Living with my dad was like living with a volcano. We never knew what would trigger an explosion, or how violent any explosion would become. One winter, for instance, we were driving up to Minnesota to celebrate Christmas with my mom’s family, and my dad got angry about something in the front seat. He used the excuse of the very first snowflake hitting the car’s windshield to turn around and head back home. I think we were somewhere in Wisconsin already, perhaps as much as four hours from home, but he had to punish us all by turning the car around and canceling Christmas that year.
Another year, he got mad about something, and swiped his arm across every table in the house, then the buffet, knocking all of the contents to the floor. I have so many memories of him doing that—followed by images of my mother, on her hands and knees, trying to sort through the mess and clean up the things that were no longer salvageable. Just days before Christmas that year, when I woke up, I saw that my father had opened all of the Christmas presents we had so carefully wrapped and placed beneath the Christmas tree for him. He had stacked his opened gifts on a chair and disappeared for one of his solitary “vacations” without us.
I was too young to understand what set him off on these violent rages, and years later, it didn’t seem to matter enough to ask my mom. “Don’t turn out like your father,” was always her warning to me. “You have his temper.” To this day, neither my mother nor my sister can tolerate yelling. I don’t want to remain quiet, though. I watched my father tower over my mother, cowering in a corner on her hands and knees, picking up the mess he had made in the house. I watched my father tower over my sister, yelling at her for crying, which made her cry all the more. Yes, I have his temper. I also have the scars he left on my psyche. He showed me that crying makes you weak, ugly, and vulnerable to an opponent’s attack. I am conditioned not to cry, so I tend to swear or yell in order to avoid developing more ulcers like I had when I was seventeen.
The aneurysm exploded in my dad’s brain when I was ten and he was fifty-one. Before this time, I was considered his “favorite” in our home of three females. After the aneurysm, I was the child left behind. My mom got to escape to one of the three jobs she had, and my sister busied herself with an after-school job until she was old enough to head out of state for college. I was the one who couldn’t hide. It all came to a head when I was seventeen.
* * *
After my dad survived each follow-up surgery, it became apparent that one permanent problem was a reduction to my father’s short-term memory. I ended up being the family member that got punished the most by this change, because I was the only one at home with him for much of the day. I would come home from school, and be yelled at for disturbing his television program with my clarinet practice. I would be sent out of the house with the instructions to return at 5:00 or 5:30 p.m., when my mother was due home from one of her jobs. When I returned at the appointed time, I would be yelled at for never coming home after school, then ordered to do some household chore as punishment.
One afternoon I was washing the dishes when my dad came out to yell at me again about being late from school. Since this was the early 1980s, I had a long-handled comb that I kept in my right-hand back pocket at all times, including when I was at home. On this particular day, my dad shuffle-walked his way out to the kitchen, yelling at me more and more as he approached. I kept my back to him, facing the kitchen wall, making faces at the wall as a way of releasing some of the tension within my body. Before I knew what was happening, though, my dad pulled the comb out of my back pocket and hit me with it. I pivoted on my heels, with my right hand raised to hit back.
I’ll never forget the icy cold glare of his blue eyes, or the steely anger that voiced the words, “Don’t. You. Dare.”
As he shuffle-walked back up the apartment hallway to the living room, I left and didn’t come back in until my mother got home.
* * *
The last day I ever stood up to my father was a Saturday morning during my senior year of high school.
Unknown to my father, every Saturday morning we would play a little game of cat-and-mouse. He was the sleeping cat, and I was forced into the role of the little mouse who would creep quietly through the house, hoping not to be caught by the cat until I was ready to run his errand. You see, my father liked to begin every morning with the newspaper. During the week, he would wake up, get dressed, and walk the two sides of our city block to reach the corner store. On Saturdays, this task was delegated to me. Every Saturday, since he came home from the first hospitalization when I was ten, this was my errand.
My father wanted the paper with his morning cigarette, and would be beside himself if the stores ran out of daily newspapers before he got his copy. If the store on the corner closest to our house was out of newspapers by the time I arrived, I would have to walk to the next store, which was about three blocks away. If they were out of newspapers, I had to head to the next store, another block away, and so on. (On Sundays, he would have to wait until my mother, my sister, and I returned from church, which was usually about noon. He would yell at my mom if we hadn’t managed to pick up a paper on the way to church, because they occasionally ran out by the time we got done with church.)
On Saturday mornings I would usually wake up when I heard my father shuffle-walking from his bedroom to the bathroom, flushing the toilet, or shuffle-walking back to his bedroom from the bathroom. If he was walking towards my bedroom door, which was between my parents’ bedroom and the bathroom, I would have to keep my eyes closed and even out my breathing.
After he would return to his bedroom, I would wait to see if he either climbed back into his own bed or was getting dressed to go purchase his own newspaper. Waiting would be easy if I was still tired. I might even drift back to sleep for another hour if I was really lucky. But the Saturday mornings when I realized I really had to empty my own bladder after listening to my father empty his were the worst. On those mornings, the minutes would take hours. I would lay in my bed listening for any kind of noise from my parents’ bedroom: a snore that he was asleep again, a squeak of the springs to tell me that he was still getting comfortable, the hinge on their closet door, the heavy sound of the wooden dresser-drawer. Why couldn’t he get up and get his own dumb paper so that I could just go to the bathroom and shower in peace?
If I really had to go to the bathroom, I would creep quietly down the long hall to the bathroom, trying not to step on any of the creaky spots in the hallway.
From the bathroom toilet seat, then, I would listen carefully for any sound of my father’s shuffle across the living room floor—which was the only carpeted section of floor in our apartment. If I didn’t hear him, I could leisurely wipe, disrobe, and jump into the shower. If, however, I heard even one floorboard creak, it was a mad dash into the shower, with all of my clothes on if necessary, just so that I could get a shower in before he sent me to retrieve his morning paper. (My father didn’t respect anyone’s privacy; we could never lock him out of a room.)
Unfortunately, the last Saturday during the fall of my senior year in high school, everything went wrong. I was climbing out of bed when I heard the first creaks of the floorboards in my parents’ bedroom. I had to quickly get back into bed. I lay still and breathed evenly so it sounded like I was still asleep.
Then I heard him stop in my doorway.
“Get up—I want my paper.”
“Okay, let me just . . .”
“I want my paper!” he bellowed.
“Yes, Dad. I just want to get ready first.”
“You don’t need to get ready. Just get some clothes on, and go get it” he barked.
I’ll never know what made me do it, but I told my dad I would get his paper, then shut my bedroom door in his face.
“What the hell are you doing?! I said go get my paper!” he yelled from the other side of my closed bedroom door.
He tried to open the do
or, but I had leaned up against it.
“Open up this goddamn door right now” he ordered.
“I’m trying to get dressed.”
His response to that began with a string of swear words. “I said open it up right now!”
“Do you mind!” I yelled back. “I want to get dressed in private.”
I don’t know which got my father angrier: the fact that I wouldn’t behave and open up the door, or the fact that I was able to keep up an adequate level of resistance on the door. Before the aneurysm, my dad had been a powerful man. We used to watch television shows together for hours, and he would tell me stories about when he had been a sailor. It was my mother who told me years later that he had been dishonorably discharged for spending more time AWOL than aboard ship. I used to marvel at his stories of all of the exotic places he had traveled to. Now he wouldn’t even walk down the street to buy his own stupid newspaper. When I was a child, my father had been a giant. Now, my father was only three inches taller than my five-foot-nine frame. In his mind, though, my father was still a “man” while I was just a “little girl,” and I was proving to be stronger. For the first time, my father saw me as the enemy rather than the “favored child.”
“I’m going to go get the hammer, then, and break this goddamn door down.”
I was sure I had heard him wrong. After all, I had been pushing with all my might against that door for what seemed like hours. Perhaps the blood that had been pumping through my body had blocked up my ears and distorted what my dad just said. No sane person would do that, the rational side of my brain suggested. I gathered up the clothes I was going to wear for my walk to the corner store, dashed into the bathroom, and jumped into the shower while my father was walking to the kitchen. If I gave him what he wanted, life would return to “normal.”
But I heard my father shuffling down the hallway to the kitchen, where the toolbox was stored. Our apartment was on a high second floor, my only window opened onto the next door neighbor’s steeply pitched roof, and the exit door to the apartment itself was about eight feet from my bedroom door. Get some clothes on, I told myself. Get his stupid newspaper, and put an end to this.
Then the rational side of my brain stepped back in. He’s not really going to get the hammer, is he? I asked myself. That thought was followed by the sound of a hinge squealing as the pantry door opened. The tool box was kept in the pantry. My father was getting the hammer. My brain screamed at me, Just grab anything, Jeanette. You must leave now.
The sound of my father shuffling back up the hallway made me move faster. I grabbed some clothes, walked the eight feet from my bedroom door to the front door, unlocked the deadbolt and the lock on the front door, turned the knob to pull the front door open, and ran for my life. The adrenaline coursing through my body made my head throb and my ears pulse, but I could still hear my father shuffling towards me as he headed back for my bedroom door. I ran down the five flights of stairs to the basement, a string of swear words following me.
“Get back up here!” my father yelled from the second floor. “Jeanette, I said to get the fuck back up here!”
I kept as still as a mouse.
“Get up here now!” he raged.
Then silence. We each waited and listened, hoping to discover what the other was going to do next. Our formerly noisy apartment building was enveloped in silence. Why was it so quiet? Had everyone else in the building gone out for the day already? Or were they just staying quietly uninvolved within the safety of their own apartments?
“Jeanette” he yelled again.
I stayed hidden, frozen.
Finally, I heard my father shuffle back into our apartment. I heard the door shut, and the deadbolt slide back into place. I don’t know if that was my father’s way of kicking me out of the house for good, or if he was just closing the door so he could get dressed to get his newspaper. My dad and I never spent another minute together in that apartment.
I changed clothes in that dark, cold corner of the apartment building, hoping no one would come down with a load of laundry. I had no idea what to do next.
I was seventeen years old, with not a penny to my name. My mom was at work, and I didn’t have bus fare to get there. My sister was away at college, in South Dakota, and my dad was upstairs, still carrying around his hammer for all I knew. I walked up the short flight of stairs to reach ground level, and walked out the front doors of our apartment building.
Once outside, I decided to walk over to Ben’s house, which was about six miles away, whereas my mom’s work was over ten miles. I hoped that Ben would be home, and that he would help me figure something out.
Even though he never touched me with the hammer, my father struck a deadly blow that day. My mom and sister still insist I was his favorite.
I wouldn’t return home until my mom had my dad committed to a nursing home. I told my mom about what happened that morning, but she told people he needed to leave our home because it was no longer safe for him to be by himself. She gave examples like how he would forget about cigarettes burning in the ashtray in the living room. The cigarettes would eventually fall out and leave burned spots on the wooden tables on which they rested. If he was making himself some food, he would leave the gas range on underneath the empty frying pan. Or he could fall while stepping into or out of the bathtub while taking a shower. I spent about three weeks living with a friend from third grade and her mom, and tried to drown myself with alcohol. I was to blame for giving my mom so many more things to take care of. I was to blame for sending my dad to the nursing home where he would live out the rest of his life.
* * *
My father died six years later, when I was twenty-three. I came back from northern Germany, where Frank was stationed with the military, to visit my dad in the hospital. My husband and I stayed for about a month, but my dad wouldn’t die. One time while we were visiting, Dad got mad about something and grumbled, “I’m going to get out of this bed and kick your ass, Jeanette.”
“Do it!” I said, hoping that his anger would give him the strength to break the cloth straps tying him down to the hospital bed. The hospital staff had decided to tie his wrists down after he pulled the oxygen and feeding tubes from his nose and throat, twice. For some reason, I wanted to see if I could still provoke the anger in him the way I had done when washing the dishes that afternoon almost a decade earlier. I was willing to swallow my fear long enough, in that hospital room, to see if I could bring the “monster” back to life.
* * *
When I was about six or seven years old, my dad took my sister and me to the zoo while my mom was at work. I know that he bought us hot dogs that day, because there is a picture someone took of my sister and me sitting on the wooden bench in our sweaters and sunglasses, holding hot dogs. I remember getting my knees stuck in the metal fence outside the tiger cage. In retrospect, I must have been leaning into the fence to get a better look at the tigers, and my knees slipped in between the bars. When my dad called for us to move onto the next exhibit, I discovered I couldn’t move. Rather than get into trouble with my dad, I sucked in a chest-full of air, held my breath, and forced my knees back through the rigid iron bars. As an adult, I have managed to suppress whatever knowledge I once had that would motivate me to voluntarily subject myself to that much pain, rather than risk my dad’s anger. My knees still hurt whenever I see that photo.
I don’t remember hearing my parents ever say “I love you, Jeanette.” The only time my dad ever used the words “I’m proud of you” was in the one letter he wrote me from the nursing home when I went away to college in 1982. The last time I saw my dad alive, tied to the hospital bed, I wanted him to acknowledge that I was there and worthy of his attention. Twenty years later, I understand that love is not abuse, but at the time, I didn’t know what love looked like. Twisted or not, I wanted my dad to show me he loved me enough to fight for me. I want
ed him to please me, out of love, the way his little girl had tried pleasing him at the zoo.
A month or so after my husband and I returned to Germany, and my father was released from the hospital to return to his room at the nursing home, we were back on a plane to Chicago. My dad had finally died. According to the death certificate, issued by the state of Illinois, my father died of “cardio respiratory arrest” after years of “coronary artery disease.” He was pronounced dead at 10:35 a.m. on March 26, 1988, and no autopsy was ordered. He had turned sixty-five in January.
When people have asked me about my dad, I usually say he died of meanness. The dad I loved died when I was ten years old. The man who made me get a newspaper every Saturday morning, who spit everywhere, and who called me a slut was a monster who haunted my days and my nights—until the casket entered the ground. I had the last nightmare of my dad the night of his funeral. Even though I was married at the time, my dream had me back in that bedroom on the second-floor apartment. I was lying in bed when the front door burst open to reveal a very large man silhouetted by billows of white smoke circling around behind him. With his hands on his hips, a deep voice announced, “I’m back!”
In my dream, the child I had been got out of bed, stood in the doorway of the bedroom, defiantly glared back at the man, and confidently said, “No, you’re not, we buried you today.” With that, I woke up, smiled to my dream self, turned onto my left side, and fell back asleep.
6. My Body
I began hating my body when I was in fifth grade. I remember being eleven, and the shame of discovering I was the second tallest in class. We were being measured for choir robes at the time. I was five-foot-one, several inches taller than the tallest boy in class. Then one of the boys in class noticed that I had pubic hair—noticeable because my school uniform skirt was suddenly too short, and rode up horribly when I sat at my desk. After Jim told everyone in our class, I learned to sit with my legs crossed. Eighth grade graduation couldn’t come fast enough. Only then did I see a benefit to attending the parochial school my parents sent me to, because no one from my neighborhood went to that school.
Heart Scars Page 6