Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Mix
She brushed her hair methodically. It wasn’t the kind of hair that really benefited from brushing, Marc said it made it look frizzy. But she liked the feeling of the stiff brush straightening her curly hair. It was so soft then, just like Preston’s and Blaire's hair. She had been worried while she was pregnant with Preston -- a worry that she kept totally to herself, because it would have made Marc furious -- about the baby’s hair. Would it be kinky, like Marc’s or big and fluffy like hers? It was neither. It was incredibly silky and very black. Even though Preston was a boy, he had been born with a full head of hair and she spent hours playing with it.
That was partly because she had hours with him with nothing to do. Marc was a cop and worked extra shifts at the A&P doing guard duty when he was done. He didn’t want her to have a job. His mother had stayed home with him and that was going to be how his children were raised too -- even if that meant he had to never see them, she supposed. She didn’t really want to work. She never had and wasn’t sure that she could do anything anyone would pay her for anyway. And she was sure she could never get one of those regular jobs that Marc would approve of, like receptionist or something, for although she was very young she was sure that she wasn’t pretty enough for someone to want her as the face you saw walking into any office. She considered working at the A&P but Marc wouldn’t allow that.
She thought when she was pregnant that she would spend a lot of time with her mother and her friends but that didn’t seem to pan out either. His mother wouldn’t speak to them because she was white and her mother would speak to her (after a bit) but wouldn’t be around her “half nigger” children or around Marc. It was okay when they were in high school. Her mother was even a little amazed that her little ugly duckling who seemed not to be growing into the swan she was promised could land such a good looking man. Everyone thought Marcus Willowby was the best looking boy in school, particularly Marcus. Her friends were all jealous when she and Marcus started dating and amazed when it seemed like they were in love. She was amazed herself. And at the prom she wasn’t really hurt when he was named the prom king and Susana Kingston was named prom queen. She stood at the side of the rented hall and watched them dance together and tried to remind herself that even though Susana was dancing with him, she was his girlfriend. And she had a big secret that only she and Marcus knew -- she was three months pregnant.
Graduation came and went and they announced their engagement. Marc’s parents tried to reason with him and her mother cried and carried on but when they said that it couldn’t be avoided anyway, because she was pregnant, the whole scene came apart at the seams. Both of them were thrown out, but that seemed only to make it more exciting. They got married at the Jersey City Municipal Court House and spent their honeymoon looking for an apartment and staying with friends. Marc already had a job as a guard at Newport Mall and had applied to the police academy. His father was one of the only black cops on the force and although he didn’t like Marc’s choice of bride, didn’t want to see his grandchildren starve and saw that some of the red tape was cut so that Marc could get through the academy faster.
Now it was five years later and Preston was four and Blair was two and a half. They bought a house in the Heights and it was more than half fixed up. Marc even said he’d put a pool in next month for the summer. Life couldn’t be better. She even thought that she might be pregnant again. Her period was three weeks late. She was sure that Marcus would be happy about it eventually.
She pulled her hair back into a pony tail. She wanted to hide the frizziness since Marcus was home today. She didn’t know why he was home, he usually worked on Saturday. But he said he’d be home today and he’d be in the basement working. She was on the second floor of the house. Preston was watching Sesame Street on the floor in their room and Blair was still asleep in her room. Preston was singing the ABCs and she was filled with pride. Not every four year old could sing the ABCs so well. She was sure that Preston would be a very successful man. He looked more white than black, she reasoned, but he had all of his father’s cunning. If only Blair were more like Preston. Blair was decidedly black. Not that she had anything against black people; didn’t she marry a black man? Of course, that was about what she could expect. It was just easier, like her mother said, if you didn’t look so black like Marcus and Blair.
She looked back into the mirror. Her cheek was red and swollen and she saw now that it would bruise. She didn’t think so this morning. He hadn’t hit her very hard. It was strange, she thought, how sometimes he would hit her so hard but it wouldn’t leave a mark and other times just a slight hit would make the most awful bruise. The last time she saw her mother she tried to explain that she just bruised very easily, it was nothing, but that woman was such a racist, she couldn’t understand anything. Marcus didn’t mean anything by it. There was a lot of pressure at work and sometimes she went too far, demanded too much. He was just doing what he could to keep meat on the table and this new roof over their heads. If she weren’t so demanding, he wouldn’t get so mad. She thought something must be going on at work but she didn’t think she should say anything. Then when he didn’t go in this morning, she just thought she should ask... it was obviously a bad idea. Just like last week when he told her he was closing their bank account and all the money was going in the bedroom closet. What money, she wanted to know and then was amazed to find out that they had over fifty thousand dollars saved. She had been cutting coupons but she had no idea that they had been able to save that much. She was nervous with all the money in the closet and said as much and he was furious. But none of that had left a mark. And it didn’t seem to kill the baby growing inside of her, which was what Marc said he hoped would happen, but she knew he didn’t mean it. He would be so happy because she was sure it would be a boy, a handsome boy like Preston. Maybe she would name this one Dillon like the boy on TV. She never told Marcus about Dillon.
In her fantasy she lived in Beverly Hills. She was one of those thin pretty girls and Dillon would fall in love with her. She knew how great it was when the best looking boy fell in love with you, but the best looking boy in Jersey City was a far cry from the best looking boy in Beverly Hills. They would fall in love and of course money would never be such a problem. They wouldn’t have to fix their house themselves; they would hire someone to do it. And he would think that she was beautiful. He would dance with her and speak in that low romantic voice and it would just be perfect. She dreamed this dream alone in the dark, waiting for Marcus to get home from the A&P and silently slip into bed and move her legs apart. She always tried to stay awake, though, because he liked her to move a little. She didn’t have to be totally awake and if she was able to coincide her fantasy of Dillon and Marc’s arrival just right, she would be able to have an orgasm too. Of course that didn’t matter that much. Marcus told her that women weren’t supposed to have orgasms all the time, only sluts did. Sometimes she worried that she had too many orgasms so she tried not to tell him.
Sesame Street ended and Barney started. Blair woke up and lay in her bed whining. She made Preston promise to stay in the room so that she could take Blair to the basement to the only working bathroom and put her on the toilet. She was in the middle of potty training and first thing in the morning was the best time to show the baby how successful she could be.
She picked up Blair and walked down the stairs. At the first floor she stopped in the kitchen and turned off the TV. She hadn’t noticed that Marcus had left it on, full volume. The door to the basement was closed and locked. She was annoyed and had to put Blair down on a chair in the kitchen and look for the key. Marcus must have done it accidentally, she thought. She found the key in the drawer next to the sink, unlocked it and turned on the light. It was very silent in the basement.
“Marc?” she called down to the basement. Her voice echoed back at her. “Honey, are you in the bathroom? I need to take Blair to the bathroom.”
Silence rang through her ears. She felt confused and scared walking down the stairs. Sometimes when he was very mad he got silent. She thought that maybe he was furious and sulking and if she went down there he would be even madder. But what could she do? He hadn’t finished the bathroom upstairs and the basement bathroom was the only working toilet.
Blair had to go to the bathroom. She walked softly and saw the glow of light from under the closed bathroom door. She felt the sting of the bruise on her cheek. She remembered the first time he hit her.
Shortly after they had moved into their first apartment, he came home from work. He was angry, that was evident, but she was getting big and finding it hard to move around. None of her friends wanted to come and stay with her and her mother was still not speaking to her at all. She decided not to clean up at all that day. She lay in their little bedroom watching TV. Matlock was playing and she was deeply interested in what was going to happen to the killer. She didn’t hear him come in.
“Marie!”
She looked up from the TV. “Oh, hi Marcus.”
“What the fuck is going on? This place is a fucking pigsty.” He took off his jacket and threw it on a chair next to the TV.
“I'm just tired today, Marc-ey. Wouldja rub my feet?”
She was still really looking at the TV and didn’t realize how angry he was. He grabbed her by the feet and pulled her out of the bed. She landed with a surprised thump. “You lazy, fucking bitch! I’m breaking my ass for a lazy, ugly bitch! Get off your ass and clean this fucking place up!” He hit her with a closed fist on the side of her head. She stayed on the floor, tears flowing but screams could not escape. She couldn’t understand what was happening. Was this Marcus? He was so gentle.
“Get up!” He pulled his gun out of the holster. She rose as if in a dream. Where was Marcus? Who was this man? She looked in his brown eyes for recognition but proud arrogance was all that she met. She spent the next hour cleaning the house in a daze. When she was done, she realized that there was blood on her head and it had matted and caked in her hair. She went to the bathroom, still very confused and tried to remove the blood with a washcloth and started crying when she saw that she was getting blood all over the newly cleaned sink and floor. Marc came into the bathroom and also started crying. He held her gently over the sink and washed the blood out of her hair, begging her to forgive him, he was under a lot of stress, he couldn’t believe what he had done. She allowed herself to be comforted and cleaned and he put her in their bed. The rest of the night he was sweet and even made dinner and brought her flowers from the A&P.
Of course he wasn’t always so sweet, but the beatings were almost worth it because then he would be sweet and kind for days. But the last few months he had almost never hit her and when he had, he was unable to comfort her. He would look at her, bruised and sometimes bleeding and just walk away. She wanted to reach out to him but it had never worked that way. She wasn’t sure what to do for him.
The light glowed and she walked toward it. “Marc?” she called out. He was still silent. Blair started moaning that she had to go to the bathroom, so Marie opened the door. Marc sat on the toilet covered with blood, the wall behind him stained with the remains of the back of his head. He sat remarkably upright with the gun still in his mouth. Marie dropped Blair, who peed on the floor. Marie stared at the yellow pool of urine around her daughter’s feet. It ran across the floor into the pool of her father’s blood, mixing like water into oil.
That was partly because she had hours with him with nothing to do. Marc was a cop and worked extra shifts at the A&P doing guard duty when he was done. He didn’t want her to have a job. His mother had stayed home with him and that was going to be how his children were raised too -- even if that meant he had to never see them, she supposed. She didn’t really want to work. She never had and wasn’t sure that she could do anything anyone would pay her for anyway. And she was sure she could never get one of those regular jobs that Marc would approve of, like receptionist or something, for although she was very young she was sure that she wasn’t pretty enough for someone to want her as the face you saw walking into any office. She considered working at the A&P but Marc wouldn’t allow that.
She thought when she was pregnant that she would spend a lot of time with her mother and her friends but that didn’t seem to pan out either. His mother wouldn’t speak to them because she was white and her mother would speak to her (after a bit) but wouldn’t be around her “half nigger” children or around Marc. It was okay when they were in high school. Her mother was even a little amazed that her little ugly duckling who seemed not to be growing into the swan she was promised could land such a good looking man. Everyone thought Marcus Willowby was the best looking boy in school, particularly Marcus. Her friends were all jealous when she and Marcus started dating and amazed when it seemed like they were in love. She was amazed herself. And at the prom she wasn’t really hurt when he was named the prom king and Susana Kingston was named prom queen. She stood at the side of the rented hall and watched them dance together and tried to remind herself that even though Susana was dancing with him, she was his girlfriend. And she had a big secret that only she and Marcus knew -- she was three months pregnant.
Graduation came and went and they announced their engagement. Marc’s parents tried to reason with him and her mother cried and carried on but when they said that it couldn’t be avoided anyway, because she was pregnant, the whole scene came apart at the seams. Both of them were thrown out, but that seemed only to make it more exciting. They got married at the Jersey City Municipal Court House and spent their honeymoon looking for an apartment and staying with friends. Marc already had a job as a guard at Newport Mall and had applied to the police academy. His father was one of the only black cops on the force and although he didn’t like Marc’s choice of bride, didn’t want to see his grandchildren starve and saw that some of the red tape was cut so that Marc could get through the academy faster.
Now it was five years later and Preston was four and Blair was two and a half. They bought a house in the Heights and it was more than half fixed up. Marc even said he’d put a pool in next month for the summer. Life couldn’t be better. She even thought that she might be pregnant again. Her period was three weeks late. She was sure that Marcus would be happy about it eventually.
She pulled her hair back into a pony tail. She wanted to hide the frizziness since Marcus was home today. She didn’t know why he was home, he usually worked on Saturday. But he said he’d be home today and he’d be in the basement working. She was on the second floor of the house. Preston was watching Sesame Street on the floor in their room and Blair was still asleep in her room. Preston was singing the ABCs and she was filled with pride. Not every four year old could sing the ABCs so well. She was sure that Preston would be a very successful man. He looked more white than black, she reasoned, but he had all of his father’s cunning. If only Blair were more like Preston. Blair was decidedly black. Not that she had anything against black people; didn’t she marry a black man? Of course, that was about what she could expect. It was just easier, like her mother said, if you didn’t look so black like Marcus and Blair.
She looked back into the mirror. Her cheek was red and swollen and she saw now that it would bruise. She didn’t think so this morning. He hadn’t hit her very hard. It was strange, she thought, how sometimes he would hit her so hard but it wouldn’t leave a mark and other times just a slight hit would make the most awful bruise. The last time she saw her mother she tried to explain that she just bruised very easily, it was nothing, but that woman was such a racist, she couldn’t understand anything. Marcus didn’t mean anything by it. There was a lot of pressure at work and sometimes she went too far, demanded too much. He was just doing what he could to keep meat on the table and this new roof over their heads. If she weren’t so demanding, he wouldn’t get so mad. She thought something must be going on at work but she didn’t think she should say anything. Then when he didn’t go in this morning, she just thought she should ask... it was obviously a bad idea. Just like last week when he told her he was closing their bank account and all the money was going in the bedroom closet. What money, she wanted to know and then was amazed to find out that they had over fifty thousand dollars saved. She had been cutting coupons but she had no idea that they had been able to save that much. She was nervous with all the money in the closet and said as much and he was furious. But none of that had left a mark. And it didn’t seem to kill the baby growing inside of her, which was what Marc said he hoped would happen, but she knew he didn’t mean it. He would be so happy because she was sure it would be a boy, a handsome boy like Preston. Maybe she would name this one Dillon like the boy on TV. She never told Marcus about Dillon.
In her fantasy she lived in Beverly Hills. She was one of those thin pretty girls and Dillon would fall in love with her. She knew how great it was when the best looking boy fell in love with you, but the best looking boy in Jersey City was a far cry from the best looking boy in Beverly Hills. They would fall in love and of course money would never be such a problem. They wouldn’t have to fix their house themselves; they would hire someone to do it. And he would think that she was beautiful. He would dance with her and speak in that low romantic voice and it would just be perfect. She dreamed this dream alone in the dark, waiting for Marcus to get home from the A&P and silently slip into bed and move her legs apart. She always tried to stay awake, though, because he liked her to move a little. She didn’t have to be totally awake and if she was able to coincide her fantasy of Dillon and Marc’s arrival just right, she would be able to have an orgasm too. Of course that didn’t matter that much. Marcus told her that women weren’t supposed to have orgasms all the time, only sluts did. Sometimes she worried that she had too many orgasms so she tried not to tell him.
Sesame Street ended and Barney started. Blair woke up and lay in her bed whining. She made Preston promise to stay in the room so that she could take Blair to the basement to the only working bathroom and put her on the toilet. She was in the middle of potty training and first thing in the morning was the best time to show the baby how successful she could be.
She picked up Blair and walked down the stairs. At the first floor she stopped in the kitchen and turned off the TV. She hadn’t noticed that Marcus had left it on, full volume. The door to the basement was closed and locked. She was annoyed and had to put Blair down on a chair in the kitchen and look for the key. Marcus must have done it accidentally, she thought. She found the key in the drawer next to the sink, unlocked it and turned on the light. It was very silent in the basement.
“Marc?” she called down to the basement. Her voice echoed back at her. “Honey, are you in the bathroom? I need to take Blair to the bathroom.”
Silence rang through her ears. She felt confused and scared walking down the stairs. Sometimes when he was very mad he got silent. She thought that maybe he was furious and sulking and if she went down there he would be even madder. But what could she do? He hadn’t finished the bathroom upstairs and the basement bathroom was the only working toilet.
Blair had to go to the bathroom. She walked softly and saw the glow of light from under the closed bathroom door. She felt the sting of the bruise on her cheek. She remembered the first time he hit her.
Shortly after they had moved into their first apartment, he came home from work. He was angry, that was evident, but she was getting big and finding it hard to move around. None of her friends wanted to come and stay with her and her mother was still not speaking to her at all. She decided not to clean up at all that day. She lay in their little bedroom watching TV. Matlock was playing and she was deeply interested in what was going to happen to the killer. She didn’t hear him come in.
“Marie!”
She looked up from the TV. “Oh, hi Marcus.”
“What the fuck is going on? This place is a fucking pigsty.” He took off his jacket and threw it on a chair next to the TV.
“I'm just tired today, Marc-ey. Wouldja rub my feet?”
She was still really looking at the TV and didn’t realize how angry he was. He grabbed her by the feet and pulled her out of the bed. She landed with a surprised thump. “You lazy, fucking bitch! I’m breaking my ass for a lazy, ugly bitch! Get off your ass and clean this fucking place up!” He hit her with a closed fist on the side of her head. She stayed on the floor, tears flowing but screams could not escape. She couldn’t understand what was happening. Was this Marcus? He was so gentle.
“Get up!” He pulled his gun out of the holster. She rose as if in a dream. Where was Marcus? Who was this man? She looked in his brown eyes for recognition but proud arrogance was all that she met. She spent the next hour cleaning the house in a daze. When she was done, she realized that there was blood on her head and it had matted and caked in her hair. She went to the bathroom, still very confused and tried to remove the blood with a washcloth and started crying when she saw that she was getting blood all over the newly cleaned sink and floor. Marc came into the bathroom and also started crying. He held her gently over the sink and washed the blood out of her hair, begging her to forgive him, he was under a lot of stress, he couldn’t believe what he had done. She allowed herself to be comforted and cleaned and he put her in their bed. The rest of the night he was sweet and even made dinner and brought her flowers from the A&P.
Of course he wasn’t always so sweet, but the beatings were almost worth it because then he would be sweet and kind for days. But the last few months he had almost never hit her and when he had, he was unable to comfort her. He would look at her, bruised and sometimes bleeding and just walk away. She wanted to reach out to him but it had never worked that way. She wasn’t sure what to do for him.
The light glowed and she walked toward it. “Marc?” she called out. He was still silent. Blair started moaning that she had to go to the bathroom, so Marie opened the door. Marc sat on the toilet covered with blood, the wall behind him stained with the remains of the back of his head. He sat remarkably upright with the gun still in his mouth. Marie dropped Blair, who peed on the floor. Marie stared at the yellow pool of urine around her daughter’s feet. It ran across the floor into the pool of her father’s blood, mixing like water into oil.
Bastille Day
It was on Bastille Day, 1985, that we found out when it was we would be leaving. I imagined my father as the evil tyrant and we the benighted prisoners – who was going to storm the walls for us? We announced it at my best friend’s birthday party. It was a sunny hot day and we hovered around her patio table next to her pool. I could see that my sister, Meg, was enjoying the drama. Tears fell in big globs down her cheeks and plopped on the clear plastic table. I sighed.
“It’s only a year,” I tried.
The rest looked at me in shocked horror. Only a year. Only. A month was a life sentence in teenage time, a year… unimaginable.
“Where are you going again?” Tara asked.
“West Germany. Bayreuth.” I answered for the fifth time. Tara wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box.
“Bayruit? Isn’t there fighting there?”
I tried to be calm. Stupidity is its own punishment, I told myself. “No. Not Bayruit. That’s in the Middle East. This is Bayreuth. It’s just a little town in Germany that our father is dragging us to for no known reason except that he likes to fuck with our lives.” I put my head down on the plastic table and sighed deeply.
Meg got up at that point and said, “Jude, we better get going. Daddy said to be home by five to help pack.”
I glared at her. “I am not going. I’m sleeping here tonight. We’re not leaving until fucking Labor Day. Why do I have to pack his goddamned books now? Let him pack them himself.”
Meg shifted uncomfortably. “Please, Judy. Please come. You know he’ll freak out if you don’t come.”
“You know, Meg, I could give a rat’s ass if he freaks out because I won’t be there. And you shouldn’t go either.” I sat back in my chair now to stare at her, to dare her to go.
“You know, you shouldn’t pick these fights with him. It’s all your fault that he’s like that you know. If you’d just do what he asks…”
“Then I’d be his slave. Like you. And you do it so fucking well, I wouldn’t want to steal the limelight. Look, Meg, just don’t go. Don’t be an idiot.”
“You’re the idiot!” she screamed. “You!” She picked up her bag and turned to go. “Are you coming or what?” she asked from the gate.
“Haven’t I already made it clear that I’m not coming?” I sneered.
“Crystal,” she shouted and opened the gate. Her boyfriend Joe gave me a nasty look and ran after her.
I sat very still in my chair, wondering if I should have gone. She had no backbone. She let him walk all over her. We had been looking forward to this party for weeks and now because he was dragging us to Germany for his sabbatical, we had to leave our party early. What sort of parent does this? I thought. If Mama were alive…
I didn’t hear Joe come back in the yard. He pushed me in the back, almost knocking me out of my chair. “You fucking bitch!” he screamed at me, near hysterical. I got up and turned around. During the fight between Meg and me everyone sort of half listened but also just kept doing what they were doing, watching MTV on the TV that was hooked up by the pool and talking about the party that was going to happen Sunday night. It wasn’t an unusual sight to see me refuse to leave and Meg have a fit about it. But now they all stared since these were different characters. Joe was a pretty easy going guy who didn’t have much use for me, his girlfriend’s little sister. I was only 14, peanuts to his 17. He usually wavered between ignoring me to a sort of playful banter which made it clear he didn’t think much of me.
“What is your problem?” I yelled back. I am quite a yeller when I have to be.
“You just let her go alone! You know what he’ll do!”
I reddened. My friends had some idea of what my father was like, but only Joe had really ever seen it. He was there when my father wrenched my arm right out of the socket and sat in the emergency room consoling my sister who was much more hysterical than I was. She didn’t get her shoulder popped back in its socket by a second year medical student. He also once got chased down the street by my father who was threatening to hit him with a hammer. Luckily, Joe was driving and my father is a fat old guy. But it was enough for Joe to get the idea of who my father was. “She didn’t have to go.” I said it quietly now. I didn’t want this discussion in front of everyone. But he wasn’t going to let it rest.
“Yes, she did. And now she’ll get it and you won’t. You fucking bitch.” He pushed me again, not hard but hard enough for me to start to get very angry.
“So what, I am supposed to go home to get beaten up because my sister doesn’t have the brains not to go home? And what, now you’re going to beat me up for him? Try, you piece of shit.” I braced myself but several people came forward to lead Joe away. Sandra came and put her arms around me and led me into the house. It was her birthday and I was ruining her party and she was nothing but kindness to me. I started to cry when we got into her family room.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed.
“About what?” she asked, truly surprised.
“I’m ruining your party. I’m sorry.”
“You are not so ruining my party, you silly willy!” She began rubbing my back and head at the same time. She bent over me, her blonde hair brushing my face and gave me several kisses on the forehead and eyes. I relaxed into a comfortable crying fit. I sobbed weakly and pitifully, secure that Sandra would keep everyone out until I was done. She was the other person who knew about my father -- although she had never seen him hit me, she had nursed bruises. She and her mother had often lied to him about where I was, even when he was threatening to come in and search the house. Her mom, all of five feet and no inches with her thick French accent, would say, Oh, Meester Hall, you can, of course, search if you would like but she is not heeer, I ahm telling you! Why don’t you wait at home – she always comes, no? And I would lie in Sandra’s big mahogany double bed with the white canopy overhead and dream that they would adopt me and I would never have to go home again.
But I did go home that night because I felt so guilty. It was eleven when I left the safety of Sandra’s house. I rode through the park attached to the elementary school that I didn’t attend, past the house with the yellow sprinkler that they never put away and it seemed like they never turned on, past the house with the pretty fence that always made me think that someday I want a pretty fence just like that when I have my own house and can make things the way I want, past the Robinson’s house with their fifteen children or some other insane number, past the house of the secretary to the elementary school principal and I can never remember that woman’s name but I used to like going there on Halloween because she gave out good candy and down the hill past the Cohen’s, past the Schwartz’s, past the Kennedy’s and home and oh shit the light is on in the dining room… should I turn back? Should I go in? Go in, you wimp, I told myself and pushed my bike behind the bushes in the front, not bringing it into the back yard and I could hear my father saying in my ear, that’s a half assed job, Jude, a half assed job…. And I always thought but never said, how do you have a half assed job – you got the whole ass if you want it or not, it’s attached – but that would really have been asking for it and I had some self preservation after all…
And in I walked to my father and Meg sitting at the table, both drinking tea from BGGs (big green glasses we called them, BGGs for short, we always thought we were being so clever with things like that and then they became real words to us, not clever at all anymore). I stood there for a moment, not sure if I should run or curse or what when my father smiled and said, “Oh, Judashala, we were hoping you’d come. Want to play pinochle?” And so I sat cautiously, for although he did not often lay traps for me he sometimes did -- but it wasn’t one this time. This time we just played pinochle until five in the morning, by which time I had gone set twice but won anyway.
“It’s only a year,” I tried.
The rest looked at me in shocked horror. Only a year. Only. A month was a life sentence in teenage time, a year… unimaginable.
“Where are you going again?” Tara asked.
“West Germany. Bayreuth.” I answered for the fifth time. Tara wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box.
“Bayruit? Isn’t there fighting there?”
I tried to be calm. Stupidity is its own punishment, I told myself. “No. Not Bayruit. That’s in the Middle East. This is Bayreuth. It’s just a little town in Germany that our father is dragging us to for no known reason except that he likes to fuck with our lives.” I put my head down on the plastic table and sighed deeply.
Meg got up at that point and said, “Jude, we better get going. Daddy said to be home by five to help pack.”
I glared at her. “I am not going. I’m sleeping here tonight. We’re not leaving until fucking Labor Day. Why do I have to pack his goddamned books now? Let him pack them himself.”
Meg shifted uncomfortably. “Please, Judy. Please come. You know he’ll freak out if you don’t come.”
“You know, Meg, I could give a rat’s ass if he freaks out because I won’t be there. And you shouldn’t go either.” I sat back in my chair now to stare at her, to dare her to go.
“You know, you shouldn’t pick these fights with him. It’s all your fault that he’s like that you know. If you’d just do what he asks…”
“Then I’d be his slave. Like you. And you do it so fucking well, I wouldn’t want to steal the limelight. Look, Meg, just don’t go. Don’t be an idiot.”
“You’re the idiot!” she screamed. “You!” She picked up her bag and turned to go. “Are you coming or what?” she asked from the gate.
“Haven’t I already made it clear that I’m not coming?” I sneered.
“Crystal,” she shouted and opened the gate. Her boyfriend Joe gave me a nasty look and ran after her.
I sat very still in my chair, wondering if I should have gone. She had no backbone. She let him walk all over her. We had been looking forward to this party for weeks and now because he was dragging us to Germany for his sabbatical, we had to leave our party early. What sort of parent does this? I thought. If Mama were alive…
I didn’t hear Joe come back in the yard. He pushed me in the back, almost knocking me out of my chair. “You fucking bitch!” he screamed at me, near hysterical. I got up and turned around. During the fight between Meg and me everyone sort of half listened but also just kept doing what they were doing, watching MTV on the TV that was hooked up by the pool and talking about the party that was going to happen Sunday night. It wasn’t an unusual sight to see me refuse to leave and Meg have a fit about it. But now they all stared since these were different characters. Joe was a pretty easy going guy who didn’t have much use for me, his girlfriend’s little sister. I was only 14, peanuts to his 17. He usually wavered between ignoring me to a sort of playful banter which made it clear he didn’t think much of me.
“What is your problem?” I yelled back. I am quite a yeller when I have to be.
“You just let her go alone! You know what he’ll do!”
I reddened. My friends had some idea of what my father was like, but only Joe had really ever seen it. He was there when my father wrenched my arm right out of the socket and sat in the emergency room consoling my sister who was much more hysterical than I was. She didn’t get her shoulder popped back in its socket by a second year medical student. He also once got chased down the street by my father who was threatening to hit him with a hammer. Luckily, Joe was driving and my father is a fat old guy. But it was enough for Joe to get the idea of who my father was. “She didn’t have to go.” I said it quietly now. I didn’t want this discussion in front of everyone. But he wasn’t going to let it rest.
“Yes, she did. And now she’ll get it and you won’t. You fucking bitch.” He pushed me again, not hard but hard enough for me to start to get very angry.
“So what, I am supposed to go home to get beaten up because my sister doesn’t have the brains not to go home? And what, now you’re going to beat me up for him? Try, you piece of shit.” I braced myself but several people came forward to lead Joe away. Sandra came and put her arms around me and led me into the house. It was her birthday and I was ruining her party and she was nothing but kindness to me. I started to cry when we got into her family room.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed.
“About what?” she asked, truly surprised.
“I’m ruining your party. I’m sorry.”
“You are not so ruining my party, you silly willy!” She began rubbing my back and head at the same time. She bent over me, her blonde hair brushing my face and gave me several kisses on the forehead and eyes. I relaxed into a comfortable crying fit. I sobbed weakly and pitifully, secure that Sandra would keep everyone out until I was done. She was the other person who knew about my father -- although she had never seen him hit me, she had nursed bruises. She and her mother had often lied to him about where I was, even when he was threatening to come in and search the house. Her mom, all of five feet and no inches with her thick French accent, would say, Oh, Meester Hall, you can, of course, search if you would like but she is not heeer, I ahm telling you! Why don’t you wait at home – she always comes, no? And I would lie in Sandra’s big mahogany double bed with the white canopy overhead and dream that they would adopt me and I would never have to go home again.
But I did go home that night because I felt so guilty. It was eleven when I left the safety of Sandra’s house. I rode through the park attached to the elementary school that I didn’t attend, past the house with the yellow sprinkler that they never put away and it seemed like they never turned on, past the house with the pretty fence that always made me think that someday I want a pretty fence just like that when I have my own house and can make things the way I want, past the Robinson’s house with their fifteen children or some other insane number, past the house of the secretary to the elementary school principal and I can never remember that woman’s name but I used to like going there on Halloween because she gave out good candy and down the hill past the Cohen’s, past the Schwartz’s, past the Kennedy’s and home and oh shit the light is on in the dining room… should I turn back? Should I go in? Go in, you wimp, I told myself and pushed my bike behind the bushes in the front, not bringing it into the back yard and I could hear my father saying in my ear, that’s a half assed job, Jude, a half assed job…. And I always thought but never said, how do you have a half assed job – you got the whole ass if you want it or not, it’s attached – but that would really have been asking for it and I had some self preservation after all…
And in I walked to my father and Meg sitting at the table, both drinking tea from BGGs (big green glasses we called them, BGGs for short, we always thought we were being so clever with things like that and then they became real words to us, not clever at all anymore). I stood there for a moment, not sure if I should run or curse or what when my father smiled and said, “Oh, Judashala, we were hoping you’d come. Want to play pinochle?” And so I sat cautiously, for although he did not often lay traps for me he sometimes did -- but it wasn’t one this time. This time we just played pinochle until five in the morning, by which time I had gone set twice but won anyway.
Nach Bayreuth
“Achtung!” we cried as we hurled our suitcases down the long flight of stairs. Annoyed adults turned and looked at us, muttering in German. We giggled in response.
My sister, Meg, and I started down the stairs after all our worldly possessions. Well, not all, but all we deemed necessary for our one year stay in Germany. A short, fat man gave us a piece of his mind but, since we had just used a very large percentage of the German we knew, we were spared knowing what he thought of us. “Sorry, sorry,” we giggled as we passed. Daddy hadn’t taught us the word for sorry yet and our little, yellow German-English dictionaries were in our suitcases at the bottom of the stairs.
We were all going to go to Germany together, of course. Isn’t that how most parents would arrange moving to another country for a year? But at the last minute Daddy had changed his and Johnny’s (our nine year old brother) tickets for three weeks later because he had to get his dentures finished before we left and there just wasn’t enough time. Not that we weren’t in favor of his having teeth -- as it was fairly embarrassing having a father who only had six teeth -- but we wanted to wait longer before we went too. We were both in the throws of one of the best summers of our lives, the summer of 1985, and leaving our friends behind was, to say the least, excruciating. But our tickets were the cheap kind that couldn’t be changed, so off we went on the very last day of August.
It wasn’t until a few days before the trip that Daddy explained that we would land in Frankfurt and have to take two trains to get to Bayreuth, where we would be living. Daddy’s new department secretary at the Universitat Bayreuth would pick us up. She had daughters close to our age. Wouldn’t it be fun? But in the meantime we had to learn enough German to get us two tickets from Frankfurt to Neuremburg and then to Bayreuth. And we’d both be carrying suitcases, large carry on bags and, of course, a box of books each. Daddy couldn’t go to Germany for a year without at least four boxes of books, so it stood to reason that two teenage girls traveling alone in a country where they didn’t know the language would be carrying two of those boxes. Didn’t it?
It actually didn’t occur to us how hard carrying all of this would be until we landed in Frankfurt and got our luggage. By the time we made it to the first train station, we were exhausted. “Do you remember anything about this train station?” I asked.
Meg shook her head. Daddy had said, “But you were in this train station the last time we went to Germany.” But the last time we went to Germany, I was five and Meg was seven. We were on our way to live in Sudan that time and our minds were probably on other things. And now I was fourteen and she was sixteen. Nothing was even remotely familiar. It wasn’t like train stations on Long Island, not that we’d been in that many. This train station was gargantuan. It seemed bigger than Kennedy airport. “Let’s just get the tickets,” Meg said.
So we went to the ticket counter and said the only sentence we knew in German. We practiced it on the plane. “Zwei fahrkharten nach Bayreuth, bitte.” The man behind the counter rattled off something in German and we looked at him blankly. It hadn’t occurred to us that we wouldn’t just be handed two tickets to Bayreuth. Finally, Meg said, “Um… do you speak English?” The man rolled his eyes. “You must to change the train – in Nuremburg, no?” Oh, yeah, that. We knew that. We smiled and nodded. He gave us the tickets muttering something that sounded like “American idiots” but we couldn’t be sure.
The train was on the other side of the Brobdingnagian train station and we felt like two Lilliputians. Germans are very efficient but not known for their escalators or elevators. At least not in 1985. We were confronted with one massive staircase after another even more imposing staircase. That was what finally led us to the decision to stand at the top of the stairs and throw our things down. We knew “Achtung” from Bugs Bunny cartoons and figured all that could really be expected of us was not to hit people with our stuff. But the stairs going up were another matter. Each one seemed to take hours. After years of bike riding we were both pretty strong. Even though I was a fairly large teenager, I was in pretty good shape. But up these staircases was another story. We seriously considered leaving Daddy’s books and claiming they were lost on the plane. But we both realized that these staircases were nothing compared to Daddy’s wrath if we didn’t show up with the books. At least there were more staircases going down.
At last we were on the train. We settled into our comfy red seats and looked out the windows. After a few minutes of riding through what must have been the City of Frankfurt, we were engulfed in a thick blanket trees which were all tall and sumptuous.
“Do you think we’re in the Black Forest?” I asked my sister. She always knew everything. Or she used to – until she started dating, that is. Now it seemed like all she knew was about boys and, frankly, I thought it was a little boring. Not that I didn’t like boys, but there had to be more going on the in the world than boys, especially her boyfriend, Joe. I couldn’t stand him and the feeling was mutual.
“I don’t know.”
I could tell she was annoyed and wanted me to be quiet. The last few years had been strained in our relationship. Our mother died three years earlier and at first we were very close. But as she got more interested in her boyfriends and as it became more and more clear to me that no boy on earth would ever like me, I grew steadily fatter and, to be honest, weirder and we grew apart. I spent all my time with our friends writing my novel furiously in thick notebooks while she was off doing whatever teenage girls do with their boyfriends. I was opposed to the whole trip to Germany and rebelled at every possible moment, and, while she was also opposed, she stayed and helped Daddy pack and get ready. And now we were going to be stuck in Germany for a whole year with only each other. And Johnny, but he was a little kid so he didn’t really count. I sighed.
“Do you have a map?” I asked.
“Judy, don’t you have something to read?”
“You know that makes me carsick.”
“We’re on a train.”
“Well, then train sick. Do you want me puking all over you?” I smiled. “I could.” I made loud retching noises.
“Judy!” But she smiled. There’s nothing like a little scatological humor to lighten the mood.
“Why are we going, again?” I asked when I stopped laughing.
“Because the only other Nilotic researchers in like, the world, are there. Daddy has to go there to write his dictionary.”
“Who writes a dictionary? I mean, what sort of freak decides to write a dictionary?”
“Miriam Webster. Anyway, it’s not a dictionary like that. It’s like… a linguistic dictionary.”
I rolled my eyes. “Why couldn’t we have normal parents? Do you know like anyone whose parents are professors?” Our mother was also a linguist and I often referred to her as though she were still alive.
“David’s Dad is professor.”
David was the son of a professor in our mother's department and had been Meg's first serious boyfriend two years earlier. They were still best friends. “Yeah, and they went on Sabbatical in Hawaii. Where do we go? Sudan and Germany. I think I’d rather go to Hawaii.”
“Well, Daddy also wanted to go to China. We could be going to China. I think Germany is at least a little more like home.”
We looked out the window. It just didn't look like home.
My sister, Meg, and I started down the stairs after all our worldly possessions. Well, not all, but all we deemed necessary for our one year stay in Germany. A short, fat man gave us a piece of his mind but, since we had just used a very large percentage of the German we knew, we were spared knowing what he thought of us. “Sorry, sorry,” we giggled as we passed. Daddy hadn’t taught us the word for sorry yet and our little, yellow German-English dictionaries were in our suitcases at the bottom of the stairs.
We were all going to go to Germany together, of course. Isn’t that how most parents would arrange moving to another country for a year? But at the last minute Daddy had changed his and Johnny’s (our nine year old brother) tickets for three weeks later because he had to get his dentures finished before we left and there just wasn’t enough time. Not that we weren’t in favor of his having teeth -- as it was fairly embarrassing having a father who only had six teeth -- but we wanted to wait longer before we went too. We were both in the throws of one of the best summers of our lives, the summer of 1985, and leaving our friends behind was, to say the least, excruciating. But our tickets were the cheap kind that couldn’t be changed, so off we went on the very last day of August.
It wasn’t until a few days before the trip that Daddy explained that we would land in Frankfurt and have to take two trains to get to Bayreuth, where we would be living. Daddy’s new department secretary at the Universitat Bayreuth would pick us up. She had daughters close to our age. Wouldn’t it be fun? But in the meantime we had to learn enough German to get us two tickets from Frankfurt to Neuremburg and then to Bayreuth. And we’d both be carrying suitcases, large carry on bags and, of course, a box of books each. Daddy couldn’t go to Germany for a year without at least four boxes of books, so it stood to reason that two teenage girls traveling alone in a country where they didn’t know the language would be carrying two of those boxes. Didn’t it?
It actually didn’t occur to us how hard carrying all of this would be until we landed in Frankfurt and got our luggage. By the time we made it to the first train station, we were exhausted. “Do you remember anything about this train station?” I asked.
Meg shook her head. Daddy had said, “But you were in this train station the last time we went to Germany.” But the last time we went to Germany, I was five and Meg was seven. We were on our way to live in Sudan that time and our minds were probably on other things. And now I was fourteen and she was sixteen. Nothing was even remotely familiar. It wasn’t like train stations on Long Island, not that we’d been in that many. This train station was gargantuan. It seemed bigger than Kennedy airport. “Let’s just get the tickets,” Meg said.
So we went to the ticket counter and said the only sentence we knew in German. We practiced it on the plane. “Zwei fahrkharten nach Bayreuth, bitte.” The man behind the counter rattled off something in German and we looked at him blankly. It hadn’t occurred to us that we wouldn’t just be handed two tickets to Bayreuth. Finally, Meg said, “Um… do you speak English?” The man rolled his eyes. “You must to change the train – in Nuremburg, no?” Oh, yeah, that. We knew that. We smiled and nodded. He gave us the tickets muttering something that sounded like “American idiots” but we couldn’t be sure.
The train was on the other side of the Brobdingnagian train station and we felt like two Lilliputians. Germans are very efficient but not known for their escalators or elevators. At least not in 1985. We were confronted with one massive staircase after another even more imposing staircase. That was what finally led us to the decision to stand at the top of the stairs and throw our things down. We knew “Achtung” from Bugs Bunny cartoons and figured all that could really be expected of us was not to hit people with our stuff. But the stairs going up were another matter. Each one seemed to take hours. After years of bike riding we were both pretty strong. Even though I was a fairly large teenager, I was in pretty good shape. But up these staircases was another story. We seriously considered leaving Daddy’s books and claiming they were lost on the plane. But we both realized that these staircases were nothing compared to Daddy’s wrath if we didn’t show up with the books. At least there were more staircases going down.
At last we were on the train. We settled into our comfy red seats and looked out the windows. After a few minutes of riding through what must have been the City of Frankfurt, we were engulfed in a thick blanket trees which were all tall and sumptuous.
“Do you think we’re in the Black Forest?” I asked my sister. She always knew everything. Or she used to – until she started dating, that is. Now it seemed like all she knew was about boys and, frankly, I thought it was a little boring. Not that I didn’t like boys, but there had to be more going on the in the world than boys, especially her boyfriend, Joe. I couldn’t stand him and the feeling was mutual.
“I don’t know.”
I could tell she was annoyed and wanted me to be quiet. The last few years had been strained in our relationship. Our mother died three years earlier and at first we were very close. But as she got more interested in her boyfriends and as it became more and more clear to me that no boy on earth would ever like me, I grew steadily fatter and, to be honest, weirder and we grew apart. I spent all my time with our friends writing my novel furiously in thick notebooks while she was off doing whatever teenage girls do with their boyfriends. I was opposed to the whole trip to Germany and rebelled at every possible moment, and, while she was also opposed, she stayed and helped Daddy pack and get ready. And now we were going to be stuck in Germany for a whole year with only each other. And Johnny, but he was a little kid so he didn’t really count. I sighed.
“Do you have a map?” I asked.
“Judy, don’t you have something to read?”
“You know that makes me carsick.”
“We’re on a train.”
“Well, then train sick. Do you want me puking all over you?” I smiled. “I could.” I made loud retching noises.
“Judy!” But she smiled. There’s nothing like a little scatological humor to lighten the mood.
“Why are we going, again?” I asked when I stopped laughing.
“Because the only other Nilotic researchers in like, the world, are there. Daddy has to go there to write his dictionary.”
“Who writes a dictionary? I mean, what sort of freak decides to write a dictionary?”
“Miriam Webster. Anyway, it’s not a dictionary like that. It’s like… a linguistic dictionary.”
I rolled my eyes. “Why couldn’t we have normal parents? Do you know like anyone whose parents are professors?” Our mother was also a linguist and I often referred to her as though she were still alive.
“David’s Dad is professor.”
David was the son of a professor in our mother's department and had been Meg's first serious boyfriend two years earlier. They were still best friends. “Yeah, and they went on Sabbatical in Hawaii. Where do we go? Sudan and Germany. I think I’d rather go to Hawaii.”
“Well, Daddy also wanted to go to China. We could be going to China. I think Germany is at least a little more like home.”
We looked out the window. It just didn't look like home.
Field Day
“Judashala,” my mother called up the stairs. “Can I talk to you?”
I grimaced. I knew what was coming. My mother wanted to come to field day. “Um, I’m kinda, like, doing my homework, Mommy.”
“This’ll only take a minute, sweetie.”
No, I thought, it won’t. I got up off my bed and dog eared the page in A Wrinkle In Time. I trudged down the stairs where my mother was leaning in the doorway connecting the kid part of the house, which had been added on by turning the garage into two bedrooms, one up and one down, to the grownup part of the house. I didn’t want to go into the grown up part of the house.
I raised my eyebrows, hoping to indicate that she was interrupting me. She didn’t get the hint.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Homework. Math or something.” I looked at the bookcases Daddy was building on our wall going up to the girls’ room, not wanting to look at her.
“Honey… tomorrow’s field day.”
“I know…”
“Mrs. Alban called and said you wanted to go this year.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like I have a choice after what you did last year.” When I was in fourth grade, terrified of the humiliation that field day would surely bring, I tried to purposely break my arm so I wouldn’t have to go. First, I tried falling off my bike. Then I tried jumping off the table on the patio. The problem was that I was afraid of heights so falling out of a tree would mean getting up the tree in the first place, which would have been a problem. Finally I took a big rock and pounded my arm, hoping it would crack. It didn’t come close and my mother caught me. She was so horrified when she realized why I was doing it that she wrote a letter to my fourth grade teacher basically telling her and the whole school off. At first I thought it was really cool – way to go rebel mom – but then Mrs. O’Keefe read it to the class. She had tears in her eyes when she read it. Now I wasn’t just a looser who couldn’t run to save her life, I was a pathetic loser who couldn’t run to save her life and teachers “worried” about me. Their worry translated into me getting beaten up at the bus stop after school. Try explaining that to your mother.
“I didn’t mean for it to hurt you, Jude…”
“I know, Mommy…”
“Since you’re going… Daddy and I are going to come and watch you. Nobody will bother you with us there.”
I looked at her full in the face. Her hair was a quarter of an inch long, growing back after the chemotherapy. Her skin looked pasty and her eyes had dark circles around them. She looked old, too old to be my mother. She was forty nine but she looked sixty nine. And anyway, everyone else’s mom was like thirty five or something. Why did I have to have such old parents? Her lips were dry and cracking. She wasn’t wearing the fake breast. I pounded my hand against the wall, trying to think of why she shouldn’t go.
“Mommy… aren’t you too tired? You’d have to stand… they don’t have chairs,” I tried.
She smiled at me. “Oh, sweetie, don’t worry. Mrs. Alban said she’d get a chair for me and Daddy can carry it around.”
I imagined my father carrying around one of those tan folding chairs. What if it broke when she sat on it? After seven children, four dying in infancy, breast cancer and diabetes, my mother looked permanently nine months pregnant. I could just imagine her sitting on those flimsy chairs that we sat on in the cafeteria for assembly and it breaking right underneath her. “You’re going to sit on a chair?” I said dumbly.
“I’ll be fine. What’s wrong, honey? No one will hurt you with your Mommy there. Just let one of those troglodytes… those uneducated… just don’t worry, Judy.”
I pounded my fist a little more and pushed my hair out of my face. “Well…” I didn’t know anywhere to turn but I couldn’t take her being there, looking so old and fat and ugly… “Mommy, if you come could you at least wear your breast?”
She looked surprised. “I guess I could, honey…”
Tears welled up in my eyes. “And makeup! Like… lipstick or something…” My mother flushed. I could see she was beginning to understand, but I had to go on. “I mean… you just look so… old. And sick. Can’t you just be like a normal mom if you come?”
“Of course.” She squeezed my arm. “Of course. I’ll try to look like a normal mom.” She turned around and walked back towards her study. I stood on the stairs and watched her walk away into the grownup section, leaving me on the stairs. I could feel her squeeze on my arm still.
The next morning I ran to the school bus barely talking to my parents. My mother was still in a house dress when I left. Immediately I imagined her wearing it to school… Other moms didn’t wear big old house dresses and call them djellabas. Other moms didn’t introduce themselves as Dr. Something-or-Other. Why could she just be Mrs. Something-or-Other like every other mom? Why did she have to always show off that she was smarter than them? I had learned to seem stupid and stay low – why didn’t she learn that? I kicked a rock all the way up to the bus.
“Judy, I see you are joining us for field day this year,” Kara Silk, a blonde haired viper said to me on the bus. Normally she didn’t speak to the likes of me.
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
“At least you aren’t in my class this year. My class is the gold team but I hear you’re class is the blue team. I guess we’ll win this year.” She laughed and flipped her platinum blonde pony tail in my face.
I tried to pretend I wasn’t there. I sat quietly and ignored the other taunts while my stomach twisted and turned. I looked out the window and imagined I was Meg or Charles Wallace from A Wrinkle In Time. Their parents were professors and always wrapped up in their work, too. But their mother was beautiful and young and their youthful father was off missing but I knew they would rescue him at the end of the book because my mom had read it to me already and I had all but memorized it, aiding in my reading it now. They were scientists and doing something important. I didn’t even really know what my parents did. Linguistics. What the hell was that? Most of my teachers didn’t know either. All I knew was they spoke a lot of other languages and sat in their study talked about it all day long when they weren’t teaching. I think they even dreamed about languages because one night I had a nightmare and slept between them, those two hulking mountains and I heard my mother say something in her sleep in some other language. I think it was French or Yiddish or something.
Mrs. Alban was waiting for me outside the classroom. She was worried; I could tell all the way down the hallway. She smiled a big pink and white smile at me. I think it was supposed to be encouraging. I wished the day was over already.
“Judy! Your mother told me that she and your father can make it to field day. Isn’t that nice?”
I smiled and nodded. Please, please, please leave me alone. Please.
“You’re so lucky, Judy, to have parents that care so much about you and are so smart. I just love talking to your mother. She’s so educated. And your father is so funny!”
I nodded again, hoping to get past her and to my desk before anyone else saw the teacher being nice to me. She might as well hang a kick me sign around my neck, I thought. Luckily the principal came on over the intercom and gave us a little “pep” talk for the day’s activities. I figited as my desk mate tied my blue yarn around my wrist. As I leaned over to do hers, she whispered, “You shoulda stayed home and we mighta won.” I looked down so she wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. I thought she was sort of becoming my friend.
We went outside and I saw the whole playground and field was set up for the various torture devices they called games. Things where you threw a ball through little holes that barely seemed big enough to hold the ball, races where you had to pass batons that always stuck in my hands, and then the worst – the batting range. I could hear the taunts still from third grade when some kid I didn’t even know tried to hit me with one of the bats. My stomach seized. I thought I might throw up. Then I heard her voice, calling me, “Judashalah! Hi honey!”
I turned and saw her. She was wearing bright red lipstick and dark black eyeliner. She looked older and sicker and uglier than I had ever seen her. She had on a black polyester pantsuit that looked molded to her round, protruding belly. The other moms were all in jeans and t-shirts with pink lips and long brushed hair. They were everything she was not. I just burst out crying and ran back into the gym. She came after me, not sure what was wrong.
“How could you, Mommy!” I cried. “How could you come here looking like that? You’re so ugly!” I cried.
My father started to say something about how I couldn’t say that to my mother, but she just put her arm around me. I could feel her small and round but frail body against mine. I closed my eyes and turned to her shoulder and wept. Everything was wrong with us. We weren’t normal. We were even weirder than other geeks! She didn’t say anything. She just let me cry on her shoulder.
Afterward
Three months later, my mother died of complications from breast cancer on September 27, 1982, Yom Kippur. I atone for the sin of not recognizing my mother’s special attributes during her lifetime every year, although I never really shared her religion in my adult life. At eleven, I couldn’t see that I would also be short and fat and no Barbie doll and that it wasn’t the end of the world. I didn’t know that I had the ability to hurt her deeply because I was only concerned with my ability to be hurt. I also didn’t realize how much love it took not to get angry at a rude ungrateful child for her hurtful words and to just hold her while she cried.
I grimaced. I knew what was coming. My mother wanted to come to field day. “Um, I’m kinda, like, doing my homework, Mommy.”
“This’ll only take a minute, sweetie.”
No, I thought, it won’t. I got up off my bed and dog eared the page in A Wrinkle In Time. I trudged down the stairs where my mother was leaning in the doorway connecting the kid part of the house, which had been added on by turning the garage into two bedrooms, one up and one down, to the grownup part of the house. I didn’t want to go into the grown up part of the house.
I raised my eyebrows, hoping to indicate that she was interrupting me. She didn’t get the hint.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Homework. Math or something.” I looked at the bookcases Daddy was building on our wall going up to the girls’ room, not wanting to look at her.
“Honey… tomorrow’s field day.”
“I know…”
“Mrs. Alban called and said you wanted to go this year.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like I have a choice after what you did last year.” When I was in fourth grade, terrified of the humiliation that field day would surely bring, I tried to purposely break my arm so I wouldn’t have to go. First, I tried falling off my bike. Then I tried jumping off the table on the patio. The problem was that I was afraid of heights so falling out of a tree would mean getting up the tree in the first place, which would have been a problem. Finally I took a big rock and pounded my arm, hoping it would crack. It didn’t come close and my mother caught me. She was so horrified when she realized why I was doing it that she wrote a letter to my fourth grade teacher basically telling her and the whole school off. At first I thought it was really cool – way to go rebel mom – but then Mrs. O’Keefe read it to the class. She had tears in her eyes when she read it. Now I wasn’t just a looser who couldn’t run to save her life, I was a pathetic loser who couldn’t run to save her life and teachers “worried” about me. Their worry translated into me getting beaten up at the bus stop after school. Try explaining that to your mother.
“I didn’t mean for it to hurt you, Jude…”
“I know, Mommy…”
“Since you’re going… Daddy and I are going to come and watch you. Nobody will bother you with us there.”
I looked at her full in the face. Her hair was a quarter of an inch long, growing back after the chemotherapy. Her skin looked pasty and her eyes had dark circles around them. She looked old, too old to be my mother. She was forty nine but she looked sixty nine. And anyway, everyone else’s mom was like thirty five or something. Why did I have to have such old parents? Her lips were dry and cracking. She wasn’t wearing the fake breast. I pounded my hand against the wall, trying to think of why she shouldn’t go.
“Mommy… aren’t you too tired? You’d have to stand… they don’t have chairs,” I tried.
She smiled at me. “Oh, sweetie, don’t worry. Mrs. Alban said she’d get a chair for me and Daddy can carry it around.”
I imagined my father carrying around one of those tan folding chairs. What if it broke when she sat on it? After seven children, four dying in infancy, breast cancer and diabetes, my mother looked permanently nine months pregnant. I could just imagine her sitting on those flimsy chairs that we sat on in the cafeteria for assembly and it breaking right underneath her. “You’re going to sit on a chair?” I said dumbly.
“I’ll be fine. What’s wrong, honey? No one will hurt you with your Mommy there. Just let one of those troglodytes… those uneducated… just don’t worry, Judy.”
I pounded my fist a little more and pushed my hair out of my face. “Well…” I didn’t know anywhere to turn but I couldn’t take her being there, looking so old and fat and ugly… “Mommy, if you come could you at least wear your breast?”
She looked surprised. “I guess I could, honey…”
Tears welled up in my eyes. “And makeup! Like… lipstick or something…” My mother flushed. I could see she was beginning to understand, but I had to go on. “I mean… you just look so… old. And sick. Can’t you just be like a normal mom if you come?”
“Of course.” She squeezed my arm. “Of course. I’ll try to look like a normal mom.” She turned around and walked back towards her study. I stood on the stairs and watched her walk away into the grownup section, leaving me on the stairs. I could feel her squeeze on my arm still.
The next morning I ran to the school bus barely talking to my parents. My mother was still in a house dress when I left. Immediately I imagined her wearing it to school… Other moms didn’t wear big old house dresses and call them djellabas. Other moms didn’t introduce themselves as Dr. Something-or-Other. Why could she just be Mrs. Something-or-Other like every other mom? Why did she have to always show off that she was smarter than them? I had learned to seem stupid and stay low – why didn’t she learn that? I kicked a rock all the way up to the bus.
“Judy, I see you are joining us for field day this year,” Kara Silk, a blonde haired viper said to me on the bus. Normally she didn’t speak to the likes of me.
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
“At least you aren’t in my class this year. My class is the gold team but I hear you’re class is the blue team. I guess we’ll win this year.” She laughed and flipped her platinum blonde pony tail in my face.
I tried to pretend I wasn’t there. I sat quietly and ignored the other taunts while my stomach twisted and turned. I looked out the window and imagined I was Meg or Charles Wallace from A Wrinkle In Time. Their parents were professors and always wrapped up in their work, too. But their mother was beautiful and young and their youthful father was off missing but I knew they would rescue him at the end of the book because my mom had read it to me already and I had all but memorized it, aiding in my reading it now. They were scientists and doing something important. I didn’t even really know what my parents did. Linguistics. What the hell was that? Most of my teachers didn’t know either. All I knew was they spoke a lot of other languages and sat in their study talked about it all day long when they weren’t teaching. I think they even dreamed about languages because one night I had a nightmare and slept between them, those two hulking mountains and I heard my mother say something in her sleep in some other language. I think it was French or Yiddish or something.
Mrs. Alban was waiting for me outside the classroom. She was worried; I could tell all the way down the hallway. She smiled a big pink and white smile at me. I think it was supposed to be encouraging. I wished the day was over already.
“Judy! Your mother told me that she and your father can make it to field day. Isn’t that nice?”
I smiled and nodded. Please, please, please leave me alone. Please.
“You’re so lucky, Judy, to have parents that care so much about you and are so smart. I just love talking to your mother. She’s so educated. And your father is so funny!”
I nodded again, hoping to get past her and to my desk before anyone else saw the teacher being nice to me. She might as well hang a kick me sign around my neck, I thought. Luckily the principal came on over the intercom and gave us a little “pep” talk for the day’s activities. I figited as my desk mate tied my blue yarn around my wrist. As I leaned over to do hers, she whispered, “You shoulda stayed home and we mighta won.” I looked down so she wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. I thought she was sort of becoming my friend.
We went outside and I saw the whole playground and field was set up for the various torture devices they called games. Things where you threw a ball through little holes that barely seemed big enough to hold the ball, races where you had to pass batons that always stuck in my hands, and then the worst – the batting range. I could hear the taunts still from third grade when some kid I didn’t even know tried to hit me with one of the bats. My stomach seized. I thought I might throw up. Then I heard her voice, calling me, “Judashalah! Hi honey!”
I turned and saw her. She was wearing bright red lipstick and dark black eyeliner. She looked older and sicker and uglier than I had ever seen her. She had on a black polyester pantsuit that looked molded to her round, protruding belly. The other moms were all in jeans and t-shirts with pink lips and long brushed hair. They were everything she was not. I just burst out crying and ran back into the gym. She came after me, not sure what was wrong.
“How could you, Mommy!” I cried. “How could you come here looking like that? You’re so ugly!” I cried.
My father started to say something about how I couldn’t say that to my mother, but she just put her arm around me. I could feel her small and round but frail body against mine. I closed my eyes and turned to her shoulder and wept. Everything was wrong with us. We weren’t normal. We were even weirder than other geeks! She didn’t say anything. She just let me cry on her shoulder.
Afterward
Three months later, my mother died of complications from breast cancer on September 27, 1982, Yom Kippur. I atone for the sin of not recognizing my mother’s special attributes during her lifetime every year, although I never really shared her religion in my adult life. At eleven, I couldn’t see that I would also be short and fat and no Barbie doll and that it wasn’t the end of the world. I didn’t know that I had the ability to hurt her deeply because I was only concerned with my ability to be hurt. I also didn’t realize how much love it took not to get angry at a rude ungrateful child for her hurtful words and to just hold her while she cried.
1984
'I hate you!' I screeched as I slammed the door behind me. Dressed in cut off jeans and a yellow T-shirt that had been washed so many times that Ms. Pac Man was only a faint outline of black with a red bow, I ran from our house on Sarah Drive to the Bethpage State Park, less than a block from our door. It was 1984, my thirteenth year of life. I had thirteen years of callousness on my soles so the floor of the forest did not frighten my bare feet. Although a solid C cup, I ran through the forest braless, not realizing that that summer, the summer of running, I was treading over the broken and deformed bodies of my Barbie dolls toward a murky and unknowable teenage-hood.
It wasn’t the first time I had fled my father. It was almost two years since my mother died and he was at the lowest point of his life. He had gone from a state of abject misery where he accomplished nothing to a state of incessant rage where he accomplished nothing. The lack of movement in his life enraged him even more, a continuing cycle of self and other hate. Today we were supposed to be going to a Parents Without Partners barbecue so my fat and disgusting father could pick up the string of pathetic women who seemed to line up to date him. It wasn’t his dating I was opposed to -- when Daddy got laid, the whole family was happy because it calmed his temper for a few days, and I was all for that. It was that I was supposed to dress my little brother, age eight, in a particular shirt which fit into my father’s deranged scenario for the day. I couldn’t find that particular shirt and then discovered that I hadn’t washed it. This crime was so great that I was at first sentenced to a few harsh pokes in my sides as I was castigated. I spoke back, however, which increased my punishment to getting thrown against a bookcase at which point several rather good novels came raining down on my head. When I threatened to throw a heavy volume of Plath back at him, the punishment seemed as though it would get even more severe, so I escaped. Youth, if nothing else, provides excellence in speed.
I took my usual summertime escape route, through the chain fence with the big gaping hole, to the forest, jumping over logs at the correct points without really having to look. I believed I was the only one in the world who knew about this path, the path that lead from Sarah Drive to the center of the west side of the park, the play ground. My usual activity there was to sit on the swings and sing sad songs to myself. Self -pity was my occupation.
Once the forest thickened around me, I slowed my pace to a jog and noticed the annoying burning pain in my unteathered breasts. Although they had been growing there for some time, it was only this summer that I found them painfully annoying. Puberty’s carnage of my body began when I was ten but its passage never alarmed me as much as it did that summer. My breasts went from being hard little knobs of annoyance which I tried to hide, to being these unwieldy masses of flesh which seemed to be growing disproportionately to my little body. Boys – even men – stopped teasing me about them and started staring silently and in earnest. My back hurt from trying to slouch enough to make them less noticeable but it got to the point that this was impossible. As I jogged along my path in the woods, I experimented with holding them up. My back, bruised anyway from the impact with the bookcase, immediately felt better, so I jogged along, enjoying for the first time the sensation and weight of my breasts. I forgot about my annoyance at my body for betraying me and just basked in the pleasure of it.
I got to the spot where I always rested -- close enough to the playground I could hear the whoosh of kites flying and the thwack of soccer balls being kicked but where I was entirely concealed by the bush. It was a clearing where, although I didn’t know it yet, teenagers came at night to build campfires and get drunk. Although I saw evidence of their forays, I obstinately believed I was the only one who really knew where this was. The sun shined in speckled patches through the lattice- work of the leaves. I stopped in one sunny spot, imagining myself some sun worshiper of ancient times, and threw my arms up to the sun, allowing it to caress and mother me as my mother no longer could. I imagined it was my mother from the heaven I then believed in sending the sun in her stead.
The bruises on my back sang their woes and I decided to pull my Ms. Pac Man T-shirt up around my neck and let the sun warm me, heal my bruised back and perhaps my bruised soul as well, the way my mother would with magic kisses.
As the sun worked its way into me, I moaned in pleasure.
“That must feel very good,” a lightly accented male voice said.
Shocked, I scrambled to put my T-shirt on.
He laughed. “Keep it off. You look good that way.”
I tried to locate him, but my eyes were drenched with the sun and couldn’t see into the dark perimeters of the forest. He stepped into the light quickly and I almost screamed.
He was much bigger than me and blocked out the sun like an eclipse. I could only see his silhouette. I struggled to pull my T-shirt down but he forced it up over my breasts. I stared dumbly at his hands, thinking how tan they seemed next to the bareness of my skin. It was the first time in my life anyone had ever touched my breasts. A combination of fear and pleasure swept through me. I knew no one could see -- he could rape or kill me and no one would see, but a scream would bring concerned parents running from the playground. I didn’t scream.
I guessed that he wasn’t an adult but still much older than me, maybe sixteen or seventeen. He used one hand to catch both my arms behind my back and the other hand to run across my nipples. I was surprised at the sensation that ran through my body, like electricity straight to nether regions which I explored alone in the darkness of my bed.
We remained like that for several minutes. I closed my eyes and didn’t struggle. He loosed his grip on my wrists but didn’t entirely let go. He whispered softly to me with his accent very thick, “You are a very pretty girl, very pretty... gold hair... very pretty.” I didn’t think about his words, just the sensation of his hands, restraining me, caressing me, causing a sensation which I had never felt before.
He pressed his body against mine and grabbed on of my hands from behind my back and placed it on his crotch. I pulled my hand away and pushed him as hard as I could. He tried to hold on to me but toppled over as I bolted away like a frightened deer. I took the shortest path back to Sarah Drive, but I could hear him following. It was my terrain, I knew where to place my feet. He was less sure but following quickly. I passed through, making little sound or disturbance, but he broke every twig and branch that he passed. The forest screamed in his wake.
Just before the street there were a series of logs which I knew from hours of sitting and playing on them. Two were obvious and one hung down, dead, lying between two trees. This one didn’t need to be avoided it you were under five feet. I was. As I felt my feet slapping the black top of Sarah Drive, I heard the thump of his head on the dead log. I didn’t pause. I ran straight to my house and locked the door.
My father and brother were dressed and waiting for my return.
Mr. Hyde had left and Dr. Jeckyl remained, calm and urging me to get ready, we were late. Wordlessly, I retreated to my room. As I removed my T-shirt I felt it tear. I looked at the tear and began to shred with my hands. When my hands no longer sufficed, I took scissors from my desk and continued the carnage of Ms. Pac Man. Finally a mass of yellow fuzz remained. I gathered it into my hands and shoved it into my underwear drawer, unwilling, as of yet, to part with it.
It wasn’t the first time I had fled my father. It was almost two years since my mother died and he was at the lowest point of his life. He had gone from a state of abject misery where he accomplished nothing to a state of incessant rage where he accomplished nothing. The lack of movement in his life enraged him even more, a continuing cycle of self and other hate. Today we were supposed to be going to a Parents Without Partners barbecue so my fat and disgusting father could pick up the string of pathetic women who seemed to line up to date him. It wasn’t his dating I was opposed to -- when Daddy got laid, the whole family was happy because it calmed his temper for a few days, and I was all for that. It was that I was supposed to dress my little brother, age eight, in a particular shirt which fit into my father’s deranged scenario for the day. I couldn’t find that particular shirt and then discovered that I hadn’t washed it. This crime was so great that I was at first sentenced to a few harsh pokes in my sides as I was castigated. I spoke back, however, which increased my punishment to getting thrown against a bookcase at which point several rather good novels came raining down on my head. When I threatened to throw a heavy volume of Plath back at him, the punishment seemed as though it would get even more severe, so I escaped. Youth, if nothing else, provides excellence in speed.
I took my usual summertime escape route, through the chain fence with the big gaping hole, to the forest, jumping over logs at the correct points without really having to look. I believed I was the only one in the world who knew about this path, the path that lead from Sarah Drive to the center of the west side of the park, the play ground. My usual activity there was to sit on the swings and sing sad songs to myself. Self -pity was my occupation.
Once the forest thickened around me, I slowed my pace to a jog and noticed the annoying burning pain in my unteathered breasts. Although they had been growing there for some time, it was only this summer that I found them painfully annoying. Puberty’s carnage of my body began when I was ten but its passage never alarmed me as much as it did that summer. My breasts went from being hard little knobs of annoyance which I tried to hide, to being these unwieldy masses of flesh which seemed to be growing disproportionately to my little body. Boys – even men – stopped teasing me about them and started staring silently and in earnest. My back hurt from trying to slouch enough to make them less noticeable but it got to the point that this was impossible. As I jogged along my path in the woods, I experimented with holding them up. My back, bruised anyway from the impact with the bookcase, immediately felt better, so I jogged along, enjoying for the first time the sensation and weight of my breasts. I forgot about my annoyance at my body for betraying me and just basked in the pleasure of it.
I got to the spot where I always rested -- close enough to the playground I could hear the whoosh of kites flying and the thwack of soccer balls being kicked but where I was entirely concealed by the bush. It was a clearing where, although I didn’t know it yet, teenagers came at night to build campfires and get drunk. Although I saw evidence of their forays, I obstinately believed I was the only one who really knew where this was. The sun shined in speckled patches through the lattice- work of the leaves. I stopped in one sunny spot, imagining myself some sun worshiper of ancient times, and threw my arms up to the sun, allowing it to caress and mother me as my mother no longer could. I imagined it was my mother from the heaven I then believed in sending the sun in her stead.
The bruises on my back sang their woes and I decided to pull my Ms. Pac Man T-shirt up around my neck and let the sun warm me, heal my bruised back and perhaps my bruised soul as well, the way my mother would with magic kisses.
As the sun worked its way into me, I moaned in pleasure.
“That must feel very good,” a lightly accented male voice said.
Shocked, I scrambled to put my T-shirt on.
He laughed. “Keep it off. You look good that way.”
I tried to locate him, but my eyes were drenched with the sun and couldn’t see into the dark perimeters of the forest. He stepped into the light quickly and I almost screamed.
He was much bigger than me and blocked out the sun like an eclipse. I could only see his silhouette. I struggled to pull my T-shirt down but he forced it up over my breasts. I stared dumbly at his hands, thinking how tan they seemed next to the bareness of my skin. It was the first time in my life anyone had ever touched my breasts. A combination of fear and pleasure swept through me. I knew no one could see -- he could rape or kill me and no one would see, but a scream would bring concerned parents running from the playground. I didn’t scream.
I guessed that he wasn’t an adult but still much older than me, maybe sixteen or seventeen. He used one hand to catch both my arms behind my back and the other hand to run across my nipples. I was surprised at the sensation that ran through my body, like electricity straight to nether regions which I explored alone in the darkness of my bed.
We remained like that for several minutes. I closed my eyes and didn’t struggle. He loosed his grip on my wrists but didn’t entirely let go. He whispered softly to me with his accent very thick, “You are a very pretty girl, very pretty... gold hair... very pretty.” I didn’t think about his words, just the sensation of his hands, restraining me, caressing me, causing a sensation which I had never felt before.
He pressed his body against mine and grabbed on of my hands from behind my back and placed it on his crotch. I pulled my hand away and pushed him as hard as I could. He tried to hold on to me but toppled over as I bolted away like a frightened deer. I took the shortest path back to Sarah Drive, but I could hear him following. It was my terrain, I knew where to place my feet. He was less sure but following quickly. I passed through, making little sound or disturbance, but he broke every twig and branch that he passed. The forest screamed in his wake.
Just before the street there were a series of logs which I knew from hours of sitting and playing on them. Two were obvious and one hung down, dead, lying between two trees. This one didn’t need to be avoided it you were under five feet. I was. As I felt my feet slapping the black top of Sarah Drive, I heard the thump of his head on the dead log. I didn’t pause. I ran straight to my house and locked the door.
My father and brother were dressed and waiting for my return.
Mr. Hyde had left and Dr. Jeckyl remained, calm and urging me to get ready, we were late. Wordlessly, I retreated to my room. As I removed my T-shirt I felt it tear. I looked at the tear and began to shred with my hands. When my hands no longer sufficed, I took scissors from my desk and continued the carnage of Ms. Pac Man. Finally a mass of yellow fuzz remained. I gathered it into my hands and shoved it into my underwear drawer, unwilling, as of yet, to part with it.
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