The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  This set of recollections describes my father accurately. He was happiest holding forth for hours on end with his friends, while smoking pot and wearing nothing. In comparison, my mother and brother and I must have seemed so dull to him. Nobody was admiring him or listening to hours and hours of his rambling, scholarly discourse.

  While we were living in that Fulton St. house, my father’s relationship with my mother began to deteriorate. My mother wanted my father’s love, but he no longer desired her sexually and he made no secret of the fact. Her fury and anguish at this development was painful to watch, but it was dangerous too, because she often took her feelings out on anyone who crossed her path.

  One night when I was eight years old, I knocked on their bedroom door. I don’t remember what I was asking for, it might have been a glass of milk or something like that. She screamed at me, and said through noisy tears “Do you want me to give you my heart bleeding?” I was stunned, and didn’t know what to do. Later, I asked my father why she had been so upset, and he said in a very stiff, formal, grim kind of voice, “Your mother and I were making love.” He made it sound as though he might have been saying “Your mother and I were amputating each other’s limbs.”

  I felt no maternal bond with my mother. None. I was terrified of her, even though I really did not want to be. I felt so alone in her presence. Her menace never stopped, even if she wore the happy face. One wrong word from me, or even the wrong facial expression, and the world would end.

  I also knew her well enough to know that any weakness on my part would make her worse. Even then I felt that she was more dangerous when she thought she had the upper hand. I learned to oppose her at an early age, like the puffer fish who was unpleasant to take a bite out of. It didn’t save me from everything but it did save me from subjugation, which I saw in my brother and my father, and which terrified me in a way that I can barely describe. It was bad enough to live with her. To silence my protests and allow myself to be enslaved was unthinkable.

  My tactics horrified my brother. He thought that opposing her would cause her to become violent. He was right, of course, but I thought that I would go through far less hell if I endured the occasional beating but I would not allow myself to be forced to think what she wanted, and I would not be forced to accept her version of events and say what she wanted me to say. I am afraid that sounds like an awfully weird mindset for a little girl, but that was what I thought and felt.

  My mother was so miserable and frustrated that she often beat me severely, for no reason I could see except her temper. She told me when I was an adult that I was such a bad child that she had to stop herself from beating me to death on at least two occasions. She seemed to think that I should sympathize with her for having to raise such a monster as I was.

  My mother was violent with me on many different occasions when we lived in that house. Once she threw the dog’s water dish at me. I remember walking along College Avenue with her one day and I had been holding her hand, like a daughter might do at that age. Without warning, she twisted the skin on the back of my hand with her fingernails until she drew blood. I have no idea what I did. I must have said something wrong; but my impression was that her “discipline” of me was random and had nothing to do with my disobedience. My sense of honor told me she was unjust: I knew when I deserved to be punished, and most of the things she did to me made no sense at all.

  To this day, I am not clear on what I did that made me such a failure at being a daughter. I have no doubt that I was a bratty child, but many children are brats and do not deserve to die. It might have been that she saw my rebellion and my refusal to surrender as a line in the sand she thought she could beat out of me.

  I am speculating here. Maybe since Patrick had surrendered and she did not fight with him, she thought beating me to the point of surrender would get us to stop fighting. Does that make any sense? There was never a point at which I accepted her “discipline” and then was hugged and forgiven. I did not see what she was doing as just, nor did I see myself as misbehaving. To me, what she did was only about her temper, not my behavior. I knew I was naughty, but I was not punished for naughtiness. I was punished randomly, for how she felt.

  It was in that house that I had reason to dread the shower, and not the bathtub.

  I didn’t want my mother in the shower with me. If I could BART to ballet class by myself, why on earth would I need my mother to help me in the shower? She was not there to help me get clean. In fact, I felt a lot less clean after the shower. I don’t want to talk about what she did. I can’t talk about what she did. I can’t think about what she did.

  To this day, I have trouble with the shower. Sometimes I have so much trouble with the flashbacks from this incident that I pile towels or clothing across my chest. Sometimes I have to force myself into the shower, because being naked is unbearable, feeling the water on my skin reminds me of her hands on my skin and her voice whispering threats in my ear. Even now, sometimes I have to count backwards from one hundred to keep myself from stumbling out of the shower with a head full of soap and a heart full of pain.

  Here is an excerpt from Elisabeth Waters’ deposition when she was being asked about my mother molesting me in the shower:

  MR. DOLAN: Let’s go on to another topic here. Do you have any information that would pertain to Marion Zimmer Bradley having any sexual interaction with Moira Stern?

  ELISABETH WATERS: No.

  MR. DOLAN: Have you ever heard that issue discussed at any time?

  ELISABETH WATERS: I have heard Moira say some things about it.

  MR. DOLAN: What have you heard Moira say about it?

  ELISABETH WATERS: She said that one time her mother fondled her breasts while she was in the shower.

  MR. DOLAN: Anything else?

  ELISABETH WATERS: That Moira said to me, no.

  MR. DOLAN: Okay. Did you ever ask Marion if any of that was true?

  ELISABETH WATERS: Yes.

  MR. DOLAN: What did Marion say?

  ELISABETH WATERS: She said that children before the age of puberty didn’t have erogenous zones.

  MR. DOLAN: Anything else she said to you?

  ELISABETH WATERS: No.

  MR. DOLAN: When did she tell you that?

  ELISABETH WATERS: When I asked her if—when I said that Moira was—when I said that I had been visiting Moira in the hospital, and that Moira had said that Marion fondled her breasts in the shower.

  MR. DOLAN: How old was—strike that. What year was this that you had this discussion with Marion Zimmer Bradley?

  ELISABETH WATERS: I guess it would have been around 1990.

  MR. DOLAN: Did you ever ask Marion if she actually did fondle Moira?

  ELISABETH WATERS: No.

  MR. DOLAN: Did you ever inquire of Marion whether there was any truth about Moira’s statement that Marion had been touching her breasts when she was in the shower?

  ELISABETH WATERS: No, I just told her Moira had said that, and she said that children that age didn’t have erogenous zones.

  This is what she said to the lawyers in 1999 before making an agreement that she would only continue to testify if they did not ask her any more questions about me:

  “MR. DOLAN: Did you ever tell Elisabeth Waters that children didn’t have erogenous zones?

  MZB: I may well have.

  MR. DOLAN: Do you have the belief that children don’t have erogenous zones?

  MZB: At the time I believed it.

  MR. DOLAN: And what time was that?

  MZB I think it was probably when my own kids were young.”

  One day Mother tied me to a chair at the kitchen table, and threatened to pull out my teeth with a pair of pliers. She thought she was teaching me to not bite my brother. It makes me feel very strange when I talk about things like this. Worse, Patrick was there and saw and heard the whole thing, because it was being done for his “benefit.”

  Here is what Lisa told the attorney about it in her deposition:

 
“MR. DOLAN: What did Marion tell you about that episode?

  ELISABETH WATERS: That Moira kept biting Patrick, and she couldn’t think of any way to stop her, so she tied her to a chair and threatened to pull out all of her teeth with pliers, and Moira became hysterical, and Marion untied her and let her go, and Moira never bit her brother again.”

  I never forgot this incident, but it would not have mattered if I had. My mother bragged and bragged about how she had “cured” me of biting my brother. However, I continued to bite him until we lived in the next house, and we quit fighting. Naturally, my mother never had the slightest curiosity about why I was biting him, rather than trying to train me out of it with yellow plastic rope and pliers. It was my reflexive defense, which began because Patrick was bigger than I was, and we fought like cats and dogs. For comparison’s sake, declawed cats and beaten dogs routinely become “fear-biters.” I believe that was the case with me.

  My mother petted and coddled my brother Patrick, which made me furiously jealous. I cannot remember a single time that she ever hit him or yelled at him. That does not mean it did not happen, only that she did not do it in front of me. He told me that her methods with him took a very different form. He remembers to this day hiding under a table listening to me scream while she beat me. When asked about physical abuse, this is what Patrick said:

  “Physical. Absolutely. But that is so much easier to bear than head games. Screaming is bad, but little whispers and threats work so much better to chill your blood and recreate being cold and naked hiding under tables hearing the shouting.”

  —Secret Keeper No More, Mark Greyland

  In a way, I believe he got the worse end of the deal, being coddled while his baby sister was beaten; how does one’s young manhood survive being treated as too weak to endure what your baby sister must endure? Patrick ended up thinking that if only he could do something differently, he could save me or stop her from hurting me.

  Mother was entirely aware of what she did, because she and my father both wanted to do away with conventional gender roles. My father disdained masculinity and anything which went along with it, and spoke as if traditional masculinity was the source of all the evils in the world. For this reason, I had to be trained to not be girlish, and any signs of masculinity in Patrick had to be forcibly eradicated. It did not surprise me in the least that she would coddle him while roughing me up. Only years later did I understand that Patrick let himself be destroyed by her because he thought he could protect me by doing so.

  “I trance out and visions fill me at the drop of a hat, then the cold spot from everything you agreed to being a joke and the sound of screams rise and I’m balling up and ”too late, too late could I have done more" wars with “she never listened anyway you are nothing and the pain for her rises and ….”

  —Secret Keeper No More, Mark Greyland

  Patrick has told me that what we call “Survivor’s Guilt” has long been a fixture of his life. I shudder to think of what it did to him. I was the firebrand, the noisy brat, the focus of her rage. I cannot imagine being in the position of trying to behave well enough to keep another human being from committing violence against a smaller person.

  Patrick used to tell me that Mother was like the hamster that ate her babies.

  One story my mother told me when we were living in the house with the lemon tree has always stuck with me. She told me she had bashed a cat’s brains in with a rock for refusing to nurse its young. She felt that what she had done was good and right, and I was expected to honor her for being so concerned about the health of kittens that she would kill their neglectful mother.

  It seems to me that this view was shortsighted. I also felt a bit like the kittens.

  Chapter 16: The Sad Waltz (1976)

  agony shrieks hollowly from what is left of my soul

  I too can be crumpled up and thrown away

  Dying, I feel I might just disappear

  wordless

  —Ghosts, Moira Greyland

  The Sad Waltz (Valse Triste) was a short film made in ’76 by Bruno Bozzetto, which I saw with my father. Set to music by Sibelius of the same name, it was about a little grey kitten whose home had been bombed into ruins. She would see mirages of the things that had been there before: a bright kitchen with a grandmother and a rocking chair, a bird in a cage, a saucer of milk; all things a kitten would love… but each time she tries to leap onto Grandmother’s lap or catch the bird, she discovers she is hanging from rubble by her claws.

  My home was also a mirage, and I cannot watch that film without disproportionate tears. I had famous parents, loved by everyone, and a home people loved to visit: a place people felt they could be themselves but it only felt like that to the visitors. Real love? Real acceptance? Mirages. I, too, ran from one thing to another, looking for love, since I could not run to my mother and father. I have found my share of mirages but in the final analysis, I am the mirage: the child prodigy who is supposed to “save the world,” destined in my father’s imagination to bring his Grand Vision to the world.

  In reality, I am not a child prodigy destined to save the world. I was a little girl who wanted her mommy and daddy to love her, but they were too busy achieving their own goals to bother with me. The reality of who I was did not agree with what they wanted me to be. I could not be the adoring sycophant my mother wanted. I would not participate in my father’s Grand Vision. Yet my refusal of them put me on the outside of my own family. I was not loved, I was nothing. I was part “prodigy” and part monster: a living, breathing irreconcilable difference.

  The last thing in Valse Triste which winks out of sight is the grey kitten herself.

  Did I disappear too? I tried. Sometimes interacting with my parents was unavoidable. I never stopped hoping that they would love me, since I was as naive as the grey kitten in the film. Nearly every interaction reminded me that our family was a mirage. My mother and father did not love me: far to the contrary, and not only was I not safe, I was in danger much more of the time than I care to think about, even now.

  It was beyond them not loving me. I was not supposed to notice that where they said they loved me, my interactions with my mother nearly always involved her rage and frightening physical outbursts, and my father openly disliked and mistrusted me because there were things he wanted to do that I simply could not do. He told me plainly that he had no more interest in me than if I had been a stranger…and yet I am supposed to act happy and believe that I am loved by this wonderful, creative family which is so accepting of difference. Well, perhaps some difference.

  Not mine.

  When I was ten, I tried to commit suicide; I took a lot of aspirin in front of my mother. She ignored my suicide attempt. I don’t know why she was so indifferent. Possibly she was too absorbed with her own pain to worry about me. Maybe she thought I was trying to upstage her. After all, both she and my father routinely threatened suicide, though I do not think either of them ever made a serious attempt.

  I wanted to die. I didn’t see any way that my pain would ever get better and I didn’t think I wanted to spend what life I had left being a punching bag for my mother. I handled my symptoms alone, downstairs, but I realized that if I was to remain alive I might as well find something to do. Even if my life didn’t matter to her, it was going to matter to me.

  Why was I so miserable that I decided that dying was the only way out of my pain? Several things happened when I was ten, a few good, but many bad.

  First the good: My mother sent me to a wonderful summer camp that year and the year before. I would routinely wake up at 4 am and go down to the barn to catch the horses and throw feed, then an hour later we would saddle everyone up, hanging bridles on the saddle horns and leaving everyone scheduled to be ridden in their halters until the ride. I was a constant presence and a good rider. I ended up being a kind of teacher’s aide on trail rides, and I was even allowed to teach a riding class. I warmed to leadership and to teaching, and knew I had found an important part
of my life.

  I also got a bicycle just prior to this, and I was practiced enough to ride it all over town. I hated to take public transit anywhere, although I did constantly from the time I was about seven. There was simply no alternative. My father could not be relied upon to drive because it upset him so badly, and because he was working, albeit working at home. Mother was also working, writing to put food on the table.

  My best friend back then was named Rohana, and she was a few years younger than I was. She lived six blocks north on Fulton from Prince St. to Derby, and I would walk to her house all the time. Her father Elliot Kenin was a banjo player of some note, and he sang funny and wonderful songs. Sometimes Rohana and I would sit on Shattuck Avenue near the BART station to sell the jewelry we made.

  I was very interested in fishing, and Elliot took the bunch of us fishing. I caught a little perch, and he sliced its head off and cooked it. I was horrified by the fact that it had to be killed, but we ate it and it was delicious. I was also disappointed in myself that I ate it but lacked the courage to kill it.

  I wanted to make some money, so I worked for our neighbor Ted on Fulton Street. He gave me a quarter an hour to pick strawberries for him, and later he would give me a dollar an hour when I asked for a raise. Then I got a paper route for the Oakland Tribune, and I had to bike through the part of Oakland every morning early which was between Adeline and Shattuck, from the farthest edge of West Berkeley to several blocks into Oakland. Nothing too fearsome happened except that people routinely stiffed me for their newspapers, which infuriated my father when he came with me to try to help me collect. I believe I only kept the paper route for three months or so—I felt at the time that it was a scary part of town, and it was ridiculous for me to be out there. Although nothing untoward happened other than the loss of money, it was more good luck than good management.