When I was ten, Donovan Duncan Adkison, a mostly-blind photographer and masseur, invited me to his home. He gave me a conventional, capable massage, then made a pass at me. I politely declined, got my clothes on, and quickly left. I was aware that he had committed an ethical breach, and as such, I was not obligated to anything beyond politeness; I did not have to feel guilty or explain my departure. However, even though I could get away from Duncan I would never have told my mother. She would have been furious with me. My father would have gotten That Look in his eye, and rubbed his hands with glee. Even at that age, he would have wanted me to not be upset, but to integrate sexuality into every single relationship. Worse, he probably would have asked me why I left, and no doubt reminded me what a prude I was.
Strange things happened at the SCA too, sadly. When I was 12, I took Medieval dance classes with Flieg a few blocks from my house in Berkeley. I was a good dancer so I felt secure enough to be a bratty adolescent, roping others into doing the Bunny Hop amid all the Medieval dances: pavanes and bransles (pronounced “brawl”) and galliards. The result of this was Flieg inventing the “Bransle de Lapignette,” or Bunny Bransle.
One day, Flieg drove me home from some SCA event or other, he gave me a hug goodbye and then, to my horror, he jammed his tongue down my twelve-year-old throat. I managed to make my excuses, politely, and escape before he tried anything else. I was very lucky that he decided to do this while parked in front of the orange church across from my mother’s house rather than at the SCA event itself, where I might not have been able to find a way to get away.
After that, I avoided being near him if there was any possibility of being alone with him. I do not remember dance classes with him after that but it made a difference in my life. In an instant I went from being the teacher’s pet to someone who could not be around my dance teacher any more, at least not in my mind. I was dragged into a situation I didn’t belong in and wanted no part of. He was an adult, I was a child, and now I felt used, soiled, as though he had used me to wipe his nose on.
I could not tell any other adult in either case, let alone the police. A child automatically has less credibility than an adult. I was certain that my objections would have been met with a condescending “You must have misunderstood” or worse, a denial. Besides, he hadn’t “hurt” me. I had left before he could back up his words with actions. It was easier at that point to learn to identify dangerous situations and get away before things got too weird. We kids could look out for each other, but there was no way to fight back legally if someone had bad intentions.
It made the world a little smaller.
Now some men will tell you that it is harmless to make a pass at a girl, all girls, every time, just in case they might get lucky. Here is the problem: when a man makes a pass, it permanently changes the relationship. Instead of Duncan being a kindly older man who was looking out for me, now he was one of the predators that I had to be wary of.
When I was eleven, I landed my first major theatrical role. I played Alice in Wonderland at the Dickens Fair. I prepared exhaustively both for the audition and for the part, reading all of Alice many times and discussing “The Annotated Alice” at length with my father. He loved the work of Lewis Carroll, and he and I spent a lot of time further annotating the book.
Of course, I realized many years later that my father had a bit too much in common with Lewis Carroll. This was not a shared interest based on wonderful literary devices and madcap humor: Lewis Carroll loved photographing little naked girls.
At the time, I didn’t know that. All I knew is that my father and I had something to talk about which had nothing to do with my being a prude. I had been cast in large part because according to Sylvia, my beloved director, I was a dead ringer for the Tenniel engraving of Alice found in the books.
I loved playing Alice, and I did my best. There were many rehearsals, and Mother had to drive me to Novato for a fitting more than once when the costumes were being made. Once there was a problem with the costume—possibly it had been delayed at the dry cleaners. Mother made me a shirt and skirt which she believed looked enough like the Alice costume to suffice. This was a kind act, but my response was not kind.
I was a rotten perfectionist, and made no secret of my disappointment. The original blouse had a collar and buttons, and the skirt was pleated with tiny pleats and cut in gores so it was very full at the hem. The costume was meant to be pale blue with white bands at the skirt hem and sleeve ruffles. Mother had made me a skirt and blouse of bright blue polyester knit with no white bands. The skirt was narrow and the wrong shape: straight from hip to hem. The blouse was made on a shapeless pattern with raglan sleeves and an elastic neckline and sleeve cuffs. Raglan sleeves are what one might find on a peasant blouse: instead of actual sleeves being set into armholes, the top edge of the sleeve forms part of a square neckline, and elastic holds the shirt in place.
I would always internally reference this afterwards as being the reason I refused to let Mother ever sew anything for me again. No doubt Mother was furious with me for hating what she had made me on short notice. Yes, she had made me a costume but it looked utterly wrong. In retrospect, my brutal honesty shocks me. I hope I am no longer so vicious. Also, one might reasonably conclude that my mother had poor eyesight and was doing her best.
In any case, my ability to sew was not lost on the Faire people around me who needed costume pieces, and I began to earn money sewing costumes. When I was twelve, I became the youngest person ever to appear on the Renaissance Faire’s approved list for people who could be commissioned to make costumes. That meant the things I made were not only known to be well made, but historically accurate enough to look right to the Faire patrons: natural fibers, concealed seams, period colors, naturally period shapes and designs, and awareness of sumptuary laws—No purple, no scarlet red, no cloth of gold unless you were royal, and no velvet unless you were noble!
Rohana worked at the Dickens Fair with me after I had learned to sew, and I got to make some dresses for our use. Recently she showed me pictures of her daughter wearing a black-and-white plaid taffeta dress I had made back then, when I was twelve. It had a border of knife-pleated hard pressed pleats: it was a thing of beauty, even all these years later. She remarked on how quickly I had cut it out and put it together. Mostly what I remember about that dress was the endless plaid-matching, where the seams have to line up one line on the plaid with the same one on the other side so it looks nice, not messy. She also saw my earlier experiments from the year before when I was eleven, where I had made some skirts with the wide wales on the corduroy going side to side instead of up and down—not a good look!
For all that I resented having to BART around so much, it might just have been a blessing in disguise. Mother owned an orange 1967 VW squareback station wagon, and later an identical one in white. On one trip to Novato for a costume fitting she got into a fifteen-car pileup, and on the way home another time, the car caught fire just off University Avenue in Berkeley. My cousin Fiona was in the car that time and I was in the back deck, as usual. I had to wake Fiona up and make her get out of the car so we could escape the fire. There had been many car accidents with Mother at the wheel. When we were still in New York, she crashed and none of us were in seatbelts. All the SCA swords and things that were in the back of the car flew into the front of the car. We were OK, oddly enough. Bumps and bruises and scrapes, nothing more.
As Alice, I was part of several different stage shows and scenes. One included my aunt Tracy as The Red Queen, and her friend Samantha as the White Queen. I admired them both tremendously as actresses, and felt so honored to be cast opposite them.
At the end of the run, the director gave me an Alice in Wonderland doll, which thrilled me. I had never owned a doll. I don’t really have a way to explain what it meant to me when Sylvia gave me that doll. After all, little girls usually have dolls, and know they are pretty and even believe that their parents will protect them. When Sylvia gave me that doll, it made m
e think that maybe someone in the world thought I was a little girl, and that maybe even I deserved to have a doll.
At the Dickens Fair the following year I was given a different role, which seemed to suit my personality better than Alice. Alice was meant to be mild-mannered, quiet, and studious. I was quiet and studious, yes, but I was as mild-mannered as a wolverine, more of a demon than an ingenue.
The directors at the Dickens Fair set me to work leading the Father Christmas parade as Princess Mistletoe. That meant I had to be able to compel crowds of people to get out of the way, choose an appropriate pathway to keep a hundred or more people together, and keep a good pace, neither too fast nor too slow.
At this point, I was twelve years old. I became addicted to coffee that Dickens Fair, and discovered it made me feel a whole lot better. I did not discover for many years that one reason coffee suited me so well was that it helped with my PTSD symptoms. I figured it just helped me stay awake, since our workdays at Fair were quite long at that point.
I wore a red military-style jacket covered with miles of gold braid, and a short yellow satin skirt. Since my character was meant to be a Christmas doll, I wore white face, red spots on my cheeks, and bright green and gold eyeshadow. It was the most unusual stage makeup I had ever done to that point. My hair was done in braids across my head, and I had mistletoe woven in among them. The following year, I made a new Princess Mistletoe costume with a longer skirt, again loads of gold braid, and epaulettes on the shoulders with gold fringe.
I appreciated the necessity of wearing stage makeup, even if it was extreme. I wanted to dress like a girl and wear makeup, but my mother was absolutely opposed to anything which would “reinforce gender stereotypes.” She could not object to my wearing stage makeup, though. She even got me cold cream, because the red circles on my cheeks would not come off any other way. After all, I was not a little girl.
I merely played one on stage.
Chapter 18: Wind-Up Dolls Don’t Eat (1977)
“…To be ‘Bone Chewing Bear’, robbing the plates of every scrap of food you could find.
Life got better as I got older and there was more money, but the earth could turn any day
to seeing the big cat stalking in her skin. I flinch from hands and eyes and am very
polite and patient day by day by…”
—Mark Greyland, Secret Keeper No More
Food is disgusting, or so I keep thinking. Where my diabetic, morbidly obese Mother lived to eat, I had trouble getting myself to eat. These days I know I had a constellation of symptoms which amounted to some type of eating disorder. At the time, all I could articulate was that “food is disgusting.”
But what does that mean?
There were two parts to my troubles with food: the starvation part and the depression part. The starvation part was worst when I was very small. I do not remember much except being very hungry, and developing the attitude that if I needed food and she could say no I could not endure feeling like that. I could not be at her mercy or I would die.
I will not beg her for mercy or for food. No I will not. Never again!
The depression part was stronger when there was enough food. Anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure, is very common in traumatized people. It never occurred to me that eating could be pleasant unless I was around my friends. Most of the time, eating had become a disgusting chore. I had a great deal of difficulty with hypoglycemia. I would not eat, or could not eat, and then I would get faint and shaky.
My mother ate too much. At 5’2 ¾ and 250 pounds, her weight was a huge issue in her life and one that she never managed to handle. Her chronic overeating and overindulgence in fats were two more habits that she could not drag me into, even once there was enough food for everyone. She read cookbooks, vegetarian magazines, and diet books obsessively, convinced she was doing everything possible to reduce her weight. After all, reading about weight loss is the same as actually losing weight, right?
This led to a lot of friction with my mother. Since she had no problem with eating, my inability to eat—coupled with my refusal to eat certain things—infuriated her. It is possible that despite her best intentions, she thought I was trying to show her up by being skinny and succeeding where she had failed. I did not see it that way at all. I just thought food was disgusting, and I could not begin to explain why.
My mother read many books on anorexia and railed against the “culture of thinness.” I was not anorexic. I was simply growing and at that age I was all arms and legs. I didn’t care about my weight. She accused me of anorexia, as if I had acquired the disease just to upset her. Worse, she accused me of being one of those “evil” girls who wanted to look good for a man. As if my lack of appetite had anything whatsoever to do with that, especially when I was just eleven!
Mother did not cook very often, and when she did her cooking revolted me. She would make homemade soup. She would take a chicken carcass that we had eaten the chicken from the day before, boil it, and add potatoes and celery. It would be full of bones and have chicken grease floating on the top. It had more disgusting chicken skin than meat, and I simply could not face it. It was my observation—possibly unfair—that she would find ways to put lumps of fat into anything. She would butter everything that wasn’t nailed down. She rarely used salt or seasonings because she was on a “low-salt diet” for her heart.
Sometimes she would put unseasoned chicken leg quarters in the oven on a cookie sheet, then when they were done, she would set the sheet on top of the stove and expect us to grab a leg for ourselves. My father and brother would eagerly eat them, but I could not. I would usually not see them on the stove until they were cold and they would stay there for days sometimes, until the skin shrank and turned dark brown and translucent, and the bones stuck to the pan. I found the grease the chicken legs sat in to be unbearable. If hunger drove me to eat them, I would have to cope with nausea afterwards.
There were times that I felt so angry I didn’t know what to do, because on the occasions when she made something worth eating, like red meat, she would give all the best of it to my brother Patrick. My brother’s temperament is different than mine, and he chose to interact with our parents more than I did. She has always maintained that although I was her “favorite” she liked him better, and I can easily see why she would like him better. I was the spitfire, either hiding or fighting her, where he did his best to be pleasant and agreeable. Patrick maintained that we were starved, and I can’t deny that, but it was better by the time I was eleven. I was a workaholic, even then. I made things and did homework, and did not poke up my head to interact with the family unless there was no alternative. Being perpetually busy meant that I was not usually aware of being hungry until it was painful.
Mother had very strong opinions on what I was supposed to like to eat. She was often angry that I refused to eat the fat on steak or the skin on chicken. She would scream at me in the supermarket about wanting boneless steaks without lumps of fat, even if the best ones, the breakfast steaks, were the cheapest of all. She would scream at me for wanting “succulent” meat with no bones in it.
She loved eating fat, which disgusted me. She said it tasted rich, which made no sense to me. Fat nauseated me in any quantity, and it made me feel anxious. It still does.
I refused to butter my bread—which infuriated her—and I would not eat any bread which she would try to hide butter on, whether toasted under jam or under poached eggs. She would talk about what an odd child I was for refusing to eat fat. She would tell anyone who would listen about how strange I was for hating butter on my toast. She eventually decided that either I would eventually become normal and butter my toast like everyone else, or I would stay scrawny.
I didn’t want to be forced to eat fat because it reminded me of things I didn’t want to think about. My hatred of fat approached a phobia. The truth of the matter is that fat or grease reminds me of creepy smiling adults with lube. Some things, after all, will not work on a child without lube
and a good deal of physical force. I don’t want to think about it. I also do not keep Vaseline in my bathroom, and I have a lot of trouble with opaque soaps and shampoos.
How could I refuse food when we had so little of it to start with? Maybe this sounds weird, but I cannot endure feeling vulnerable. If she can use food as a weapon against me, then she owns me. I cannot need something she can withhold or she will never stop using it, as though I was a dog she was training.
What on earth did I eat, when I couldn’t cope with her food? I could usually find a can of something, even if it was a can of something weird. I ate a lot of sardines and tuna fish, more canned soup than anyone should, and even odder things. I would heat them up and season them. If she bought chicken hearts and gizzards, I would put them on a fork and cook them on the burner.
Why did we have so many cans? Back then, my mother would shop at what she called “The Used Bread Store.” I thought this was hilarious. Its real name was “The Returned Bread Store.” She would buy stale-dated bread and other stuff, especially a loaf which seemed to be flavored with prunes which I loved, and she also bought mountains of dented canned goods, which were much cheaper than real food.
To be fair, there were also times where she cooked edible things. She made a lentil-tomato-potato stew flavored with curry, turmeric and cinnamon, which I loved, and which I make for myself to this day. Sometimes she would make a beef stew that was wonderful. I have gleefully stolen her recipe.
There were even times she tried to help me. Many mornings I would wake up revolted by food and unable to eat. Mother would sometimes put raw eggs, milk, and a little sugar in the blender for me, call it eggnog, and I would usually be able to get it down.
There was a cookbook I used and loved which she had among her hundreds. It was “The Back-To-Cooking Cookbook,” and I use the brownie recipe to this day. The thing about that cookbook: it was hilarious! It was sarcastic, mostly full of stories about how bad eating processed food was, and how unhealthy and pointless it all was. It suggested that the perfect murder could be committed by feeding one’s husband lots and lots of shortening-laden biscuits; It made merciless fun of popular housekeeping magazines. Among all this barbed social commentary were simple, practical recipes. The only other one of my mother’s cookbooks, other than “The Joy of Cooking,” which I stole from her with her knowledge and consent, was “To Serve Man,” a humorous not-quite-cookbook by Damon Knight which featured cannibal recipes, grudgingly permitting the substitution of chicken and beef for people.
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 16