Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood

by Julie Gregory

  “Excuse me. Ma'am?” Then she turns to me. “Now, tell her what you did.”

  “I'm sorry, I couldn't, you know, go.”

  “That's okay, honey, we'll just reschedule you for another—”

  “Look, there has got to be something wrong with this kid, she can't even do one simple test. This has never happened before; she must have something seriously going on here. Can the doctor just please look at her?”

  “It's really okay, Ms. Gregory. This happens all the time with children.”

  “Well, it's never happened with this one!”

  “I'm sorry, but the urine sample is a requirement for all new patients.”

  The nurse reschedules us and I tiptoe away to the woolly fabric chairs of the waiting room. They are so wide three of me could sit next to each other as my feet dangle, swinging above the floor. I scootch over to the far side of the chair and rest my scrawny wrist on the cold metal arm. It's as skinny as the armrest, skinnier even! I pride myself on how little space I take up. I am going to shrink and shrink until I am a dry fall leaf, complete with a translucent spine and brittle veins, blowing away in a stiff wind, up, up, up into a crisp blue sky.

  I envision myself growing paper thin. Mom lovingly takes care of me and does everything because I'm a frail but smiling child, riddled with a cancer you can't see. I imagine my beautiful bald head, how cool my silk headscarf will look, knotted at the nape of my pale neck, trailing down my back. I am untouchable. No one ever makes fun of the cancer girl. And everybody is nice to her because they never know when she's going to die.

  I DREAM A DREAM THAT NIGHT that stays with me for life. I'm sliding my feet along our slate-bottomed creek, the muddy water rushing around my ankles after a torrent of rain. My mother has always warned me to never walk in the creek after a storm; all it takes is one piece of slate to wash away and you could fall into an underground cavern and be trapped forever. I think of her words as I inch along, clutching for branches and gripping my toes. My heel slips on slick moss, and as I try to catch myself, the slate crumbles under my foot like pie crust. I'm swept off my feet into an underground shaft, angled like a water slide. The walls are smooth wet clay and I slide faster and faster, flying down into the core of the earth on a bed of rushing water. The faster I slide, the narrower, steeper, and drier the tunnel, until I am shooting down a pike, tightening around me, pinning my arms to my sides. I am not scared. I accept the fall. I fall and fall and I know, in my dream, that I will never, ever be able to crawl up the sides and break surface to the light again.

  THE FIRST OLD WAR VETERAN to shuffle down our rough gravel walkway and into the trailer was Mr. John Beck. Mr. Beck was a leftover from the Second World War. Most of his life had been spent in a VA hospital. He'd never married and his pension and disability checks stockpiled into an account he didn't have authority to use on his own. If he needed money, he had to ask the person in charge of him and they'd see what they could do.

  Mr. Beck would come shuffling down the hall, sliding the plastic feet of his Kmart slippers along the carpet. He'd reach out his thick bruised arms, one after another, for chair backs and counters, the edge of a fish tank, a sort of land-bound trapeze artist trying to make it to the toilet in time.

  Beck, as Mom called him, was diabetic. He shot insulin; or rather she shot him with insulin twice a day, sometimes doubling up the doses if she didn't get around to it on his marked schedule.

  Beck looked like a weathered eggplant in the mark-down produce section. The dark purply tissue under his skin was just as hard as muscle, but discolored and taut, like death was already in there, hardening things up from the inside out. After an endless time in the bathroom, he'd journey back to his bedroom and drop stiffly—his legs, swollen into tree trunks, literally did not bend—into his recliner in front of his tiny black-and-white TV. It got only one channel: fuzzy.

  Every day Mr. Beck sat in his chair, snaked his way to the toilet, and shuffled to the kitchen table when Mom called him. He ate before us because Mom couldn't stand the sight of him chewing with his mouth open, a gaping dark toothless hole, bits of food careening down his front.

  When the old men first came, Mom would make a nice dinner and we'd put the leaves in the wood-look dining table, drag in some good chairs, and attempt to have a family meal. Mom would cock her head and try to engage the men in conversation, asking about families or what they did in the war, but most of them couldn't hear, or were too drugged up from their government-issue meds to do anything more than nod, their chins inches above their plates. And some of them could hear, but just didn't give a shit to be talking to any of us. They knew we were only nice to them because there was a check attached at the end of the month and they weren't going to extend niceties; we worked for them. It didn't take long before Mom stopped letting them eat with us and called them to the table in mid-afternoon. And soon after that, she stopped making them separate meals, and started giving them slop—our extended-stay leftovers— all mixed together and heated up in one of the old pans with the Teflon flaking off, because she said they couldn't taste anything anyway.

  And all the while these men came and went, the strong ones getting removed, the weak ones slipping into our lair, there sat our constant, Beck, in his flannel shirt and too-short polyester checked pants. In his tube socks with their stretched-out elastic down around his ankles, his legs of wood, his eggplant skin and turtle leathery face.

  He stayed with us for years, the best vet of all, riding out the trip to Disney World Mom paid for from his account, sitting in silence for hours, sweltering, parked in the truck with the windows rolled up and the doors locked while we wandered the theme park. And on the days Mom would be gone until dark, taking me to the doctor, she'd lock Beck's door and stick a black plastic garbage bag on the seat of his easy chair.

  FROM THE OUTSIDE, my mother personified normal. Unlike her earlier Smokey days, with the fringed leather, yoked western outfits, performer's smile, and platter-sized turquoise belt buckles, her days with my father were dampened to flat. She tucked herself neatly into a smooth, sane parenthesis. Pastel colors, simple blond wigs, an eager, yearning face that cocked just so when she was talking to someone outside our family. She used attentive uh-huhs and I knows sprinkled like clockwork within a conversation. It was as if every cell in her had mutated and was now divided and eagle-eyed, joining forces to work overtime, straining to connect her to anyone she wanted to impress.

  Her head would crane forward to show undying interest in whatever was being said, whether it be the price of pork bellies or the latest politics she didn't have a clue about. She'd nod in agreement, her eyes locked, direct and penetrating, on to the subject before her, her hand in that L—thumb under chin, two fingers resting to the side of her face. My mother could have been a model to train stewardesses. Her antennae were so keen that the twitch in a doctor's mouth or the pivot of his turn at the examining table would tell her he was getting ready to dismiss my illness and she'd have to convey to him the urgency of doing one more test, just to be sure his wasn't the key that unlocked the answers. She could sniff out a speck of indifference in the air.

  And now that we had Beck and Dad still had his job—not to mention the extra money from selling litters of puppies—Mom had over a hundred pairs of shoes in her bedroom closet. They lined up in tidy color schemes to await the dates, dinners and couples events my father would someday take her to. I used to squat down and count them. It was like a shoe museum. The shoes filled the double closet that ran the length of the master bedroom, and when Dad finished the additional bedroom that made it twice the length, she ran them down the sunken step into the add-on and all the way down the wall to the back of the room. Twenty feet of shoes, three pairs deep: cork wedgies, cowboy boots in every color— some with the high fashion heel for line dancing— classic low pumps, plastic jellies for the beach, rope espadrilles—there they sat, like land mines, ready to detonate whenever she got lost in her closet trying on clothes and realized her youth w
as rotting away on this Godforsaken appliance pit, with this absentee husband, saddled with these ungrateful kids.

  DAD COMES HOME FROM WORK, stands JL^on the tiny looks-like-stone foyer by the door, and singsongs, “Sisssssy, Dannnny,” and we come skittering through the hall like hound puppies. I fling into his strong arms, while Danny tries to wrap his little ones around Dad's gargantuan rock-hard middle or just settles onto a single leg. Despite his enormous belly, Dad's still got chicken legs with stick calves and, despite his big Popeye arms, a slender, solid wrist, packed hard with muscle.

  After Dad hugs us, he plops down in his recliner, grabs the side handle on his chair for a choppy three position ease back, flicks on M*A*S*H, and says, “Fetch me a diet pop, Sissy.” Mom waits in the kitchen for him to find her and give her a kiss, which he usually forgets, and she spits out to the living room, “Don't make her wait on you hand and foot, Daaannn,” drawing his name out. And Dad shouts back from his chair, “She likes it, don't you, Sissy?” To which I always nod yes because Dad likes me best when I'm fetching for him.

  The food Dad consumed collected around his throne like a 7-Eleven altar: pretzel rod bags with salty bottoms and a few split stems, a mound of faded pink pistachio shells, old cups of fizzless Tab, globs of jelly that he'd wiped down the side of the chair. Every week I'd get out the canister vac and suck up the gunk from the deep folds of the furniture, along with whatever Beck had dropped around his place at the table.

  But sometimes, if Mom has spent too much time in her closet, she'll have to talk to Dad the second he comes in the door. She even calls him at work and says he had better get straight home here and do something with these kids. They are out of control. She tunes her ears for the sound of his car pulling in at the top of the road and rushes to the living room to wait at the door.

  “Dan,” she hits him the second he steps in, “you have got to do something with these kids. They are driving me nuts.” Dad stands in the foyer, lunch box in hand, blinking out the sun to adjust to the dark trailer. Mom rattles off what we've done that day, things we could never do. We were kids who knew the Lord's Prayer by heart and made burnt matchstick crosses at summer Bible camp. We knew all the Sunday school stories and thought hell was a place you burned for eternity if you didn't finish your meat loaf. And we even spread the gospel to kids at school that the Lord was our Savior. Our mouths didn't know how to make the words “bitch” or “cunt,” and our heads certainly didn't know what they meant. But that's what Mom says we call her.

  Dad just stands there, still in his muddy steel-toed boots.

  “What are you going to do about this, huh? These kids need a father that disciplines them, they need to be straightened out.”

  “What'd ya want me to do, Sandy, beat 'em?” He's tired. “Look at them—they're two beautiful kids who were kids today. You want me to beat 'em for that?” We exhale. Mom amps up the heat, that little white blob of spit starts to flick between her top and bottom lip, she leans toward him, hand thrust on hip.

  “Okay.” She slaps her leg. “You leave me no choice. I wasn't gonna tell you this, but you have got to know how out of control these damn kids are.” Danny and I stand very stiff at the velour couch, whimpering.

  She glares at us. “See what I mean, Daaann? They won't even give their own mother respect to talk. And you're just going to stand there and let them walk all over me.”

  “Kids, let your mother talk.”

  “Okay, Daaann, let me telllll you what these bastards did. And then you are really going to want to take your belt off and beat the living crap out of them.” I pinch a hunk of velour, Danny hops from leg to leg.

  “They were out there in your garage today, all right?” Dad perks up. “All right?” she says again, to get his nod. “And when I walked in they were playing in your toolbox.” He lifts his head. His toolbox. She gains.

  “I told 'em, ‘Kids, you know what your father says about you playing with his tools, now you get out of there.’ And you know what they said, Dan?”

  He wants to know. What did these damn kids say when they were playing with the tools they know better than to be messing with?

  “They said, and I kid you not, Dan, they said,” her mouth twists, ‘Scrreeew him, fuuuccck him.’” Dad is unbuckling his belt.

  “Then they said, ‘He's crazy, he's too stupid to notice!’ And you know what they did? They took your new ratchet and threw it in the pond, while I was screaming after them, begging them to stop!”

  We are hanging on every word, eyes like saucers. When she gets to the clincher, Danny and I yelp in protest.

  “Are you calling your mother a liar? Huh? Answer me, dammit. Are you trying to tell me your mother would stand here and make things up, lie to my face? I'm your father, how stupid do you think I am? Get your pants down, boy.”

  Danny has never been hit with a belt before. His screams crack the air and drown out my own worried cries. Dad hauls back his burly arm and welts raise like oven biscuits on Danny's soft baby skin. For me, it will be different. I'm older. I know better. I unbuckle my pants but I'm too old to be bending over the couch for my father. I grip my fingers onto the fat arm of the sofa but I can't quite make my lower half maneuver over to the leather belt Dad's snapping. His voice bellows over my tiny one, delicate, frantic, trying to explain.

  “You got the count of three, girl. One, TWO—” He swipes out for my arm and I break, dashing out the patio screen door, leaping off the deck, running around the pool. He charges after me and catches my weak wrist. I jerk back from my own momentum and he flings me in the grass, flailing the belt over my arms, my legs, my head, my face. I am branded by my father's favorite belt, its leather piping edges raising ruby-tinged bolts on my skin. Mom slips out the front door and creeps to the garage. She's got to get that tool out of the box, just in case he checks.

  BUT ON THOSE GOOD DAYS AFTER DINNER, when Mom has slipped into pastels that morning, when she has curl-ironed her hair for an hour and sprayed it luminously with an industrial-size pink metallic can of Aqua Net, when she has selected the precise pair of shoes to wear for my doctor's appointment that day, when she has me watch her get ready and tell her how good she looks, when she tells me to stand on the edge of the tub and study the back of her hair to make sure the curls meet perfect in the center, when we are getting somewhere in the medical mystery of what's wrong with me, when Dad remembers to find her in the kitchen for a kiss after work, when everything is just right—then he belches like a tornado and plunks down in his chair, unzips his trousers, and nestles a palm down there.

  OUR STRANGE TIMES ARE PUNCTUATED with brilliant ones, too, enough of them to convince me of the happy childhood Mom and Dad say I have since kids in Africa are dropping off like flies. Times when all convention is thrown out the window and we say to hell with having turkey on Thanksgiving and cook up a bunch of shrimp instead, laughing at our quirky freedom. We are free—of relatives, neighbors, friends. Nobody can tell us what to do. We'll stick a can of Crisco in the fondue pot and tempura up a pile of cheese cubes and mushrooms for Christmas dinner. Who says we have to follow any rules?

  Dad is a one-off inspirational chef. Most of his weekends are spent watching TV or tinkering in his garage, but now and then he wakes up early, has his Agent Orange puke, gets out the heavy pressure cooker pot and candy thermometer, and we make rock candy.

  We have to plot how we're going to get the flavors because Mom thinks it's a waste of money, so when we're all in town, Dad and I sneak back to the pharmacy counter while Mom gets groceries and we act like espionage spies, asking in a whisper if we can see the flavors “in the back.” The pharmacist plays along, looks around to see who's watching, and then covertly opens up a cabinet, where hundreds of small vials of potent flavors sit: butterscotch, tutti-frutti, strawberry, watermelon, horehound.

  While Dad drains a whole bottle of Karo syrup into the pan, I pick out the flavors from our growing collection. The pot of hard candy is poured out onto wax sheets in a big pro
duction where Dad—in big fluffy mitts up to his elbows, at the exact set second and temperature—shrieks, “Look out, Sissy! Look out!” and zooms across the kitchen to ooze the concoction onto the paper before it starts to set. I fly out of Dad's way and sprinkle the cooling candy with powdered sugar. Then Dad and I take the big sheets and strike them against the edge of the counter to make smaller ones and then I get to break them into mouth-size pieces with our drywalling hammer.

  And the rest of our happy times were captured in Kodak moments as tangible proof for the world to see that we were, in every sense of the word, normal. Tucked in Christmas cards and signed with our individual names, forged in Mom's own cursive handwriting, these photos—us standing on the edge of the Painted Desert, crowded into a plywood cutout shark's mouth at Sea World, grimacing next to our horses, holding runners-up ribbons—were the casting lines out to distant relatives and long-lost friends Mom so desperately wanted to look good to.

  BUT THE REAL TRUTH can be scrutinized by peering just a little closer at the small stack of pictures left over from the fire. In one Polaroid, me, Mom, and Danny sit amidst a frenzy of torn wrapping paper, under the Christmas tree—loaded with ornaments, laden with icicles—the three of us surrounded by a moat of presents: Stretch Armstrong, ballerina jewelry box, Hot Wheels loop-de-loop racetrack, Rubik's Cube, Spirograph, Mouse Trap, latch hook rug kit, boxed set of Black Beauty and Other Classics—all the proof of our happy Christmas. Danny wears his funny clown face, Mom cranes her neck, strains a smile. And hiding behind my own puffy eyes is the tiniest glint of what really happened that morning: Mom screeching through the trailer, threatening to commit suicide.

  DANNY IS ALMOST OUT of kindergarten JL^when Mom notices the wheeze in his chest. We always knew he was going to need tubes put in his ears and his tonsils out, like I did, but now Mom says he's got to get an inhaler since he's having such a hard time catching his breath.