Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood

by Julie Gregory

  But as soon as she drove off, I ran like hell. I hitchhiked to Columbus and got a job out of the paper with an environmental canvassing group. I bought an old convertible and just enough stuff to load it up and flop a futon over the top when I needed to run. And I didn't stop running for three years; ten moves through three different states, never a forwarding address or my name on a lease. Once, I made the mistake of giving Mom my address, only to get a box in the mail full of cheap stuffed animals and gold-plated ankle bracelets from the same guy that was still calling her about me.

  Most times I lived just one state away, and some summer weekends, when I was missing my brother and feeling lost without a family, I'd cruise down to Lancaster's Value City and other old stomping grounds. And sometimes I'd drive down into the holler of the country, down into the tangle of treetops, pull into the gravel drive, and step out into the outdoor concert of bird song, dragonflies, and locust calls. Danny would bound out to the drive like a puppy and fling his arms around me, just like he used to with Dad.

  I have a picture of Danny when he's twelve, still living with Mom. He's driving my old Buick convertible with the top down, barreling down our dirt road, high spindly fields of green whizzing by. I've climbed out the window and spread myself across the hood of the car, hooking one arm around the antenna and an ankle around the hood emblem and snapped the photo: his head is tossed back in the sun as he speeds down the road, laughing over our momentary joy, a drop of laughter in our bucket full of pain.

  Each time I'd come down, Barbwire Bob had built on a new deck or tacked up a new pressboard addition. And Mom had started collecting concrete animals, clothes, and shoes all over again.

  There were afternoons when it was just Mom and me, when Danny was still in school and we went off and did things together; rode the horses, got in the pool, stroked the fluorescent green tree frogs that still suc-tioned themselves under the blue plastic pool liner. We never talked about the past or how I'd outrun my medical condition. And after our day, we'd sit at the kitchen table and she'd tell me what a no-good son of a bitch my father was, while I sat nodding I know, Mom, I know.

  MOM AND I SIT IN THE LITTLE TRUCK. We're at the Volunteers of America thrift store in Lancaster, the rain has started to rail against the windows, and Mom has me trapped, talking venom about Dad. I know the score. “Uh-huh,” I say, “I know.”

  Today she is specifically ranting about what an asinine bastard he is and how he borrowed from her share of the insurance money and was supposed to pay her back with interest, but now he's saying he doesn't have to, that they're even-steven.

  I take this opportunity to once again remind her of God's will for us, how he miraculously and divinely caused lightning to hit that night, of all nights—the only one we were all away—and burn the house down, so that the two of them could afford to get divorced.

  “I think that was pretty good timing on,” I turn my palms up to heaven, “His part.”

  My mother shifts to look at me like I am the stupidest thing she's ever seen. She drops her jaw and rolls her eyes. “Oh, cooome'mon, what are you, some kind of moron? You think God burned that house down? It was your father. He's an electrician, Julie.” She slaps her knee. “My God.” She looks out the window and humphs. “You are such an idiot. You think we all just happened to be ‘away’? How do you think I have a stack of pictures that were in the log cabin? They just open the door and walk in there? Huhhh?” She is seething, that little blob of white spit sitting smack in the middle of her bottom lip.

  My eyes lock straight ahead on the rain racing down the windshield, my mind reeling. That's why she was in the log cabin that day; she was looking through the things he stashed in there. That's how come she still has Danny's and my birth certificates. That's how come they had a cache of clothes to last them. It slowly comes together as if she's just raised the shade on a window I never knew existed.

  “But…” my brain hurts, “but what about P. J.?”

  “Oh, your asshole father just left her there.” I cannot comprehend. How could anyone lock a little soft, curly-haired Shih Tzu in a house, then torch it? How could anyone breed a dog and sell off her puppies for years and years and pay her back by burning her alive? Tears stream down my face, matching the windshield.

  “Oh, Jesus, that dog pissed my house full. I hated that dog. He just left her inside. That's what kind of a sick son of a bitch he is, you see?”

  I glance over to her and catch sight of that little white drop bobbing on her lip, that speck I have watched in silence my whole life. A slow rage boils in me. God, I want to reach out and smear it off of her, I want to claw my fingers into the insides of her cheek and tear the flesh from her rancid mouth.

  I sit there, caught. All this time, I thought it was God that delivered us from hell when it was my fucking dad who used his electrical rat-trapping to wire our house up to burn it to a crisp. And it was the two of them who arranged it so we'd all be away. And they did it after I came back from foster care, after they'd filed bankruptcy—that's why we were such a kind family for those three weeks; their plan was in place. And it was the two of them who split the insurance money. And all her kids got was a hundred fucking dollars each to replace all their belongings. And we were so naïve, we felt humbled by her generosity. And Danny and I used a bucket for a toilet while she traipsed through Mexico with Barbwire Bob. And Dad had a satellite dish installed and a washer and dryer delivered right to the little swing door of the pull-behind camper when his own kids didn't even have a pot to piss in.

  At that moment, I lost my faith in God. My belief in God's will, the only thing that allowed me to find the meaning in the meaningless, was shattered, erased, stripped from my heart, and done so in a way that told me I was stupid for even thinking it existed in the first place.

  I'm tired. My lids are so heavy. I could just lean against the truck and sleep.

  My soft voice, barely audible, chokes. “We should go in before the store closes.”

  Mom said, “Jesus, Julie, I thought you knew. It was so obvious.”

  “No, I didn't know.”

  And I was still crying. I was crying for P. J., I was crying for everything fucked up in the world that nobody could do a goddamned thing about.

  THE YEAR I TURNED TWENTY-ONE, I moved back to Ohio. I hadn't planned it, I just lost the juice to keep driving. It was one of my weekend trips down to the country and Mom had since given me a key, so I could come down anytime, whether she was home or not. I pulled in one afternoon when no one was home and riffled through her dresser, looking for some cutoffs to wear around the house. There in the bottom drawer, under stacks of pastel shorts, was a bulky manila envelope that read “Proof of Unruly Charges Against Julie Gregory. “

  I sank onto the edge of the waterbed and ripped it open. Out spilled a pile of folded-up notes, handwritten on lined paper, torn from spiral notebooks, the same kind of notes I used to pass to my friends in class.

  A couple of the letters were real ones from Missy and Carmen, but the others were nothing like our girly notes from seventh grade. Racing over the lines, I read of plots to run away and plans to be picked up at the top of the road by older men. I read lines that slurred, “Fuck my mother, that no-good bitch …” and “I'll do it for 50 bucks…” then digressing into profanity that flamed my face with blush. The words were written in big loopy letters to match my own and signed with my name. There were even answers signed by my friends. I stared at the letters, knowing they weren't mine, and there, scarcely visible to the untrained eye, was the unmistakable trace of Mom's shaky cursive writing.

  After that, I didn't have the energy to drive any farther than Columbus. I opened the Sunday paper, and took the first cheap apartment I found. I didn't have the heart to run anymore. In fact, it was my heart that was sick, but I didn't know why. The symptoms of my child-hood were starting to come back and I was beginning to think I might even die before I hit twenty-five.

  And after all these years, I still float throu
gh the day with rumbling hunger pains and collapse into bed at night, starving. The skinny and ravenous hospital girl of thirteen, the girl whose mother would not feed her, has given way to the skinny and ravenous girl of twenty-three, who cannot feed herself. The girl whose life was held upright with stiffly knitted illusions is now the girl starting to unravel.

  I wake in the morning and mix up a box of chocolate cake batter. I eat the whole bowl with a tablespoon and spend the rest of the day asleep or aching, my muscles like strands of flakey pot roast, falling off my bones.

  My scalp is burning, searing. There are two cave-ins on each side of my head above my ears in the pockets of my scalp, indents from the vise that is collapsing my skull. The pockets slowly pool with lead liquid. I push in on them to relieve the pressure and a wave of nausea boils over me. It feels like the corner of the coffee table is still in there. My breath comes in shallow dips, my heart races upon rising, sometimes I black out on the toilet. I wake up on the floor, shaped around the tub like a chalk-drawn body at a crime scene. There has got to be something wrong with me.

  I trek back down to good old Dr. Strong in Lancaster, the doctor who took my case after my heart cath. He half-heartedly listens to my heart and tosses me some advice on what might be wrong with me now.

  He doesn't ask me if I am eating. I don't know that I'm not. The way I care for myself is no different than the way Mom taught me to, following the doctor's advice.

  But Dr. Strong has lost interest in the pursuit of my heart condition and my mother has passed the baton to me. I am the only one running with it now.

  AND I AM STILL ONLY a phone call away from my mother.

  We go shopping and she lopes down an aisle toward me and the cart, clutching a stuffed animal, singsonging, “Will you buy it for me, Sissy? Huh, huh? Pleeaase.” She stands at the checkout with her fingers looped through the slots of the metal cart, sneaking things off the candy rack onto the conveyer belt, while I unload the basket and pay for everything. I am the mother of my mother and as I age, she regresses.

  And this is when I swing wildly from identity to identity, either elevating to be Mom's therapist or regressing to the stupid child she trumps, whatever it is my mother needs.

  About every other month, I get a call from Danny to come take the gun out of Mom's mouth or the bottle of pills from her grip. It's over with her and Bob, and when she tried to go back to Dad, she found out about his girlfriend. This time she's locked herself in his truck and is going to do it. For real. Danny doesn't know how many pills, if any, she swallowed. I race the forty miles down to Dad's garage. My little brother has mouthed to her through the tinted window that I'm on my way.

  Now I am the therapist. I sit on the stained cloth seat of the truck, bunched right up against her back, spooning her, and wrestle the bottle from her fingers clawing around it.

  She's sobbing. “If that no-good, faggot-assed, wife-beating, paranoid-crazy, cocksucking son of a bitch don't want me, who will? Who's gonna take me?”

  I try to explain that if Dad is all these things, if he causes so much pain, then why does she want him to want her? “Because if I can't make him want me,” she wails, “who will?”

  I have traded her for the pills she clutches a colorful publication called Sweetheart Magazine. I read about it in People and sent away for a copy to have on hand for her next suicide attempt. It's a personals magazine that lists all the lonely ranchers and mountain men that dot the remote plains of Montana, complete with half-page intimate write-ups and full-color portraits. I dangle it in front of her and flip through the pages, ooing and ahhing over lonesome cowboys with wide Chiclet teeth and big Western hats and pointing at bold-type ads that order up: “Wife Wanted.” Her eyes take the bait, and as I soften her fingers from around the bottle, I slip the magazine in unnoticed. This is the thing to sate her: the promise of a man to latch on to, from one monkey bar to the next, and to trade in her death for the hope of a life with another.

  But then I am the child. And it is Danny and I, down on the farm, and she is the raging mother who has always frightened us, kept us in a state of held breath. She degrades us with sharp logic and we cannot defy the truth of her words: We are dumb kids; we did get bad grades, we do look sickly. She will press her fingers to weak bruised joints to make us fold.

  She stands before a mirror and demands that I take pictures of her, while she barks at Danny to pivot the mirror just so, so that the picture I take is an exact replica of the reflection she's put in the glass. These are the pictures she sends to the men in the magazine. Her new hopes have restored her supremacy.

  While I am waiting for Danny to reposition the mirror for the next shot, I am lost in thought, thinking about how Mom places all of us as mirrors around her, demanding we reflect back exactly what she needs to see, at precisely the right angle. And if we don't, she strikes out to break the glass.

  AT AGE TWENTY-FOUR I AM GOING back to school.

  I was walking the aisles of a used-book store when I picked up a child's encyclopedia. The primary colors and simple text were so exciting that I plunked down right there on the floor with it, devouring the basic fourth-grade curriculum I'd missed along the way. And after that, I was hungry enough to try to learn what I was too sick to grasp as a kid. Since I don't have an actual high school diploma—thanks to losing that senior year mythology book I didn't have the dough to replace—I lie on the application for community college and somehow fool them into accepting me.

  With just enough food coursing through me to make it out of the house three times a week to class, I muster up the energy to go. I want to find out if I'm crazy like Mom and Dad said, if I am stupid like high school confirmed. I want to know if I have brain damage like Mom's always told me. Going to school, especially in Columbus, is the only way I can find out in private, to hide the shame that I am all those things.

  I take meticulous notes, study the solar system, Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. I read The Name of the Rose and great works of literature and learn that the Upanishads have the same creation stories that the Bible claims as its own. My mind is expanding and my grades are easy A's and B's. I cannot get enough of the possibility I might be even a little bit smart.

  But my sickness is sneaking back. A few months into my second year, I can't keep up, just like I couldn't keep up on the farm. My heart races whenever I stand. I tremble as I mix a box of cake batter for breakfast. I study in bed, fudge papers, and keep missing class because I can't get out the door. I tell my instructors I'm going to have to withdraw for a while because I have a mysterious heart condition, left over from childhood. Because, for God's sake, what else could be wrong with me?

  IMEET RAY: brilliant blue eyes, lean physique, a mop of unruly hair. Ray's a local musician who dresses like Frank Sinatra and blows hard-core punk out the end of his saxophone. I mix him up and pour him into an IV bag that I then inject into my arm. We are inseparable. Every day, I get nothing done. I eat my cake batter and live for Ray. His touch, his ways, anything he wants to inflict upon me. Neck bruises, teeth marks, late-night calls to come get him because the fifth of vodka he drank has him clinging to a wall on High Street. I question none of it and somehow, it is the happiest time of my sickened life.

  BUT THINGS ARE CRASHING. Ray is moving to San Francisco at the end of the month and I can't function without him.

  He snorts cat tranquilizer and crawls in my door, scoots across the floor, and oozes into bed. I live drug-free with only my devil's food cake batter to sedate me. We talk about things he doesn't remember the next morning; plans for me coming with him, plans for us staying together. He is slipping from me and I can't claw any harder to get inside him. We stop eating, stop speaking. Our choppy, punctuated words stab each other and we can't get them flowing again. I don't care about his drugs, his alcohol, his inability to match socks before he puts them on. I only know that, just as it was with my mother, I'll die without him.

  Quaking apart, we understand each other only on a sexual plane. I mar
k little stars on my calendar for each day, each time we are together, as the only tangible proof I have that yes, he still wants me. I study my calendar squares with their tiny stars for clues to reality; some days there are many, other days are sparse. Several starred days in a row make a visual pattern that can be extrapolated into the future. The future when everything is better; the future when it's all different. The future I've been living in hope of my whole life.

  When Ray stays away, I take the calendar to bed with me and nestle my tear-moist face to the squares with the most stars, willing more days like these. I wake in the morning with them stained in a trail down my cheekbone, like Cracker Jack tattoos. I contentedly wear the stars of Ray through the day, and break into quiet hysterics when I catch my face in the mirror and see they are fading.

  In the final days, Ray takes what he wants when he wants and I have nothing but an insatiable urgency and passive comfort in signing my body over to him for as long as he'll have me.

  I HAVE SIGNED UP FOR SUMMER QUARTER—a light load of two classes—determined not to be completely engulfed by Ray. I slip into abnormal psych class a half hour late one sticky July afternoon. I am there with greasy hair and sweaters on my teeth and a few anemic-looking bruises deep and purple on my bare legs. I slump in the back row, doodling as my slow country comrades hold up the class talking about their twice-removed cousin Ernie who they think had the mental disorder we just discussed. Didn't they ever read that new psychology students always identify with at least some of the disorders and start diagnosing themselves and their families? Don't they realize they're doing that? God, I hate students. My head swaddles down into the protective nest of my arms, curled on the desk.

  The professor's soft voice moves on to a specific kind of child abuse:

  The perpetrator, usually a mother, makes an otherwise healthy child sick in order to seek continued medical care.

  Mother…Make…Sick.