, on top of all her housekeeping, that she couldn’t really spend time with me. And she worked in the school office during lunch hour—since her mother refused to give her an allowance, even though she could certainly afford it—so we couldn’t even sit together at lunch.
I ended up eating lunch with a girl named Sharon. We both wanted to lose weight, so every day we each bought an apple for lunch and sat far away from the cafeteria, where we might be tempted by the smell of food. And this routine had another advantage for me: it allowed me to save my lunch money so I could buy myself some new school clothes. The problem with only having an apple all day, of course, was that by the time I got home from school I was starving and ended up eating too many sandwiches.
I didn’t have nice clothes and I felt awkward and out of place at school. I didn’t feel good enough about myself to be friendly with the other kids, and I di
dn’t know where I fit in. I didn’t want to hang out with the rough kids—I’d had it with being in trouble all the time. And the good kids, mostly popular kids, didn’t welcome me into their midst.
I noticed that the girls I wanted to hang out with were all on the honor roll for getting all A’s so I buckled down and studied hard, hoping that if my name was on that list in the school newspaper I would gain their respect. But it was an uphill battle. The popular girls all came from good families with money and they came to school with perfect hair and perfect clothes. While I no longer had to endure having my hair cut by a barber and I tried my best to style my hair well, it was always a struggle for me.
One day in Home Economics, one of the popular girls, Ann Goodman, let me know my hair didn’t look good.
“If you’re going to cut your own bangs, you need to learn how to do it,” she said smugly. “You have to cut all the way across.”
My stomach sank. I was completely humiliated. Ann Goodman was one of the popular girls, but she was also one of the most self-righteous. I had never liked her, and now I hated her guts.
At home, at least, I found that I no longer needed to roam the neighborhood looking for friends. I befriended the nice old German lady next door and sometimes I went over to her apartment after school, but mostly I preferred being alone. I realized that I had been too easily influenced by the friends I’d made on Janice Drive. I felt like I needed time alone—to heal from all the trauma and to discover who I was and what I wanted to do with my life.
I went into a sort of hibernation. I focused on studying and regaining my mother’s trust. I wrote lists of how I was going to improve myself:
Lose weight.
Help Momma out more around the house.
Study harder and get on the honor roll.
Don’t talk back to Momma.
My freshman year in high school was an important one in my life, not because I made lots of friends or found my place in the social hierarchy but because I began to find myself. And I was reinventing myself. I was leaving behind the angry, rebellious girl who hated the world and creating a new version of myself. Acting out and getting into trouble had gotten me nowhere, and I wanted to go somewhere.
By my sophomore year, I had been reintroduced to a girl named Florence who I’d met in school while living on Janice Drive. As it turned out, Florence’s parents had moved and she now lived in the new school district as well. In junior high, she had been a nice girl who never got into trouble, so our paths had never really crossed.
Florence collected friends like some people collect knickknacks, and she had her our own table in the cafeteria. When she saw me, she remembered who I was and invited me to sit with her and her friends. This was a huge relief.
Sophomore year was a pretty good year for my mom and me. We were able to connect with one another more than we had since before the sexual abuse. I think she was starting to trust me more. I wasn’t getting into any trouble and was focused on my studies. During the summer, I babysat as much as I could so I could buy my own clothes and school supplies. And I was beginning to feel better about myself.
Mom’s new job was helping her feel better about herself too. She worked with a group of lovely ladies who were as charming and sophisticated as she was. She fit right in with these women, and they treated her with respect and admiration.
Whenever I met these women over the years, I was always impressed with them. My mother brought home a photograph of the group that was taken around this time. They were all standing behind one of the cosmetic counters, smiling. I was stunned. There were five of them and they all looked equally beautiful— dressed in expensive suits, hair coiffed, perfectly made up, just the right earrings and pins. All of them were silver-haired like my mother, with the exception of one dark-haired beauty. My mother had finally found women in Bakersfield who were as classy, sophisticated, and intelligent as she was. She’d found her tribe. She looked happier in that photograph than I had ever seen her.
A feeling of love rose up in me as I looked at my mother smiling in that picture. That smile said it all: I feel happy. I feel proud. I’m with people I respect.
I wish I could say the same for myself. While having a table to sit at in the lunch room was a huge relief, I didn’t really have much in common with Florence’s friends. And while I liked Florence a lot, she was not particularly open with me—or anyone, for that matter. I longed for a friend I could really talk to.
In spite of some good things happening, time seemed to be inching by. I did get on the honor roll, but I was so bad in math that I couldn’t keep it up. And being on the honor roll didn’t help me make friends with the girls I admired. I couldn’t wait to graduate and leave Bakersfield behind.
Even though we were now miles from any farms, Bakersfield had a cloud of pollution hanging over it. The town was surrounded by mountains on all sides, which meant that the dust the wind stirred up and the residue from the insecticides that were constantly being dumped on the fields by crop-dusting planes were trapped with no place to go, making my mother and me cough incessantly and making me feel as trapped as the pollution.
And even though our apartment looked good on the outside, it was dark and dreary on the inside. We had only two small windows facing the front, and they were recessed so deeply into the building that very little light could enter. A common walk-way extended around the periphery of the front of the building, so we all kept our blinds closed for privacy, keeping even more light out.
I often felt claustrophobic because the front of our complex faced a busy street and the back door opened up to the chain-linked fence of the house next door. Opening the back door was like walking into a prison yard: there was just a narrow walkway leading to the laundry room and the alley alongside our building. And the next-door neighbors were often in their backyard tending to their fruit trees, so again, there was no privacy. In the past, if things got too rough, I’d always had the option of going outside and sitting in a tree, or at least sitting on the stoop of a porch, but here there wasn’t any place to escape to.
Adding to my claustrophobia was the fact that my mother’s cigarette smoke left a sticky residue all over our stucco walls, ceiling, and baseboards. Everything in the apartment reeked of stale smoke. I’d try to air the place out during the day when she wasn’t home, but it didn’t help much.
I needed to get out of Bakersfield. I needed clean air. I daydreamed about moving to San Francisco, where I could be close to the ocean and breathe in the ocean air. I’d never seen the ocean but I imagined it must be magical. I escaped my claustrophobic feelings by spending hours making a watercolor from a scene of San Francisco on a postcard Uncle Frank had sent me: a cable car at the top of a hill with the harbor and ocean below. I worked on the watercolor for hours, meticulously drawing in every detail and then carefully painting each tiny aspect of it.
I’d seen a movie about Paris in the 1920s, when artists like Picasso and Matisse and writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald would gather at cafes and have intellectual conversations about art and culture, and I imagined how wonderful that would be. I’d heard there were lots of artists living in San Francisco and that they met up at coffee houses where musicians came to play. I imagined what it would be like to sit with a group of artists and writers and share ideas with them. I could almost taste what it might be like.
chapter 27
My mother hadn’t seen her sister, Natalla, for many years— not since she’d moved to California when I was just a baby. And she didn’t talk much about her, but even so, Natalla had been part of my life in a unique way: she was our “benefactor”—the nice lady who sent us a care package every Christmas.
My mother seemed to have mixed feelings about these boxes. She was grateful to receive them because my aunt had married into a rich family and the clothes she sent us were expensive— nice dresses and suits my mother could wear to work. And when I was little she had no choice but to accept Aunt Natalla’s gifts of sweaters and coats—items
to keep me warm in the bitter cold of Bakersfield winters—and little tailored dresses and jumpers, which helped me to look decent when I went to school.
But as I got older Aunt Natalla began to send us hand-medowns—clothes that she had bought but hardly worn, or clothes that didn’t fit her anymore and Momma seemed to resent this.
By the time I’d entered junior high, I was taller and bigger than most of the other girls in my classes and was the same size as my mother. My aunt was not an alcoholic like Kay and Frank, or a drinker like my mother, but she had a weight problem that seemed to get worse as she got older. Because of this, I could fit into many of the clothes my aunt sent us, and this continued throughout high school. Although Aunt Natalla’s hand-me-downs were sometimes a little mature for me, I didn’t care; I loved receiving them. There were expensive suits, jackets, and skirts that I wore over and over for years because my mother couldn’t afford to buy me new clothes.
During high school, my mother and I started playing a kind of game about the large box Aunt Natalla sent, which would arrived about a week before Christmas. We’d open the box on Christmas Eve, and I always felt like an excited child as I tore into the few wrapped presents. At the bottom of the large box would be the folded “used” clothes that Momma and I would each try on and decide who it looked best on.
I felt proud of my mother for being able to put her pride aside instead of holding on to her resentment that my aunt was sending us her cast-offs. And I felt rather proud of both of us when it came to making our decisions. Since we were the same size and both so much in need of clothes, we could have fought over these items, but instead we were more likely to do the old— “You take it—no, you take it” routine.
Raising Myself Page 16