Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood

by Julie Gregory

  “Are you okay, Danny, you sure you can breathe, honey?” Mom stands behind my little brother with her hand resting lightly on his back while he sputters and huffs.

  “He can't seem to catch his breath around the house when we're home.” Mom scissors a fold of Danny's thick golden hair between her fingers, and gently pulls it to the side of his face so the doctor can see him. Danny sits in the examining room with his shoulders curved into himself, occasionally gasping like a guppy out of the bowl. I sit in the other chair because Mom has to keep me home from school too. Otherwise, by the time she's done shopping, she wouldn't get back in time to see me off the bus.

  “Strangely, at school, he seems to breathe fine. It must be pollen rolling in from the fields that have these asthma attacks coming on. We're surrounded down there by ragweed and clover, Doctor.”

  Mom has researched Danny's wheeze in the medical books she's been collecting. She sends away for the Time-Life series. No commitment necessary, cancel at any time. The books stack up like a miniature winding staircase by the couch: The Encyclopedia of Disease, Internal Organs and Their Functions, The Pill Book. She reads late into the night, long after we've all gone to sleep, keeping an eye out for our symptoms so she can suggest the right tests and meds to the doctor.

  Danny walks through the house with his white plastic inhaler stuck in his mouth.

  Mom tags behind. “Are you okay, Danny? Can you breathe? Are you starting to wheeze up, sweetie? Let me put a hand on your chest and feel what's going on in there.” And she holds him sandwiched between her hands, one on his back, the other rising and falling with each of Danny's wheezy gasps.

  The next week, Danny lies on the couch, sucking on his inhaler like a pacifier. Dad glances over on a commercial. “Son, what the hell you got in your mouth there?”

  Mom pops like a jack-in-the-box from around the kitchen partition. “Dan, this is something I've been meaning to talk to you about.” She walks in to stand in front of the set. “When the TV's off.

  “Dan.” She pauses, licks her lips. “Your son has asthma, and you need to know what his state of health is. I can tell you right now it doesn't look good.” Dad blinks and nods in agreement, then tries to remove her from in front of the set with a few airy swipes of his hand. “We'll talk about this on a break.”

  Mom rolls her eyes and stomps back to the kitchen. On the next commercial, Dad snaps his chair up in a great swoosh and springs out of it. I'm setting the table when the trailer shakes. I make out their torsos through the space between the cabinets and the counter. Dad grabs Mom's wrist and pins it to the counter. He leans in close, and she draws away, bending back over the sink. “Let's get one thing straight, Sandy.” He growls low. “You're going to leave Daniel Joseph Gregory the Second alone from now on. That's my boy in there,” he cracks her wrist against the counter like rock candy, her cry twists my stomach, “and my boy's just fine.”

  MOM AND DAD VEHEMENTLY OPPOSEDX smoking. Alcohol wasn't allowed under our roof. Mom and Dad never touched a drop. And every fall Danny and I were tugged into the living room and made to watch Angel Dust, the yearly antidrug program where some kid on LSD thinks he can fly and jumps from the balcony into an empty swimming pool. In slow motion. Even Dad willingly gave up his reruns to make sure we saw Angel Dust.

  And we went to church in fresh-start spurts after weekends of beatings and taking the Lord's name in vain. But despite the straight-and-narrow, fear-of-the-wrath-of-God life we lived, authority was always something to be taken into our own hands. And with the right to bear arms.

  Because as soon as we moved down to the bottom of Burns Road, Mom and Dad started stockpiling guns. We didn't have to worry about black kidnappers anymore, but Mom had read about an escaped convict who caught a Greyhound into the country and butchered a family when he wandered across their isolated farm. Our road was so remote, Mom reasoned, that if an escaped convict got down here, there'd be nothing to stop him from murdering us, chopping us into little pieces, and sticking us out in the forty-cubic-foot freezer in the garage. Who would know? How long would it take before anyone noticed us missing?

  To keep us out of the ice box, guns were stashed throughout the house: one on top of the fridge (out of little Danny's way), one in the bathroom cabinet behind the hidden Fredrick's of Hollywood catalogues, one under each of Mom and Dad's bed pillows, one in the car glove box, and another tucked under the front seat. You never knew when you might need a loaded gun.

  The country was so eerily quiet that when a car pulled in to the top of our graveled road from the paved one, we could instantly hear the faint grumble of its tires, alerting us that someone was on their way. How fast they drove told us if they knew the sudden curves in the road or if this was their first time down. If it didn't sound like one of the two families that lived beyond us, Mom would stick a gun in her back pocket and peer out the rear bedroom window as the car drove past, jotting down the license plate number and calling it in to the sheriff's to run a check on it. She scattered her calls among different county departments, and any one of them would run the license on the suspicious vehicle that was staking us out—driving slowly past our property or turning around in the drive.

  It got so it was just easier for Mom to carry a gun in the back pocket of her jeans all the time; that way, she didn't have to run for one when she heard strange tires. Mom pulled her gun on the one lone salesman who came to our door selling magazines. And when two teenage boys hiked back our road on a day trip, she sent Stink Pup and Ebony out to tree them, and then held them there with her pistol waving until she had thoroughly interrogated them herself.

  WHEN I WAS TWELVE and as stickly as a child insect, I learned to fire a .45 at the make-believe target of a human heart Dad sketched in the air with his hand in case I ever saw a strange man on our property. Dad clasped my palms over the pearl handle of the gun and steadied my wrists, aiming the barrel at the man's imaginary chest.

  Then he let go and told me to squeeze. My weak wrists shimmied from the resistance of the trigger, until finally, with my shoulders curved into my body, my knees buckled for leverage, my face clenched down, and my head drifting sideways, the gun—by now lopsided too—exploded with a little puff of metallic dust that went peppery in my nose. The back kick of the bullet alone nearly toppled me over.

  LATER. MOM IS STANDING in front of the TV again. This time she's blocking M*A*S*H, a sacrilege in our house.

  “Sandy, Jeeeesus.” Dad winces like Archie Bunker. “Can't it wait till a goddamn commercial, can't you see I'm in the middle of this?”

  Danny and I teeter at the edge of the living room, stretching out over the colonial velour wagon-wheel couch on our tippy toes. “Mom, pleeease, just leave him alone, please don't do this. C'mon, Mom, please come over here.”

  But she stands solid, her hands ganged up on her hips like a bunch of bananas, her torso leaning forward, that little white blob gaining speed. “If you were a man, you fat-assed faggot, you good-for-nothing, lazy-ass, son-of-a—” She flicks off the set with a superior snap!

  Dad roars out of the La-Z-Boy like an incensed rhino and charges after her, scooping up one of the concrete animals she lines the trailer with into his wide palm. Mom races down the hall screaming. We bolt out of the way and stand helpless in the kitchen, at the mouth of the dark hallway, straining after their shadows. He catches her neck and strings her up against the wall at the end of the hall; she dangles choking, like a long, thin praying mantis. He bashes the smiling calico cat again and again into the orange velvet wallpaper as she flops her head. She's yelling, “He's gonna kill me! He's killing me!”

  I snatch the gun off the fridge, grip my fingers around white mother-of-pearl. Little Danny and I race down the hall into the eye of the storm. Our mother's feet sway off the floor, her head lashing in smaller and smaller arcs as he walks his grip up her neck. He is going to bash in her skull.

  I am a gazelle in slow motion, leaping down the hallway through distant time and space. I lunge tow
ard them, and Mom's screams swallow my head. Danny flings himself around Dad's legs, his forehead pressing into Dad's groin for leverage as he beats his little fists on Dad's belly. I cock the trigger and yank my father's hair back with one hand, pushing the gun into the soft hole of his temple with the other.

  “Go ahead, shoot me, you fucking bitch, pull the goddammed trigger, blow my brains all over this goddamned wall. Shoooooooot meeeeee!” He blindly hammers the concrete cat into the wall like an assembly-line machine. Holes open in the wood paneling and swallow sheets of orange velvet.

  “Let her gooooo. “

  “Let him kill me, Julie, just let him put me out of my misery and kill me!”

  “Noooo, Moooom! Don't go, Mommmy. Don't kill Daddd, Sis!”

  Mom screams. Dad screams. Danny screams. I scream.

  And there we are, slammed into the corner of the broken hallway, glued together, our throats scorched from the violent force of words meant to save each other, the four of us one tight coil to spring or wind in tandem. And as we reach a crescendo, we hover timeless; resonating in the glass-shattering acoustics torn from our chests, and then, almost in perfect unison, the tension breaks. Dad's shoulders deflate, his hand eases off Mom's neck, her feet float dreamily to the floor, the gun slides out of his temple leaving the perfect round indent of a bullet's path. Danny unhinges from Dad and there we stand, dazed, unwound, eyes glossed with adrenaline.

  It is the boil-over that brings us back to a simmer.

  Mom slips into her room, Dad staggers back to the TV, and Danny and I turn our backs on each other and stumble into our own rooms, diagonal from one another. School's only been out for a few days. We've got another whole week of keeping the peace before Christmas break is over.

  BUT THE MEMORIES THAT HANG heaviest are the easiest to recall. They hold in their creases the ability to change one's life, organically, forever. Even when you shake them out, they've left permanent wrinkles in the fabric of your soul.

  It's a school night and I'm already tucked into bed. I can tell Mom's standing in front of the television because Dad's roaring, “I'm telling you, woman, you had better be out of my way by the time this commercial is over. Onne. Twooo…”

  It's hard to say what Mom wants to talk about. The bills, us kids, my medical problems. But it's nothing that Dad'll turn the TV off for. Or if he does, it's in a once-a-year attempt to be a better father, a better husband, a better man, and he clicks the set off, releases a sigh and says, “Okay, Sandy. Seeeee, now. The set is off. What is it that's so important you want to talk about?”

  But tonight they're yelling on the commercials, and that's a good sign. At least they're communicating. I've got the Fingerhut and Swiss Colony catalogues under the covers with a flashlight, one eye on the page, one ear trained on the sounds of the trailer, picking out all the things I'm going to buy Mom as soon as I'm old enough to get a job. I'm making lists. Then diagramming my lists, with weekly payment columns and minimum payment versus interest, tallying up the things I'm gonna put in layaway, because I've thoroughly read the policy page in the middle of the catalogue and they do take payments, you know.

  Every week, Mom'll get a mail-order surprise: the hundred-dollar fruit-and-petit-fours basket, or the pink terry inflatable bath pillow, or the little strawberry-wrapped candies from Swiss Colony. She'll always have something to look forward to. I cannot wait to make my mother happy.

  My list is three sheets long now. I imagine Mom's face when she opens my gifts, how excited she is and how each present comes on the brink of an argument or crying spell or dead-end doctor's appointment and none of it really matters because she'll already be looking forward to the next present from me. The trailer goes silent. I'm falling down elevator floors jerking into sleep, my hand folded in between the order forms. The plastic doorknob on my bedroom door slowly squeaks open. Mom is framed in the doorway like a ghostly hologram, the hall light glowing behind her, her face in shadow. She tiptoes to the edge of my bed and turns to sit. That's when I notice the gun in her mouth, her full lips formed around the barrel of the .45 off the fridge.

  She looks at me with her tear-streaked, puffy face. She holds me with her eyes, terrified like an animal in a chute, and raises her hand to cock the trigger. Her wrist shimmies just like mine did.

  “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” I shoot from under the covers, and start crying on cue. Mimic and match. If I mirror her with an appropriate response, she'll look in the mirror at herself, her attention distracted from the gun, even if only for a second.

  She opens her lips, still with the weight of the metal barrel pressing on her tongue. “Won't you want we to will myself?”

  She slides it out of her mouth. “You kids want me to kill myself, don't you?” I cry harder. “I mean you kids hate me. I'm such a bitch, such a nag as your father says and you kids hate me, that's what he says.”

  And now my tears have caught up for real. I'm crying for her, telling her no, we don't hate you, no, Mommy, we love you and we don't want you to kill yourself because then we couldn't have a mommy.

  She drops the gun to her lap, her chin collapses to her chest. I cling around her like a baby monkey. As she deflates, I get stronger.

  “Mom, if you don't live then I can't live. Okay? Okay?” trying for the nod of agreement she demands from Dad. “Who would take care of me when I'm sick, who would take me to the doctor?” I lace my voice with disgust and jab a thumb toward the La-Z-Boy. “You think he will?”

  Mom shakes and sobs. “Have you ever been molested, Julie?”

  I don't know what molested is, I'm only eyeing the gun, thinking of how I'm going to make a grab for it.

  Mom hiccups and sobs. “It was Lee, him and the neighbor boy. They tied me on the workbench, got the cell batter” she wails, “reee.”

  My stomach is churning but I can't make out the rest of what she's saying. I hang on to her, slipping the gun so lightly from her lap she doesn't notice, sliding it under my blankets. “It's okay, it's okay, Mom.”

  “They hooked the clamps to my—Oh, God,” she sobs, “I remember screaming for Mom. She closed the basement door. She knew, Julie, she knew what was going on.”

  My tears are all my own now, flowing and falling; for my mother, for me, for what happened to her, for those same things she says could happen to me at the hands of men; men I know, men who might be a brother who's a little off, wink, wink, or my father, or a neighbor and I'm saying don't die, don't die, Mom, and making a silent promise to myself that nobody will ever touch me there—ever—and the harder I cry, the less my beautiful mother who I love so much and could never live a second without does. And then she stops altogether. She straightens up on my bed and blows her nose on her flannel farm shirt. He eyes are near swollen shut. She gives my knee a little squeeze and says, “Hey, thanks for listening, Sis.” She rises from my bed— “Well, you better get to sleep now, honey” —and leaves me on the edge of my mattress, with a loaded gun under my covers and a face as marked by her life as her own.

  She turns in the doorway, “Isn't your father a no-good son of a bitch for turning you kids against me?”

  “I know, Mom, I know.”

  EVEN THOUGH IT'S A NEW medical center, Mom knows what to do. She sits me in the waiting room and makes her way to the desk. She whispers through the reception window that I'm shy about my symptoms. She better speak to the doctor private.

  I sit on the examining room table, in a big man's gown, swinging my legs against the cold metal sides. I'm waiting. How weird I had to take off my undies. I never did that at Township. Mom is somewhere out there, with the doctor.

  A nurse knocks lightly and peeks in. “Okay, Miss Gregory. Can you follow me now, hon? We're going to another room down the hall.”

  It's a larger exam room, dimly lit. The table sits in the center and next to it stands a different nurse with a metal tray. I sit on the table and the nurse at my side takes ahold of my shoulders and pushes me back until I'm lying down. That's odd. As I'm adjusting on
the paper, trying not to wrinkle it for them, the nurse who came and got me rolls her stool over to the bottom of the table and wraps her icy fingers around my ankles, stretching them away from me.

  “Now I'm just going to have you put your feet into these stirrups. It might be a little cold.” I'm thinking, Stirrups? How can they have saddle stirrups in here? as the nurse slips my bare heels into what feels like the shoe sizer in good department stores.

  “What're you doing? What're you going to do to me today?” They always tell me what they're about to do. Without a word, the nurse at my side ties my arm with a clear rubber hose. She smoothes an alcohol pad over the thin skin of the crook of my arm and taps for a vein.

  The nurse at my feet says, “Now this might be a little stick, Julie. We've got to get this plastic tube into the urethra ‘cause Mom says you can't go.”

  My heart is pounding; what's urethra? What is she doing down there? I open my mouth to ask, but a startled scream rips out instead.

  “Now, Julie, I can't do this if you don't stay still for me.”

  She jabs at me with a hard plastic straw.

  My limbs retreat like a spider's, curling in to protect soft belly, to keep spindly legs from snapping off. The silent nurse at my side stretches my wrist out, to make the soft pad of my vein arch to the needle. She pushes the plunger. My blood sears with hot liquid, blazing through me.

  “Julie. Stop it!” the nurse at my feet commands. “I know it's a shock, but be a good girl and let's get this over with. Hold still for me now.”

  I hook my free arm over my face, bite, suck, gnaw on it. I heave uncontrollably like a distressed infant. My head lashes side to side. The nurse at my feet mumbles something about how an injection of iodine dye will color my urine so she can see how it flows. Slobber and snot and tear slick smear the crook of my arm while the rubber sheath unsnaps my other one, offering it back, limp, used.