Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood

by Julie Gregory

  I made an appointment with Mr. Marks, our school's part-time counselor. I calmly, rationally explained what I needed and sat with pen in hand, ready to sign.

  “Well, why do you want to leave home?”

  I wasn't prepared for that. I didn't think I'd have to tell him why. I ventured out a few things and he raised his eyebrows.

  He said he'd think on it and call me back to his office when he came up with something. But who he called instead was Mom and Dad.

  That night in the kitchen Mom caught me by the hair and slung me to the floor. Dad grabbed both angles of the countertop for leverage and, hauling his leg back again and again, sank steel-toed boots into the hollow of my belly.

  For the rest of sophomore year, Mr. Marks took me out of art class every week to counsel me for an overac-tive imagination.

  MOM AND I SIT in the intestinal exploration wing of a new medical center. Two nurses prepare a separate cubicle for me, so I can drink the barium meal in private. The other nurse stands at the sink, mixing up the gunk that will light up my intestines.

  “So where you guys from? Do you live here in Lancaster?”

  “We're right on the Fairfield-Hocking line, just about forty minutes away, to the southwest of Lancaster.”

  “Julie, what flavor would you like to choose, hon? Yep, you get a choice. Orange, chocolate, or strawberry.” The nurse turns back to Mom. “Murray, that's my hubby, and I live down out toward Pataskala, so you're not far from us at all. Do you play bridge?”

  “Oh, we love it. Julie, answer her, now, what flavor do you want?”

  “Which one tastes best?”

  “Well, they all taste prit-tee bad. But if I had to pick one, I'd take the orange, it tastes like Orange Crush.”

  I okay it.

  She mixes the flavor into the bottle. “We've got a little group that meets every week for a game,” she turns back from the sink and winks at Mom, “without the boys. Just us girls.”

  “Well, you ought to come down to our house for a bridge night. Maybe we can get a team of nurses together, or at least, you know, get away from the men.” Mom starts to squirm. “I'd love to have you down to the farm. We've got sixteen beautiful acres of woods and pastures around us. It's just beautiful.”

  “Ahh, I bet that is pretty. Well, I think we might just do that sometime. Now, Ms. Gregory, you'll have to sit in the room with Julie and make sure she drinks all of this, so we can get an X ray of the lower intestine.”

  The nurse smiles at us, hands me the drink, and walks out the doorway.

  Mom leans after her. “Thank you so much, and make sure you jot down your phone number for me before we leave.” She turns back to me, “All right, let's go, Sis. Let's get this done and over with.”

  I touch the metal malt container of thick barium to my mouth. It's orange chalk, ground up into a quart of oil, mixed in a base of magnet dust. After gulping down a mouthful, the most natural response to barium is to vomit it out as far from your body as possible.

  A memory of metal washes over me. What was it now, the zolt of red match tips sinking into my tongue? Why am I still at the hospital? What are they looking for? Is my stomach messed up? I look at Mom. Help me, please, help me. Tears stream down my face. I choke down the barium, belch it back up; sour, thick bubbles. Let's get this over with, Sis. My throat flexes open, pinches shut. Please, help me, Mom, don't make me drink this.

  But Mom's gaze is fixed in midair. She looks right through me, mouthing imaginary conversation. A muscle in her jaw tweaks with a rapid pulse and her animated eyes dance over the scene before her, the only one she can see as she stares into my face. It's not me here, crying, trying to force down a barium meal. It's not the exam room where we sit in the medical center. She's smiling at the circle of nurses fanned around the good dining table in our bay-windowed addition, munching out of a party box of potato chips, playing bridge, laughing over husbands, late into the night, just the girls.

  MY PROJECT FOR 4-H was a registered . JL quarter horse named Skipster's Barr. Barr stood fifteen hands at the withers—towering over me—magnificent and regal with his sleek brown coat, gleaming muscles, and four white socks.

  Barr was supposed to be a barrel racer, with record timing in the ring for the barrel-racing contests Mom wanted to enter me in. But she said he turned out to be just as lazy as I was.

  It was my secret relief to have an uncooperative horse. The thought of steering a high-strung, adrenaline-amped equine around hairpin barrel turns was enough to make me nauseous. At least now I had an excuse. But we hooked up a box spring to the riding mower, piled on cinder blocks, and drug a practice ring in the field anyway, and Mom'd haul Barr out to it to show me how it was done from her trick-riding days. She'd spring up in the saddle with a rallying Yeeeee-haaaa, crack the whip over my horse's beautiful rump, and gouge her spurs into his ribs until he ran so fast he nearly scraped her off around the barrels.

  By the time they screeched to a halt in front of me, Barr's nostrils were slinging snot and his soft eyes were flared with terror.

  But on summer days when Mom was busy in her closet or in a good mood, I'd tell her I wanted to take Barr to the upper fields to practice running him. I'd have to kick and kick and kick with my heels just to get him to trot off the farm as fast as possible, in case she changed her mind. Then, as soon as we were out of sight, I'd ease him to a stop in the woods. I'd stash the blanket and the saddle, the bridle and my stupid cowboy boots, and climb up on him bareback with the help of a tree stump.

  My bare heels would give a little squeeze and Barr would pick up again, only this time with an easy plod, his head slung low, bobbing lazily in the sun while I stripped out of my shorts and top.

  We settled into our pace, my clothes draped across his withers, my only rein a tuft of his mane wrapped loosely around my index finger. Barr led us wherever he wanted to go, through the woods and the upper pastures where we wouldn't see a soul. I trusted him. I rode in my underwear, my skinny legs dangling long over the ribs of his meaty belly, my ankles casting off the end of my lean shins into ballerina points. With each forward thrust of his muscled thigh, my butt bones rocked back and forth, a streak of oil and horsehair lathering a track down the inside of my leg. And with each rock, my torso shifted into itself more and more until I was in the delicious luxury of a full slump with my mouth hung open as wide as I needed it to be. No need to talk. No need even to think.

  Sometimes Barr would stop altogether, standing in an empty field. He'd cock one back hoof up and shift his weight to rest. I'd lean over his neck, sliding my legs up and over his rump, until I was stretched out long across his back, as warm as sand, my arms draped around his neck, my head falling against the slab of his withers. We'd stay like that, for a long, quiet time, drifting in and out in the sun's warmth. And when Barr was ready to go, he'd shift his hoof back under him, hoisting us up a notch, and then take a baby step forward to rouse me.

  I'd pull myself up, draping my legs back down over his ribs again, then lean over and give his neck a pat, pat. Barr would start up once more, carrying us along in his slow, easy plod, farther and farther away from Hideaway Farm.

  THE SUMMER AFTER MY NOSE HEALED, Mom would line me up in the gravel driveway and snap Polaroids of me, hair held up in a bun on top of my head with one hand, our plywood-sided trailer as background. She'd pack me in a padded bra, tight Wrangler jeans, pink button-down with the collar flipped up, and sometimes a cowboy hat. She'd send these off to the Ford modeling agency in New York City, waiting for me to be discovered. And the ones she kept behind rode in her purse. She never knew when she might run into a nice older man who might like to have a look at me.

  I have a stack of these pictures, the last remaining window of my youth to peer through. My sockets hold the pale gray eyes of a ghost, telling of a life in which I have little say. The rest of my face wears a look that says I eat men for breakfast, broken and smeared upon my morning toast.

  AS SOON AS I'M SIXTEEN, Mom puts me on t
he pill so I won't get pregnant. I'm old enough now to date, and she has a few guys she'd like to see me go out with. The first is Debbie Miller's son. He saw me riding my horse and arranged it between Debbie and my mom. His name is Don. When I meet him, he reeks of Polo and sports a bushy black mustache. He is thirty-one.

  My first date with Don is on his boat with Debbie as chaperon. Debbie lights up a cigarette and the platinum split ends of her frizzy perm flap along leathery tan shoulders with every thrust over the wake. Don cruises into the center of the lake and cuts the motor and we drift in the lazy sun beating down. Debbie has brought sandwiches, pink ham salad. She winks at Don when she hands him one. I think she is trying to tell him something, but I can't be sure. Sitting between mother and son, my stomach drains hollow. I'm famished but I can't seem to do more than nibble at the smooth spread from around the edges of the bun.

  Debbie feigns a stretch and crawls off to the padded bench on the other side of the boat for a catnap, leaving me with Don on the little triangle deck in front. He reaches out to feather his fingertips along the strings of my bikini top. Don wants me to come to his condo, all on my own. He's got something he wants to show me. He tries to kiss my face, grating his thick skin against my own, as soft as a colt's underbelly. I scoot over a couple inches and talk fast about Dad's old cars. I want Debbie to wake up, to shout, “Don, in God's name what are you doing? Stop that!” I want her to make him feel bad, to stick a knife in his gut, to fillet him with guilt and shame. But she is giving her son his privacy and I stay where I am. They have been so nice to feed me lunch and to take me out for the day. I don't want to disappoint anybody. When Debbie wakes up, I jump into her arms with an enthusiasm that startles us both.

  Don jerks the throttle and drives his boat fast, grating against white peaked waves, Miami Vice style, his jaw set against the fading sun and the protective bond I've suddenly forged with his mother. As we ease into the bay, I am so glad to see my own mother waiting in the parking lot that I leap onto the dock and run to her. She is leaning out the window of the car, waving wildly to Debbie and Don.

  WE HAVE HIT THE END OF THE ROAD. The doctors can't find anything else wrong with me. I am on my heart medications with slight variations in dosage and frequency. But the big ticket, the big chance to get in there and really get to the bottom of it, is behind us.

  At one time, we had a chance to do the open-heart and get some solid answers. But my doctor was too young and inexperienced to know how to handle my special case. Mom has spent her life trying to get competent medical care for her sick kid and it's all been in vain. I'm still sick and Dad lost his job last year on my birthday, so we don't even have the good medical coverage anymore.

  We still occasionally go to church, and when we do, Mom tells everybody that I'll never get better and to please include me in their prayers. She'll be surprised if I live to twenty. The best we can hope for is to stabilize me with the meds I'm on. But my heart still races, I'm still out of breath, and I still walk around with my mouth hanging open. I still drink cans of chocolatey Ensure Plus and crunch on weight-gain wafers, only now knowing they don't do much of anything.

  DAD NEEDS TO HAVE a heart-to-heart talk with me. In here: he motions to one of the empty bedrooms. He walks to the bed and I follow, apprehensive. He sits down on the edge and pats his knee for me to climb on like I was still a child. But I'm not. I'm sixteen. And I do not want to sit on my father. I teeter one sit bone on his knee and brace the rest of my weight on my other leg, which stretches as far away as possible.

  Dad places a hand on my back. “I can't let you try out to be a lifeguard for the Y. “

  “But, Dad! It's the only thing I want to do for my first summer job. I can swim and I can—”

  “Remember when you were little and people used to laugh at you out in public?”

  I nod, hot tears welling up.

  “Well, honey, I just can't see my little girl go out there in a bathing suit and get laughed at. You got no tits, no hips, no ass, Sissy. You look terrible in a bathing suit. Kids are cruel, sweetie, they'll just make fun of you. But don't worry about finding another job, Mom says she's gonna see if she can get you on at the hospital.”

  WITHOUT THE DOCTOR APPOINTMENTS,tf f the extra hours of summer pile up, without boundaries or direction. The country holds no outer distractions to break up the time or keep your reality suspended in a busy world; no shopping malls to stroll through, no nearby restaurants, no Blockbuster Video. Time stretches out, and a single day can feel like four.

  Most nights Dad tinkers alone in the garage. When he's with Mom, they scream at each other all the time. They fight about Dad losing his job. They fight about the money he lost. And they fight about the divorce they can't afford.

  We're all stuck down on the farm together: restless, bored, anxious, stressed. Mom's shoes sit in the closet, ticking away. Me, Danny, and the foster kids stick to the plastic seats of the station wagon, sweltering, while she ducks in and out of stores to buy more: more clothes, more shoes, more concrete animals to line the hallway.

  We have added on as many rooms as a former trailer could possibly spawn. We have six bedrooms, three baths, two living rooms, a freezer room, a laundry room, a den, a good dining room, three decks, and the back junk room where we, the children, and the wood spiders hide.

  We have built a garage off the side of the log cabin, a pole barn to stack with hay, a junk barn for Dad's old parts to sit in, an extra bay to store the boat we bought out of the paper but never use. We have planted the slow-growing willows and fruit trees, graveled the drive so many times I have permanent calluses on my hands from fanning rocks, one shovelful at a time, from the dump-truck size pile we get every year.

  The pool is up. The fence lines strung. The horses number ten. The tack room is stocked with every silver-conched saddle and matching show bridle, blanket, lead, and halter imaginable. Danny and I have won all the yellow, pink, and purple polyester ribbons that line the hutch shelves, and I have been runner-up Horse Queen in the Pickaway County Fair.

  MY MOTHER IS STANDING next to the wood-burning stove, her arms crossed tightly before her, weight on one leg, her body stiff.

  She says, “Well, what are you going to do about it, huh? You fairy-assed faggot, you goddamned fucking faggot?”

  And as she is dripping out each word my father is getting more and more riled by her insults, seeing red. His anger at her boils, but it's his cowardice that runs like lava in the grooved pipeline to me. He charges, grabs my hair by the fistful.

  “I'll show you what I'm going to do about it. No little fucking bitch of a slut is going to make me sick picking up her goddamned crusty Kleenexes.” The coffee table is all that's between us. He is clutching the life out of the Kleenex, getting the germs all over him, his adrenaline-soaked palm mixing with its deadly hosts.

  Mom has told him I drop them so he will have to pick them up; a premeditated attempt to sicken my father with clever trickery.

  He takes the Kleenex, and as his voice gains momentum, my mother's trails off. Like a relay race in which she just puffed through the first leg, he is stepping in and now she can let go. My eyes are frozen wide, this can't be happening. I tell him that the Kleenex is Mr. Beck's; that he loses them when he's shuffling to the bathroom, that he can't help it because he's slow from the drugs.

  My mother rolls her eyes: That's the most insane excuse she's ever heard spew out my mouth. He responds to her cue that I am lying, and he is prompted by the promise of the reward: Let her give him peace, please God, give him peace, just let him be, let him go back into his shell.

  Oh, now I'm calling him a liar, I'm challenging his view. No little shit is going to call him a liar.

  He takes my head down, down, smash my skull goes into the piercing corner of the coffee table. Pain splinters my face, my new nose, and ricochets, vibrating to all points over my scalp, like the crack of lightning that fingers its way through the sky, crack my face goes into the wood, the glass, the evil sharpnes
s of this madness.

  I cannot cry. I am going to die. There is no reason to cry when there is no hope you'll live. I am petrified wood, like Kawliga in the old song Mom and I used to sing in the car, stiff like my mother in the corner with her arms crossed. But then he pulls my head up, hair still clenched, with an urgency as if I'd been drowning in a metal tub of cold water while bobbing for apples and he, with an opportunity to save me, plucks my head from the water with great, shuddering force.

  He is holding the Kleenex and I am crying now, No No No, as he is now teaching me the lesson I will take to my grave. Don't you ever leave another Kleenex around here again, and he is thrusting it to me because he wants to see me do it. He wants to see me place the Kleenex in my mouth and chew it up. And in that split second he knows I can't and that I'm testing his strength to make me, to see if he is man enough to not let his own daughter make a fool of him. I see it in his eyes, it is her voice that drives him, eggs him on and crack, dunk, again back into the corner and on the way down, which is a long way down because I am already five foot eight, I slice my eyes up in a plea to my mother for help.

  “God, please,” I scream, “help, Mom, he is going to kill me!”

  And she is standing just where she was three minutes ago. Three minutes ago my life was different. Three minutes ago I could have made it out of here intact, but now…

  And my mother, arms folded, body now relaxed and loose, is wearing the curly smile of a Cheshire cat, staring right at me, holding my eyes as I go down, crack, into the corner. I come up again to meet the growling promise that I will be killed by his fists or maybe he will just strangle me with his bare hands until I'm limp and he is huge, bellowing and at least two hundred and fifty pounds of angry Brahma bull and I have no reason to doubt now and I put the Kleenex into my mouth so slow, so dainty like it's a fluff of a ladyfinger from the Swiss Colony catalogue, hoping it doesn't touch anything as the paper sinks in to my saliva, the dried snot I imagine as stale fibers of cotton candy; a rich, peppermint sugar puff from the bottom of Grandma Madge's purse and it collapses into my tongue and begins its meltdown, its digestion there in my mouth, and my father is screaming, eyes wild, his brows burrowing a deep V down to his nose, rippling smaller ones over his forehead and he's still holding my hair, now at the back of my head so I can't pull away, and I start chewing softly, feeling cotton touch my fillings, cotton compress under the weight of my molars, cotton go from dry to wet, dissolving into fine white bits that work their way up under my gum and cheek. My father is threatening I had better hurry up and fucking chew it up and swallow it because I have two seconds before he kills me and—