A Normal Suburban Childhood with Regular Beatings
“AND DON’T FORGET to go through the stuff in the cedar chests downstairs,” Wendy says. “There are old comforters that you can look through to use for your bed in the dorms.”
I’ve been packing up, organizing, or trashing every item I own for days now. The dorm assignment papers that came in my freshman orientation packet last week stressed the fact that there’s limited storage space and we might not have our own closets. So I’ve got to pare down everything I own to two suitcases, limited wall decorations, and bedding.
Wendy’s taken my departure from the house as an opportunity to pawn off all the crap in the house she doesn’t want but doesn’t want to throw out. Piles of smelly, aged, ripped sheets and pillowcases sit on my bedroom floor. The frayed and bulb-burned lampshade from a long-broken lamp stem decorates my bureau.
“Here. A going-away gift,” Wendy proudly offered, despite the fact I’d explained that my dorm room will come furnished with a desk and study lamp.
I wonder if David received the same “gifts” when he left for college a few years ago. I can’t remember.
So much has been lost. So much has been denied, despite the evidence, the psyche marks, like cigarette burns on formica.
The moments that my brain does remember seem quite random.
Even now, after all these years, my memory of that moment with David and The Three Stooges remains crystal. It’s wrapped in a sort of warm insanity that, however peculiar, provides vague comfort.
It became clear to me, early on, that David had a unique method for dealing with the stress of our family. I think he figured he couldn’t change the situation, so he retreated to a place where no one else could go. I, on the other hand, fought back. But it was a war no one but me knew I was fighting. I was a secret warrior. Incognito.
Over time, I developed the voice of a mother, the mother I imagined out of “Beaver Cleaver-land.” In the beginning, I used it to call the police. Later, I used it to call in the absences and tardies my brothers and I accrued when my mother went to party with her friends and left us, sometimes for days, without supervision.
In retrospect, I don’t feel bad about lying to the lady about Howard pointing the gun at us. He had, in the past, not only threatened but hurt each of us. He was a man filled with a rage he couldn’t contain. It seethed and seeped out, sometimes in alcoholic bursts, sometimes with no alcohol and seemingly no provocation. He beat us with his belt or his large fists. His blows were uncontrolled and without concern for the frailty of our small bodies. He must have been unaware that his physical strength was much greater than ours, and I felt, when he beat us, that he wanted pure domination over us and, sometimes, the annihilation of our wills, our individual wills to defend, to argue, to defy, and even—at times—to live. In those moments, I felt his true intent might be to kill me.
We were smashed against walls, beaten against furniture, slapped down on floors, and left with no reactive movement. We learned to get there fast, to that place where we didn’t react, feigning unconsciousness, disassociating from the pain because it caused response and response equaled more pain. The sooner I could leave my body, the sooner he’d leave my body alone.
Wendy beat us with the horsewhip she used on her rides at Withensea Stables.
I think the reason the police came that day when Howard had the gun—they didn’t always come—was because I told them my father had threatened us, his children. Although the local police thought a good talk and a walk around the block was the correct way to deal with domestic violence, I don’t think their morals stretched to allow child abuse. At least, not when firearms were being waved around.
In our community, hitting your kids isn’t considered child abuse. This is “spare the rod, spoil the child” territory. Good old Puritan ethic. Massachusetts is, after all, the state that, in 1646, enacted the law allowing the death penalty for a rebellious child—the “stubborn child” law. People here look the other way when parents discipline their children. When we were beaten, we were left with visible welts, scratches, and bruises, but no one ever asked about them—and if they did, they were satisfied with an honest “my father hit me” or an obviously made-up version of how we’d gotten the marks.
They were minding their own business.
I knew Mrs. O’Connell was trying to be kind that day with Howard and the gun. For a New Englander, getting involved rather than maintaining a cold, silent regard was a grand gesture. But my mother didn’t like the neighbors because they were “nosy.” It must have been hard to ignore the stuff going on, though, and my mother never did get that.
“Who cares what the neighbors think?” was one of her favorite sayings.
I think there must have been many small fractures, but with no hospital visits and no x-rays, there’s no way to be sure. When you’re young, bones heal fast.
Complaining about a beating or the pain invited more of the same. Also, I knew my friends were being hit by their parents as well. I knew our situation didn’t differ much from theirs. But I never believed that my friends were being hit as often or as hard.
Now I understand more about why Howard and Wendy were so mean.
For Wendy, we existed merely as a barrier between her and loneliness. I found out when I was about six that Wendy was adopted. I think, as an adopted child, she must have missed out on the crucial bonding in early childhood that deters sociopathy. I read an article about it in one of Wendy’s Psychology Today magazines. Then, this year, I learned more secrets that explain why Wendy is so messed up.
She received an exclusive education at Girls’ Latin School in Boston, where she distinguished herself as an excellent student. But she was never taught to take care of herself. Yetta waited on my mother like a servant. Wendy wasn’t expected to do chores, let alone pick up the clothing she dropped on the floor as she removed it from her body. She was a pampered, spoiled child who never developed housekeeping skills.
Yetta loved to cook for Wendy, but refused to let her learn to cook herself. Later, in her teens, Wendy spent hardly any time at home with her parents and refused to eat most meals with them. Yetta began leaving Wendy her meals in the refrigerator to have when she wished. It wasn’t until Howard and Wendy married that she began her education, instructed by Howard, in what were considered her wifely duties. It was a painful education that, had it been graded, would have received poor marks for execution and a failing score for effort.
Howard, ten years her senior, married Wendy when she was seventeen. He seemed entertained by her independent, nonconformist behavior before their marriage. Afterwards, he became scarily determined to subvert her personality and pull a Pygmalion-style miracle by transforming her into a suburban housewife. They were both unhappy with the attempt.
Howard expressed his displeasure by having affairs, and, after several years of half-hearted attempts to please him, Wendy began to assert her independence. For this reason, my mother spent more time in the kitchen during the early period of my childhood than she ever did again. Howard demanded that she provide balanced, nutritious meals and bellowed if they were less than palatable. I remember a lot of bellowing around the dinner table.
That day with the gun marked the beginning of another chapter in my life.
My first seven years were filled with the fear of Howard’s violence, but they were also filled with artistic and athletic activities. My brothers and I participated in most of the same activities our friends did. There was at least a semblance of normalcy in our suburban existence. We were kept busy with practices and lessons. My brothers played team football and baseball. We all endured piano lessons. I used to sit at the piano in my wet bathing suit in the summers, because I’d have run in off the beach just in time for the lesson. In the winter, I peeled off snow clothes before sitting down, having just come in from playing outside.
I hated my piano lessons because it meant I had to come back to the house and the chaos. My teacher, an older Itali
an woman who ate foul-smelling pepperoni sandwiches, beat time to the piano metronome with a baton, on my knuckles, as I tried to play. I still can’t play the piano without thinking of the smell of pepperoni and that tapping baton.
I also attended ballet classes with the Boston Ballet on Saturdays. This remains the one class Wendy brought me to with regularity. She always got stoned with a friend in Boston while I practiced. I never wanted to be a ballerina, though I liked the formality and structure of the ballet studio classes. I possessed no real talent, and eventually the ballet master became honest about my chances for acceptance into the corps. He encouraged me to study tap dancing. But I knew tap wasn’t my style. Tap was for people who smiled. Ballet was serious.
Summers were better. My father’s sister, Doreen, owned a summer bungalow in Withensea and came to live there every summer. During the first seven years of my life I spent almost every summer day at my aunt’s beach bungalow or on the beach with my other aunts, uncles, and cousins, and grandparents on Howard’s side.
I felt freedom on the beach. It was my playground. My cousins and I spent all day in and out of the freezing waves, drawing and playing circle hopscotch with Popsicle sticks and building elaborate sand castles with our plastic pails and shovels. At lunchtime we were whistled in like dogs. We would run—pink-skinned, blue-lipped—to the spot up on the soft, white sand where there was a semi-circle of aluminum chairs and chaises. Once there, we were toweled off and fed warm peanut butter sandwiches, soft peaches, and icy water from a long, silver thermos. Afterwards, we were lectured to stay out of the water until we had digested. We always ignored those instructions and ran directly back into the ocean, where we played for hours, until the ice cream truck rang its bell at the edge of the dunes. Then it was a chorus of whines and begging until someone offered coins, which I would trade for blue raspberry Italian ices.
Howard, who, as I’ve described, disciplined us in a manner usually reserved for inmates or delinquents in a military school, displayed a paradoxical sweetness around his family.
After the divorce, when he remembered to pick us up on Sundays, we were taken to his sister Doreen’s home and dropped off while he went elsewhere. Going to our Aunt Doreen’s was a treat we looked forward to. We missed our long summers on the beach with this big Irish family and the nighttime barbeques and marshmallow roasts that followed.
Howard drank at one of the local tourist bars or spent Sundays out playing poker games.
During the winter, when Aunt Doreen went back to her winter home and we were alone with him, our visits were a different story. Without the audience of his family his mood was unreliable and often volatile. We spent our time either playing outside or cleaning Aunt Doreen’s place for him, or sometimes I would read the Sunday newspaper from cover to cover—literally—in a corner somewhere while he watched sports on television and drank beer. He never let me bring a book to read. He said I read “too many books, like your mother.” My brothers played ball outside or watched television with him. When his libacious sports television time ended he called us together and, usually inebriated, drove us back to Wendy, often without having offered us anything to eat for the entire day. We learned not to complain.
Howard drives us to a nearby restaurant and tells us to stay in the car. He hops out of the car, goes in, and comes back with a small bag. When he leans back in the driver’s seat and opens the bag, he pulls out a lobster roll and proceeds to eat it without offering us a bite. David, who sits behind him in the car, makes the mistake of asking if we will be allowed to order something to eat.
“Didn’t your mother feed you breakfast this morning?”
He always looks for ways to blame her for anything.
David replies, “We ate Wheaties for breakfast.”
“Good, you shouldn’t be hungry now; it’s only been a few hours since you ate breakfast.”
David perseveres. I’m sure hunger motivates him. But we all know not to cross Howard, as well as the consequences for not behaving well.
“But I’m hungry again. Aren’t you going to give us lunch?” Howard turns around and backhands David across the seat. “There, that’s lunch. Is it tasty?” he snarls.
We all freeze. I sit next to David in the backseat and Moses cowers in the front. None of us breathes at first. I steal a peek at David and see he’s fighting back tears. I don’t want to embarrass him by letting on I see him crying. I stare out the side window. Howard eats the rest of the lobster roll while we all sit in silence.
He says, “Lobster rolls are expensive. I can’t afford to buy you all lobster rolls for lunch.”
The cost of the lobster roll would have covered the cost of several less expensive sandwiches for all of us. I remember feeling shocked at his selfishness. I’d been a witness to it before, in many ways, but I’d never seen such a blatant display. That experience solidified my understanding of his nature.
Our stomachs were audibly rumbling, but he drove us back to Doreen’s place so he could watch a football game while we played outside.
From that point on, we never complained about the lack of meals on those visits; instead, we ate tons of Raisin Bran and Wheaties on Sunday mornings, just in case. We never told Wendy, either, knowing she would cause trouble with Howard and fearing the retribution we might endure the next time we saw him if she did.
Before, we’d gotten glimpses of his softer side at bedtimes, holidays, and birthdays. At those times he became the magical father of our dreams. We celebrated birthdays with parades. These were elaborate productions with hats that Howard had intricately folded from newspapers, worn while we marched around hunting for presents and singing “Happy Birthday.”
Christmas Day before the divorce was blissful. It was the one day that stayed argument-free. Whatever friction our parents held was put aside and temporarily forgotten. My father decorated the outside of our old Victorian with large, multicolored bulbs that made it look like a gumdrop-laden gingerbread house. My brothers and I hung stockings on our fireplace that were so big we could have jumped inside them ourselves. They’d be crammed with toys the next morning. Howard’s friend owned a toy store, and at Christmas our living room became the previous year’s “Toy Clearance” repository. We’d wake each other up in the middle of Christmas Eve night to go down and marvel at the toys stacked from one end of the living room to the other. Most were unwrapped, and we were unable to resist playing with them. These were the Useless Presents, as in A Child’s Christmas In Wales. We waited to open the Useful Presents. This is how our parents found us in the morning: already occupied with the toys. They didn’t mind as long as we didn’t open the wrapped presents—the Useful Presents—from “aunts who always wore wool”
Wendy made a Christmas pancake breakfast for everyone, and then we spent the day playing until dinnertime. Wendy complained we were being spoiled with toys, but she never made a scene about it on Christmas.
After the divorce, we rarely saw Howard’s family.
Summer days were spent with friends or pursuing other interests. Birthday parades went away. Christmas became a lonely time. Wendy, who had been raised a Jew, didn’t enjoy Christmas celebrations with the same spirit as Howard.
We missed our Christmas mornings and the spoilage, now replaced by a single, thoughtless, used gift from Wendy. No Christmas pancake breakfasts. Instead, after opening our present, we retreated to our rooms and met later for TV dinners. I learned to prepare them for myself and my brothers in those early years after the divorce.
After Howard left, bedtimes were not monitored. As long as we were in our rooms, Wendy could party with privacy. She never checked to see if our lights were off and we were asleep.
I developed a bad nocturnal habit of staying up late due to the noise level, which earned me tardy slips at school. This is where my ability to forge Wendy’s signature came in handy.
Although Howard kept his Sunday appointments for child visits sporadically, there were a few times he showed up for other reasons. Once
he came back with a gun—again—to threaten Wendy’s new boyfriend. He also showed up when Wendy had a motorcycle accident, and once more during the Blizzard of ’78.
After Howard left, Wendy changed. The house changed, too—after Wendy’s redecoration it looked like someone had hired a lunatic as a designer, someone who had plenty of money to spend but had experienced a prolonged, visual anxiety attack during the process. The neighborhood changed; the land Howard sold off got developed into rows of aluminum-sided, raised-ranch houses all around us. We became less like children and more like neglected pets. We got intermittent feedings until I learned to cook, no affection, and almost no attention, except when we didn’t behave in a way that pleased Wendy, which pretty much meant being in the same room as her and breathing. We developed independence beyond our years. Within our own pet universe we found hierarchy and function.
I still practiced my escape down the ladder, and the ruggedness of the beach kept our new neighbors from crashing my private retreat in the cove.
A huge meadow of wildflowers decorates the area surrounding our house in the spring and summer months. Another Victorian-era house, the O’Donnells’, built the same year as ours, sits across the road. For years, nothing more was built around us on the cliffs with their sweeping, dizzying view of the rocky coast below.
The calm I found within the chaos was almost always instantly available to me there below the cliff.
I have been to church and synagogue. None of it feels personal. The pronouns are wrong. I think that place on the beach provided a kind of substitute church for me. I don’t think I would have called what I did back then praying. I’d have called it wishing hard. I kept a hope I’d get over feeling so badly about things. I don’t know why, but I anticipated that things would end up all right and I’d come out strong and feeling better.
When I imagined God’s image I pictured the wooden woman, the ship masthead. When my father lost the bar, I was devastated to learn she’d been sold at an auction, yet I still believed she was watching out for me. Otherwise, I felt isolated. I felt a child’s social understanding of existential loneliness. I felt different, but I couldn’t name or describe my difference. All I knew was that my concerns, my needs, my likes, and my dislikes were different than those of my brothers and any of my friends.
The Belief in Angels Page 4