Annabelle, in fact, won’t even let Laurie have friends, since anyone who became close to her daughter might threaten to expose her. (An unlikely invitation to a birthday party from a girl Laurie’s just met prompts this sour grape: “More likely she’s just looking for as many presents as she can get. Honestly, when she hardly knows you!”) After Laurie receives the invitation, she knows exactly what’s coming—Annabelle is going to insist the family move to a new school district, where the children don’t know Laurie enough to like her and the people at the hospital have no records of recent burns and broken collarbones.
Laurie, highly attuned to her mother in an effort to not be beaten within an inch of her life at every turn, knows to watch Annabelle for the telltale twitch at her mouth that means she’s about to get walloped, and she knows that Annabelle, despite seemingly losing control with each violent eruption, is able to control herself enough that she never beats Laurie when any adult is around. What Laurie doesn’t know is why she’s being beaten in the first place: “Not for the first she wondered what had made Annabelle the way she was. And as always before, she couldn’t come up with an answer to that.”
Roberts is careful at the beginning to lay out exactly the way Annabelle, by all appearances a pretty, happy stepmother and housewife, is able to avoid detection even though she wounds Laurie violently enough that the librarian, upon seeing Laurie, exclaims, “What happened to you?” But she also has to establish why Laurie doesn’t tell the other adult who lives right in the house with her, yet has no idea what’s going on—her stepfather:
How would he react if he knew about the things Annabelle did to her? It wasn’t the first time she’d speculated on that, of course. He’d never been there when anything happened; but what if she went up to him when he came home and said, “My mother deliberately cut me with a knife today because she was angry with me”?…Naturally, it wouldn’t be the same as if it happened to his own kids. He thought she was a funny girl, an odd one he didn’t understand. But he was kind, if you didn’t let yourself be scared by his loud voice…But of course, Annabelle wouldn’t just stand there and let Laurie tell her story without offering her own version, the way she did with doctors and the nurses and the teachers. She’d remind him of how careless Laurie was and how clumsy, and probably she’d even say Laurie was lying.
If she did that, who would he believe?
I’m also interested in how little Roberts stints on presenting the actual beating, even though this is a book for young children. The scene below, where Laurie is beaten with a hairbrush simply for making too much noise playing with Annabelle’s curlers one night, has stayed with me my entire life, since it so clearly depicts the nature of absolute, inexplicable rage:
Annabelle never did her hair when she had a headache, but Laurie reached up a trembling hand to remove the first one, anyway. Her mother reached out as if to help her, but instead of removing the little pins that held the curls in place, she jerked curler, hair and all, so that Laurie let out a yelp of pain. And then Annabelle’s hand came around in a hard blow against Laurie’s cheek as she exploded in low-voiced fury.
…Eyes blurred, head stinging where the hair had nearly been pulled out, Laurie bent over to pick up the nearest of the curlers on the floor. And Annabelle kicked her…hard enough to send her sprawling, hitting her mouth against the edge of the bathtub. Laurie felt a tooth go through her lip, tasted the blood in her mouth, knew the old, familiar terror and helplessness.
She was almost unaware of the blows that rained on her back as she crouched on the floor, her hand to her mouth, watching the blood run down her arm and into the tub. She just closed her eyes and waited until it was over.
When after Annabelle finally delivers a beating that no one can explain away—it involves an iron poker—Laurie is able to get help, and is lucky enough that her stepfather and step-grandmother want to keep her a member of the family. Her stepfather, handily enough, also is the one to finally let Laurie know why Annabelle treats her as she does: “The doctor said maybe what she does doesn’t have anything to do with you at all…You see, many parents who mistreat their kids do it because they, themselves, were mistreated by their parents, years before. And it makes a sort of sickness in them that they can’t control. It doesn’t mean that she hates you. It just means she’s unhappy and she can’t help it, the things she does.”
Well, okay not exactly. As Laurie points out, she’s never beaten, or wanted to beat, anybody. Through Laurie, we get answers to these small questions, valuable for their (God forbid) application in the real world, or just for the creation of empathy and awareness. But I keep coming back to that brutal scene. Nowadays, such explicitness can easily veer into the sensationalistic, the salacious, a kind of over-the-top entertainment. (What child today, after all, isn’t being abused by an authority figure in some novel and horrible way?) But Roberts’s scenes of beating fully display their horror, and Don’t Hurt Laurie! walks a tightrope nothing on Lifetime ever does. Yes, we understand Annabelle—and are even more determined to take that brush from her hands.
EXTRA CREDIT
Are You in the House Alone?
By Richard Peck 1976
Can You Hear Me Now?
Without exaggeration, I can say with confidence that any child of the 1970s and 80s can confirm, in a sizable swath of mainstream TV, they raped everyone. First it was Differ’nt Strokes’ Kimberly, locked up by that old man and nearly molested while Arnold banged on the door. Ditto Punky Brewster. The Facts of Life’s Natalie had some bus-station incident with Tootie banging helplessly on the door (doors blocking what happened apparently were the way to go on prime time), and Fame’s Irene Cara had to show her breasts to the pervy guy—and a girl in the Fame spinoff TV series got raped.
I’m not done! Family Ties’ Justine Bateman got perved on by her dad’s best friend. The pretty daughter on Gimme a Break had her sweater half ripped off and, if I do not mistake myself, then they raped Hunter’s Dee Dee. They raped Cagney. They may have raped Cagney twice. (I’m surprised they didn’t rape Kit.) And there was of course, the infamous Lipstick, with Mariel Hemingway screaming, “He raped my sister!” which we weren’t supposed to watch, but of course did.
I cannot emphasize how disconcerting it was, in the era of Love Boat followed by Fantasy Island, to see the sit-com characters one was accustomed to living vicariously through in very unfunny peril. As I sit here rocking in my cane chair, I am dimly aware that, nowadays, there are shows devoted to rape and the procedural accoutrements thereof. The impulse to raise awareness on a Very Important Issue remains high, as does the salacious lure of insta-drama. (Witness the entirely gratuitous rape of The Sopranos’ Dr. Melfi.) But I’m not here to retroactively wrist-slap the media. I lay out the Rape-In-Our-Times roundup only to emphasize how Richard Peck’s Are You in the House Alone? was such a departure from the one-episode treatment of its era, and to wonder, given the temporary cultural fascination of that time, why there weren’t more books like it.
The story of Gail Osbourne, whose parents have moved from New York to the Greenwich-esque Oldfield Village in Connecticut just as she enters high school, Are You in the House Alone? is a commentary not only on the laws that govern the nation but society. Gail is dating Steve Pastorini, a hot working-class brainiac given to sending her notes with quotes from Othello. Her best friend, the doggedly social-climbing Allison, is dating Phil Lawver (ironic name alert!), the scion of the richest family in town. Anyone who can add two and two can probably predict how the foursome will add up.
Other social conventions will probably be more jarring for the modern reader. First of all, Gail, horror of horrors, is having sex with Steve—but it’s not a big deal that she is. It takes place alongside doing homework, going to each other’s house for dinner, or any other normal activities of a near-adult relationship—in short, it’s central and important but not controversial. But alongside this laissez-faire (and short-lived) sexonomics lies a less palatable artifact: Allison’s
grim determination to marry Phil straight out of high school, something that’s become far more the exception than the rule—and certainly nothing that most girls would choose to do anymore to make their way up in society.
And Peck upends a bunch of stereotypes on his own, as each character reacts to the rape in unprecedented ways. After Phil Lawver rapes Gail—having stalked her through a series of increasingly sick notes, frightening calls and, finally, a horrible unsolicited visit—Allison all but rejects her, accusing her of lying. (Then, she inadvertently reveals she knew it was him from the beginning. What kind of a teen-novel best friend is that?) Gail and Steve predictably break up—but for the unpredictable reason that they were simply falling out of love already. Mrs. Montgomery, the hip and likable divorcee Gail babysits for whose house she’s raped in, tells her she can’t let her babysit for her anymore because it’s too much of a reminder. (A set of conservative parents, sure, but the hip divorcee?) Gail’s parents neither go vigilante nor blame Gail but are simply powerless, locked in an odd kind of stasis. Even Phil’s behavior is surprising: cocky and at ease, he continues to ask Gail out as if she’s merely playfully holding him off.
Even more surprising for readers of the time must have been Peck’s brutal depiction of the ways Gail was trapped even from the time Phil started harassing her. As she explains to the lawyer, even letting people know about the early harassment didn’t work: “It was like running a film in reverse. The events skipped back in a blur, jumbling up. Allison saying, ‘It never happened, Gail.’ My mother saying, ‘What has that Steve Pastorini done to you?’ Connie saying, ‘Men can’t afford to fail. It’s like bred into them.’ It seemed that everybody had turned blind ears and deaf eyes to me.” After the actual rape, Gail learns, it becomes impossible to prove that she, already sexually active, hadn’t just decided to cheat on her boyfriend—despite looking like she’s gone 10 rounds. “Why does the law protect the rapist instead of the victim?” she asks the lawyer. He gives my favorite answer ever, unglossed, which is also the last line of the chapter:
“Because the law is wrong.”
Is how Gail reacts realistic? When all is said and done, she’s able to go back to school in fairly short order, weathering the loss of her boyfriend and best friend, and holding on to the horrible secret that nobody knows. She’s bloody but unbowed: When Phil approaches her on a deserted road, she picks up a rock and smashes his windshield: “Just knowing I could give Phil Lawver a little hell, even if that only meant scratching his surfaces…What can I say? That thinking made me feel better? No, but it got me through the moment.” She’s angered but not consumed with rage; bloody but not shattered; frightened but not crippled. In the midst of a welter of Very Special Episodes, Peck created a character who was neither overwrought nor unnecessarily bleak, and the horror of what happens to Gail is all the worse for the prosaic details:
Later, in that winter, Mother said, “It could have all been worse.”…
“It could have been worse, Mother, but not much.” She was sitting at her desk in a little pool of light, composing a real-estate ad for the newspaper. “Not much worse. We were all trying to protect ourselves as individuals and families instead of organizing to make everybody safe. There are more Phils out there, you know.”
“Don’t talk that way,” she said.
“Well, there are. We should have done something else. We still should.”
“But what?” Mother said. “What could we do?” And then she turned back to her work.
EXTRA CREDIT
Go Ask Alice
By Anonymous 1971
Smoke and Mirrors
You are just going to feel dumb if you reread this debunked diary, which purported to detail the downfall of an “Alice,” a nameless girl growing up sometime during the 1970s who is yanked out of a comfortable middle-class existence where “ten globby pounds of lumpy lard” are the worst problem she faces into a life of drugs, prostitution, chaos, and disrepute. BECAUSE IT IS TRULY THE WORST-WRITTEN BOOK IN THE WORLD. According to the author, fatness, family, social alienation, and hair issues are credible reasons to start taking drugs in earnest, and Alice’s life, filled with parties, new friends, boyfriends, clothes, and a benign, caring family, is a plasticine ideal of the idea of a teenage girl’s existence, a teen mass-produced for a public who needed to know, with all these people spelling establishment Establishment, how they ticked and how to stop them ticking. I know, I know, I know, in our grammar-school years, it seemed incredibly dangerous and real. This is why they call it propaganda. It’s not a mistake that the part where she rolled up her hair in orange-juice cans was just as hard to picture as the part where it seemed confusing that a man and a woman would take turns raping someone all night. On reread, though, was my particular fave, the middle-school student she sells some acid to, then comments he’s probably pushing it on grammar-school-aged kids. No, sadly—we were all too busy reading this book.
EXTRA CREDIT
It’s Not the End of the World
By Judy Blume 1972
Splits and Starts
In these days where the statistic that fully 50 percent of marriages end in divorce doesn’t yield so much as a blink, it seems hard to remember that a simple divorce was once as enormous an event as any other brutal and unplanned death. But the depiction of Karen’s parents is all the more striking because of how ordinary it is, exactly the kind of simple loss of affection that drives children, who would like a more earth-shattering explanation for the dissolution of their family, completely insane. It’s Not the End of the World immediately assumes the kind of familial intimacy you get when sleeping over at a friend’s house—and there we are, watching the family fight, fall apart, stomp off angrily, and finally make peace, wondering if we should call a parent to take us home.
Chapter 6
Girls Gone Wild
Runaways, Left Behinds, and Ladies Living off the Fat of the Land
Eating Our Words
Do you know exactly how much money is in your wallet? How much food is in your fridge? How long you’ll be able to stretch the cache of dried abalone near the cliff that’s only reachable during the summer season? When to pick those little purple flowers that look so nice in a summer salad? No? And you call yourself independent? Tell me at least you can knit.
I am convinced more than ever that once the great global climactic catastrophe has destroyed the earth, when the stragglers dig themselves out from their damp bomb-shelter hovels and go hard-core low-tech, readers of young adult fiction will make up the core of the new society…because we are the only ones who will find living off the land fun.
Imagine, if you will, a Hamlet who spent hours on how one prepared the funeral meats and elided the whole dead-father-mother-betrayer theme in a few paragraphs, and you will have a sense of the nature of the true girls’ survivor narrative, wherein the point isn’t if you get there, but how. (“Fortinbras! What is your method for removing mud from your boots after days of marching in the rain? I use a decoction of sunflowers and saltwater…”)
The ne plus ultra of all skimming-the-cream narratives is, of course, Little House in the Big Woods, where Ma goes so far as to color the butter with squeezed carrots before she shakes it out into neat pats. But Karana of Island of the Blue Dolphins is no slouch—able, as she is, to not only create beautiful skirts for beach-purpose strolling but also to tame wild dogs, birds, and other animals, and then to make spears and hunt the animals she does not care to tame. The Witch of Blackbird Pond’s orphaned Kit makes a brave show of stirring the corn for mush with her new Puritan cousins, then seriously considers marrying a lump of a man just to have to never do that again. The Endless Steppe’s Esther Hautzig tears apart a skirt to remake it into a sweater, laboriously plucking out each stitch to then card and spin her own wool. (She may take the cake here.)
From whence comes our obsession with churning, straining, boring, sewing, scraping, stirring, carding, pulling, picking, boiling, and scrubbing? Certainly not from
any domestic instinct. These children do not simply flit around cooking, cleaning, and readying the slippers for the approaching salary earner. But they are also not simply vagabonds who hunt, moving across the land, sleeping on pine needles and drinking from streams as they go, leaving the litter of kills in their wake.
They are some lovely amalgam of the two, picking, like conjurers, perfectly civilized meals, clothing, and shelter as if from thin air (or dirt, for that matter). It’s one thing to simply drink from streams and sleep under the stars. It’s quite another to take a cow and a plot of dirt and transmogrify it into yellow, flowery pats of sweet creamery butter. These girls kill the bacon, bring it home, then fry it up in a pan they hacked out of a gourd on a hearth they built out of rocks they gathered painstakingly, striking the fire by rubbing sticks of wood together to create a spark.
I know, that is kind of long for a slogan! But I think it has a nice ring to it.
BOOK REPORT
Island of the Blue Dolphins
By Scott O’Dell 1961
Feather Waits
I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island.
All I want for Christmas is a skirt of black cormorant feathers that shimmer green in the sun! There. I’ve said it. While we’re on the subject, I also want a yucca skirt of tightly woven fibers, a sealskin belt, some sealskin sandals, a necklace of glittering black stones, a bull-elephant-tooth wristlet spear to kill devilfish with and—oh, what the hell:
Three fine needles of whalebone
an awl for making holes
a good stone knife for scraping hides
two cooking pots
a small box made from a shell with many earrings in it
Did you hear that, Mom? A good stone knife. Basically, I just want the possessions of one Won-a-pa-lei, secret name Karana, last inhabitant of the village of Ghalas-at, located on the outcropping of earth known to you as Island of the Blue Dolphins.
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