Mud Sticks

It's all true

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:22:00 +0000

Child abuse is real and it is not a new phenomenon. Since time immemorial, children have been born to women who neither wanted nor loved them. In the Fifties, when I grew up, severe corporal punishment was allowed by both the society and the law, and a child who received such punishment was deemed to have deserved it. All parents, particularly mothers, were presumed to love their children, and so any pain inflicted on them in the name of punishment or discipline was acceptable. It was not until children were starved, their bones broken, or they bore incontrovertible evidence of beatings that the authorities might be willing to step in. Sexual abuse was swept under the rug...it simply did not exist in the minds of the citizenry...and emotional abuse was unknown. So, unless your mother broke your bones, set you afire, or starved to the point of emaciation, any complaints you might express to teachers, clergy or other adults was inevitably met with something like "so, what did YOU do to provoke your mother?" The innocence of childhood was somehow compartmentalized to provide for children provoking their parents to violence and the parents who "succumbed" to the provocation were viewed as blameless.

It took me more than a year to write the stories presented in this blog. And it took me many, many years to find a way to write them that was not so personal, so gut-wrenching, that I would break down mid-way through a story and be unable to continue.

When I discovered the distancing technique of writing in the third person...writing as if the protagonist...the victim...was another person, I was able to find the necessary buffer between my emotions and my mind. It was then that these tales were able to come out without undue distress.

Don't get me wrong...even with the distancing technique, I wept through each installment, sometimes unable to finish one until I had taken a break. Each foray back in time reopened the old wounds and when forcing myself to examine some experiences in the detail necessary to write them down, the pain...and sometimes the feelings of fear and hopelessness...would come rushing back.

It is said that time heals all wounds but I don't believe that. Time, by itself, merely puts soft layers over certain wounds, layers of forgetfulness or minimizing. Healing requires reexamination in the bright light of reason, it required re-experiencing old, painful feelings with the knowledge and perspective that time can bring. Healing hurts, sometimes more than the original wounding.

I took a few liberties...most notably changing names to protect the guilty and the innocent alike. If you know me, you know who the people really are, despite the name changes; if you don't know me, the names don't matter.

The stories are not in chronological order. Memory doesn't work like that. They are posted in the order they popped into my mind. Some memories trigger others, some memories come in waves of related experiences; others pop up based on a single, seemingly unrelated detail. These are presented in reverse order, the oldest story being the first one that came to my mind.

Comments are good but rude comments won't get posted. Neither will spam, even if it accompanies a comment. So, if you want your comment posted, please be polite and sensitive and don't leave links to spammy stuff...or to your own site or blog. This very painful exposure of the life of a neglected and abused child is not about your commercial interests or driving traffic to your own site. If you cannot have compassion for the pain of growing up abused and unwanted, for the aftermath of such an upbringing, for the hours of tears and hurt that went into writing this account, then please don't comment at all.

Turning a corner...

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:31:00 +0000

“Why doesn’t anybody want me?” she wept softly, hugging the baby to her.

“I did everything he wanted,” she sobbed, rocking the infant. “I did everything she wanted…why is it the only person who loves me is you?” She gently kissed the child’s downy head, the fine blonde fluff damp with her tears.

She looked around the dismal furnished room. Annie’s crib was crammed into a corner, leaving only a narrow walkway between it and her own bed. The one interior door led to an efficiency kitchen crammed into what was once a walk-in closet and, through a curtain in the kitchen, the toilet and a rusting steel shower stall. This, at least for now, was home.

She had left Rich. She didn’t know what else to do. They had only been married seven weeks when the Navy shipped him off to Southeast Asia, leaving her fatly pregnant and agonizingly alone. She wrote him almost daily, reams and reams of childish outpourings of love and hope and dreams recorded on ring binder paper in her round, immature hand, but as the months wore on and the mailbox remained empty, she had begun to despair. In his entire seven month deployment overseas, she had received perhaps eight letters, most of them written in those first few weeks. Between the time of Annie’s birth in March and his return in July, she had received only two letters, neither of them of any particular length or depth.

An invitation to visit was extended by Rich’s father and stepmother. Twelve long, swaying, lurching Greyhound hours later she arrived in the dusty, dry Central Valley town of Turlock and was swept away to Maynard and Thelma’s air conditioned double-wide trailer. Thrilled at the impending visit of their first “grandbaby,” Thelma had borrowed a white wicker bassinette and spent hours sewing a bright pink gingham liner with a tulle flounce for it, along with matching bedding. Annie, tiny, pale-skinned and virtually bald, was almost was lost in the vibrant pink, but Thelma’s welcoming effort was appreciated.

Thelma went out of her way to make her at home and engaged. An active, positive, upbeat kind of person, Thelma taught her new recipes, how to knit, new nursery songs to sing to Annie, and a host of other new things. She did her best to be a lively, entertaining and helpful houseguest, but her own sense of despair deepened with each passing day. She was fearful...afraid the silence from Rich meant that he had forgotten about her.

“It’ll be fine,” Maynard tried to comfort her in his clumsy, joking way. “Just you get yourself some black sheets, honey, and you’ll be fine,” he said. When she looked at him quizzically, not understanding his reference, he clarified with “He’s gotta be getting tired of them dark women on white sheets…he’ll be looking forward to a white woman on black sheets when he gets back!” She had not been amused, but was too inculcated with the requirement to be polite…especially to superiors…that she just nodded with a wan smile.

Annie, nestled snugly in her arms, had slept the entire twelve hours it took to get back home and they were settled back into their tiny converted garage cottage for a full week before Rich returned from deployment. A crowd of thousands was on hand to meet the ship, but Rick was easy to spot in his crisp Marine Corps uniform…there were fewer than two dozen Marines in their summer khaki shirts…amid the teeming mass of white navy uniforms. Shrieks of recognition and joy surrounded her, the sounds of women crying and children shouting “Daddy! Daddy!” filled the air. She made no sound, but stood on tiptoe and waved frantically, trying to catch his attention. But it was only when his feet stepped off the gangway and touched the dock and she was standing right in front of him, did he acknowledge her presence with a quick half-smile. Her heart sank…something was wrong and she could feel it in her bones.

‘Wait until I get him home,’ she thought to herself. She had worked hard to lose the baby fat and was now as slim as she had ever been. She had stopped nursing Annie at his request, but her breasts had retained their full, round shape. Granted, she had some stretch marks, but the Caesarean scar was hidden in her bikini line and should not be very visible. And, now out of Mother’s restrictive grasp, she had learned a few things about hair, makeup, and the provocative power of just enough…but neither too little nor too much…clothing. And to that end there was a sheer black lace-accented nightgown and peignoir at home…

It had not gone well. She was 18…he was 19…both of them were healthy, clean, attractive. Supposedly they had both been celibate during their seven month separation and yet…the black lace nightgown had been a waste of money, time and hope. Pleading fatigue…he had risen at 4:30 that morning, he explained…he lay down on the bed and simply went to sleep.

When he returned from work the following night, he brought his friend Rod with him and, despite the fact that none of them were old enough to buy liquor, the two of them killed two six packs of beer. Rod stretched out on the living room floor with a blanket and Rich collapsed on the bed in his clothes in a drunken stupor.

The third night was even worse…he didn’t come home. She had gone to the landlord’s house to use the phone, and when she learned that he had left the ship at four o’clock, like everyone else, she sat a lonely, tear-filled vigil until sheer fatigue drove her to bed. She awoke in the morning to Annie’s insistent demands for her breakfast only to find his fresh uniform gone and a crumpled one smelling of stale cigarette smoke and beer, on the bathroom floor. He had not even bothered to wake her.

The final straw came on Sunday morning, five days after he had returned. He had staggered in at 3 am and she had been awake. Not yet understanding the folly of arguing with a person when he’s drunk, she confronted him and got the shock of her young life…

"What do you want?" she demanded angrily.

“What I don’t want is to be married anymore!” he shouted drunkenly. “I hadda lotta time to think when I was out at sea, and I’m too young to be tied down to a wife and baby!”

“Shouldn’t you have thought of that before you asked me to marry you?” she shouted back, her fury effectively blanketing the hurt of his words.

“You got what you wanted!” he yelled. “You got a father for your kid, you got away from your mother, you got out on your own. What more do you want from me? Isn’t that enough?”

She stood there, stunned at what she was hearing. “You said you loved me,” she finally said in a small voice. She saw him shaking his head and a cold chill numbed her feet and began to climb slowly upwards. “Was that a lie, Rich? Wasn’t that true?”

He continued to shake his head as he sat on the bed, head between his hands, staring at the floor.

“Then why did you want to marry me, Rich?” She couldn’t seem to summon any tears, although her throat felt as if a tree stump were stuck in it and the back of her nose burned like fire. “Why?”

He continued to shake his head.

“Why?” she was screaming now. “Why did you marry me if you didn’t love me? We both knew Annie wasn’t yours, you can’t say you had to marry me…so why? Why?”

“Rosie,” he muttered, still looking at the floor.

“Rosie?” she asked, more calmly. Rosie was his girlfriend from high school who couldn’t wait for him to finish boot camp…all of six whole weeks…and come back to Spokane for her. Rosie had taken up with some other guy and ended up marrying him in rather a bit of a rush. “What does Rosie have to do with anything?”

He raised his head but kept his gaze on the floor. “I wanted to hurt Rosie the way she hurt me,” he said, his tongue stumbling clumsily. She could feel the coldness creeping past her belly and approaching her lungs. “She was supposed to wait for me but she didn’t…she fooled around with some guy and got herself pregnant. Do you know how much that hurt me?” He looked up at her, his face flushed and twisted with pain. “So I figured to get even…there’s no way she would know that the baby wasn’t mine, so she’d think I wasn’t being true to her. She wouldn’t be able to think she’d made a fool out of me. She’d be hurt to think I was cheating on her the way she was cheating on me.” He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. “So, I thought that it would give us both what we wanted…you’d have a father for your kid and get away from that bitch you call a mother, and I’d be able to get back at Rosie the same way she got me.” He threw a forearm over his eyes to shield them from the overhead light and was quiet.

The coldness had crept up and stolen her breath. She had nothing and everything to say, but the coldness had frozen her tongue. She walked past him to Annie’s crib and lifted her warm, cuddly body, limp and heavy in sleep, and cradled her closely, then silently walked out of the room.

Rich woke late the next morning with a dismal hangover and an even worse attitude. “Coffee!” he demanded, staggering out to the kitchen table looking like death warmed over. “Gimme coffee!”

“Shhhh,” she quietly admonished him. “I’m trying to get Annie to nap. She’s teething and seems to have a touch of colic and…”

“Just get me my fucking coffee,” he snarled, “And spare me the voice-over.”

Alert to the sudden tension in the air, Annie stiffened, raised her head up and began to cry. Rich grabbed both sides of his head as the child’s piercing wail painfully penetrated his skull.

“Shut it up,” he growled.

“Rich, I can’t. She’s teething and her tummy hurts and…”

“Shut it up!” his face took on the frightening mask of irrational anger she remembered so well on Mother’s face.

She put the coffee on the table and hurried to the living room where she scooped Annie up from the quilt on the floor and tried walking and soothing her. But, no longer drowsy and driven by her own pain as well as the palpable tension in the house, the child was inconsolable. Annie wailed, she sobbed, she screamed, her little face screwed up into a red knot of misery. The tiny house filled with her cries, including the kitchen where Rich nursed his hangover.

He came tearing out of the kitchen, his bloodshot eyes bulging, his crisp red hair standing out in all directions. “If you don’t shut that brat up, I’ll do it for you!” he bellowed. “I don’t know what I am doing here!” he yelled, his body rigid with fury. “You can’t cook, you can’t clean a house”…he had found dust on the top of the doorframe during a “white glove” inspection when he first got back…“you can’t even take care of a four month old baby. What the fuck good are you? Now shut it up before I do it for you!”

Speechless with alarm, she rushed to the bedroom and hurriedly changed her clothes and packed a diaper bag. Holding the screaming baby in one arm, she took the bag out to the kitchen and pulled all of the freshly made bottles from the refrigerator and packed them.

Annie continued to scream and she grabbed her purse and headed for the front door but Rich was standing in the way, a murderous expression on his face. She did a quick about-face and ducked out the kitchen door, moving as fast as she could under the awkward weight of the baby and the bag. Where the hell was she going to go?

She ended up at Pat’s, the only person she knew who had a young baby too. Pat was living with her new boyfriend, Russ, in a bed-sit downtown. It was too small for them to put her up, even overnight, but at least it was a place where she could sit for a while and ponder her options. She was afraid of him now…she wasn’t sure if she could go back.

And so she ended up renting the vacant little bed-sit in the back of Pat’s building. She borrowed a blanket from Pat and slept in her underwear on the bare bed, Annie cuddled to her chest, and in the morning, after she knew Rich would be back at work, she went back to the little cottage and removed all her personal and household goods, leaving Rich’s clothes, shaving gear, and personal mementoes. She wept through the entire task, but she wasn't sure she knew why. She was afraid he might come back…she didn’t care if he hurt her, but she was deathly afraid he might hurt Annie. Each item she packed up drove the knife of despair deeper into her heart. She had had such hope of happiness…how was she to survive the pulsing mass of pain that had replaced it? What had she done wrong? Why had this gone so wrong? What had she done to cause it? Or failed to do to prevent it?

And now she sat on the sagging bed in the dismal, cramped little room. Annie delightedly played with her toes, gurgling sounds leaping joyfully from her tiny pink bow-shaped lips. Her little world was intact, as far as she knew…Mama was there with the clean diapers, warm bottles, and loving arms…it was a shame that this sweet baby had to grow up and learn disappointment.

She looked at her child. Was this baby the only person on the entire earth who wanted her, who loved her? There had to be someone else, didn’t there? Mark didn’t want her or his daughter, and Rich had been pretty clear about his feelings. Mother…Mother had never wanted her…and when she was unable to prevent the marriage to Rich, Mother had fixed her with a cold stare and said “you made your bed, now you lie in it…don’t come running to me when things get tough.”

Daddy? …he and Maggie had three kids and another one on the way. They didn’t want their household disrupted again…they had rescued her from the county hospital and taken care of her until she married Rich…that was surely enough. Her grandparents? They hadn’t wanted her past the end of the summers, she now could see. They probably hadn’t even wanted to take her for three months out of every year, either…she didn’t know what kind of bargain Mother had with her parents, but with the clarity of hindsight, she could see that something had been in place there. Her friends from school had dropped out of her life as soon as she got married…their paths were going very different ways. Was there anyone besides her precious Annie who wanted her, then? It didn’t seem so.

For three days she sat in the dark, tending to Annie’s needs, weeping, pondering, wondering. And on the fourth day, she got mad. How dare Mark turn his back on her like he did? How dare Rich discard her like a used tissue? There had to be men out there who would find her attractive, men she could make want her. A lot more than just the two of them, too! She pulled out her makeup bag and sat down in front of the mirror…she was young, she wasn’t ugly…she could find somebody…she could find a lot of somebodies…and she knew just how to do it.

Waiting

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:03:00 +0000

Waiting

“Wait here in the car for me,” Mommy said. “I’ll be back in about an hour.” Mommy gave her a sharp look. “You two behave while I’m gone…and keep your brother out of trouble.”

She hated waiting in the car with Brother. She was fine doing it alone, but Brother scared her when they were alone together in the car. Oblivious to any consequences to his actions, either immediate or delayed, Brother viewed the car as a giant toy for his personal amusement and brooked no attempts at interference. She might as well not even be in the car, for all her admonitions or objections to his behaviour accomplished. And while she knew he couldn’t drive it away since Mommy took the keys with her…this time…she knew that fooling with the gearshift lever and the hand brake could have disastrous results. Brother knew too…she had told him so…but he dismissed her as inconsequential and stood on the seat behind the wheel merrily shoving the shifter up and down the column, making motor noises with his lips and tongue.

Noting that the handbrake was set, she was merely tense and anxious about his pretence at driving the car. She didn’t know enough about how the thing worked to know if his slamming of the shifter up and down could put them in any danger, but she knew if the handbrake was set, they weren’t going anywhere. Which was good, because they were parked on a hill and this made her very nervous.

“Brother, stop it!” she pleaded with him. “Come sit in the back with me and I’ll tell you a story.”

“No!” he said petulantly. “I wanna drive!”

She watched him carefully, not sure what she could do to stop him if he started doing something truly dangerous. He was bigger than she was and weighed more, for all that she was two years older. A man exited the red brick building that Mommy had entered, and walked to the car that was parked in front of theirs, entered it, and drove away, leaving her now with a clear vista of the long, steep hill the car was parked on.

Nervously, she looked at the clock. Half an hour until Mommy came back. Could she keep Brother from doing something that would hurtle them down that hill and into the big grey granite bank building at the bottom? Maybe they would be hit by another car as they careened through an intersection against the light? Daddy always did something called “parking the car in gear” when they parked on a hill…in case the parking brake didn’t hold, he said. Had Brother changed the gear? Was their parking brake going to hold?

Brother had both hands on the steering wheel and was gleefully twisting it from side to side, screeching noises emanating from his lips. Simulating a crash, he gripped the wheel and shook it, making explosion and rending metal sounds. She was a wreck, keeping one eye on Brother and one eye on the clock. Maybe Mommy would get back early? Then he would have to stop.

“Are we there yet?” Brother cried gaily from his perch on the seat, adjusting the rear view mirror so he could see himself “driving.” He pretended to pull the car over to the curb and park it, shoved the gearshift lever up, as he had seen Mommy and Daddy do countless times, then reached for the handbrake. Trouble was, the handle was already pulled all the way up and when he tried to give it a bit of a yank, it wouldn’t yield that satisfying sound of the brake being set. His attention was instantly diverted to trying to release the brake so he could set it himself and she went immediately into panic mode.

“Brother!” she cried. “Stop! You’ll crash the car and Mommy will be mad! She’ll spank you!” He hesitated momentarily, looking at her. “With the strap!”

He shook his head. “Spank you!” he said, now wrestling with the handle. She climbed into the front seat and tried to pull him away, but he gave her a mighty shove, sending her sprawling against the passenger door, where she hit her forehead painfully on the chrome door handle. Her eyes smarting with tears, she returned to the fray, trying to get him away from the parking brake handle before he created some kind of disaster.

“Stop it!” she cried, fear making the tears roll down her face. “Stop it!” She slapped at his hands, which just made him angry. He let go of the handle, rose up on his knees, and punched her in the chest with his fist, then returned to his quest. When she was able to breathe again, now crying in earnest, she resumed trying to deter him from his goal. He put his pudgy, sweaty hand in the middle of her face and, bracing his legs against the door and putting his superior weight behind it, pushed her away until she was pinned against the passenger door. When he released her, he immediately resumed trying to find a way to release the parking brake.

She glanced at the clock and realized that Mommy was more than fifteen minutes late and a new fear struck her. What if Mommy wasn’t coming back? Dark, shadowy flashes of half-memories flitted through her mind, dim, fearsome things that darted through her consciousness too quickly for her to grasp, leaving behind only coldness and fear and a yawning sense of emptiness. An alarming sense of terrible familiarity swept over her like a shroud, enveloping her, invading her, filling her, and she began to weep piteously.

At first Brother ignored her, but when her sobs and wails did not subside, he grew disturbed. “Stop it,” he said, shaking her, but she only wept more loudly. “Stop!” he commanded, but his voice fell on deaf ears. The fear had consumed her, it held her hostage, and with each glance at the clock, it escalated. Two hours passed…Mommy wasn’t coming back…what was she going to do now?

A woman stopped by the car and tapped on the window, concerned about the hysterically weeping little girl huddled miserably in the seat, but Brother, finally heeding the rules for a change, refused to roll the window down. The woman walked away and Brother resumed trying to silence his distraught sister.

“Stop!” he demanded again. “Mommy will be mad!”

“She’s not coming back,” she wept, looking at the clock again. “She’s been gone almost three hours now. She isn’t coming back. What is going to happen to us? Nana’s not here…”

“Daddy will get us,” he assured her, but his lower lip was quivering a bit.

“Daddy moved away,” she reminded him through her tears. “Mommy made him move away…and now she’s gone, too!” She burst into noisy sobs again and, curling into a tight ball, her arms wrapped around her head, she sank into a dark, empty place.

“What in the name of holy hell is going on here?” Mommy’s voice cut through the darkness surrounding her like a hot knife through butter. A claw-like grip on her shoulder dragged her from the corner where she was huddled, and she felt herself being shaken like a rag doll.

“You conniving little bitch!” Mommy hissed at her. “I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I? You have to go and pull some little attention-getting stunt like this and just embarrass the shit out of me!”

“She said you weren’t coming back!” Brother volunteered.

Mommy rolled her eyes. “Whatever made you say that, for Chrissake? You had your little brother in a panic, he ran into the lawyer’s office crying and upset everybody! What is your excuse this time?” Mommy shook her again. “Well?”

“You were gone…” she croaked out, her throat dry and sore from crying. “You said you would be gone an hour…and it was more than three…”

“What made you scare your little brother by telling him I wasn’t coming back? Jesus H. Christ, you’d think you’d know better than to do that. Why do you want to upset him like that?”

She just shook her head, sniffling, knuckling her tear-swollen eyes. “I was afraid…” she began.

“Of what?” Mommy interrupted with a sneer in her voice.

“That you weren’t coming back…you were gone so long…”

Mommy rolled her eyes skyward and sighed long-sufferingly. “And I suppose it didn’t occur to you,” she asked in a voice dripping sarcasm, “that I at least had to come back for my car?”

Besmirched

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:53:00 +0000

Nick Philby was the most popular boy in the eighth grade…probably in the whole school…and he liked her!

She couldn’t believe it when he asked if she would like to go for a Frostee after school. She couldn’t go, of course…she had to be right home after school or face Mommy’s wrath…but she was so careful how she phrased her decline of his offer so he wouldn’t think she was rejecting him, just this one specific meeting. They had different lunch periods, so she couldn’t have lunch with him…and besides, she always had lunch with Reenie…but she’d find a way!

She stepped out of her science class, her arms wrapped around a stack of books, only to find them snatched from her arms and cradled with Nick’s in his muscular grasp. Nick was a budding gymnastics star who could do absolutely amazing things on the rings and bars and had the physique to prove it. “Those are too heavy for a small girl like you,” he said, flashing his brilliant smile…his older brother was a dentist…“what’s your next class?”

“Mr. Shepherd,” she groaned, rolling her eyes. “I have to stop by the restroom and wipe my lipstick off or he’ll make me spend the entire class period in the hallway.”

He shook his shock of sun-bleached hair. “I feel sorry for you. I’d hate to have a teacher who got on me for my clothes or something.”

She nodded, at a loss for something to say. What was Nick Philby doing walking her to her next class? Nick Philby was a jock, really, really cute, and really, really popular. The girls all batted their eyelashes at him in the hallways, the guys all wanted to hang out with him…what was he doing with her? She smiled weakly.

“Look,” he said, handing her back her books at the door to the girl’s room. “I know you have to go right home after school…how about I walk you home? Wait for me outside Shepherd’s class, OK?”

She nodded dumbly as he turned and dashed down the corridor towards his last class of the day. Who would have ever believed? Nick Philby and her?

Weeks later, Nick was still walking her home. He had come over on a weekend and had even managed to impress Mommy with his gentlemanly manners and deferential attitude, so much so, Mommy actually asked if he might have an older, unattached brother. She had shuddered at the thought, telling Mommy that his only brother was married. Mommy actually looked disappointed, especially when she drove by Nick’s house and realized that his family was one of the original land owners of West Beach and although they had sold off much of their acreage to housing developers, they still lived in a grand old Victorian, the grounds of which took up an entire city block. She was rather unimpressed with the house and grounds since Nana’s garden was even bigger and her house was just as venerable, but she did stand in awe of the priceless antiques…furnishings that were originals with the house…that were an everyday part of Nick’s life.

At first she didn’t think it was particularly odd that Nick brought her to his house when no one else was home. He was the only person she knew who had a maid, and when the maid was working, they stayed out in the little guest house, playing board games and kissing games. She was accorded entrance to the main house when there were only the two of them, and she found a kind of reverent delight in being able to actually touch furnishings of an age and quality that she had only ever seen before in museums. As much as she loved Nana, she had no illusions about Nana’s taste…pedestrian at best. This, she could just tell, was fine…very fine.

Nick liked to make out, not an unusual preoccupation for a teen-aged boy. She was not his first girlfriend, and he had considerable experience and, if she was any judge, talent. So when his mother went out one Saturday to spend the day as an exhibitor at the annual flower show in Cabrillo Park, Nick invited her over, ostensibly to play chess. Frank had taught her to play chess, and she didn’t mind that she was still a novice at it. Her games with Nick involved a forfeit of one kiss per captured piece, and quite often the game was forgotten halfway through as they found a great deal more pleasure in the forfeits. This particular Saturday Nick had set up the chess board in the parlour, an elegant room furnished in plush velvet settees, gleaming mahogany tables, delicate Dresden shepherdesses, and massive bay windows looking out into his mother’s beautiful cutting garden. The room was splendid…not overdone, but tasteful and serenely gracious. She loved it.

He gave her the seat on the settee that had the best view of the garden and, distracted by the beauty of her surroundings…and Nick’s flashing smile…it was not long before they were stretched out together on the settee. She had been having some difficulty with Nick’s tendency to have what the girls called “wandering hands” of late, and today was no exception. The kissing was lovely…exciting…and being in his arms made her breathless…but when one of his hands began inching itself around towards her breasts or down below her waist, she would find the spell broken and her passion quenched. It was really quite annoying.

Today, with the long, deep settee, they sprawled out and, lost in Nick’s kisses, she didn’t realize that something was amiss until she felt his hand fully cover her right breast. Snapped suddenly back to full awareness, she struggled to remove it, only to find herself pinned beneath him, her right arm trapped so that she could do nothing but flail it impotently against his back. “Stop it,” she hissed in his ear. “You’re crushing me…let me up!”

“Just relax,” he said in her ear, kissing her just beneath it where she usually found it titillating. Now she just found it alarming. “This feels so good,” he said with a kind of half moan, his hand tightening on her breast, his thumb brushing across the nipple. She felt a jolt of sensation that frightened her even more, and pushed at him again.

“I can’t breathe,” she said. “Let me up!”

He shifted his position a bit, just enough to ruck up her shirttail and bring her bra into view. “Stop!” she cried, truly alarmed now. “Stop it!” and she began to struggle in earnest. He groped her breast through the bra and began grinding his lower body against hers.

“Stop it!” she cried. "Stop it right now or I will scream!”

“There’s nobody here but us,” he breathed, rubbing his face against her bra cup. “So, you don’t stuff, do you?” he said, half to himself. “The guys in gym all thought these were fake.” He squeezed for emphasis, then shoved the cup upwards, revealing her entire breast.

She would have clawed him, but she had no nails…she would have hit him, but he had her hands pinioned. With sudden alarm she realized that he had carefully planned this…he had even asked her to wear a skirt today rather than her usual capris…dear God, what was he going to do? “If you don’t let me up this instant,” she hissed in his ear, “I will never speak to you again!”

“OK,” he said, closing his hand over her bare breast, his fingers and thumb pinching the nipple painfully. OK? she thought. Did he just say “OK”? Icy fingers of fear crept over her and she clenched her fists and pounded his back, wriggling back and forth to try to break his grasp. He laughed and pushed his pelvis harder against her. “I knew you’d like this,” he said with a chuckle and bent his head to put his mouth on her.

She screamed for him to stop, she struggled, she even started to cry, but all she succeeded in doing was encouraging him further. When he had her bra pushed up to her chin and both breasts bare and glistening with the moisture of his efforts, she began to realize that her skirt and slip were bunched up and nothing stood between them but her thin cotton panties and his chinos, which she suspected were not as securely buttoned and zipped as she would have ordinarily expected. When he moved one hand down towards her leg, freeing her hand, she lashed out with a stinging slap and bucked up against him, trying to throw him off. He just laughed.

“Shove up against me a few more times like that,” he chuckled, recapturing her hand. “I’ll show you how to do it right…”

As he bent his head to her breast again, she went absolutely rigid. “I will tell your mother,” she said.

“She won’t believe you,” he said, mouthing her nipple.

“I swear to you, before I leave here today, I will hide something in this house to prove I was here, and I will tell your mother. I will describe this room and the guest house and the kitchen and the dining room and I will tell her what you did to me unless you let me go right this minute!”

He went still, the grinding of his pelvis against her stopped, his mouth lifted from her now sore nipple, and he looked at her closely. She must have done a very good job of hiding her fear and projecting only her anger and determination, because finally he relented and let her up from the settee. She jumped up and turned her back to sort out her bra and shirt, then bolted for the kitchen door.

“Wait!” he called after her. “Wait a minute and I’ll walk you home!”

By Tuesday afternoon she knew something was wrong. She had refused to speak to Nick before school on Monday and ignored him when he showed up at her classroom doors or at her locker. “Don’t make me say something to embarrass you,” she finally said, just before lunch. “Just go away and leave me alone.”

He didn’t take it well. “You can’t break up with me!” he said to her in a low, angry voice. “Just who the hell do you think you are?”

She raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. “I can break up with you and I just did. And who do I think I am? Not your girlfriend anymore, that’s who!”

He stomped away, his face a study in fury, and she didn’t see him again. But by Tuesday afternoon she had had three boys she didn’t even know ask her for dates and many of the girls who usually ignored her were now pointing at her or nodding in her direction and whispering behind their hands. By lunchtime on Wednesday, a path parted when she walked through the halls, the girls stepping back as if afraid to get their fluffy felt poodle skirts soiled, the boys clearly appraising her. It was making her crazy…what was going on?

It was Reenie who provided the answer. As much as she wasn’t plugged in to the elite social groups of school society, Reenie was often an object of teasing and ridicule and Reenie’s friendship with her was well-known.

“What happened with you and Nick this weekend?” Reenie asked, happily swapping her pastrami sandwich for the nasty peanut butter which was the only thing Mommy bought these days for school lunches.

She shrugged, not wanting to go into embarrassing detail. “I broke up with him.”

“That’s not what’s going around school,” Reenie said, licking her lips over the peanut butter.

She went instantly cold. “What’s going around school?” she asked.

“Well, Nick says he dumped you because he finally got what he was after, and that’s why he was going with you all this time. It’s all over the school!”

“WHAT?” she shouted, dropping the pastrami in her lap. “He said WHAT?”

Reenie started to repeat herself…she could be a little dense and literal at times…so she held up her hand. “Nothing happened…he tried…he almost” here she leaned closer to Reenie and lowered her voice “he almost raped me.” She got up from the steps and excused herself. “There’s something I got to do.”

With Reenie hot on her heels, she stalked over to the circle of teenaged boys whom she knew would have Nick at their centre and shoved her way through the crowd.

“Hiya, baby!” Nick grinned. “Back for more?” The boys around him laughed appreciatively.

“You lying sack of dog turds,” she shouted at him, hands on hips. “I don’t know what kind of lies you are spreading around school about me, but I want it to stop.”

“Awww,” Nick smiled, “Feelings hurt because you weren’t good enough for me to want a return engagement?”

She stood there silently, rigid with rage. When the red haze finally cleared, she calmly looked around the circle of boys, the few girls, and at Nick.

“Ok,” she said. “Have it your way. I won’t tell them that you are such a terrible kisser that you had to hold me down against my will and force yourself on me. And I won’t tell them that you almost raped me. And I certainly won’t tell that that you ignored my threats to scream and my threats to break up with you…but when I threatened to tell your Mommy you let me up like a scared widdle kiddie. I also won’t tell them that I have refused to speak to you since then, and I most definitely won’t tell them that today after school, while you are hanging out at the Frostee shop, making eyes one of these girls and getting ready to pull the same stunt on her, I’m going to be over at your house having a nice little talk with your mother!” With that she turned on her heel and stalked back to her place on the steps, the crowd parting silently to let her pass, Reenie still at her heels.

“It won’t do any good,” Reenie said after they sat back down. “Your reputation will never be the same. Mud sticks, you know…and it dries hard.”

“I know,” she said disconsolately. “But it was worth it to set the record straight. Did you see the look on his face when I said I was going to tell his mother?” She smiled wanly.

One of the girls from the crowd sauntered over and took a rather dramatic pose, one hand on her jutting hip. “Nobody believes you, you know,” she said airily. “Nick doesn’t have to force a girl…especially a little nobody like you. We all knew the reason he was going with you was because you put out. And when he got it, he dumped you. We all knew you were nothing but a tramp…why else would someone like Nick Philby go out with you anyway?”

She looked over at Reenie and said in a loud stage whisper, "Well, if Nick doesn't have to force a girl, I guess we can assume that any girl who goes out with him puts out then, can't we?"

She then turned to the girl whose jaw was hanging open at her oblique insult. "Better get going," she said, nodding in Nick's direction. "There's a line of girls forming to put out for Nick...you don't want to lose your place now, do you?"

Snapshots

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:51:00 +0000

She wasn’t in the mood.

In fact, she hadn’t been in the mood for months. And James did nothing to put her in the mood anymore. Actually, it was kind of disgusting, if you thought about it…he would lay back on the bed, propped up with pillows, holding a magazine…usually one of his financial wizardry magazines…in his left hand and, while he read, fondle himself with his right. She could kind of ignore it while the covers were pulled up to his waist, but of course, his manipulations eventually made him warm and he would push the covers down and continue…his eyes never leaving the pages of dollars and schemes. Finally, when his penis was more demanding than his desire to find a way to get rich without any effort, he would put down the magazine and reach for her.

She was not in the mood. And tonight she told him so.

At first he seemed surprised. Then nonplussed. And then he was angry. “I don’t give a fuck about your ‘mood’!” he sneered, his free hand rough on her shoulder. “Now come here.”

“No!” she shouted at him, actually relishing the opportunity to sink her teeth into a fight that she had a chance of winning. She had been far too passive for far too long. “No! I don’t want to and I’m not going to! I have the right to refuse and I am exercising it!”

He sprang from the bed, standing beside it, naked, erect, and furious. His whole body was red and trembling with his rage…his eyes practically bulged. “You have a right?” he roared indignantly. “You have a right? What about my husbandly rights?”

She couldn’t help it…she giggled. He looked so ridiculous with his pulsing hard-on and the rest of his body trembling with impotent rage, and when he topped it off with that ludicrous antediluvian tripe about “husbandly rights,” she couldn’t help herself. That giggle, of course, sent him right over the raving edge, complete with arm waving and bits of spraying spittle as he raged incoherently for a time. Eventually the incomprehensible tirade subsided and he stood beside the bed naked, his arms crossed resentfully over his chest. “Well?” he said, his demeanour hostile and intimidating.

“Well what?” she asked, suddenly serious.

“What about my rights?”

“What rights?”

He was getting really angry now, but for some reason she was neither frightened nor intimidated. Surprisingly, liberatingly, she actually felt quite angry in return.

“My husbandly rights!” he demanded indignantly.

She looked at him coolly. “In a state that recognizes the concept of spousal rape,” she said smugly, “there is no such thing as ‘husbandly rights.’”

For just a moment, she thought he was going to hit her. Then, without warning, he returned to the bed and began to masturbate with great vigour while staring at her belligerently. Taking her book and cigarettes, she rose and left the room, slamming the door behind her. She waited until the light no longer showed under the door before she finally returned.

* * *

“Get me some coffee,” he said, eyes on the TV, one of his ubiquitous finance magazines spread across his lap. Why couldn’t the man just work to make a fortune? Why was he so fixed on finding some kind of get-rich-quick scheme?

“Can you get it yourself?” she asked mildly, gesturing to the sewing spread across her lap.

His baleful glare was her answer and, with a heavy sigh, she carefully set her work aside and went to the kitchen.

It had been one of those days…she dreaded weekends because he was home and he did nothing but complain. Today he couldn’t find a spoon (in the drawer where they had been for the last 5 years), he couldn’t find anything to snack on (in the breadbox where it had been kept for the last 5 years), he couldn’t find the shirt he wanted to wear (in the laundry, he’d already worn it this week) and a thousand other little things. He had been annoyed with her since morning because he was out of shaving cream…although he had neither bothered to tell her he needed some nor had he written it on the shopping list that hung on the refrigerator door…and the day had gone downhill from there.

She put the steaming mug on the coffee table and returned to the rocking chair, picking up her sewing and spreading it across her lap to resume. She picked up her needle and took a stitch.

“I can’t reach it there,” he said, nodding towards the coffee mug.

She raised an eyebrow. “So sit up, lean forward, extend your right arm, and you will be able to reach it.” She knew that sarcasm was probably not her wisest move, but sometimes it just popped out of her mouth that way. Sure enough, he snapped his head in her direction and fixed her with a venomous look.

“You are the one who put it in the wrong place, now get off your ass and move it,” he growled.

A swift shaft of irritation pierced her and she gave it voice. “Pardon me? You think I’m a fucking robot or something?”

He fixed her with a cold stare. “Wives are supposed to be utilitarian...good wives are.”

* * *

She couldn’t remember how many times they had had this argument. And every time she felt like they were about to reach a point of resolution, he would say “I don’t want to talk about this anymore” and refuse to communicate further. Until the next time the subject came up.

And so, as they stood in the dining room enmeshed in yet another déjà vu quarrel, she suddenly decided to throw in something new. “You know what the problem here is?” she asked.

“What?” he asked warily, looking for the hook. His suspiciousness stuck out like antennae.

“You aren’t willing to compromise,” she said.

His response was righteously indignant. “I do so compromise! I compromise all the time. All the fucking time!”

She shook her head. She knew better. He was like her mother… “my way or the highway.” He didn’t even know how to compromise…how could he believe that he actually did it?

But then, like a lightning strike, it came to her…perhaps he quite literally did not know what compromise was, what it meant, what it involved...maybe his definition of compromise was not the same as hers...

“James,” she said, sitting down on the sofa, certain in her own dictionary-definition. “Define ‘compromise’ for me, please.”

He looked at her as if she had suddenly grown a second head and with a perfectly straight face he said “Compromise is when I get what I want and you get what’s left.”

* * *

She was exhausted. She’d fallen asleep in the rocking chair again, when all she had intended to do was take off her shoes and rest for five minutes.

But today should be a turning point…today she had a fat check to wave under James’ nose…a check that rose to his challenge and should now shift the burden of household work. She trudged out to the kitchen, slipped an apron over her clothes and opened the refrigerator.

They always fought over the household chores. The argument was a simple one: he didn’t do any. When she left the trash bins for him to empty, they overflowed. When she left the lawn for him to mow, it went to seed. He didn’t even see to the maintenance of the cars, that was something else she took care of, taking his in for work whenever he was on a business trip.

Nearly a year before they had had a stupendous battle on the subject, with his point being that he earned nearly twice as much as she did, so he was exempt from household chores…he contributed in cash what she had to contribute in kind. “Sweat equity,” he had called it. She was livid. She commuted as many hours as he did, she worked as many hours as he did…they were both away from the house for the same length of time each day…so why didn’t they both allocate roughly equal time to the household? He did…quite literally…nothing. In fact, on their first Christmas in the house she had bought him an electric drill as a gift…now, five years later, she had worn out a set of drill bits on it and he didn’t even know where the thing was stored!

That had been the seminal argument on the subject…they had screamed at each other for half the weekend, him refusing to even put trash in the bin…he left used tissues, empty cigarette packs, discarded wrappers, wherever he happened to be when he discarded them. And her requests for him to take the bin to the curb on trash day fell on deaf ears. She was tired of trying to get him to participate in the household and he was adamant that his greater salary “bought” him out of the responsibility. “When you bring home a pay check as big as mine,” he bellowed at the end “then I will help with the housework…but not one second before!” And he had adamantly refused to discuss it again.

The chicken parts sizzled in the pan, browning nicely as she readied them for braising in the wine sauce. Tonight! she thought. Tonight! In my purse is a pay check for more than he earns in a month and tonight things are going to change!

He tucked into the Coq au Vin and steamed broccoli, nearly inhaled the roasted herbed potatoes, and shoved away from the table without a word. She couldn’t remember if he had ever commented on her cooking except to complain that something was not the way he expected it to be, although he did refrain from comparing her to his mother, whom he considered to be a dreadful cook. When he settled into his chair in front of the TV, but before he could get one of those attention-robbing financial magazines open in his lap, she stood by his chair and handed him her pay check.

“What’s this?” he asked, his eyebrows going up slightly as he looked at the amount.

“My pay check for last month,” she said, finding it difficult to keep her smile under control.

“OK,” he said, handing it back to her and reaching for a magazine.

She felt a bit deflated. “Hang on a minute,” she said. “It’s time for you to keep your end of the bargain!”

He looked at her blankly. “Bargain?”

“Yes,” she said, holding up her check. “You said when I brought home a pay check as big as yours, you would help with the housework.” He continued to stare at her blankly. “Well,” she said, waving the check,” I earned more than you, so it’s time to sort out who is going to do what around here!”

“Hmf,” he snorted dismissively. “That’s not a pay check, that’s a commission check. It doesn’t count.”

* * *

“I’m damned tired of you driving my car. Every time I want to use it for something, it’s full of baby crap and girlie shit…and it’s out of gas!”

She shrugged. “Then I need a car of my own, don’t I?” he had been resisting buying her a car, which was OK with her. As long as she had something to drive to take the baby to the pediatrician, the cat to the vet, and get to the grocery store and school and back, she was fine. She didn’t have to have a car of her own, but if he objected to sharing his, then that was the obvious solution.”

“So, what are you going to buy it with?” he asked. There was an unmistakeable sneer in his voice.

She looked up from her textbook. “I’m not. I don’t have a job and I don’t have any money, and until I finish secretarial school, that’s not going to change. I figure you can share your car, chauffeur me around, or front me the money for a car of my own. I’m OK with any of those options, so you choose.”

He was clearly annoyed, but he picked up the classified ads from the floor and spent some time poring over them as she continued studying.

“$2,500,” he finally said. “You can get a decent used car for $2,500. I can stand you that.”

“I don’t want a used car,” she said, not looking up from her book. “I don’t want to buy someone else’s bad driving and poor maintenance habits.”

“You want a new car?!” he asked incredulously. “No fucking way am I going to buy you a new car!”

She shrugged. “Sharing your car works fine for me.”

In the end he agreed to pay up to $2,500 for a car for her…and if she could find a new one for that money, he would buy it. And the very next Sunday she began poring over the new car ads, that Sunday and every Sunday for the next three weeks. And then one morning she shook him awake early. “Get dressed,” she said. “And bring the money. I’ve found the car.”

He snoozed in the passenger seat while she made her way to the Ford dealer in La Luna, an upmarket suburb of trendy fern bars, natural cedar siding, and chic boutiques. He shook his head, wondering what she was up to...you didn't find a cheap anything in La Luna, but she was already out of the car and marching up to the showroom door, newspaper ad clutched in hand.

“I want to see this car,” she told the salesman, pointing to the newspaper. James looked over her shoulder at the ad and his eyebrows nearly went into orbit…holy shit! She’d found a brand new Pinto for $2,442!

They added a radio for $50 and she was happy…and eight dollars under the limit he had set for her. The car would be ready for pick up the following day, the salesman told them, counting the hundred dollar bills James had placed in front of him. James glared out the window in a sullen, sulky silence all the way home and continued the gloomy visage for the rest of the day.

“OK,” she said that evening over the meatloaf, “What is eating you? I would think you would be happy…I not only found a car, I found a new that comes with a warranty and nobody else has had a chance to screw it up. So what is bothering you?”

He muttered something into his plate that sounded like “pail” or “mail,” but she couldn’t quite make it out. “What did you say?” she asked.

He looked up, glowering, his mouth full of baked potato. “You were supposed to fail, goddamnit! Instead, you went and made a fucking fool out of me!”

She put her fork down incredulously. “What?” she asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You did this to prove me wrong,” he said, almost hissing at her. “Instead of taking a decent used car, like I wanted you to, you spent all this time and effort looking for a new one just to prove me wrong, just to spite me, just to humiliate me!”

She was incensed. “I did not! My father is a mechanic and I know very well how people can screw up a car by driving it badly or not taking care of it. I have a baby to drive around and I have appointments to keep…I just didn’t want a car that would break down and strand me with him or make me late for school!”

“You did it to prove me wrong!” he yelled, slamming down his fork and storming away from the table. “You did it to make me look bad, to prove yourself right, to show how superior you are to me!” The door slammed behind him as he went out and she sat at the table staring at the remnants of supper, wondering exactly what had just happened here.

Best Friends

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Sun, 18 May 2008 05:57:00 +0000

Reenie had been her best friend since the seventh grade.

They’d met at lunch time one day, each of them eating alone and ignored by the other kids. In the casual cruelty of youth, Reenie had been rejected by the other kids as unsuitable for friendship because she had a “wandering eye” and the doctors felt that she was not physically mature enough for surgical correction, leaving her with thick glasses and one eye that turned towards her nose when the other looked straight ahead.

They had sat at opposite sides of the steps leading up to the music building for several weeks, eating alone, ostensibly paying no attention to each other. Then, on a particularly chilly autumn day, Reenie had moved to her side of the steps where there was more sun, uttering only the words “Cold over there.” From such a diffident beginning sprung a fast friendship that had brought them through junior high and most of high school.

In the summer break after ninth grade Reenie had finally had the surgery to correct her eye and she started high school with a fresh new look. Reenie had a tiny, extremely curvy body and a sweet elfin face with large, expressive brown eyes. Unfortunately, the kids at the high school were the same kids they had gone to junior high with, so Reenie’s improved appearance meant nothing to people who had called her “Quasimodo” behind her back…and sometimes even to her face. Pretty, shapely, winsomely shy, Reenie remained an untouchable, irrevocably tainted by the past.

She could relate. Aside from the eczema on her leg that looked hideous and repulsed many of her classmates, she had been forcibly isolated from most of her peers and, by the time she started junior high, was completely out of the loop. She didn’t know what music the kids listened to, what was cool to wear and what was not, what entertainers the girls swooned over…in short, she was as far removed from the culture of her peers as her mother was. There was no teenager living in their house, just a smaller, indentured adult. An outcast in elementary school, her status remained quo in junior high.

But Reenie had gone to a different elementary school, so neither was aware of the other’s pariah status…not that it would have made any difference in the long run. Both were outside the junior high society and it was natural that, once they met, they should bond. It was a friendship that had supported them for better than five years and, to her complete and utter amazement, sparked no objection from Mother. In fact, it seemed to relax Mother’s restrictiveness, her friendship with Reenie. She was allowed to go places and do things with Reenie that would have been forbidden alone. And tonight, she and Reenie were taking the bus and going downtown to a USO dance.

Usually, she went to Reenie’s house to get ready…Reenie’s mother was sweet and gentle and she enjoyed her company. But tonight Reenie was coming here, they would eat dinner and do each other’s hair and make up, then dress up and take off for the dance. At the end of the evening, Reenie’s mother would pick them up from the bus stop and drive them home, her own mother of the opinion that it wasn’t snowing out (as if it ever snowed in Southern California) and there were no kidnappers or murderers reported to be on the loose, so she could damned well walk home, no matter that the last bus dropped them off only fifteen minutes before midnight.

She had gotten up early and washed her long, straight hair and put it up in rollers. Without a hair dryer, it would take all day to dry. Mother’s short, naturally curly hair needed only to be pushed into place with a finger when it was damp and then air dried…why on earth would she want to spend money on a hair dryer? Reenie would take her hair down and tease it and ease it into something full and elegant and sophisticated…then she would do the same for Reenie. They shared make up and jewellery, shoes and accessories…everything but clothes, Reenie being tinier than she was. Tonight she would wear the white tulle strapless semi-formal with the blue taffeta cummerbund and her white spikes…Reenie would doubtless show up in something sleek and form-fitting, like the purple sheath that showed her curves off to perfection. Reenie was so cute that the guys…except for the guys at their high school who simply could not forget her as “Quasimodo”…all noticed her right away. It was fun watching Reenie go all flustered at the unaccustomed male attention, a good portion of which spilled over to her. She wasn’t as cute and curvy as Reenie, but she was well-endowed and a lively conversationalist, so she got her fair share of the attention.

How she loved to dance! Checking to see that her hair was nearly dry enough to take down, she cha-chaed out to the kitchen, humming something with a Latin beat, to see what was going on for dinner. She stopped in her tracks at the sight of Mother frying pork chops.

“Um, would it be OK if I made a hamburger patty for Reenie?” she asked. Mother turned her head and fixed her with a baleful glare. “What? My cooking’s not good enough for your hoity toity friend?”

She shook her head. “It’s just that…Reenie doesn’t eat pork. She can’t.”

“Allergic?” Mother asked, her eyes back on the chops.

She should have lied and said “yes.” It would have saved untold drama and humiliation, screaming and hysterics. But, at that precise moment, she didn’t know that a lie would have been wiser than speaking the truth and since she was not in the habit of lying without compelling reason, she shook her head and said, offhandedly, “No, she’s Jewish.”

In that moment, time seemed to stop. Mother stood perfectly still…rigidly so. She made no sound, did not even appear to be breathing and only the sound of the grease cracking and popping in the frying pan gave life to the scene.

Her hand tightening on the spatula, Mother turned slowly and deliberately to face her. “She’s what?” Mother gritted out, eyebrows almost disappearing into her hairline. “What did you just say?”

Wary, but unsure about what she had done to offend, she took a step backwards. “She’s Jewish?” she replied questioningly.

“That’s what I thought you said,” Mother shouted, waving the grease-dripping spatula at her. “Jesus H. on-a-goddamned-crutch Christ! What is the matter with you, bringing a goddamned kike into my house?!”

She stepped back again, staggered at the ferocity of the onslaught. What on earth was going on?

“It’s not enough I have to listen to you babbling on about those snot-nosed little brats that you just can’t seem to remember are half brothers and sisters, it’s not enough I have to listen to you prancing around the house blabbering in your pretentious French, it’s not enough that I put up with that racket you call music…now you are telling me that all this time you’ve been sneaking a goddamned filthy Jew into my house?”

She was stunned. She knew Mother expected her to dislike Negroes and that Mexicans were viewed as being only good enough for stoop-labour. She understood that Asian people of all nationalities were considered “Japs” and “Chinks” and they were to be avoided because of The War…Mother had suffered severe deprivation due to war-time shortages and rationing and she laid her lack of silk stockings and fresh butter directly at their feet---why she didn’t hate Germans, too, was a bit of a mystery, except when you considered that Mother’s own heritage was mostly German.

“I cannot believe that you had the audacity to bring that dirty kike into my house!” Mother was still screaming. “She will not ever set foot in this house again! Do you hear me?”

She nodded in still-stunned silence.

“And don’t be bringing home any other kikes, either. You better call her up right now because if she shows up at my front door, I’ll throw her ass off the property!” The smell of smoke made Mother turn back to the stove and the pork chops that had been fried to cinders. A new wave of invective turned the air blue and she slunk out of the kitchen before she was shanghaied into cleaning up the mess.

She hurried away, shaking with shock and disbelief. She wasn’t allowed to have Jewish friends, either? Dear God, how was she supposed to tell? Was she supposed to interview everybody she met and make sure they weren’t Jewish before she could be friends? It was easy enough to sort the Negro and Mexican kids out…the dark skin and Spanish surnames were a dead giveaway. A thought suddenly struck her…Mother hadn’t said a word when she was going out with Danny Feldman…Mother couldn’t tell just by looking, either!

She picked up the phone and dialled Reenie’s number. “Hey…we were just leaving…”

“Change of plans,” she interrupted. “Mother burned dinner and is having one of her fits…would it be ok if we did this at your house?” She would die before she told Reenie the truth. What if she wasn’t allowed to hang out with Reenie any more? What was she going to do then?

“Sure,” Reenie replied unsuspectingly. “How about my mom picks you up and I’ll put some mac and cheese on the stove for us?”

“Bitchin’,” she said. “I’ll meet your mom out front. We’re gonna have such a good time tonight!” she promised, a bright smile in her voice. She put down the phone, shook her head, and hurried to pack up her things and be outside by the time Reenie's mother arrived...God forbid the poor woman should knock on the door and her mother answer it! Heartsore, embarrassed, saddened, she stuck the bright smile back on her face...it was going to be a long, long evening.

Baby Redux, Pt, II

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:35:00 +0000

“You gave us quite a turn, there, young lady.” She didn’t know if it was intentional or a result of the drugs, but the speaker was backlit by a diffuse white light coming in through the frosted…and barred…window behind him. It gave him an almost luminous, angelic appearance. She squinted her eyes to reduce the glare and looked away, her eyes burning and tearing in the harsh light. The man rose from his chair and pulled down the blinds, tempering the brightness and she felt some of her tension leave.

“Your pupils are still dilated,” he said, returning to his chair. “It may be another day or two before you being to feel like yourself again.”

She was in no mood for beating around the bush. “Who are you and where am I?” she asked.

The man, whom she could now see was rather large and shaggy and clad in corduroy trousers and a white lab coat…she could not focus her eyes well enough to read his name tag…laughed shortly.

“Dispensing with the small talk, I see. Very well then, I’m Dr. John Kendall and you are in the psychiatric unit of County Hospital. Anything else I can tell you?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head, a wave of disappointment washing over her. She had failed. And now her worst nightmare had come true…she was going to have to face her mother over this… An involuntary shudder passed through her.

“Cold?” Dr. Kendall asked. “Would you like a blanket to wrap up in?”

She shook her head. “I’m not cold.”

There was a long silence between them, the doctor obviously waiting for her to step into the breach. The silence ticked on until finally she opened her eyes and looked in his direction. “Are we done, then? Can I go now?”

He smiled briefly. “Well, I guess that is up to you, but I thought you might like to talk about this…” He paused and waited.

She let a minute of silence pass. “About what?”

“Miss Janssen, it isn’t every day we get a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl in here suffering from a near-fatal overdose. Suicide attempts by young, intelligent, attractive girls such as yourself aren’t all that common, you know. I’d like to know what brought you to this.”

Another long silence ensued during which she turned over ways to give him the greatest amount of information with the least amount of effort. She still felt deadly tired and in no mood for an exhausting extended chat. “I’m pregnant,” she finally said, by way of explanation.

He nodded. “We knew that. Your mother seemed very concerned as to the condition of the baby…”

A short, cynical snort of laughter erupted from her lips, causing him to raise his eyebrows in interest. “You find this amusing?” he asked, his voice mild.

She sighed. She really didn’t want to talk. She was tired. She shook her head.

He waited again for her to speak, and when minutes had passed and she did no more than slouch in the chair with a glowering expression on her face, he took the initiative. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me what I said that you found worthy of a laugh?”

She sighed heavily. Obviously he was not going to let this go…who knew how long he might keep her here, picking at her wounds until either they bled or she screamed? She turned her head slowly to look at him. “My mother having any kind of concern over this baby is hysterical,” she said bitterly, “considering that last month she tried to force me to have an abortion in Mexico and now demands that I give it up for adoption. Concerned…sure, she was concerned…that I might not miscarry.”

“I see,” he said, putting his fingertips together thoughtfully and slowly nodding his head. She wondered if his technique was as transparent to other people as it was to her.

“And how do you feel about this?” he asked.

She looked at him incredulously. “It isn’t obvious?”

“I’d rather you told me so there is no misunderstanding.”

She shrugged. Why not? “All my life my mother has taken away everything I loved or had an attachment to. My toys…my dog, my cats, my parakeet that I raised from a fledgling…even my father. And now she wants to take my baby away,” she paused and looked away, her face shadowed. “I’d rather be dead.”

“So you are angry with her?” the doctor prompted.

“I’m not allowed to be angry,” she replied.

“Then you are feeling hurt…betrayed?”

“I’m not allowed to be hurt…or to cry.”

“So what are you feeling, then?” he queried.

She looked back at him, steely-eyed. “Nothing.”

A week passed. She learned the routine of the ward, was befriended by a pregnant inmate near her own age, Pat, and was informally adopted by an older woman who had always wanted a daughter, Nan, who had made a suicide attempt to escape her abusive husband. Pat and Nan seemed lucid and well-grounded, just victims of circumstances beyond their ability to control and she felt a kinship with them and their situations. Nan, in particular, she empathized with. A woman with no real education, no work experience, and a minor child at home, Nan was wholly dependent on her abusive, miserly husband who treated her like a servant and kept her without any kind of funds. She was amazed at Nan’s ability to be cheerful and caring with the others in the ward whereas she was so wrapped in her own misery and fear, she could think of little else.

Visiting hours brought Pat’s boyfriend and his buddy Rich, a cute red-headed Marine who, because he felt like a fifth wheel with Pat and Rod, chatted with her. Nan’s husband arrived and she was astonished to see that the man was in a wheelchair, his body bent and gnarled with rheumatoid arthritis. But Nan’s fear of the man was palpable, her normally sunny disposition transformed into a grey timorousness. It was strange to see someone transform before her very eyes, to become someone she barely recognized, just because a certain person entered the room. She wasn’t sure how to take it…and she wondered if the same thing happened to her…and then her Mother walked in.

She felt herself go instantly wary, like prickly spikes had suddenly popped out all over her body and each one had a sensor at its tip. The room felt suddenly dark and close, as if it had shrunk down to just the two of them and the space they occupied. A nurse touched her on her elbow and she jumped, startled. “Your mother would like to speak with you.”

She almost stepped forward, propelled by years of compulsory obedience, then halted herself. “Do I have to?” she asked. The nurse shook her head. “I don’t want to…” She could feel a sense of panic building within, a compelling urge to cut and run for safety, but the nurse’s hand on her arm restrained her. “She is going to yell at me, call me names…”

The nurse shook her head. “Dear, if your mother causes you any distress, we will ask her to leave.”

“She won’t go. You don’t know her, what she’s like…”

The nurse patted her arm reassuringly. “Visiting hour can be stressful for some,” she said. “That’s why we bring in some of the orderlies from the men’s side,” she said, nodding at several immense white-coated men lounging in the doorways. “If your mother declines to leave on her own, these gentlemen will help her out. Now come and sit down and talk with your mother.”

“How long are you going to keep goldbricking in this place?” were Mother’s first words, spoken only after the nurse was out of earshot. “Do you have any idea what this is costing me? Christ on a crutch, you could feed the entire population of one of those banana republics on what this place charges per day!”

“What do you want?” she asked, more abruptly than intended.

“Well, 'Hi, Mom, it's great to see you too!'" her mother said sarcastically. "I want to know when you are going to stop conning these people so they will release you. I know they can let you go after 72 hours and it’s been a week, so you must be doing something so they will keep you here…playing on their sympathies or just play acting.”

She sat there silently, her mouth half open at what she was hearing.

“Don’t you give me that stupid look!” Mother hissed at her. “I know you and I know what you are up to and it’s not going to work!”

“What?” she asked, unbidden anger straining her voice. “What am I up to? I wish you’d tell me because I have no idea, myself! You think I want to be here? You think I like institutions? You think this is what I was intending?”

“Of course,” Mother sneered, one side of her blood red lips curling. “Those things you took wouldn’t kill anybody, just make you sleep for a long time. The active ingredient isn’t fatal. So if that was your real intent, you certainly botched it! But I think you knew what you were doing…in fact, I know you knew what you were doing. It was another attention-getting device, another grandstanding play, another bid for sympathy. ‘Look at poor little me, pregnant and unmarried, and my mean old mother won’t let me stay home and parade my little bastard around for the neighbourhood to gossip over. Boo hoo hoo!’”

She stood up from the table. “I think you’d better go now.”

“Not on your life, girlie. You are going to hear me out. You tell that doctor what he needs to hear and get yourself out of here this week or I will make you sorry for the rest of your days that you defied me like this!”

She turned and started to walk away from the table, her face a tight, blank mask. She heard the chair scrape as Mother abruptly stood. “Don’t you turn your back on me and walk away, you insolent little bitch!” she heard her mother say. “Come back here…get your hands off me! Just who the hell do you think you are, grabbing hold of me like this…unhand me, you son of a bitching bastard!…I’ll have your job for this…”

She closed the door to the day room and went to her bed, a very slight smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

“I hear there was a bit of a disturbance at visiting last night,” Dr. Kendall said after she had been sitting silently in his office for nearly ten minutes. “You want to tell me about it?”

She shrugged. “Nothing to tell, really. My mother came, I didn’t say what she wanted to hear, she went off. Normal.”

“That’s normal for you?” he asked.

“No,” she answered with a mirthless smile. “Normal would include her clobbering me a time or two, but even she knows not to do it in front of witnesses. Might make her look bad instead of me.”

“Did you ever hit your mother?” he asked. She shook her head. Another protracted silence enveloped the room.

“You want to tell me why you did it, then…took all those pills?” he finally said. “You nearly died, you know.”

Cocking her head, she quirked up one corner of her mouth. “That was the point, you know.”

“Was it?”

She nodded and looked down at her chewed fingernails.

“Why not look for other solutions to your problem?” he asked. “Girls get into your situation every day…they don’t try to kill themselves.”

“They obviously don’t have my mother,” she replied dryly.

“Look,” the doctor said, “you don’t seem crazy to me. In fact, you seem pretty normal, all things considered. How about I write you a prescription for some tranquilizers and spring you from this joint?”

She looked up, alarmed. “And go where?”

“Why, home, of course.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m quite serious. You don’t belong here…this place is for really crazy people who are a danger to themselves and others. You aren’t crazy and I really don’t think you are in serious danger…you’re just under a lot of stress and didn’t have an effective way to cope…”

“I don’t think you want to do that,” she interrupted softly, studying her ugly hands.

“Why not?” he asked.

She did not raise her head, but her voice was dark, heavy, bleak. “Because if I have to go back there, I’ll make sure I am not found out the next time.”

Baby Redux

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:29:00 +0000

Her life was over. She was seventeen years old and her life was over.

If she wanted to keep her baby, she was going to have to live the next six months in a locked institution; if she wanted to live freely at home, she had to agree to give her child up for adoption at birth…how could she do that and live? Dear God, she still wept over Duke when she thought of him, and Mother had given him away ten years ago. And her parakeet…if she would still cry over the loss of a bird more than six years after Mother had given him away, how would she live through having her baby taken from her and given to strangers?

And now Mark had abandoned her. Her last, best hope…the final anchor in the maelstrom that was her life…was gone. His father was sending him to a distant school and Mark, still under eighteen, felt he had no choice but to go. It was not in him to defy his father a second time, especially for her. It appeared that the old saw about repeating a lie often enough and people begin to believe it is true seemed to operate here…Old Fritz had insisted from the first that the baby was not Mark’s and now, even Mark was questioning the baby’s paternity. She had never felt so completely alone.

She was curled on her side on her cot in the kitchen, the corner of her pillow stuffed in her mouth to muffle her crying. Mother had forbidden tears and, while there had been no physical assaults since she returned home pregnant…Nana and Grandpa had made it clear to Mother that such a thing had better not happen…nothing held back Mother’s vicious and vituperative tongue. She went out of her way to avoid provoking it, sometimes biting the inside of her cheek or lip until she tasted blood to prevent her from lashing back at Mother’s cruel and scathing diatribes. Living with Mother was but a single step away from Hell itself, but at least here the doors were unlocked during daylight hours.

In the morning she resumed her normal routine and headed out to the public library as soon as it would be open. She had graduated from high school and Mother would not pay tuition to the local junior college nor give permission for a work permit. Aside from the cleaning, she had nothing to do all day, so she spent her time taking long walks down to the beach and back and visiting the library. But this morning she had made a very slight variation…after Mother had driven away to work she opened her bottom drawer and, at the back, pulled out a balled-up pair of her old gym socks. Unrolling a pair, she extracted the small amount of money she had secreted there, then replaced the socks in their exact position. That was how Mother snooped and found stuff…she looked for things that were positioned differently, or a little out of place. This would give her no clue in her next spying foray.

After spending some time in the library she stopped at a pharmacy and pored over the boxes of sleeping tablets, finally selecting a single box. Tucking the little bag into her purse, she set off on her normal morning walk, but altered her routine slightly by stopping at each pharmacy she came to, purchasing yet another little blue box of pills until she had almost run out of money. She calmly walked home, spread her purchases out on the bed and consolidated all of the pills into a single pile, which she scooped into a small plastic bag, twisted the top shut, and hid in the pocket of her winter coat in the closet. Nobody would think of looking there for at least another six weeks, when Indian summer was over and the biting ocean chill of autumn set in for good. Then, careful to leave no evidence for Mother’s prying eyes, she collected up the debris and took off on another short walk, disposing of the blue boxes, the printed pharmacy bags, and the empty pill containers in a public waste bin at a street corner. She checked the hours of the corner liquor store, then set off for home again.

She cleaned the house…not immaculately because that would make Mother suspicious, like the time she learned how to set a formal table at school and tried to duplicate it at home. “What are you angling for?” Mother had asked suspiciously and later, when it was time for her to get ready for her Girl Scout meeting, Mother had refused to drive her, saying she would not be manipulated by a mere kid. No, to do something without leaving room for some kind of complaint invited suspicions as to your motives, which in turn, awakened Mother’s snooping proclivities. Better to do a couple of things half-assed and keep Mother lulled.

Calling Mark, she calmly and quietly asked him to meet her in the morning at the beach at the end of Fanuel Street. She wanted to say good-bye, she told him, to see him one last time before their lives permanently diverged. She had selected an isolated little beach on a quiet inlet of the bay where grew a huge sheltering tree, its branches arching down to the ground to create a secluded refuge in which they could sit and speak privately. He agreed on her promise that, after this meeting, she would not call him again, as his father had actually forbidden further contact between them. Later, after the dinner dishes were done and Mother and Frank were busy with the TV, she sat on her cot with the breadboard across her lap and wrote Mark a final letter. It would be her final message to him. Then, feeling unaccountably lightened, she lay down to sleep.

For the first time in months, she awoke refreshed. Careful to keep her renewed sense of purpose to under wraps lest Mother’s radar pick it up, she stayed in bed and complained of morning sickness, pulling the covers over her head and waiting patiently for her mother to leave the house. She then rose, showered, and took a beach towel and a small bag with only a few items. After stopping at the corner liquor store to get a bottle of Coke, she walked down to the beach, spread out her towel and sat down to wait for Mark.

At 8:30 she put down the paperback she had purloined from Mother’s stack of sleazy detective novels and decided he wasn’t coming. Not that she was entirely surprised...she was, after all, the cast-off girlfriend and as such, not particularly important to keep appointments with. She supposed he had agreed to meet just to get her off the phone. She sighed. No matter...his presence or absence really made no difference now.

It was time to put Part Two of her plan into action, although she had hoped to have had a chance to tell Mark goodbye and to give him her last letter. She rose from the beach, picked up the towel, and headed for the seclusion of the tree. Nobody would even know she was there unless they actually parted the branches and came inside the shelter created by the branches that swept the ground…and it was too early on a week day for anyone to come along and spoil her plans. Up the sloping beach, near the trunk, on the side nearest the concrete wall that divided the beach from private property, she spread out the towel and sat down again. She opened the little bag and withdrew the plastic bag of pills, and spilled them into the skirt of her muumuu. The Coke, having been open for nearly an hour, has lost a lot of its fizz and she commenced with the unpleasant task of swallowing several dozen pills with as little drink as possible…she didn’t want to dilute their effect. From her research in the library, scopolamine, the active ingredient in these pills, needed to be taken in rather large quantities in order to be fatal. She hoped she had taken enough…the very last thing she wanted was to wake up and have to deal with Mother over this.

She tidied the corners of the beach towel, took out her letter to Mark and stuck it upright in the sand, and secured the soda bottle in the sand. She then stretched out on the towel, having dug a little hollow in the sand to accommodate her burgeoning tummy, opened the turgid novel and resumed reading.

There was something in her throat and she could not breathe! She arched up, trying to claw at the obstruction in her throat only to be seized by paroxysms of violent vomiting. She could not breathe! Her arms were immobile, she could not use them to free herself from the object that closed off her throat and kept her from sucking in any air. Eyes popped wide and staring, she could see a bright white light, the glare of which was so brilliant that it blocked out the owners of what felt like dozens of arms and hands clawing at her, dragging her down, pulling her away from the light. There was a background din, a cacophony of clashing beeps and distorted voices, metallic clangs and humming machine sounds. Were these Satan’s minions, demons dragging her to Hell? Had Grandpa been right after all? They were suffocating her, these demons…was that going to be her eternal punishment, alternately suffocating and vomiting until her lungs and her guts felt like they were going to burst? Still unable to breathe, panicking, she heaved herself upwards and struggled against the clawing fingers one last time, making one last, desperate, effort to draw a breath. Failing, her immobile arms unable to reach the obstruction and dislodge it, she fell back limply as her eyes rolled up into the blackness of her head.

1%

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:20:00 +0000

It was hot…damned hot! Big Tiny had gone back to their room, a lean-to attached to the side of Bronson and Shayna’s mobile home, for a siesta. He was sprawled out on their sleeping bags on the floor and she could hear him snoring all the way out in the kitchen. Since she was unable to sleep during the day…once she was up, she was up…she had stationed herself beside an open window, not that it did a helluva lot of good.

The house was quiet. Shayna was at the breakfast bar polishing her nails, Bronson was reading comic books in the living room, and the only sound besides Big Tiny’s snoring was the slow, rhythmic scrape…scrape…scrape of Bear sharpening his knife, an Arkansas toothpick of prodigious size. She didn’t like Bear…or his girlfriend, Judy, the psycho. Judy was out somewhere in her fancy car, spending the wads of money her Daddy wired her from Texas every few weeks, no doubt happy to keep his delinquent daughter as far from home…and out of the clutches of the local law…as possible. Judy boasted that she was out on bail, awaiting trial on a murder rap in some little podunk Texas town, a claim she did not doubt, given Judy’s hair-trigger temper and lack of impulse control.

When Shayna got up to turn on the swamp cooler, she peeled herself off the vinyl kitchen chair and went to the lean-to. She was bored…she needed something to do. After a few minutes she found the cleaning kit, went back to the kitchen and took the .9mm Astra out of her boot. She removed the clip, ejected the round that was in the chamber, then opened the cleaning kit and took out the pieces of the rod and began to screw them together.

Slowly, methodically, she cleaned the weapon, smoothing on the gun oil and polishing it with slow strokes as her mind wandered. Bear seemed intent on his task, and she reflected on how such an attractive man could be such a first-rate flaming asshole. You tended to grow up equating physical beauty with goodness, but this guy was the poster boy for bad news…even among his own kind.

The bikers she knew…and she knew quite a few…tended to have a rather rigid code where their women were concerned. Depending on the club you rode with, that code could be as flexible as the “citizen” society or it could be so strict that a man did not even speak to another man’s ol’ lady without permission. But, whether club member or not, the rule among bikers was that if you had a problem with a brother's ol’ lady, you took it up with the brother and you let him sort the ol’ lady out. Even loners like Bear understood and abided by this rule…it saved a lot of misunderstandings, disagreements, and broken noses...not to mention broken bones, stab wounds and bullet holes. Bear, however, for some reason believed himself to be exempt from the rule. She shook her head as she wiped the weapon down, nearly ready to reassemble it.

Bear didn’t like her tattoo. What was it with guys like him, anyway? What fucking business was it of his? Discreetly tattooed on her lower right butt cheek was the legend “1%”. That was it. Nothing more…and none of Bear’s business. She had discovered his antipathy one night at work, one of the few nights Big Tiny wasn’t sitting at the bar sipping orange juice while she danced. Judy was working as a cocktail waitress in the same place…she blew Daddy’s money a lot faster than Daddy wired it…so most nights both Tiny and Bear would spend the evenings hanging out while the girls were on shift. Bear, however, drank beer…and a great deal more than he could handle with equanimity, it often appeared. And he kept to himself.

As a dancer in the place, it was part of her job to smile at and be nice to the customers, chat with them, encourage them to buy more drinks and tip both the waitresses and the dancers. She couldn’t fathom Bear's hostility to her when she would walk by the bar stool he had taken as his own and smile at him in greeting. He returned her smile with glares of pure hatred, puzzling her.

And then one night Big Tiny dropped her at the front door of the club, and shouting over the panhead’s valve clatter, told her he’d be in a bit later, he had some errands to run. She nodded, smiled, kissed his wind-chilled cheek, and headed inside. She stripped to a G-string in this club, and teased and kidded with the customers from the stage, stopping by to chat with them later, after she had cooled down and changed into her costume for her next set. Walking past the eternally scowling Bear, she found herself stopped by his sudden dismount from the barstool, blocking her path. She stopped. He frowned. She smiled. He glowered. She tried to step around him. He blocked her path again.

“OK,” she said, stepping back a pace. “What’s the deal?”

“Ah don’t like yore tattoo,” he drawled, gesturing toward her right butt cheek.

She raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see how that is any of your business,” she said and tried to step around him again.

“You git rid of thet thang or I’ll take it off you,” he said, lowering his brows.

She saw red. “Who the fuck do you think you are, coming in here and telling me what to do? It’s none of your fucking business, asshole! You can boss your ol’ lady around all you want, but if you have a problem with me, you can take it up with Big Tiny!” And this time she shoved him in the chest, shortly and sharply with both hands, and when he staggered off balance, she swept past him.

Every night for the past two weeks he had straddled that barstool, making gestures at her while she danced, sometimes saying “Get rid of it, or else” or “I’m gonna take it off’n you.” Mostly she ignored him, but when she did speak, it was to again refer him to her ol’ man. Bear didn’t seem to get the hint. She even spoke to Judy, who she really did not like. “He says you aren’t a one-percenter so you can’t wear the tattoo,” Judy shrugged.

“Somebody else’s ol’ lady is none of Bear’s fucking business,” she reminded Judy, who shrugged again. “Doesn’t he realize that he’s a loner from another state riding in here and basically telling one of the locals what he can and cannot do? Big Tiny’s usually not real keen on taking orders from anybody except the club president…and Bear ain’t even in the club.”

Judy lit a fresh cigarette off the smouldering stub of the third one she had smoked during the conversation and shrugged again. “Look, if he wants his lights punched out, that’s his business, you know?”

She shook her head. “Some great fucking ol’ lady you are…stand by and watch your ol’ man dig himself a grave with his big mouth and you don’t even try to help him.”

Judy narrowed her eyes and squinted through the cloud of smoke issuing from her nostrils. “You think what goes on between you and Big Tiny is none of Bear’s business? Well, what goes between me and Bear is none of yours, so shut the fuck up.”

She started walking away, shaking her head. “Tiny’s gonna fuck him up if he doesn’t stop. If that’s OK with you, it sure as hell is OK with me.”

The pistol was clean, oiled, and reassembled. She slapped the clip into the butt of the grip, chambered a round, and set the safety, then put the weapon on the table in front of her while she disassembled the cleaning rod and repacked the kit. She took her glasses off and put them on the table, rubbing her tired, gritty eyes with the backs of her hands. Stuck in a suffocatingly hot trailer out in dry, desiccated desert is not where she had ever expected to find herself.

A thirteen-inch Arkansas toothpick suddenly quivering point first in the table in front of her wasn’t exactly what she had expected to find, either. She looked up from the still vibrating knife to see Bear standing opposite her at the table. Shayna, whose table now bore the deep impression of the knife point, was getting down from her barstool, nail polish brush still in hand, and advancing upon them, loudly voicing her objections to Bear.

Bear leaned forward and wriggled the knife loose from the table and gripped it in his right hand. “You gonna git that tattoo covered up?” he asked her in a low growl. “Or am I gonna cut it off?”

She projected a coolness she did not feel. Insides quivering with fear, she still managed to keep a calm face. “I told you, Bear, you gotta talk to Big Tiny. Why is it you only bring this up when he’s not around?”

Bear started advancing around the table towards her and she realized she was trapped against the wall, with only the hallway to the bedrooms behind her. There wasn’t enough time to push back the heavy wood and vinyl chair and sprint for the safety of the lean-to and Tiny. In a split second she looked from the freshly sharpened knife to Bear’s determined face and knew that he was not kidding, and he would have a chunk carved from her hide before Tiny could even be awakened…she reached for the gun.

It was her .9mm, she knew its feel in her hand. As her fingers folded themselves around the handgrip her thumb automatically flicked off the safety and in one fluid move, she lifted the piece from the table, swung it in Bear’s direction, and fired a single loud, ear-shattering round. She hadn’t even had time to put her glasses back on.

“Shit!” somebody shouted into the silence that enveloped the room after the discharge. She heard the clatter of Bear’s knife being dropped on the floor, and then there was an immediate explosion of light, colour, darkness, and stars as she felt herself and the heavy chair knocked over backwards. She had been punched in the mouth! A heavy body landed on top of her, but she had instinctively drawn up her legs as she and the chair went over, and the body managed to make contact between one of her heavy boots and some rather sensitive parts of the male anatomy. It was Bear and he was suddenly dead weight.

She pushed at him ineffectively...he was a heavy son-of-a-bitch, but a low moan in her ear told her that she hadn't killed him. She could feel her lip puffing up, and the tinny taste in her mouth told her she was bleeding. Bear started moving and she pushed at him again, struggling to dislodge his bulk when, without warning, his entire weight was abruptly lifted.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Big Tiny said, one massive hand inside the back of Bear’s shirt collar, raising him fully off her body. Tiny looked down at her. “You OK, mama?”

She shook her head “no” and put one hand to her rapidly swelling lip. “He punched me,” she said.

Tiny shifted his hold on Bear so that the smaller man was now backed against a wall, just one of Tiny’s hands holding him there by his neck. “Go in the bathroom and clean up, mama,” he said, his voice uncommonly gentle.

“But he…” she started to protest.

Tiny held up his free hand and nodded in the direction of the bathroom. “Trust me, mama, just go clean up.”

She left the bathroom door open so she could hear what was going on. It seemed like a pretty-one sided conversation to her. She heard Tiny say, very matter-of-factly, “You hit my ol’lady, you stupid, shit-for-brains motherfucker. Now I’m gonna have to kill you.”

She poked her head out of the bathroom door in alarm. Tiny had Bear backed against the wall and lifted six inches into the air by his shirt front, his feet dangling uselessly. Bronson was standing to one side of Tiny with the Astra in his hand and Shayna was standing next to Bronson holding Bear’s pig sticker. It wasn’t looking very good for Bear.

“But I’m not in the mood to do any killing right now,” Tiny said, almost to himself. “I’ll need to finish my nap first.” He paused for effect. “So I’m gonna let you go for right now. But if I see your face around this town after sundown tomorrow night…I don’t care if it’s next month or ten years from now, motherfucker, you are a dead man.” Tiny’s hand released its grip on Bear’s shirtfront and the man collapsed to his knees. “Now get the fuck out of here and don’t let me see you again.”

Bear stumbled out of the mobile home and strode stiffly out to his bike. His rage was a palpable thing, enough to warrant Shayna voicing a fear of retaliation against them for the humiliation that had been perpetrated upon him in their house. Tiny shook his head. “That asshole is a fucking coward. I been waiting two weeks for him to come to me with his beef, like a man, but all he ever did was wait until my ol’ lady was alone and then hassle her. He doesn’t have the guts to come back and bother you guys…he knows I’ll hunt him down and kill him…slowly…and with great pleasure.”

She was in the lean-to, laying back on their pallet of sleeping bags with a cold cloth on her fat lip when she heard the unmistakeable sound of Judy’s Cutlass 442. Her stomach clenched. As soon as Judy knew what went down, she’d be back here like a whirlwind of teeth and claws, and with this fat lip and the shakes from the adrenaline rush, she was in no mood to duke it out with Psycho Bitch. The door to the lean-to was suddenly snatched open and Judy stood on the threshold. But her eyes didn’t hold the expected fire of indignation and vengeance. In fact, the woman looked positively subdued.

“I can’t stay…Bear told me to get my stuff, we’re leaving town tonight,” Judy said.

She sat on the pallet, compress on her lip, and nodded silently.

“Will you do me a favour?”

“Depends on what it is.”

“I’m supposed to work tonight. Would you take my shift and tell Sam I had to leave town suddenly? He’s a nice guy and I hate to see him jammed up without somebody for the tables tonight.”

She nodded her agreement silently, expecting Judy to walk way, but the woman lingered awkwardly. “Look,” Judy finally spit it out. “I’m sorry about what happened here. Bear can be a fucking asshole at times, and I did try to talk to him about it. If it’s any consolation to you, the bullet came so close that he heard it whiz past his ear and he nearly pissed himself. He never thought you had the balls to actually try and shoot him!”

She smiled then, wincing at the stretch it put on her split lip. “Well,” she said, “It’s a good thing for him I didn’t have a chance to put my glasses on then, isn’t it?”

Audition

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 06:45:00 +0000

“Owww! Mommy, that hurts!” she complained, pulling her head away.

Mommy fetched her a sharp slap and yanked her back in place by the hank of hair she held in her hand. “Sit still and stop fidgeting!”

She hated having her hair curled. Mommy’s nails were as sharp as thorns as they dug into her scalp to hold the curl in place for the pins, which stabbed and scratched her scalp as Mommy secured the pincurl. She hated it. It hurt to have the curls made, and combing them out just made frizzy “rat’s nests” in her thin, fine hair, and which could not be styled without painful yanks with the comb. She hated it!

She was going to an audition and she had to look her best. She sighed…inwardly, because she couldn’t show anything less than rabid enthusiasm without risking a reprimand…and wished she was outside, playing with Nancy and Choosey. She didn’t want to spend her Saturday being dragged around to smelly rehearsal halls, singing and being artificially cute to strangers who would look at her like some kind of bug in a jar. She would rather just go outside and play.

She winced as another sharp bobby pin was shot home, scraping a furrow in her tender scalp, and thought about Merle, Mommy’s hairdresser. It was Merle who started all of this. She used to like going to Merle’s shop…it was in the back of her house, with steps leading down to a pretty garden where she was allowed to play, and Merle had the cutest little dog, Toy…a Boston Bull Terrier…who got so excited when she came out to play with him that he actually wet himself. Mommy could sit inside, filling the little room with stinky cigarette smoke and gossiping while Merle did her hair. Sometimes it was just a hair cut, other times she dyed it red, and for a while it had been bleached bright blonde and styled so that Mommy looked like Marilyn Monroe. But the gossip was always Mommy complaining about how bad she was, what awful thing she did lately, how she just couldn’t understand why she was saddled with this wilful, stubborn, bullheaded child. That being the topic of conversation, she was perfectly happy to be outside with the wriggling, squirming, slobbering, peeing Toy.

But one afternoon there was a lady waiting for her perm to set up while Merle cut Mommy’s hair, and that lady overheard her singing a nursery rhyme to the silly little dog. Merle had already told Mommy about the Little Miss Sunbeam contest, an annual contest run by a bread company to find a child who looked like the face on the bread wrapper…there were cash and prizes, and a chance at a career as a child model…maybe even movies. Mommy and Merle had been talking about the contest when she came back into the shop, called in by the perm lady.

The lady asked her to sing a couple of nursery songs, blowing on a funny little gadget to give a tone for the first note. For each song she gave her a different tone, and when she had sung five or six songs, the lady thanked her and gave her a nickel…a whole nickel! She went back outside to play with the dog some more, delighted in his delight in her company. She had no way of knowing that this was her last time…that she would not play with Toy in Merle’s back garden ever again.

The lady with the perm was a singing teacher named Bessie Gowan, and while she and Toy gambolled away their final afternoon together, Merle, Bessie, and Mommy had their heads together. The following Saturday, instead of Merle’s house, she was driven to Bessie’s flat, a great rambling thing with an upstairs, a huge upright piano, and a whole wall completely covered with pictures of famous people, every one autographed. Some of the people she even recognized. Curious, but unconcerned, she followed Mommy into the house, sat politely on the sofa when invited to do so, and cast her eyes about to find something interesting to engage her mind while Mommy and the lady talked. In a few minutes Bessie called her over, uncovered the keys to the piano, and struck a note. “Sing,” the woman commanded.

She wasn’t sure what to do. Sing what? “Laaaaaa,” she finally sang, for lack of a better idea. Bessie struck another note. “Laaaaaaa,” she sang again on the note. They went through this tedious exercise for another ten minutes as she became increasingly, desperately bored. Bessie muttered something that sounded like “perfect pitch” and continued to bang keys on the piano and make her sing. It was probably only an hour or two before they were in the car again and headed home, but it seemed like a lifetime and she was glad it was over...now maybe she could go out and play. But from this day forward, this became the sum of her Saturday mornings. Saturday afternoons she practiced at home with Mommy, first with a pitch pipe for the notes, later with the big ugly piano Mommy bought. Saturday became her most hated day of the week.

Mommy had “ambitions” for her, and those ambitions started with the Little Miss Sunbeam contest. Merle styled her hair in the cluster of Miss Sunbeam ringlets and Mommy took her to a professional photographer to have her picture taken. Surely the judges could see she looked nothing like the little girl on the bread wrapper? Surely they would not be interested in a little girl with fingernails chewed down to mere nubs? Surely her pink dress…when Miss Sunbeam wore blue gingham…would be counted against her? Maybe the judges could tell the slice of bread she was holding wasn’t even Sunbeam bread? She could only hope!

The Saturdays wore on and then more of her life began being sucked up by this singing obsession of Mommy's. Mommy started sewing costumes and she had to stand very, very still or get pricked all over with pins while Mommy was fitting them. There was some kind of show coming up, but she had no idea what that meant, all she wanted was to be left alone so she could play with her friends. Some nights, when they thought she was asleep, she heard Mommy and Daddy arguing about her “singing career,” Mommy saying “She loves it! I asked her and she said she did!” which, actually, was true…she was afraid to tell Mommy how she really felt so she gave Mommy the answer that she knew would keep that horrid strap on the back of the kitchen door. But Daddy didn’t like it any more than she did. It was but a small consolation that she was not chosen to be Miss Sunbeam…her life, it seemed, was being sucked up by something no less consuming.

And so one Saturday afternoon, after enduring more pinching and pricking for yet another fitting, after sitting to have her hair pincurled…an experience only marginally less painful than the strap…she was sent to bed for a nap. A nap! Babies took naps and she was almost seven years old! But her indignant protests were met by Mommy’s implacable stare. “You will be up very late tonight for the show,” Mommy said. “You have to take a nap. I don’t want you falling asleep when it’s your turn.” Her turn for what?

She had sung the same song over and over and over, so much that she could do the song…and the gestures…and count the beats for the pauses…in her sleep. She still wasn’t entirely sure what the show they were going to had to do with her, but when she got up from the nap and finished her dinner, Mommy dragged her into the bathroom and began painting her up with make up. The mascara brush was horrifying, so close to her eyeballs, but she was forbidden to blink lest she smear it before it dried and Mommy give her a whack. When Mommy was done and those horrid pincurls combed out, she didn’t recognize the face in the mirror. She thought she looked like one of those ladies hanging around the ferry dock when they went to pick up Daddy from work…the ones Mommy told her she wasn’t allowed to look at…but Mommy pronounced her “prize winning,” whatever that meant.

And so she went to the show and got to go behind the stage and meet the people who were in the show and she was having a really good time until it suddenly occurred to her that she was going to have to go out there on that stage and sing…that she was part of the show as well! She suddenly had to go to the bathroom. And she was rigid with fear when she heard her introduction.

It turned out not to be so bad, once she was out there. The stage lights were so bright she couldn’t see much of the audience, so she couldn’t see how many people were really out there, and the lights were hot enough to relieve her chill. Bessie began pounding out the familiar tune on the piano and she quickly found that if she just focussed her mind on the music itself, the words came unbidden and the looming spectre of hundreds of people watching her and judging her faded from her consciousness. She was so glad when it was over, though, that her knees literally failed her as the stepped into the wings. She pretended she had stumbled over a stray cable, earning a sarcastic “Clumsy!” from Mommy, but fortunately some anonymous stage hand caught her, mid-collapse, or she might have hurt herself.

It was over, she told herself with a sigh as she curled up in the back seat of Mommy’s car and pulled her sweater over her head to filter out the cigarette smoke that filled the air and choked her. She had learned long ago that asking Mommy to put down a window…she wouldn’t dare ask Mommy not to smoke!...earned her only enmity, so she devised her own way of coping. She breathed the warm smell of wool dampened with her breath and drifted off to sleep, looking forward to having her Saturdays back again. It was over!

It only took her two days to find out that she was wrong. She had had the rotten luck to win that talent competition and, rather than satisfy Mommy’s lust, it had only whetted her appetite. Now Mommy expected her to practice after school, although she had no idea how to accomplish that without someone to play the piano for her, a concern she knew better than to voice to Mommy. “Just do it,” Mommy would tell her. She couldn’t let a little something like lack of accompaniment keep her from practicing her singing right? One thing she had noticed recently was that she no longer sang to herself while she played or did her chores…not only was it no longer a pleasant accompaniment to her solitary hours, it was dangerous…if Mommy happened to overhear her, she would end up standing by the piano practicing the note she had not quite hit correctly when simply singing nursery songs to herself or her dolls. She didn’t much like singing any more.

But she still had to sing on Saturdays, and Mommy started taking her to nightclubs where she would get up on stage as a “guest singer,” and then Mommy got her on a local TV show very early on Saturday mornings. Her life, it seemed, was becoming engulfed by this charge to…to what? All she wanted to do was to go over to Choosey’s house and play with her new Tiny Tears! What was it Mommy wanted?

Hollywood.

Mommy had an auntie who lived in Los Angeles and suddenly she found herself riding the two long, interminable hours in the back of the car, admonished not to mess up her clothes or her hair or her make up, to Aunt Kitty’s funny little apartment in the courtyard…the one with the Murphy bed that pulled down out of the wall and was ruled by a scolding little parakeet named “Happy.” Aunt Kitty was really nice…she was a retired teacher and really knew how to treat kids, and Mommy didn’t dare lay a hand on her around Aunt Kitty…although Mommy thought nothing of giving her a smack when Aunt Kitty wasn’t around. They drove those two, long, boring hours to go to auditions in Hollywood, using Aunt Kitty’s little cottage as a hotel. Mommy wanted to put her in the movies. She wanted to go over to Choosey’s house. Mommy, of course, prevailed.

But only to a degree…Mommy could pore over Variety and locate auditions for parts for little girls, but even Mommy had no influence with the casting agents, the directors, the producers. She was just another painted precocious little dolly, hair tortured into unnatural shapes, faces painted like geisha…or cheap tarts, depending on the skill of the mother…and wearing fetching little costumes. Some of the little girls were quite talented and were clearly delighted to show off those talents…they could sing and dance, recite lines…and did so with great enthusiasm. Other little girls, however, were simply dragged there unwillingly by stage struck mothers, and any talent they might have was undermined by their lack of passion for the task at hand. She most definitely identified with the latter group of girls, but Mommy just as clearly saw her as one of the former.

But she did her best at the audition…she had to…Mommy knew what she was capable of and anything less than her best was a punishable offence. That strap was a powerful motivator. But when her turn was over and it was clear that she had not “wowed them,” as Mommy had instructed her to do, she heaved a sigh of relief, actually looking forward to that two hour ride home and her play clothes and a chance to play with Choosey’s new Ginny doll. Mommy, unfortunately, had other ideas.

“See that man over there on the folding chair,” Mommy whispered in her ear. She nodded. “He’s the producer. I want you to go over there and thank him very politely for letting you audition for him.” She nodded her head and started to step forward, but Mommy restrained her. “That’s not all. After you thank him, I want you to climb up on his lap and give him a kiss on the cheek.”

She looked over at the man and a feeling of revulsion washed over her. She had walked near him earlier, on her way to the makeshift stage, and he was repulsive. He was old and fat and half bald, he was shiny with sweat and his white shirt had stains under the arms. And he smelled bad, too… like onions and cigars and b.o. She didn’t want to go anywhere near him. She shook her head.

Mommy was as surprised as she was at her refusal. This would fetch her a serious spanking later, no question. But there was nothing Mommy could do here, in front of all these people, and they both knew it. Mommy bent down to speak quietly in her ear, this time through gritted teeth. “You are ruining this. I didn’t spend all this money and time on lessons and costumes and driving up here so you could have your big break, only to have you get balky on me. Now get over there and do what I told you before one of the other girls beats you to it.”

She hung her head down and looked at the toes of her shoes and shook her head again. The man was creepy. Revolting. Almost oily feeling. She hadn’t like him when she had to go by the first time, she didn’t like the way he looked at her, and her stomach rolled at the thought of his smell.

Mommy couldn’t yell or scream at her here, but she was still surprised when Mommy resorted to bribery. Mommy never used the carrot approach…the stick worked just fine, so why bother? “After you give him his kiss, we’ll go down to Schwab’s and you can have an ice cream!”

Schwab’s fascinated Mommy…it was rumoured to be the place a talent scout discovered Lana Turner, one of Mommy’s favourite actresses. Maybe Mommy thought one of them was going to be discovered there? She didn’t care, she didn’t want to be discovered and she didn’t want to go kiss that smelly old man. She shook her head again.

Mommy’s grip on her arm became painful. And although Mommy’s bloody red lips were curved in a smile, she was speaking through clenched teeth. “Don’t push me on this, Miss. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into getting you a break like this. Get your ass over there…”

She shook her head. She could feel her eyes and nose pinken, she was on the verge of tears, which would be a disaster of epic proportions because it would make her make up run. She just could not stomach the thought of getting within smelling distance of that man!

“What about a banana split?” Mommy was trying a coaxing tone of voice, but it sounded insincere even to her inexperienced ears. “You’ve always wanted to try a banana split and I hear Schwab’s makes great ones!”

She shook her head again, miserable. She didn’t believe Mommy would come through on the coveted banana split…if she kissed that disgusting old man, Mommy would just scream and shout at her about her defiance and tell her she didn’t really deserve a treat for doing what she should have done in the first place: obey her mother. She might only be seven, but she knew how this kind of thing played out. There was a whipping with the strap in store for her, and only Mommy’s mood at the time they got home would determine how severe it was going to be. The die was cast...she had nothing to lose...she continued to refuse.

Mommy’s voice was almost conciliatory. “Look, honey, just go up and thank him…” Mommy stopped talking for a moment. “Oh, shit,” Mommy resumed, her voice now tight with suppressed anger. “Shit, shit, shit. Well, we might as well leave now, somebody else had the same idea and her daughter isn’t too prissy to play up to the man who could hold her future in the palm of his hand!” Grabbing her by the shoulder, Mommy dragged her out of the building and fairly flung her into the backseat of the car.

“You haven’t heard the last of this, young lady!” Mommy growled as she eased the car out onto the busy Los Angeles boulevard.

Her stomach knotted up, knowing the two hour drive home would be an endless harangue about her ungratefulness and every other deficiency she had shown since she drew her first breath. And, at the end of the trip, there would be the strap waiting for her and, if the two hours of hollering at her had wound Mommy up, a really long, painful spanking.

She sighed and closed her eyes. At least she hadn’t had to kiss that awful, creepy, stinky old man.

Sanctuary

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:12:00 +0000

“I don’t want to get married, James,” she was saying as he plied her with champagne. “I’ve been married…twice…and I didn’t like it. Look at me, for God’s sake…27 years old, two total-loser ex-husbands, three kids…two of whom I have no idea where they are, the other a toddler my family doesn’t even know exists because I’m afraid if my mother knows about him, she’ll show up and steal him, too! Why on earth would you want me for a wife?”

“That’s not your fault,” he soothed her, filling her glass. “Look, we’ll buy a house…you’ve always wanted your own house…if we get married you can have one.”

“I can?” she mulled that one over, sipping from her glass, wrinkling her nose at the bubbles. “That would be nice…but do you know how nasty divorce is? How much it cost? How awful it feels?”

He shook his head. “Do you love me?” he asked, dribbling more champagne into her glass. “Of course I love you, you’re very good to me…” she giggled.

“Then let’s get married. We’ll buy a nice little house, I’ll go back to school at night so I can finish my degree so I’ll be more promotable at work…c’mon…”

She shook her head to clear the fuzziness from the bubbles. “I dunno, James…I really don’t think I’m meant for marriage…some of us aren’t, you know…”

He dribbled a bit more bubbly into her glass. “Babes, we’ve been together for a year now…haven’t I passed my probation?”

She gave him a puzzled look. “Probation?”

He took a small sip from his glass, then held it up to her lips for her to drink from the same spot. “You told me that if you could live with a man for a year and he was still the same as when you moved in together…if living together didn’t change him…then you could marry that man. Didn’t you tell me that?”

She pursed her lips and nodded. “Yah…’cause a year is a long time to pretend to be somebody or something you’re not. You’d give it away before the year was over…”

It was a very small wedding just a few days after Christmas. Very small…just the two of them, in the dining room of the minister’s house, with his wife as witness. There were no vows, no promises, no rings, only a signing of documents and a pronouncement by the minister that they were married. No honeymoon followed, no reception, only a few telephone calls to family members who might be interested. Only his mother sent a congratulatory card. The morning following, life resumed its normal pace as if nothing had changed.

It was a mistake. Within three months, she knew it was a mistake. Except that he wore the same face every day, the man to whom she was married was a complete stranger to her. She was quite certain that she had not suddenly lost her ability to cook well, to iron his shirts correctly, to clean a bathroom or vacuum a carpet, but to hear him complain, you would think she was the most irritatingly incompetent creature ever to sully the earth with her presence. Every time she opened her mouth to ask a question, he told her if she didn’t know the answer, it was proof of her stupidity. After nearly a year of studying at a local trade school she had graduated…at the top of her class…and gotten her first “straight” job, as secretary to the marketing manager of a small firm. But it had been an uphill battle…James had gone from supporting her studies and praising her accomplishments to complaining that her taking a job was a gross insult to him and his ability to support his family. The fact that they could barely afford to eat…and God forbid any kind of emergency should happen because they didn’t have a dime in savings…seemed of significantly less importance than the possible opinion of a stranger upon learning that his wife had a job.

He sabotaged her at every turn, cluttering up the house, ordering her about like a servant and picking fights if she objected or even, God forbid, suggested he take a hand in the housekeeping. “It’s your job!” he would sullenly insist, “You want to take a job outside the house, fine…but that will have to be on top of your job here, which comes first!” Funny, though, that he didn’t complain about her job when she deposited her pay check in their joint account every week.

But the final straw was when he reneged on his promise to buy her a house. With her job they could afford a small house in a safe neighbourhood, a place for Christopher to have a yard to play in, a neighbourhood school to attend, a place where she could grow some flowers, put nail holes in the walls to hang pictures, and choose the carpet colour herself. A place where she could not find herself evicted because the landlord was selling the place, where there were no noisy neighbours stomping about overhead, where she could put down some roots and not be dragged off, thither and yon, moving, moving, moving, like she had done since she was thirteen years old. She had sat down and figured it out once, and discovered that she had lived in thirteen places in her last two years of high school. Thirteen moves in two years! She wanted to live somewhere that she could grow things…

It has been the promise of the house that had tipped the balance of her resistance to marriage. She had not been playing coy little girlish games with him when she said she was not really interested in marriage. She wasn’t. She had found marriage to be rather stultifying, and she found it difficult to be autonomous in a close-ended relationship. Rather than a symbol of security, marriage to her was a rather fearful state, a place in which her independence was curtailed and her individuality had to be suppressed. She had not really liked being married…it didn’t guarantee love, it didn’t even guarantee security. But it did guarantee a damned difficult time getting free and feeling safe again.

But the lure of her own house…now there was at least a modicum of true security. With her name on the deed, she had a home…a real home…not just temporary digs in somebody else’s place. He could leave, but he couldn’t throw her out. And with his name on the deed…and the mortgage…he would be less likely to just stomp out in a huff and never come back. A house…her own house…represented the kind of security she was unable to earn enough to provide for herself… And respectability…she wanted to know what it was like to feel respectable...she'd never had that. Except for some fleeting glimpses of it when she was with Nana and Grandpa, she had always been the little girl whose mother respectable ladies crossed the street to avoid passing, the child with whom other children were not allowed to play because her mother was divorced, the girl with the frizzy home perm, cheap clothes, ugly shoes, and the red, scaly, weeping rash that covered the inside of her left leg. She had spent her entire life being on the outside, looking in…owning her own home offered her, if not an entrée into respectable society, at least a refuge from which she could not be cast out. So alluring had been the prospect of safety and security in a nest of her own, she had shushed the nasty little voices in her head that had noticed disturbing, unpleasant things about James. He had promised her a sanctuary of her very own, and that was enough.

And now he was reneging on that promise. It was time for a showdown.

“James,” she said above the noise of the TV. “James, we have to talk.”

“Uh huh,” he said, eyes glued to the tube. Who was that pompous ass with the iron-grey finger wave pontificating on the TV about stocks and bonds? she wondered. Jesus, he should be walking the streets in San Francisco…

Knowing it would piss him off but seeing no other way to compel his attention, she took the TV remote off the coffee table and clicked the set off. He was off the sofa like a mad bull, advancing on her. “What the fuck did you do that for?” he roared, waving his arms threateningly.

She held her ground. If she could face down Big Tiny when he was threatening to deck her, James was no real threat. “Because we need to talk and I need your full attention…”

“Give me back the fucking remote,” he snapped, feinting a grab.

She narrowed her eyes. “Do not fuck with me, James. Do us both a favour and just sit down and talk.” The very softness of her voice was sufficiently unnerving to make him sit back down.

“Whut?” he grunted, crossing his arms over his chest defensively.

“I want to know what is going on,” she said.

He gave her a puzzled scowl. “What do you mean.”

“I mean that since we got married, you are not nice to me any more. You yell, criticize, and insult me when you deign to acknowledge my existence at all, the rest of the time you ignore me or treat me like some kind of appliance. You weren’t like that before…I want to know what the fuck is going on.”

“Nothing,” he said. “You talked, I listened, now gimme the remote.”

She scowled. “You are pushing me, James…not a good idea.” He crossed his arms over his chest again. “Now tell me what is going on.”

“Nothing, I told you. Nothing. Now give me back the fucking remote before I get up and take it from you.”

She stood quite still at that moment, only the fire in her eyes showing any animation. There were times that even she was afraid of her temper, and this was one of them. She forcibly banked the fires of her rage and spoke to him as calmly as possible.

“I’m not giving it back until you have satisfactorily answered my questions. And if you try to take it from me, I guarantee that you will live to regret it.”

He seemed to turn this over in his mind for a moment, then gave her his best glare. “Fine,” he said, his eyes flinty. “What do you want to know?”

“First of all, I want to know what has been going on with you over the past three months. You are like a stranger anymore…sarcastic, critical, rude, domineering…what has happened to you? Why aren’t you nice to me any more?”

The smile he gave her could not be described as anything but evil. So much so, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. He raked her contemptuously with his eyes. “I don’t have to be nice to you anymore,” he said coldly. “I married you.”

If he was hoping to provoke an outburst from her, he was disappointed, for she stood beside the sofa, remote hidden in her crossed arms. “One more question,” she said. “What about the house you promised me?”

“I can’t afford it,” he said dismissively. “Besides, I didn’t say when I would buy a house…maybe next year…” that evil smile began creeping over his face again. “Maybe in five years…maybe more… you’ll just have to stick around to find out, won’t you?” The smile was smug now, self-satisfied, triumphant.

She curled her upper lip. “Don’t hold your breath, bucko,” she said, tossing the remote at him and walking away. “Don’t hold your fucking breath.”

It took about ten minutes for the curiosity to build sufficiently that he got off the sofa and went to look for her. He found her in the bedroom, the drawers of her dresser open, clothes neatly folded and arrayed on the bed.

“And just what the fuck to you think you are doing?” he bellowed…but it came out more like a bleat.

She looked up, expressionless. “Packing.”

“For what?”

“To leave.”

“And just where the hell do you think you are going?”

“Dunno yet.”

“How the fuck you gonna get there?”

“My car.”

“Wait a minute!” That had gotten his attention. “That’s my car! I paid for it!”

She shrugged. “Paid cash. Pink’s in my name. My car.” She continued her packing.

“You can’t do this!”

She stopped and stood up straight, a shell pink sweater in her hand. “Why not?” she asked, her face a mask of calm.

“Well,” he spluttered, “…well…because we’ve only been married for three months! What will people say?”

She shrugged and smoothed the sweater into a neatly folded shape. “I don’t give a fuck.”

“Well, I do!” he shouted, waving his arms over his head. “I care what they think!”

She looked up, eyes narrowed to slits, her lips rigid. “I see. You care what 'people' think but you don’t give a fuck what I think or feel? Figures.” She looked back down at her packing.

He stood there stiffly, looking around the room. “I’ve got both sets,” she said, correctly divining that he was looking for the keys to her car. She straightened, putting her hands to her lower back.

“There is one way to stop this,” she said. “And one way only.”

He looked at her suspiciously. Why hadn’t she noticed that shifty-eyed set to his face before, she wondered.

“And that would be…” he said slowly.

“You’re supposed to be the fucking brains of this operation,” she said scathingly. “Figure it out.”

“The house,” he said after a long pause.

She straightened up from packing and raised one eyebrow. “Well, halle-fucking-leujah,” she said sarcastically. “He figured it out.” She bent back to her packing.

“OK, OK…we’ll buy a house.”

She continued packing.

“We’ll go house hunting this weekend…” she was still packing… “…every weekend until we have something…”

She stood up. “I’ve found a house. No money down with VA, brand new, corner lot, ready to move into first of June.”

He looked nonplussed for a moment, then the balky look reasserted itself. She bent over and resumed packing.

“OK, OK,” he said, holding up his hands. “When can I see this paragon of a single-family detached dwelling?” he asked, his anger only barely leashed.

She reached into her waistband and pulled out the keys to her car. “Now is a good time.”

Fidelity

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 06:10:00 +0000

Santana was desultorily singing about black magic women in the background as she danced around the little stage that was surrounded on three sides by a bar…and patrons. Like a double-wide shuffleboard table, her stage was long, narrow, jutted out into the room, and was surfaced with good wood flooring. Ironically, she kept a can of shuffleboard wax at the entrance to the stage to keep the floor smooth and slick so she could do her trademark slides…a high kick that ended in a rapid hell-slide into the splits. Every guy in the place watched that kick, eager to see if there was any chance that her jewelled g-string might reveal just a little bit more than was intended.

Wednesday was usually her day off, but the bar was short a girl tonight…that insipid Janine, all boobs and no brains at all had called in saying she had locked her keys in her car…or maybe she had lost them…and she didn’t know when she would be able to get her brainless platinum bubblehead to work. So, the manager had called her to see if she wanted the hours, knowing she could always use the extra money, what with the private detective’s fees and all. Besides, Animal’s bike had crapped out on the run and he was stuck a day’s ride out of town, trying to get it fixed. Kraut, Animal’s cousin, came by two days ago to tell her about the breakdown and borrow some money for the parts Animal needed to get the bike back up. She was expecting him back sometime tomorrow afternoon…so she might as well put in an extra night’s work…nothing else to do with her time except brood.

Wednesdays were rather quiet nights and, at nine o’clock, it was fairly early yet…later, as the soldiers began straggling back to the base, they would be stopping off at the Body Shop, right outside the main gate, for a last beer and a hopeful view of some hopelessly unavailable pulchritude. It was not a night for the gowns and boas and gloves…it was a night for bikinis and G-strings and as little effort as possible…she saved the fancy duds for the weekend crowd and private parties, where the money really was. Moving her hips in time with the pulsing Latin beat, she sidled up to one of the customers and gave him a slow, sexy smile, one hand toying suggestively with the bra clasp between her breasts. Leaning forward, her hands covering the jewel-encrusted blue crepe cups, she quickly flashed the customer, winking slyly at his neighbour. When the man reached out to try to touch her, she shook a finger at him, smiling as she backed away, hips never losing their suggestive pumping in time with the music. Tease, tease, tease…she thought as she moved out of arm’s reach…that’s what the whole thing was about. So why did so many of the guys actually think the dancers were available?

She danced to the centre of the stage, out of reach of grasping hands, and played a slow game of peek-a-boo with her bra, the patrons’ eyes glued to her as she pressed her ample breasts together, bra clasp undone, only her hands holding the cups in place. She danced tantalizingly close to one man, then back to the centre where she came to a complete halt. Slowly, acting as if the very act of removing her bra in front of fifty strange men was the most erotic event of her life, she slipped one hand beneath a blue cup and, covering her breast with her hand, let the cup spring free on its elastic straps. She repeated the motion with her other hand, the bra falling to the stage floor where she kicked it out of reach of the souvenir-seekers in the crowd…damned things took forever to make and cost a fucking fortune! Arms crossed over her breasts now, playing more peek-a-boo games with the salivating crowd, she looked up as the door from the parking lot opened and a blast of chill evening air blew into the room.

She stopped moving as she watched the couple enter the bar, neither of them looking up at the stage. A thin woman under a fluffy bubble of bleached platinum hair was being helped out of her coat by a slender young man wearing a distinctive fringed leather jacket. The music continued pumping in the background as the blonde reached up to cup the cheek of the man helping her and his head lowered to kiss her. He raised his head suddenly at an unexpected sound.

“You bitch!” she screamed, leaping up onto the nearest bar barefoot, her spike heels standing eerily alone in the middle of the stage.

“You fucking, cheating, lying, low-life, scum-sucking, man-stealing bitch!” she screamed again, jumping down from the bar and covering the distance between them in two rapid strides. “You back-stabbing, two-faced, mattress-backed whore!” she shrieked, hitting the blonde girl in the chest with both hands, knocking the girl backwards and out of Animal’s protective reach.

“I gave you a place to live when you didn’t have any!” She grabbed the girl by the front of her tee shirt with her left hand and planted a strong fist in the girl’s face.

“I fed you when you were hungry!” She dragged the girl outside the doors, knowing that a fight inside the bar could get her fired and she needed this job. She dragged her out to the front of the building, spun her around, and laid a heavy, hard right to the girl’s mouth.

“You fucking whore, I loaned you my costumes! Helped you get a job!” The girl was trying to pull free so she released her shirt with a shove up against the building, then dropped down and laid a right cross to the side of the blonde's jaw. The girl tried to shield her face with her hands, but received a haymaker of a gut punch for her troubles and started crying.

“I helped you when you were down and out, you fucking slut, you two-bit whore, you slimy piece of shit…and look how you repay me!” The girl had slid down the rough wood siding, curled in a protective ball, her hands covering her face.

“Get up, you sorry sack of shit!” she screamed, scuffing gravel from the parking lot at her. “You sneaked off with him for two days…fuck! I even covered your shift for you today so you could hang around fucking my man…you lie and cheat and connive…but you aren’t woman enough to stand up and fight for him?”

Huddled against the building, her arms wrapped protectively around her head and face, the girl simply shook her head.

She kicked the girl in her exposed butt. “Get the fuck out of here, you cowardly piece of shit. Get out and don’t come back. If I see you again, I won’t stop until you can’t answer me.” The girl struggled to her feet and turned her battered, tear-and-mascara stained face to the crowd appealingly, but no one moved to offer her any kind of help. Slowly she walked…limped…away, her pale hair standing out from her head like dandelion fluff.

Fists still clenched, she stood trembling, more with rage than cold, although it was pretty chilly outside and she was nearly naked. She felt a shirt being thrown over her shoulders, twitched into place to cover her bare breasts, and one of the waitresses from inside pressed her shoes and her bejewelled bra into her hands. The comments and congratulations from the crowd behind her were just so much buzz in her adrenalin fuelled mind...she stepped back into the club. “Hey, beautiful,” Animal beamed from the bar, raising his glass and holding out a drink for her. “Looks like you won me, fair and square.”

She drained the drink, a double Canadian whiskey and water. “Fuck you, Animal!” she snapped. “Give me my house keys.”

He looked bewildered, then condescending and then placating. “But baby, it’s over now…I’m all yours…you won the…”

She grabbed the front of his shirt, tight, up near the collar. “Give me my fucking keys!” she snarled at him, “And give them to me now!”

“OK, OK,” his tone was conciliatory as he tugged away from her choking grip, “But I got a lotta my stuff there. How about we talk this over in the morning when I can get a short to carry…”

“Now, asshole. Give me the fucking keys now or I will take them off you and you won’t walk for a week.” Her voice was alarmingly calm and low.

He paled, looking down to see her knee…and that strong, muscular dancer’s leg…positioned precisely between his thighs. “OK,” he barely squeaked out, reaching into the pocket of his cutaway and coming out with a small ring of keys. She snatched them away from him and released his collar with a shove to the Adam’s apple that sent him into a paroxysm of coughing.

“Noon tomorrow,” she said softly. “Your crap will be on the front stoop. Take it and do not ever let me see you again.”

“Or what?” he sneered, stepping back out of range. “Just what do you think you can do, huh? I’m not like Janine, you know, I fight back. And I’m bigger than you are…I can stop any move you can make!”

She had already turned away, promising the customers that as soon as she cleaned up, she would be back to finish her set on the stage. She turned back, hands on hips, bare breasts gleaming sweat in the spill over from the stage lights.

She looked him slowly, sneeringly, up and down. “Or what?” she echoed. “Or what? Well, I’ll tell you what, motorcycle boy…if I see your sorry ass again anywhere in this town, I’ll shoot it…and you...dead, on the spot.” Slowly she turned away and, hips twitching suggestively, sauntered back to the dressing rooms.

Red Tulips

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:22:00 +0000

It was cold, so she put Jakie down for his nap in the warmest place in the house…in his carriage in front of the oil log. Annie was dressed in several layers of clothing and sitting on a blanket on the drafty floor, playing with her new doll, the only birthday present she had received. Rod, wrapped up in a blanket, was curled up on the sofa watching TV. She snorted quietly…they couldn’t afford a telephone or a warm place to live but he managed to find a way to afford a TV…and his damned brandy. He should have been at work…it was Tuesday…but he had called in sick one time too many and so now he was “between jobs” again…she barely had money for milk for the kids, but he somehow managed to find enough for a bottle for himself. Selfish bastard.

It was only two o’clock and already freezing. March heralded the beginning of spring back in California…but here, in the armpit of New England, the countryside was still in the frozen grip of a bitter winter. She looked out the uninsulated kitchen window at the snow flurries and felt the flimsy, ancient clapboard structure shudder with the gusting winds that forced frigid air through the millions of little holes in their flat. This thin wall of decaying wood was all that stood between them and the promised storm…an unseasonable blizzard, according to the weather forecast. She went into the bathroom…a lean-to added to the back porch, as the building had been put up long before indoor toilets were commonplace, and the bathroom had been added later…and turned the tap on to a trickle in the sink and tub. She had yet to figure out how to keep the water in the toilet from freezing, but keeping the water running in the tub and sink kept those pipes from bursting.

Back in the kitchen she stirred the pot of sauce. Dishes that had to cook all day kept the kitchen warm and it was where she put the kids down to sleep at night, for the only heat in the miserable little shotgun flat came from the oil log in the kitchen stove…provided, of course, Rod could be prevailed upon to hike down to the cellar, fill up the oil bottles, and hike back up to the third floor carrying them. So far she had managed to avoid going down into that terrifying black, cobweb-festooned pit, but she feared that eventually she would have no alternative…Rod would go out for milk one evening when the last bottle of oil was low, stop off at the tavern for a “quick one” that wouldn’t end until closing time, and she’d have to brave the pit or freeze---quite literally.

If he would let her go to the grocery store and stock up…but that wasn’t going to happen. He had nearly had a coronary when he came home one afternoon and found her and the kids in Flo’s apartment across the hall. The apartment doors were open, there were no males over the age of nine about, and still he had grabbed her by the hair and dragged her across the hallway and slapped and punched her until she was black and blue all over. She burned for the day she could find enough money to get out. Her shoulders drooped…she was not allowed outside the apartment without him, and she never had any money…she was stuck. For now. But things would change, she knew this.

The afternoon wore on slowly, the noises from the TV not quite drowning out the sounds of despair in her head. She washed diapers in the kitchen sink and strung them on lines in the kitchen to dry…they would only freeze solid outside…and at four she realized that Jakie, an energetic little boy for all his five months, had not awakened from his nap. She checked the carriage, saw he was still asleep, and reached in to adjust his blanket. The backs of her fingers brushed his cheek and she drew back in alarm…he was burning up!

She ran to the front door, shouting “Jakie’s sick!” over her shoulder to Rod as an explanation, and pounded on Flo’s door. A moment later, thermometer in hand, she lifted the unresisting infant from his carriage and pulled down his diaper to take his temperature. Impatient, she watched the silver line of mercury shoot up like a rocket. When it reached 103, she snatched it out, placed it on the table and turned the limp infant on his back. “Jakie!” she said urgently, patting his cheek briskly. “Jakie, honey, wake up! Look at Mama!”

He lay limply in her arms, the most she was able to elicit from him was a weak whimper and a rolling of his eyes under the lids. She put him back in his carriage and rushed to the living room where Rod remained transfixed by the TV. “Jakie’s sick, we need to go to the hospital!” she cried. “Get the car started, I’ll take Annie to Flo’s!”

Rod did not move. “Rod, for God’s sake, Jakie is really sick! Please go warm up the car!” He looked up at her with grave disdain. “Jesus Christ, you panic over every little sniffle. It’s probably just a cold…he’ll be fine.” He turned his eyes back to the television.

Stunned, she stood for a moment trying to decide what to do. If she asked Flo’s husband to drive her to the hospital, Rod would beat her stupid when she got home and accuse her of every vile act under the sun in the bargain. But if she didn’t take Jakie to the hospital, who knew what would happen? He was almost unconscious!

“I’m calling the police, then,” she said. “They will take us to the hospital.” She snatched open the door and started across the hall to use Flo’s phone and he rocketed off the sofa and grabbed her arm, dragging her back inside. “Like hell you will!” he yelled, aiming a sharp slap for the side of her face. “Get your ass back in that kitchen where you belong!”

She began to scream. “The baby is sick! Sick! I tell you! He won’t wake up! He’s going to die if we don’t get him to a hospital!”

"Die, my ass!" Rod was yelling as Flo’s door opened and her husband, the big, burly Ken, stuck his head out. As the devoted father of four sturdy young sons, he was less than amused at what he had overheard. “Wrap the kid up good,” Ken said, looking past Rod as if he wasn’t there. “I’ll be downstairs warming up the car. Flo, get my jacket.”

“Like hell you will!” Rod shouted, placing his hand on Ken’s chest and giving him a sharp push back into his apartment. “I’ll take care of my own kid and I don’t need no help from some ignorant fucking Polack!”

“Then stop standing around flapping your lips, you stupid guinea asshole, and get the kid to the hospital before he dies!” Ken shouted back.

Quietly, in the background, Flo said “Send Annie over. I’ll watch her until you get back.” She nodded and went inside to get the kids ready.

While Rod tried to find a parking place in the snowbound parking lot, she hurried the baby in to the triage desk. “I put him down for a nap at two,” she said urgently to the bored-looking nurse. “Now I can’t wake him up! All he does is whimper a little and sort of moan…” her face was a study in anguish as the nurse peered into the bunting in her arms and found a deathly pale, unnaturally still baby. Without warning, the nurse snatched Jakie from her arms and hurried down a corridor, calling out commands as she strode purposefully to an examining room.

The next half hour was a blur. Doctors and nurses crowded around her baby, poking him with needles, drawing blood, urine, even spinal fluid samples. At the end of it all she was left with a limp, almost lifeless infant in her arms, only lightly swaddled due to his fever. Finally, a tall, slender blond man approached her, his manner alarmingly calm. “Your baby is very sick, Mrs. Martinelli. He has spinal meningitis and we have to get him to Children’s Hospital in Boston right away. We don’t have the means to treat him properly here.”

Bewildered, she could feel herself start to cry. “It’s dark outside…I have no idea where this place is…I don’t think we can find it in the dark…can we take him in the morning? I don’t want to be driving all around Boston, lost, with a sick baby in the car…with all the snow...” Tears were flooding down her cheeks, her hands knotted with anxiety.

The doctor sat down beside her and placed a hand gently on her shoulder. “Mrs. Martinelli, your son has spinal meningitis and he may well die before morning if he doesn’t receive immediate treatment at a proper facility. We’ve called the police to provide you with emergency transport to Children’s. It’s the only chance he’s got.”

The ride to the hospital was a nightmare. The backseat of the patrol car was not constructed for comfort, and she was shivering in the frigid temperatures, sliding around the slick, cold upholstery in the back seat. What would normally be a twenty minute drive took more than an hour as they battled the worst March blizzard in memory, driving directly into the brunt of the storm. Jakie became terrifyingly still and limp, only his slight breath and the feverish waves of heat radiating from his tiny body indicating that he was still alive.

She was completely lost. She had tried to take note of their route, but it was dark and between the snow blowing into their windshield and the headlights from oncoming traffic, she had no idea where they were. Snow had built up alarmingly in the roadway, especially at corners, despite the efforts of the slow-moving snowploughs that lumbered through the darkness, their emergency lights furiously rotating like yellow beacons of hope. The flying snow virtually occluded vision, but the police officer did not falter and, to her great surprise, they pulled up to the emergency entrance to the hospital in once piece.

The snow, however, was so deep she could not get the car door open! The officer got on his radio and in a matter of a few minutes, two white coated people ran out the ER doors, waded through the snow drifts to the side of the car and took Jakie through the window. The tears nearly froze on her cold face as she watched them disappear back through the doors with her child.

“OK, ma’am,” the officer said, turning to look at her over his thickly padded blue shoulder. “Let’s find a place where we can get the door open for you.” She nodded silently.

It took her fifteen minutes to make her way to the emergency room through the back corridors of the hospital. And when she got there, Jakie was gone. She found his bunting, his little shirt, the tiny blue booties she had knit herself, but he was nowhere to be found. She wandered about the quiet, empty hallway, peeking in examining rooms hoping to find him, his little clothes clutched in her numb fingers, panic growing inside her like a live thing. What had they done with her baby?

She turned a corner and found a desk that was staffed by a woman in starched white, an outlandish little pouf of pleated organdy and black velvet ribbon perched precariously on top of her head. A pin on her well-concealed bosom identified her as an RN. The nurse looked up, over the tops of her ridiculous little half-glasses, raised one steel-grey eyebrow and frowned. “May I help you?” she inquired in a cool, professional voice. “We don’t allow people to wander about the emergency suite unaccompanied,” she said disapprovingly.

Clutching Jakie’s clothes tightly to help keep her from crying, she shook her head. “I’m looking for my baby,” she thrust out the clothes in her hands. “These are his…we came in a police car and two people came and took him through the window…now I can’t find him…” She was rapidly losing the battle against tears and she was starting to feel a bit light-headed…she hadn’t eaten since noon.

Recognizing the symptoms, the nurse got up from the chair and came around to her. “Sit down, please. Take some deep breaths…put your head between your knees if you are feeling faint…let me see what I can find out for you.”

She leaned back in the stiff chair and put her head against the wall, eyes tightly closed and fingers still clutching Jakie’s things. God, where was he? She refused to allow herself to think about his condition…she would wait until she could speak with a doctor.

“Mrs. Martinelli?” the voice of a young male was calling her. She opened her eyes and saw him approaching. “Is that your baby? Rodney Jacob Martinelli, Jr.?”

She nodded. “We call him Jakie,” she whispered. “Please,” she said, her voice gaining strength. “Where is he? Is he going to be OK?”

The young man, the badge on his white coat said “Dr. Michael Warren,” shook his head. “He’s very, very sick. He’s presently in intensive care…” she stood up, ready to rush to her baby’s side, “…and there are no visitors allowed.” She felt as if she had been struck by lightning, shocked and stunned, and she stared at the doctor incredulously. “It interferes with monitoring and treatment, to have parents always hovering around and fretting, distracting or interfering with the staff. You are allowed one ten minute visit at 8 pm every evening as long as he is in ICU.”

She stood, steadying herself on the wall. “How long will that be?”

The doctor was very silent for a very long time. Finally he sighed. “I’m not going to lie to you, Mrs. Martinelli…Jakie is a very sick little boy. If you hadn’t gotten him to the hospital in your hometown when you did, he would be dead by now.” She gasped, her hand going over her mouth. “But he’s very critical…we don’t know if he is strong enough to make it through this…spinal meningitis is often fatal in babies this young.”

“Fatal?” she felt like she had fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. Could things get any worse?

“I’ve already called a priest and he’s been given Last Rites…”

“Last Rites?” she felt her throat closing up.

“Go home, Mrs. Martinelli. Go home and get some rest. And pray.”

For the first time she noticed there was another person standing behind Dr. Warren, an equally young man wearing an equally doctorish long white coat, but sporting long, hippyish hair. He was tugging on Dr. Warren’s sleeve urgently. The two men held a hurried, whispered consultation then Dr. Warren turned to her. “Excuse me, but I have to get back to the ICU urgently.” He turned on his heel and hurried away.

The other man, however, lingered a moment, looking her over in a wholly inappropriate way. She averted her face and her gaze. “Martinelli, right? The kid with meningitis?”

She looked back and nodded, her face a study in anxiety.

He looked her up and down appraisingly, then jerked his head in the direction in which Dr. Warren had disappeared. “Mikey worries too much about bedside manner...and he sometimes ends up giving false hope. If that was my kid, when I got home and got done with my prayers, I’d call my friendly neighbourhood funeral director. ’Cause come morning, lady, you’re gonna need him.”

She didn’t remember how she got home or when. Rod was gone when she woke up in their freezing bedroom, and she lay on the bed for a few moments, trying to orient herself. Jakie! It came flooding back to her. Jakie!

She shoved her feet into her shoes…she had slept in her clothes…and rushed to Flo’s front door. “I need to use the phone,” she pleaded. “I have to call about Jakie…”

“Relax,” Flo said, pressing a cup of hot tea in her hand. “I called about ten minutes ago. That boy of yours is a real fighter!” She looked up at Flo hopefully.

“Oh, he’s still real sick,” Flo cautioned her, “He’s still unconscious. But he made it through the night…and that’s a real significant achievement, they told me.”

She sipped her tea, relief flooding over her. “Thanks, Flo,” she breathed, her cup and saucer rattling with the trembling of her hands. “I was afraid I was going to have to call a funeral home this morning.”

“Nah!” Flo said, in that joshing way of hers. “Just give the kid some time and he’ll be back home before you know it!”

***

She bought a pot of huge red tulips and put them beside his crib. It had been more than a week and he still had not opened his eyes, but he was out of ICU. She spent half an hour talking to him, holding his tiny hand, stroking his peach-like little cheek with the back of her fingers, and finally got up to make the two hour trek by bus and subway home. She didn’t see him open his eyes, but red tulips were the very first thing he saw.

The Homework Assignment

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:58:00 +0000

Years later, she would be surprised to learn that children in many communities took homework home with them as a matter of course. In her experience, homework normally began when you entered junior high. In lower grades, being assigned homework was a sign that you were failing a subject and needed extra work in it.

Even at the age of eight, that made no sense to her. It seemed rather obvious that if you didn’t know how to do something in class, where you had examples on the board, access to the teacher, and maybe even a classmate or two who did understand the work and might be able to explain it to you…if you weren’t grasping the work and were unable to do it under those circumstances, what hope was there that you could do it alone, without resources? Ask your parents for help? Well, maybe some other little girl, but not this one! Even letting Mommy know that homework had been assigned was enough to warrant a spanking or two, and she was happy to keep that nasty strap hanging on the back of the kitchen door, thank you.

Staying after school for help wasn’t an option, either. She had given herself a lifetime of headaches trying to figure out Mommy’s thinking so she could anticipate trouble and stay out of it, but so far, no reliable patterns had emerged…although there was a growing list of items and actions both forbidden and unadvisable. The expectation of perfection…first time, every time…was unspoken…as was unquestioning obedience. Once, in response to her tearful excuse “I tried, I couldn’t!” Mommy had taken her shoulders in a bruising grip, shaken her until her teeth rattled, and said “If I tell you to go in the bathroom and tie a ribbon around a stream of water running from the tap, I expect you to do it! No tries! No failures! No excuses! Do you understand me?” She understood, all right, a sense of hopelessness rising within her. She simply did not know how to stay out of trouble with Mommy.

And this homework assignment was no exception. Mommy would have a screaming, raving fit when she found out about it. Only kids who were in danger of failing a subject got homework…this assignment would tell Mommy, loud and clear, that she was failing arithmetic. She already knew what that would mean...

“This from my genius daughter? This is simple arithmetic…you cannot possibly be so stupid that you can’t do this! Brother can do this and he is three grades behind you in school! You’re daydreaming again during lessons, aren’t you? Staring out the window when you should be paying attention, then playing dumb to get sympathy from the teacher. I know how your mind works, little girl, and you may fool that silly old biddy of a teacher of yours, but you don’t fool me one bit!” All of this delivered in a high-pitched, enraged shriek punctuated by the stinging snaps of the strap as it bit into what would be her bare butt, for Mommy would make her take down her pants and bend over the bed and remain motionless…to move prematurely was to invite a protracted punishment. Better to lay passively and take the lashes, maintaining silence or shrieking with each blow, depending on what Mommy wanted at that given time. No thanks.

She had gone to her teacher to beg her to reconsider but Mrs. Brown had just said “You need the extra practice, dear.” Then she got scared, thinking about Mommy’s reaction to homework…and she tried to explain, through tears, what was going to happen to her when her mother saw the homework. Mrs. Brown smiled indulgently and scoffed, “I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that, dear. Now take your assignment paper and have it back to me inside a week.”

Reluctantly, she took the paper off her teacher’s desk and took a look at it. Her heart sank and that sense of hopelessness that had created a kind of hollow space just below her throat, expanded. “I can’t do this,” she said in a choked whisper.

“Of course you can, dear,” Mrs. Brown said with cheerful encouragement. “Of course you can!”

“This is all multiplication and long division,” she said, her voice tinged with horror. “I don’t know my times tables!”

“Well, then, you will just have to ask your parents for help,” Mrs. Brown said dismissively, turning back to marking the papers on her desk. “Be careful walking home, dear.”

She had folded the paper into a small square and stuck it in her sweater pocket so that nobody could see it. If anyone saw her carrying a homework paper and told Brother, he would delight in tattling to Mommy, and this was something to keep quiet…very quiet.

She took the shortcut home, through the creek, and went straight to her room, closing the door behind her. She had only a few minutes to change into her play clothes before Brother would be at the door, demanding that she open it. Closed doors, except when changing clothes, were not permitted. She had to find a place to hide the paper until she could decide what to do about it. She looked hurriedly around the room…not under the mattress…Mommy would find it when she changed the sheets. Not the closet, either…coming home that day and finding most of her toys gone to the Goodwill taught her that her closet wasn’t a safe place for anything. She couldn’t leave it in her pocket…it might fall out or Mommy might decide to wash the sweater and find it…where? Where?

Her eyes fell on the upended orange crate that served as a bedside table for her. Inside the crate was a stack of Little Golden Books and a clutter of old colouring books, paper doll folders, and some old drawings of hers. Perfect! She slid a book out of the middle of the stack, slipped the paper between the pages, and returned the book to its original position. That should buy her some time to decide what to, she thought with a huge sigh. She had a week.

By the end of the week, however, she had come up with nothing. At first she had thought she could do it while Mommy was at work, but Brother was always spying on her. She then thought about asking Daddy for help, but Daddy hated secrets of any kind and would insist that she “come clean” about her troubles with arithmetic. That would be fine as long as Daddy was home, but the minute he was off to his evening job, Mommy would beat the stuffing out of her with that strap for not telling her first and making her look like a fool with Daddy. But telling Mommy she was failing anything was out of the question…Mommy took her mistakes and failures as personal assaults and punished them accordingly.

The homework had been assigned on Friday afternoon. By Monday night she was beginning to feel sick to her stomach all the time. Not a real stomach ache, just a kind of general kind of mild carsickness feeling. And her eczema was itching like crazy, much worse than usual, with the little spots behind her knees flaring into weeping patches of itching misery. She could feel a boil coming up on the back of her thigh, a fact she was careful to conceal from everyone, lest Mommy find out and hold her down and squeeze it. She wasn’t sure which was worse…Mommy sitting on her to hold her down…and cutting off her breath…or the deep, piercing agony of having the boil squeezed, followed by hours of deep, hot, tender throbbing, like a toothache deep inside her muscle. That she was not allowed to scream or cry during the process didn’t help at all, either. Why couldn’t Mommy just put egg skin on it, like Nana did, and let it come to a head on its own?

She had four more days and had not yet figured out how to get that homework paper done and back to school without being found out. She lay in her bed at night, unable to fall asleep, dreading the arrival of dawn. Another day…the countdown grew shorter. She felt doomed, hopeless, like her life had taken a bleak turn and there was no way to steer herself back to safety. She was afraid and on the edge of tears every moment. She was extra careful to stay out of trouble because she didn’t think she could take a whipping with the strap right now, not with that boil coming up on her leg. If Mommy hit that with the strap, she would probably pee in her pants from the sheer agony of it. She turned in her bed and looked at the stars outside the window. God was somewhere out there. Why didn’t He rescue her? Exhausted, feeling sleep inexorably claiming her, she looked out at the cosmos and whispered, “Please, God, don’t let me wake up in the morning.”

It was Friday morning and despite her fervent nightly prayer for oblivion, she awoke and dragged herself to school. She had black circles under her eyes from lack of sleep and her roiling stomach hadn’t allowed for much appetite. Always a bit on the thin side, she was beginning to look undernourished. If Mrs. Brown noticed her distress when she called her up to the desk at the end of the day, she gave no indication. “Don’t you have something for me?” the teacher asked mildly.

She hung her head and shook it. “I lost it,” she lied. “I can’t find it anywhere.”

Mrs. Brown pondered her for a moment, then nodded. “Ok, well, I’ll give you another paper. If you don’t have it to me next Friday, I’ll have to contact your mother, do you understand?” She nodded miserably, taking the paper and folding it to fit her pocket. Once home, it joined its mate in the Little Golden Book, and she flung herself down on the bed, staring out the window at the cloudless sky. “Why won’t you let me die?” she whispered, tears leaking out her eyes and running a thin trail to her ears. “Why do I have to do this?”

By the end of the second week, she merely shook her head “No,” when Mrs. Brown asked for the homework paper. She had considered pleading her case with the teacher again, but, convinced of the hopelessness of it…indeed, convinced of the hopelessness of her whole situation, she opted for muteness. Mrs. Brown handed her a paper to give to her mother. “Return it to me on Monday, signed,” the teacher said. She did not even acknowledge, simply folded the paper to fit her pocket and trekked home, “losing” it in the creek on the way.

Monday saw her with a gripping stomach ache. She had barely eaten for several days and had nothing to vomit, but her body paid no attention to that pointless little fact. Bent over the bowl, she heaved and gagged and cried, her darkly shadowed, red-rimmed eyes accentuating the paleness and growing thinness of her face. Surprisingly, Mommy did not accuse her of goldbricking this time, but put her to bed and told her to stay there until she got home from work. She spent the day sleeping and trying to do the homework, but without knowing her multiplication tables, she was unable to even hazard a reasonable guess. A black mantle of hopelessness settled over her, and she climbed back into her bed, more prayers for deliverance on her lips. She had hours of uninterrupted time to think. And she could find no solution to her dilemma that did not involve another whipping, another tongue-lashing, maybe even perpetual reminders. Her bedroom wall was paper thin and when Mommy had company, she often lay with her ear to the wall, listening to Mommy tell her friends what a horrible child she was, how difficult, how wilful…she wasn’t stupid, after all, so she had to screw things up to royally and regularly through sheer dint of wilful defiance. There was, in Mommy’s mind, no other answer, and every mistake, every misstep, every error she had ever made in her entire short, miserable life, had been trotted out by Mommy as examples. “Poor Georgia,” she once heard a woman say, “you certainly put up with a lot from that child.” She lay in her bed, burning with humiliation, listening to her transgressions being broadcast to everyone Mommy knew, each new one described in minute and painstaking detail…and this one was going to be the jewel in Mommy’s crown of “Poor Georgia, saddled with this horrible child” stories.

Mrs. Brown must have telephoned Mommy at work because Mommy was screaming when she came in the door. “You conniving little bitch!” she bellowed. “Get your sneaky ass out here this instant because if I have to come for you, I will snatch every hair out of your head dragging you here.”

She rose from the bed, dizzy from two weeks of eating next to nothing, and her bladder suddenly wanted urgent emptying. She walked out to the living room, staying close to the wall for support, to face her Mommy. Brother was sitting on the couch, unaware of what was going on, his eyes wide open, his mouth formed into an “O” of surprise. She looked around the room, her eyes resting on the clock on the television, her heart sinking. Daddy wouldn’t be home for half an hour yet…she was going to die for sure.

“What in the name of all that is holy do you think you are up to, miss?” Mommy said, grabbing a handful of her frizzy perm and yanking her head back. “You look at me when I am talking to you!” Mommy shook her violently by her hair. She clicked her eyes over to focus them on Mommy’s and felt herself begin to go numb. First her feet felt like they had disappeared, and the feeling began creeping slowly upwards.

She wasn’t even sure what Mommy was saying to her, her attention had been focussed on the feeling that was disappearing from her legs. Would she faint when it reached her head? Was she dying, at last? Would this be her release? Would she go to Heaven and be with Jesus? Was Heaven really there? She had thought Jesus loved children, but she was having trouble reconciling that with Jesus leaving her here with her mother. Mommy was shaking her by the hair and screaming at her, but she couldn’t understand the rushing, distorted sounds. Mommy’s freakishly red lips opened and closed rapidly and flecks of spittle flew from them, but she didn’t feel any thing. She could tell Mommy was shaking her head back and forth by the hair, but she really didn’t feel anything, the rushing and roaring in her ears overwhelming everything else.

She saw Brother bring the strap and somebody took down her pajama bottoms…did she do it herself? She wasn’t actually sure. Mommy’s mouth continued moving, her crooked yellow teeth alternately bared and covered by the bloody red lips, making strange warped sounds. She could see the strap flying through the air, she could even feel the slim strip of leather wrap itself around her, following her every contour like a caress, and she could hear a wailing sound in the background…was it a siren?...but, curiously, she didn’t feel the strap and she didn’t exactly understand what was going on.

She opened her eyes suddenly and she was in her bed. She thought she remembered walking back to the bed, getting in, and pulling up the covers, but it seemed rather dreamlike in quality, so she wasn’t exactly sure. Daddy was beside the bed, shaking her gently.

“Are you awake, punkin?” he was asking. “Mommy says I need to have a talk with you.”

The fog instantly cleared from her brain. This was really bad, if Daddy was being sent in to punish her, too. She held her tongue and waited for him to continue.

“Mommy says you lied to her about a homework assignment…” she shook her head. “You didn’t lie?” Daddy asked. She shook her head again. “OK, then, what happened?”

“I didn’t tell her about it at all,” she said, breaking eye contact with him. She hated to see disappointment in Daddy’s eyes…it almost hurt more than the strap.

“I see,” Daddy said, looking thoughtful. “And why didn’t you tell her?”

She kept her eyes down, focussing on her ugly little hands with the nails chewed down to the quick. “I was afraid.”

“Of what, honey?”

“That Mommy would get mad. Only kids who are failing get homework….”

Daddy sat quietly for a minute. “Let me guess…arithmetic?” She nodded miserably.

“You could have asked me for help,” he said gently.

“Then Mommy would know.”

He nodded his head again, looking at her. “Did Mommy spank you?” She nodded with a shudder that shook her whole body.

“Well, she expects me to spank you, too,” he said, and she began to silently cry.

“Shhhh,” he said softly. “There’s a way around this.”

She looked up hopefully. “You and me, we’ll work on your arithmetic when I get home from work,” he said. “We’ll get that grade up so you don’t fail, ok?” She nodded slowly.

“What about the spanking you’re s’posed to give me?” she asked, her eyes still swimming with tears.

“I’ve got an idea,” Daddy smiled, winking at her. He stood and slid his belt off through the loops and folded it in half, “When you hear the smack, holler like it hit you,” he said, pushing the double layer of leather together to make a loop, then rapidly jerking his hands apart to make a snapping sound.

“Ow!” she hollered, winking back at him, “Owwww! Daddy!...”

She could almost smell Mommy lurking outside the bedroom door.

Advancement Opportunity

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:15:00 +0000

Boring, boring, boring. That’s what her life had become. Boring.

She tried to invent things for herself to do…she baked bread on Mondays, for example…that took up most of the day. She sewed things…curtains, clothes for Annie, robes and pajamas for the boys… She read books, and the newspaper from beginning to end every day, kept a vegetable garden, sewed and embroidered, and studiously ignored the soaps, for to succumb to them would be the complete and utter end of her sanity.

She was stunningly, mind-numbingly bored. From the time the kids left for school in the morning until they began straggling back in the afternoon, her life was nothing more than a quest to keep her consciousness from going AWOL.

A whuff…whuff noise from the front door announced the delivery of the morning mail…the dog was so used to the postman there was no barking to announce his arrival...that excess of canine energy was reserved for announcing potentially dangerous strangers, like meter readers and neighbours. She dried her hands on her apron, made her way to the mail box on the front porch and fished out the usual assortment of bills, circulars, flyers and junk, discarding most of it in the bin as she passed it en route back to the kitchen sink. She stopped, however, at the magazine-sized booklet from the local junior college…a catalogue of next session’s classes. Maybe this was the answer to the tedium of her daily life?

She finished the morning dishes and prepared the roast for dinner. After piercing the slab of meat all over with a sharp knife, she carefully filled each hole with slivers of freshly cut garlic, put the roast into a deep pan of wine vinegar, sliced lemon, and herbs and placed it in the refrigerator to marinate. The vegetable garden was next, checking to see what was ready for picking for tonight’s supper. The corn, maybe? Certainly some tomatoes, lettuce and a cucumber…were there any radishes ready? She pulled out the hose and laid it at the top of the irrigation ditch system James had worked out for her, turned the water on to a trickle, and walked back into the house.

Inside, she looked at the basket of ironing, then decided against it. Best to wait until the two o’clock movie so her brain could focus on something as her hands mindlessly worked over the clothes. Now she could sit down and review that catalogue…she had some time. She sat down at the dining room table with a slice of fresh bread and butter and a cold soda, and eagerly opened the cover.

Twenty minutes later she was frustrated and confused. Every class she thought looked interesting had a prerequisite, and every prerequisite had a prerequisite as well. She had thought to brush up her French…why should she take first year French…or even second year, for that matter, when she had been the third highest scorer in her state on a nation-wide test of second year students on third year material? She would be bored stupid, not to mention the monumental waste of money she would have to pay in order to “study” material she had already mastered!

She continued to study the catalogue, becoming more confused as each minute passed. There didn’t seem to be any classes that didn’t have, once tracked back, absolutely puerile prerequisites! For crying out loud, why did she even bother to go to high school if she was going to have to repeat her high school classes in college? What was the point of taking college preparatory classes and excelling in them, only to be hurled back to high school material upon entry into college? That made no kind of sense at all…she must be reading this thing wrong.

She circled half a dozen classes that interested her…a creative writing class, a French literature class, some classes in psychology, European history, a beginning Latin class…all things that had not been available to her in high school and which piqued her interest as she discovered them. She was shocked, when she looked up at the clock, to see that nearly two hours had passed and if she didn’t get a move on and start that ironing, she’d be behind schedule with her work.

Creamy homemade mashed potatoes, succulent roast beef and au jus gravy, freshly picked corn and an equally fresh salad graced the dinner table along with slices of home made bread. The house was redolent with the rich scents of the meal, a meal that had taken hours of preparation, and which was placed lovingly on the table for her family’s delight. So why were she sitting there alone, watching the gravy congeal?

James. Annie had come to the conclusion that until James came to the table, she did not need to, her brothers following suit. And James was unlikely to leave his TV until the end of whatever it was he was watching. That’s assuming James was even home at all. How many times had he called her to say “I’m leaving the office now,”…so she could have the food ready shortly after his arrival…only to have it sit on the stove waiting for him? How many nights had she seen the perfect pink slices of veal go gray, the crisp vegetables grow limp, the salad wilt? She sighed, looking at the repast spread before her, growing cold. He was going to yell at her again tonight…if the food was cold, he would yell…if she reheated it, he would yell “I do not eat warmed-up fucking leftovers!” Why couldn’t he just get off his butt and come to the table?

“Why don’t you serve when the program is over?” he would shout at her during their “discussions” on the subject. “Why do you always have to serve in the middle of a show?”

“Because that is when the food is done,” never seemed to make any sense to him. Despite the fact that he could not boil water without burning it, he was convinced that she need only take into account the length of time it took something to cook, put it on the stove at the proper time, and everything would be done and ready during a commercial break. Even showing him recipes that stated “cook for 30 to 40 minutes or until done” did nothing to bring about any kind of enlightenment. His precise engineering nature left no room for such sloppy instructions as “or until done.” Put it on the stove at the proper time and it will be ready at the proper time…during a commercial break…and anything less was incompetence or insubordination on her part.

James was rather odd that way…ever willing to sacrifice the reality of experience for the specious logic of his imaginings. She had had to take the keys to her car away from him, he was killing her clutch…the shift point of his car was fully half the rpms necessary for shifting her high-rev sports job, but he refused to adapt to the needs of the vehicle. After the fourth or fifth time he stalled it at the bottom of the drive way and brought it home with complaints that there was something wrong with the clutch because the car bucked and simply would not shift smoothly…after checking out his complaints and finding the car in good working order…she took back the extra set of keys and found ways to keep him out of it lest he truly damage the clutch her meagre household budget simply did not have the funds to repair. They had had many other disagreements on many other topics, but most of them had that one thread in common…reality simply did not dent James’ head when it was contrary to how he had worked out how something should be. Cars shifted at 2000 rpm, and that was all there was to it…any car that did not shift smoothly at 2000 rpm was, therefore, defective. And a wife who could not determine the cooking time of several ingredients and have them all on the table, cooked but not overcooked, at an exact, preset time, was either incompetent or insubordinate. End of story.

The family drifted to the table and James yelled at her for correcting the children’s table manners…her voice interfered with his hearing the program that had resumed after he took his place at the table. The roast was cold, the gravy congealed, the vegetables limp, the salad room temperature, the bread gone stiff on the cut edges. Another meal ruined, food money wasted, he opined as he made a sandwich of the lukewarm meat, drying bread and now-spreadable gravy, and went back to the living room where he could hear his program without the distractions at the table. Who knew Louis Ruykeyser, with the strange white finger wave, half-lisp, and peculiar tan, could be so riveting?

She caught him after dinner, as the kids washed up. It was the long commercial break at the top of the hour…she had time to get her question asked and, if he was in a cooperative mood, get an answer. She stood beside his recliner, catalogue in hand, and as the commercial break began, asked “Can you help me with something?”

He looked up suspiciously. “What?”

She held out the catalogue. “I’d like to take a class or two while the kids are in school during the day. I’ve identified some things that I’d like to do, but everything seems to have prerequisites. I can’t even find classes that don’t have prerequisites, except ones that look like the same stuff I took in high school.” He rose from his chair and walked towards the bathroom. She stopped talking until he returned.

She held out the catalogue to him as he re-entered the living room and he took it…snatched it, actually…and opened to a page she had marked.

“Since you’ve been to college and are familiar with how these things work, I was wondering if you could look at this catalogue and help me figure out a couple of things to take…not stuff I already took in high school, but…”

“Jesus Christ, woman!” he suddenly bellowed, rolling up the catalogue and striking the side of his leg with it. “Will you just shut the fuck up?”

She was suddenly both silent and afraid.

“What in the name of God makes you think you can go to college?” he sneered, shaking the rolled catalogue in front of her. “What makes you think you have the brains for it? For the love of God, hasn’t it occurred to you that if you are too fucking stupid to read the goddamned catalogue, you are too fucking stupid to go to college?” He hurled the rolled catalogue across the fifteen foot length of the living room where it slammed into the mahogany-panelled wall and fell to the floor like something dead.

I Love Lucy

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 07:54:00 +0000

She was scared. Really scared. Bessie, her singing teacher, called it “stage fright,” but she didn’t care what they called it, she was really, really scared.

It was opening night of the County Fair and the place was packed. There were thousands of people out there, and she had to go out in front of them and sing. And sing on key. Without her voice shaking. Or Mommy would be really mad at her. She shuddered, knowing what that meant. She clung to the open curtain, her bare legs goose-pimpled with cold and fear and swallowed her urge to cry…it would run her mascara. She peeked around the curtain, eyes growing wide.

It was an outdoor theatre with a tall stage at one end and hundreds of folding chairs set out in rows of semicircles. The cheap wood chairs that pinched your bottom if you didn’t sit down on the seat just right, which was hard to do when your feet didn’t reach the ground when you were sitting down. The chairs creaked and groaned like a demented chorus under the weight of the hundreds of fair-goers who were eager for the live stage show, their voices adding an uneven hum to the background. It was the biggest place she had ever been, bigger than the USO hall or the YMCA auditorium or any of the clubs Mommy dragged her to at night. It was so big! And it was so creepy! There were no clouds and the moon was full, so a strange silvery light bathed the waiting audience, their upturned faces glowing strangely pale in the darkness. They were waiting for her!

Panic gripped her and she clutched at the curtain, her knees threatening to fold up, her dinner threatening to make a sudden, unwelcome reappearance. She had begged Mommy not to make her go, she had begged Bessie not to make her go, but they were a team, implacable and insistent. When her fear made her balk at getting out of the car, tears welling in her eyes, Mommy climbed into the backseat with her for a moment. She calmed, expecting a comforting arm around her shoulder and a reprieve. What she got was a peek into Mommy’s purse where lay, coiled like a sleeping snake, the strap. Mommy had brought the strap with her! She was absolutely doomed.

Not a word had been spoken by either of them. Mommy had simply patted the seat beside her and, when she had moved over closely, Mommy had placed the shiny black patent leather purse onto her pale, nearly bare little legs and silently clicked open the jewelled latch. The brown strip of leather, coiled neatly and sitting top Mommy’s spare pack of Pall Malls was all she needed to see. She looked up at Mommy and nodded silently, Mommy closed the purse, and they both got out of the car and walked calmly over to where Bessie awaited them at entrance to the curtained-off back stage area.

“Are you cold, dumpling?” Bessie asked, seeing her tremble. “Here, take my shawl.” A crocheted shawl smelling of dusting powder and old roses settled over her shoulders and she clutched it to her, happy to have something to grab on to. She wanted to go home and thought to voice her desire, but one look up at Mommy’s excited, animated face and she changed her mind. “Yours is not to reason why,” Mommy had told her when she asked why she had to do this, “Yours is but to do or die.”

Bessie said it was a great honour to be one of the opening acts, especially an opening night act, for the Fair. And most especially when there would be really famous people there. She didn’t exactly understand what Bessie meant, but it seemed to excite Mommy a lot.

They had entered the dark area behind the stage, an area curtained off by large flaps of canvas stretched over the raw wood of the superstructure. The ground had been trampled smooth by hundreds of feet, no trace of grass or even weeds remaining, and the claustrophobically narrow area had already developed a distinctive smell: raw lumber, airborne dust, and the stink of waterproofed canvas. She wrinkled her nose and hung back for a second, a sneeze building, but Mommy fixed her with a glare that stopped it dead. Following Bessie up some narrow stairs, Mommy dragged her along behind, her thin short legs having difficulty keeping up. In a moment, though, they were in a wider space, dimly lit, with people who looked like police standing near the entrance to a roped-off area. She squinted and sounded out the words on the sign…Performers Only Beyond This Point.

Bessie took her hand and they headed for the entrance to the roped area…Bessie would play the piano while she sang, but Mommy had to stay behind. She was beginning to be afraid…she wanted her Mommy…but when she looked over her shoulder, Mommy was gone. Panic gripped her and she began to feel sick to her stomach. Bessie took her to a large, heavy curtain near the stage entrance and told her to stand there while she went to check on the piano.

Bessie took back the shawl, then bent over to do a last minute inspection and tidy her flyaway curls. She’d spent hours sitting still for the torture of those pincurls. “Don’t move, now, do you hear?” Bessie commanded when she was satisfied. She nodded. “OK, then. You remember your lead in?” She nodded again. “OK, then, when you hear it, put on a big smile and come running out, OK?” She nodded again, miserably. And then Bessie was gone, too.

She was scared. Really scared. She’d never been backstage in a place this big. The curtains were huge, making scary shadows in the dim lights. There was someone on the stage talking and making all those silvery-faced people laugh. She was afraid she was going to cry and that would make her nose run and she didn’t have a hankie and it would make her make up run and that would make Mommy mad at her. She was scared and getting scareder with every passing minute. What if she missed her cue? What if she opened her mouth and her voice quavered? Worse, what if no sound came out at all? Clutching the curtain in a death grip with her nerveless, nail-chewed fingers, she tried to remember what she was supposed to sing tonight. What if she forgot the words? Mommy would kill her!

Looking back over her shoulder, she tried to locate the stairs, but there were too many people between her and the ropes that the policemen guarded. She couldn’t go back because she would get lost. She looked back at the stage…was it her turn yet? She hadn’t been paying attention…did they play her lead-in and she missed it? She wished she was home in bed, not out here freezing in her thin cotton costume, clinging to a stinky canvas curtain and trying not to cry or throw up.

She felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. Hoping it was Mommy, she turned around and found herself looking up into the face of a lady with the reddest lips and orangest hair she had ever seen in her life! The lady was wearing the prettiest green dress, with the collar flipped up at the back of the neck like Mommy wore hers, and big, big petticoats that made the skirt stick out on all sides. The lady bent over until she could smell her perfume, a scent that caressed her nose and didn’t make her want to sneeze like Mommy’s perfume.

“Are you all right, sweetheart?” the lady asked, looking into her face. She could feel her lower lip tremble and tears well up in her eyes.

“Aw, you poor kid,” the lady said, reaching into her sleeve to withdraw a small white hankie. “No tears now,” the lady said, reaching out to dab gently at her eyes. “You don’t want to go out on stage looking like a raccoon, do you?” She shook her head and giggled a little.

“I know it’s scary sometimes…I get scared too. But you know nothing is going to hurt you, right?” She nodded.

“And when you get done with your act, people are going to clap and cheer for you because they loved you, right?” She smiled a little and nodded again.

“So you’re gonna pick your chin up and smile, and when it’s your turn, you’re gonna go out there and knock ‘em dead, aren’t you?” She smiled and nodded at the lady, who actually looked kind of familiar, and who had a huge grin on her face.

“That’s the spirit!” the lady said, giving her a hug and standing back up. “You’re going to do just fine, aren’t you?” This time the smile was genuine and she nodded again, and the lady waved and walked away, suddenly lost in a small milling crowd.

Bessie had wrapped her in the shawl when she came off the stage to the sounds of thunderous applause. People were always surprised at how big her voice was…she didn’t understand that, either, since it was her voice and it seemed perfectly normal to her. They threaded their way through the backstage crowds towards the ropes and the stairs beyond. She was tired, ready for bed…although she knew she would have to stand still for Mommy washing all the make up off before she could go to bed…she hoped Mommy didn’t get soap in her eyes again this time…that stung so bad! It upset Daddy to see her all painted up, so Mommy always made sure she was clean before she could go to bed. She obediently trailed behind Bessie then halted as she caught a glimpse of green skirt. Bessie, too, stopped and looked in that direction, her face transfixed, her mouth formed into an admiring “O.”

“She’s a very nice lady,” she said to Bessie, careful not to point impolitely. “She wiped my face with her hankie when I was going to cry.”

Bessie looked down at her distractedly. “Who?”

“The lady in the green dress, she’s nice. I like her.”

Bessie gave her a funny look. “The lady in the green dress? The one with the red hair?”

She nodded, wondering if she had done something wrong and was going to get in trouble.

“Do you know who that lady is?” Bessie’s voice was a little breathless.

She shook her head. “But she’s very nice. She wiped my tears and told me everybody was gonna love me and clap for me…and they did!”

“That was Lucy,” Bessie said, a note of excitement in her voice. “Lucy. You had your tears dried by Lucy!”

“Lucy?”

“From TV, honey,” Bessie said, leading her back towards the car. “Lucy from TV!”

She wasn’t sure why Bessie seemed so excited. She was on TV every week just like Lucy but nobody seemed to be excited about seeing her. Every Saturday morning on Channel 8, on Tiny Tot’s Ranch. She shrugged. All she knew was that this Lucy lady was very nice. She had dried her tears and hugged her and said everything was going to be fine. And it was.

She smiled all the way home.

Information, please

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:34:00 +0000

“Mrs. Blake,” the receptionist called, her lips so primly formed that the name almost came out “bleak.” It was exactly how she felt…bleak.

No matter how she apportioned it, $105 a month simply could not sustain her and the baby. The Navy said her husband should be allocating some part of his pay to her allotment check…maybe $35 a month or so…but they couldn’t make him do it. And since he was someplace between the California coast and the Asian, she couldn’t do much about it either.

And so she decided to get a job.

Jean, next door, had offered to babysit. Annie was a good baby…a little colicky at times, perhaps, but mostly a sweet natured cherub. Jean was home all day with her two toddlers and, being a Navy wife too, could use a little extra money. She had transportation and child care all worked out, now all she needed was a job.

The last time she had gone job hunting, it had been an unmitigated disaster. Oh, she had gotten the job all right, but Mother had put the kibosh on it, but quick. She had found a job as a live-in housekeeper and baby sitter for a widower with two preschool children. He knew she was pregnant, he knew she was seventeen and unmarried, and when she said she expected to keep her baby, he just shrugged. “What’s one more in the house?” he asked. “There’s plenty of stuff you can use out in the garage…a crib, clothes…lots of stuff.” She had pretty much been Mother’s housekeeper since she was seven or eight, and her three young siblings…uh, half-siblings…had given her a considerable amount of experience in dealing with young children. She was confident she could handle the job, it provided a roof over her head and a wage, and he had shown her a room with attached bath, private entrance and…very important…locks. He didn’t seem like a lecherous type who would be interested in more than having his home kept up and his children looked after…she had learned the hard way to recognize that predatory aura about a man…and he travelled a lot, so she would be home alone with the children a great deal. Seemed about perfect.

Mother, of course, took a decidedly different view. “You will not go move in with some strange man!” she declared hotly. “Isn’t it enough that you are pregnant and not married, but you have to go shack up with some guy you barely know?”

“It’s not like that, Mother!” she argued back. “It’s a job! I’ll have my own room with a private entrance and locks on the insides of the doors! I’ll get paid! It’s something I know how to do!”

“I will not have you advertising to the whole world what a little tramp you are! That man ought to be arrested, soliciting a seventeen-year-old girl! That’s white slavery! It’s statutory rape if he touches you!”

“He’s not going to touch me!” she shouted back. “I don’t know what you are so upset about! You don’t want me here…and I’ve found a perfect solution to the problem…”

“You are my problem,” Mother ground out through clenched teeth. “And you will remain my problem right up until the day you turn eighteen. And you will do exactly as you are told, not one iota more, not one iota less, do you hear me? And you will not…I repeat, you will not take this job or any other one, for that matter! When you start to show you are going to the Florence Crittenton home and that is the end of it!”

Well, it hadn’t been the end of it, but it had been the end of that job. But Mother was not part of the picture now, even though she and Frank just lived across town, and she was on her own. “You made your bed, now you lie in it,” Mother had said when she had dropped her and Annie off at the little cottage after picking them up from the hospital. “Don’t think you can come running to me when things get tough!”

She hadn’t. She’d gone job hunting. She was eighteen, a high school graduate…with excellent grades, mind you…and she was reasonably intelligent. There had to be something she could do to earn a decent living.

It took just over a week, but she finally found the perfect job. The telephone company was hiring information operators…entry level! She packed up a bag for Annie, dropped her off with Jean, hopped a bus for downtown, and presented herself at the personnel office, ready to start her training. She was a bit surprised to learn that she had to fill out a six page form and then come back tomorrow for testing, but that was OK…she always aced tests, so that actually worked in her favour. Unless, of course, there was a lot of math on it. But why would they want an information operator to do math? She turned in her forms and took the test appointment slip and headed back to her little converted garage cottage full of confidence.

It turned out not to be such a difficult test and, in fact, the last part was actually rather enjoyable. She had had to write an essay about a famous person, living or dead, and what she admired about that person. She had chosen John F. Kennedy, a man still very much in the hearts and minds of people, despite his shocking and untimely death. The test, actually, was much easier than the college entrance exams she had taken back in high school…was that really only a year ago?...and she wasn’t even sure why she had had to take it, since it didn’t seem to have anything to do with switchboards or looking up references or anything she imagined an information operator might be expected to do.

Those college exams…she shook her head, a flush of anger surging over her. She had qualified for a scholarship…she could have gone to college, instead of ending up sitting here in a dingy personnel lobby, waiting for the results of her test and the offer of a job. She knew she had done well on the exam…one of these jobs working for the phone company was surely in her future…a secure future working for a major corporation with benefits and retirement and everything! It was almost as good as going to college, she told herself, tamping down that surge of anger again…and much more immediate. Money by the end of next month instead of in three more years… If she didn’t get this job, she didn’t know what she was going to do…

“Mrs. Blake,” the receptionist called. She looked up expectantly.

“Mr. King will see you now.”

She stood and brushed the wrinkles out of her blue wool skirt and tugged down the hem of her jacket. Some of the clothes she had bought with Nana that summer were turning out useful even after high school she thought, moving purposefully, confidently, towards the interview room.

Mr. King gave no preamble. “Well, Mrs. Blake, yours is probably the highest score we have ever seen on this test.” She smiled a very tiny smile, just a slight quirking of the corners of her lips. “And the essay was also one of the very best we have ever read.”

Something was wrong here, she could feel it. Mr. King did not seem pleased at the prospect of having the highest scorer on their test sitting in front of him…in fact, he seemed downright uncomfortable. What was going on?

“You may not be aware, but the position of information operator is a rather repetitious job…not very challenging or interesting. Boring, one might say,” he paused, looking at her earnestly. She nodded for him to go on.

“We have found certain kinds of people do well in this occupation and…well, others do not.”

What was he trying to tell her? If she scored so high, what was the problem? Did she score poorly in the parts that were important to the ability to do the job?

“What I’m trying to say, Mrs. Blake, is that we don’t think you’d be happy as an information operator. Someone as bright as you are…you’d find it boring, uninteresting, and you probably wouldn’t be with the company long enough to justify our cost of training you.” He looked directly at her, blinking owlishly.

She could not believe her ears. “You mean you are turning me down for this position because I’m too smart to be an information operator?” she asked incredulously.

He nodded and gave her a rueful little smile. “In a nutshell, yes.”

“And I don’t get a chance to show you how well I can do this job?”

He shook his head and pushed back his chair, signalling the end of the interview.

“Mr. King,” she said softly. “Mr. King, I need this job! I have a baby and we just don’t have enough to get by…”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Blake,” he said, his voice now professionally cool. “But I am sure than someone as intelligent and obviously able as you are will be able to find something suitable without much difficulty.” He showed her to the door and nodded to the receptionist to send in the next applicant.

She stood in the wind on the sidewalk outside the glass door. People hurried by her, rushing to their destinations, their own jobs, their own livelihoods. She just stood there, stunned, clutching her purse, unable to move. All her life she had been encouraged to excel. Even Mother, who was almost impossible to please in any venue, would call up her friends and brag when a straight A report card came home…not that Brother ever got one. Be smart, study hard, do well, get good grades, excel…it is the key to success, to getting ahead. Or so she had been told.

It was a lie. A bald-faced, blatant, unequivocal lie. She was too damned smart to be a damned telephone operator…they didn’t want the smart ones, the ones who did well in school, the ones who had good grades, personal discipline, and the ability to use their brains. They wanted to screw-ups, the girls who couldn’t get into the College Prep or Honours classes, and who made barely average grades in their average classes. Excellence didn’t count for shit!

She should have known…she should have had it figured out back in high school… She’d done well on the SATs, she had scored unusually high on the CEEB, and when she applied for a couple of scholarships, her guidance counsellor had offered the opinion that she should have little difficulty winning one or even both of them. She was smart and capable, her grades were good, and she was definitely college-ready. And what happened?

Everyone acknowledged that she had better grades, better scores, even a better record of extracurricular activities than the boys to whom the scholarships were given. Their financial need was not even as great as her own. It wasn't fair! she had cried, but, the counsellor said, despite their lacklustre grades and uninspiring school record, they were boys…they needed the college degree because they were going to grow up and marry and have families to support. She, on the other hand, did not need a degree because she would just grow up and marry someone who would support her and her children. Like now...

She should have figured it out then…that intelligence, excellence, and performance didn’t mean a thing. But she didn’t…she thought it was more of that crap she used to put up with Mother, always favouring Brother because he was a boy...like that actually meant something. But now she knew…she was female, she was smart, and she was doomed.

She turned herself towards the bus stop and began walking. She still had to find a job or she and Annie would starve. She wasn’t sure yet what she was going to do for work, but she knew now that it damned sure wasn’t going to involve her intellect.

Old Jim Crow

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:36:00 +0000

“What’s that, Daddy?” They were sprawled out on the living room floor on their tummies, chins cupped in their palms, watching the blurry black and white images flicker across the screen. “Is it a parade?”

Seeing Daddy focussed on the screen, Brother allowed his wriggling and fidgeting to include a punch or two to her shoulder and leg. “Owww!” she protested. “Stop it!”

“Quit your bickering,” Mommy’s voice came from the kitchen, “And leave your brother alone!”

She got up and moved to the other side of Daddy so brother would have to climb over him to get to her. “What is it Daddy?” she repeated.

“Well, it’s a bunch of kids going into a school,” he said, his voice measured, sombre. What could be so serious about going to school?

“Why are all the soldiers there?” she asked. “And why are all those people on the streets? Are you sure it isn’t a parade?”

Daddy shook his head. “Those soldiers are helping those kids get into the school be cause a lot of people don’t want them go.”

She squinted at the screen and saw a cluster of people wearing normal clothes, the soldiers clustered about them. “I don’t get it. Why don’t people want those kids to go to school? Kids have to go to school…it’s their job!”

Daddy shook his head, an amused smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “They are Negro kids, honey,” he said. “And those people don’t want the Negro kids going to school with their kids.”

She lay on her stomach a while, pondering this peculiar bit of information, watching the slow procession of the nine students and their Army escort. She didn’t disbelieve Daddy, but she couldn’t figure out any kind of a reason. “Why?” she finally asked.

Daddy nodded at the screen. “They think that the schools…and a lot of other things should be separate for the coloured people,” he said. “They have a thing called ‘separate but equal’ there.”

She pondered this for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t get it. Why can’t they all go to the same school? Isn’t it wasteful to have two schools instead of one? Nana says ‘waste not, want not.’”

Daddy struggled to contain his smile. “Yeah, you’ve got a point there, punkin. Why have two schools or two water fountains or two of anything when one will do?” He looked back at the TV. “Maybe you should to talk to those guys.”

“Oh, for Chrissakes, Eddie, quit beating around the bush with her or we’re going to end up with a wagon load of snot-nosed little half-breed pickaninnies for grandchildren,” Mommy was standing in the kitchen door with her hands on her hips, a dishtowel slung over her shoulder, noxious odours wafting past her head. “Just tell her that they are a buncha dirty, lazy, shiftless niggers that nobody wants their kids to associate with and be done with it.” Mommy disappeared back into the kitchen, trapping the smells of burnt meat and hot, rancid bacon grease on the other side of the kitchen door.

“Yeah!” Brother chimed in. “I don’t wanna go to school with no nigger babies!”

“Why not?” she asked, keen to discover the reason for this peculiarity.

“’Cause they’re dirty and they’re shif’less!” he declared. “Mommy says so!”

She looked to Daddy for clarification, but he just shook his head. She pondered on it some more, watching the slow progression of the nine students and their military escort. People were coming out of the crowd and throwing things and she could see upraised fists being shaken and the soldiers holding the people back. It was scary.

“Do we have a different school for Negro kids? Is that why we don’t have any at my school?” she asked. She had seen Negroes before, but didn’t think she had ever seen one at school.

Daddy shook his head. “I don’t think any Negro families live around here…but if they did, their kids would go to school with you.”

She sighed. “Daddy, I don’t get it.”

Daddy turned on his side as a commercial came on. To the background tune of “Pamper, Pamper, new shampoo, gentle as a lamb, so right for you…” Daddy tried to explain.

“Some people don’t like certain other people and don’t want to associate with them…”

She nodded attentively. “I don’t like Stanley Moran and don’t want to play with him,” she offered.

“Why don’t you like Stanley Moran?” Daddy asked.

“Because he teases me and he calls me names and he’s mean to the girls and says bad things about other kids.”

“So you don’t like Stanley because he’s not a nice person?” She nodded. “Who do you like at school?”

“I like Trudy and Dana and…”

“What if Trudy’s skin was black? Would you like her then?”

“Of course,” she said. “She would still be Trudy, wouldn’t she?”

Daddy gave a little shake of his head, muttering something about “mouths” and “babes.”

“Well, honey,” he said, sitting up into a cross-legged position. “There are people who would not like Trudy just because she had black skin. Because they don’t like anybody with black skin.”

She was beginning to get it. “Because their skin is black?”

“Bingo!” Daddy said. “Because their skin is black.”

“Well, that’s just not fair!” she huffed indignantly. “They can’t help having black skin! Not like Stanley could be a nice boy if he wanted to be.”

“That’s true,” Daddy said, drawing her into his lap. “But that’s the way it is…or at least the way it has been for as long as I can remember.”

“What do you think, Daddy?”

“I think they should send all the niggers back to Africa,” Brother piped up. “They don’t belong here anyway.”

“Nobody asked you,” she said, sticking out her tongue from the shelter of Daddy’s lap.

“I think it’s OK to have Negro neighbours,” Daddy said. “And it’s ok to work with them and go to school with them, even sit next to them on the bus or at a café…and maybe even have Negro friends. But I don’t think it is ok to go out on a date with one or to marry one.”

Well, that was a new thought! “Why not?” she asked. The rules surrounding Negros seemed to be very confusing and without any identifiable logic.

“Because if you date one, you may marry one…and then the children will be half Negro and half white and nobody will want them because they won’t be either one.”

Ah. That made sense. Sort of. She looked at the TV again, trying to find people who looked half Negro and half white, but couldn’t seem to find any. Looked like Daddy was right.

“Do you know any Negroes?” she asked. Mommy called them for dinner.

Daddy nodded, helping her up onto her feet. “Yep. Got a couple of Negro boys working down at the shop on the weekends, pumping gas, cleaning up, that sort of thing.”

They moved towards the kitchen, her footsteps dragging as she recognized the smell of liver and onions fried in bacon grease. “I don’t think I’m very hungry, Daddy,” she said, hanging back.

Daddy smiled and laughed outright. “You don’t fool me with that act,” he smiled at her. “C’mon, I’ll make sure you get a really little piece…”

Fair and Equal

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:19:00 +0000

“Just where do you think you are going with that, young lady?” Mommy asked.

“To the car,” she said, struggling with a pillowcase full of clothes.

“And why, pray tell?”

“Daddy said we need a change of clothes and a warm coat and extra socks because it gets cold at night up in the mountains,” she replied, nearly to the front door.

“And what makes you think you are going?”

Mommy’s voice stopped her cold. She turned around, the pillowcase falling to her knees in concert with her heart. “What do you mean?”

Mommy smiled that funny little half smile of hers and took a deep drag off her cigarette. “I mean, what makes you think you are going?”

She was sure Daddy said both of them were going camping with him…Mommy didn’t like camping so she was going to stay home.

“Daddy said I was going?” she asked, hopefully.

Mommy blew out a perfect smoke ring, then a second smaller ring to pierce the first. She wondered idly what Mommy had done with her long black cigarette holder…

“Did you ask me if you could go?”

She shook her head. “But Daddy said I could…”

“Did you ask me?” Mommy inquired again, her eyes and lips thinning, her body leaning forward from the sofa.

She shook her head silently, then stood apprehensively as the silence lengthened and grew.

Mommy finally spoke. “Well?”

Was she supposed to ask Mommy for permission after Daddy had already said she could go? What could it hurt?

“Can I go camping with Daddy and Brother?” she asked, hefting the pillow case that was getting awfully heavy.

Mommy leaned back against the sofa cushions and sucked in another long draught of smoke from her cigarette. “No,” Mommy said dismissively, reaching down for her True Confessions magazine. “Now go put that stuff back.”

Her heart nearly stopped in her chest. “Why not?” she wailed, oblivious to the danger her question posed.

“Because I said so,” Mommy answered, not looking up.

“But Brother gets to go! That’s not fair!”

Mommy sucked another drag off her cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray with the dozen or so other red-stained butts. “You are a girl,” Mommy replied, turning a page in her magazine.

She stood by the front door, nonplussed. What did Brother being a boy have to do with anything?

“I’m older than he is!” she pleaded her case. “I do better in school!”

Mommy shook her head silently, her eyes never leaving the page.

“Mommmeeee!” she cried, prancing up and down with frustration. “Mommy, why can’t I go? Daddy said I could…I’ll be good…I haven’t been bad…”

“You are being bad right now,” Mommy said, lighting another smoke. “I told you to go put those things back in your dresser and you’re standing there arguing with me.” Mommy’s eyes narrowed down again. “Do you know what happens to little girls who argue with their mothers?” She nodded her head stiffly, mutely. “Then go to your room like I told you.”

“It’s not fair!” she cried, but headed towards her room dragging the pillowcase behind her. “Daddy said I could go!”

“You are a girl,” Mommy repeated. “You are not spending the night out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of boys and men,” she said, a note of finality in her voice. “Now if I hear anything more about this, you can continue your whining and complaining to the strap, do I make myself understood?”

She nodded again, stiffly…mutely. “Fine,” Mommy said. “Now get out of my sight…and don’t you dare start your goddamned blubbering because if you do, I will give you something to blubber about.”

Her pillowcase was unpacked and back on her pillow, silent tears staining it. She could hear Daddy and Mommy talking through the thin wall that separated her bedroom from the living room.

“She doesn’t feel well,” Mommy was saying. “I sent her to bed…no, don’t disturb her, she’s asleep.”

Daddy’s voice was just a rumble, but moments later she heard the front door close and the sound of his car engine, an old Kaiser he had modified for camping and hunting and fishing. Before long the engine sound faded into the distance.

She turned the pillow over to find a dry spot.

Mother

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:34:00 +0000

She had worked on the card for days. It was Mother’s Day this Sunday and the whole third grade had been making cards. She had chosen a stiff white paper and made flowers of coloured tissue and stuck them on the front in a three-dimensional bouquet. She had composed a short rhyme and had carefully written it on the inside in her very best handwriting. On the front she had inscribed “Happy Moher’s Day” in crayon, with a shadow carefully drawn to the side of each letter. It was beautiful, even if she did say so herself.

On Sunday she made a pot of coffee and when she heard Mommy stirring, poured a cup and added milk and sugar until it was just as Mommy liked it. She made toast and buttered it and put a jar of jam and a spoon on the tray. As a finishing touch she added the little yellow flowers she had found in the vacant lot next door and the pretty card. Mommy should be pleased that she had spent so much time and effort just to make her happy and to feel good!

The tray was awkward, but she managed to shove the bedroom door open with her hip and not jostle the contents of the tray. She put the tray on the empty side of the bed and handed Mommy her cup of coffee and, after the first few sips were down, proudly handed Mommy the card. Mommy studied it. She opened the card and read the rhyme, then closed it and studied the front of the card again.

She quivered with anticipation. It was a beautiful card, she knew it. She had worked for days to make it just right. Any minute now Mommy would tell her how nice the card was and smile and be happy.

Moments ticked by and her anticipation began to turn to anxiety. Mommy took another sip of coffee, then looked up at her. “How do you spell ‘mother’?”

She was puzzled. “M-O-T-H-E-R” she answered.

Mommy tossed the card at her. “The least you could have done is spell it right.”

Underneath it all

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:19:00 +0000

She couldn’t believe she was in junior high! It was so exciting! It was a little scary, too, but exciting! She was probably the youngest student in the seventh grade, but that was OK, she’d been the youngest kid in class for more than three years now, so she was used to it and the teasing that invariably came with it.

Starting junior high was not without its problems, though. She would now be going to gym class…”Physical Education” or “PE” they called it…every day of the week and she needed a gym uniform. She knew this was not going to sit well with Mommy because if Mommy couldn’t sew it herself out of scrap material or remnants she found on sale, it wasn’t going to be in her wardrobe. And the school was pretty adamant about the gym uniform.

They were allowed to wear just any old shorts and shirts for the first two weeks of school, to give people time to get the regulation uniform, but after that the gym teachers would start deducting points from the grades of each kid who showed up in “civilian” shorts. Some of the gym teachers were a little flexible on the matter, but her teacher, Miss Pederson, was not of a flexible or agreeable persuasion. A former member of the Marine Corps, a fact proudly displayed in the Marine Corps insignia sticker that was on the back of her roll-call clip board, Miss Pederson was a rigid, by-the-book kind of teacher. And that first Monday she showed up in the roll call ranks…they were arrayed in a formation like little soldiers…wearing her turquoise and white checked shorts and matching top when every one else was wearing the regulation white cotton cap-sleeved shirt with snap front and black twill shorts with a white stripe down the left side, all hell had broken loose.

“Janssen!” Miss Pederson had bellowed in a credible imitation of Mommy. She trembled visibly as she replied in the requisite form, “Yes, Ma’am?”

“What is that you’ve got on?”

“Shorts and a shirt, Ma’am,” she replied, her voice wobbling. The other girls turned and stared at her.

“Where is your uniform?”

“I don’t have one,” she answered, her voice growing weaker, thinner.

“And you don’t have one because…?”

She felt like she was going to faint, like she couldn’t get enough air. Why did she have to be in the middle? Why couldn’t Mommy and Miss Pederson fight it out without making her the messenger? She knew this was going to be ugly and Mommy had no compunctions about killing the messenger.

“My mother said I didn’t need one, that these shorts will work fine.” She hung her head and stared at her toes.

“The uniform is required, Janssen. Not by me, but by the whole school district. City wide. Do you understand?”

She nodded her head. Oh, she understood, all right. She understood that Mommy wasn’t going to spend a cent more than she absolutely had to, and this gym uniform was not, in Mommy’s eyes, a necessity. She had shorts, she could wear them. She sighed.

“Did you have something more to say, Janssen?” Miss Pederson asked loudly. All eyes were on her and the other girls were tittering. She shook her head miserably.

It was no better the following day when she “suited up” in her turquoise checks and again stood out like a sore thumb in the roll call.

“Janssen!” Miss Pederson bellowed at her. She wanted a hole to open up in the blacktop and swallow her.

“Yes, Ma’am?” she responded.

“Where is your uniform?”

“My mother refuses to buy one, Ma’am,” she said. There. Let the two adults duke it out! Let this be the last day the other girls snickered at her.

Mommy was livid when she walked in the door from work. “What in the hell did you think you were doing, giving that woman my telephone number at work?”

She knew instantly who Mommy was talking about. “I didn’t! I didn’t!” shook her head. “She must have got it from the office!”

Mommy was not mollified. “She had some goddamned nerve calling me up at work and demanding that I go out and buy one of those prissy uniforms! For an hour a day you can wear a pair of plain shorts and a shirt, there’s no reason to spend money on such a thing! Does she think I’m made out of money? If it is so goddamned important to her, she can just go out and buy it herself!”

Mommy continued to rant and rave throughout making dinner, yelling that she had not cut the potatoes small enough, there was dust on top of the TV…although it wasn’t dusting day…and the trash can was full…even though it was Brother’s chore to take the trash out. Invective rained down upon her from the moment Mommy walked in the door until she was sent to her room to do her homework. Standing on a stool to put the dried dishes away…this was one chore he could not shirk because Mommy was home…Brother looked down at her wide-eyed as Mommy slammed out of the kitchen. “Boy,” he breathed, “What did you do to set her off?” It was all she could do to keep from crying.

“Some students cannot afford uniforms,” Miss Pederson said at the beginning of the next gym class. Since she was the only student without a uniform, all eyes were turned on her and she could hear the shushed giggles, even if she couldn’t identify the kids responsible. “…and I have been told by the principal’s office that we must take that into account. So, if any of you girls cannot afford to buy a gym uniform, you may wear civilian shorts until the end of the first quarter, by which time you must have a uniform or you will be failed for the following quarter.” She paused and looked around. “Is that understood, girls?”

“Yes, Ma’am!” they cried in unison, 45 pairs of eyes slewed towards her.

The uniform debacle, however, was nothing compared to her very first day in PE. It had been a humiliation that she was afraid she would never live down…and it was repeated every single school day, twice each day, when she had to strip down to her underwear and change clothes.

She had never felt so ignorant in her life. Without access to the magazines and entertainments of her peers, isolated from the other girls and not allowed to go on sleepovers or other girlish group activities, she was mentally and socially stuck in about the fifth grade. When they began disrobing in the gym that first day they were instructed to suit up, a resounding hoot went up from the other girls when she stripped off her slip to reveal that her second set of shoulder straps were for an undershirt…every other girl in the gym class was wearing a bra. Even the girls who were as flat as she was had little white bandeaus across their undeveloped bosoms. Her face burned with embarrassment.

Linda Johnson, who had the locker next to hers and was as flat chested as a boy, jogged her with an elbow. “What gives with the baby undershirt?” Linda joked. “Forget your bra today?”

She shook her head and looked down at her own featureless chest. “I’m not big enough for one…” she began.

“That’s why they make training bras, silly,” Linda had said, stretching out the soft elastic fabric of her own bra cup. “So you can grow into them.” Linda lowered her voice conspiratorially. “You should get one so the other girls won’t laugh at you.” She nodded.

“Can I have a bra?” she asked her mother that night at dinner as she pushed the greasy, heavily peppered fried potatoes around her plate.

Her brother laughed and her mother just raised an eyebrow. “Whatever for?”

“All the girls in gym class have bras,” she said. “I’m the only one who still wears an undershirt.”

“I’m not made out of money,” Mommy said, forking up a mouthful of those awful potatoes. “Besides, you don’t need one. How would you keep it from riding up to your chin and choking you?” she laughed. Brother sniggered into his plate.

“I want a training bra,” she emphasized. “It will grow with me until I’m big enough for a regular one.”

Mommy raised an eyebrow at her again, a forkload of desiccated, leathery brown stuff that might once have been a piece of beef, lifted halfway to her mouth. “Training bra? What would you be training them for?” Mommy laughed.

“Please, Mommy,” she begged. “I’m the only girl in gym who is still wearing an undershirt and its embarrassing!”

“Then don’t wear the undershirt,” Mommy said.

“Mommmmyyy!” she pleaded. “I need a bra!”

“That’s enough!” Mommy had said loudly, slamming down her fork. “Jesus H. Kee-rist on a crutch, you would think I was made out of money or something! First a gym uniform that you don’t need, now a bra you don’t need either…you are just going to nickel-and-dime me to death!”

She opened her mouth to protest, but Mommy held up her hand. “Not one more word out of you, young lady or you’ll be sorry you brought this up and you won’t get a bra until you are 35! Now shut your mouth and eat your dinner.” There had been no further discussion. And there had been no bra.

Every day Mommy gave her a nickel and a penny…money for milk with her lunch at school. And from that day forward, she stopped drinking milk. When she had saved enough money, she took her nickels and pennies to a little shop that specialized in teen age fashions…including lingerie…and bought for herself her first bra. She washed it by hand in the girls bathroom and hung it in her gym locker on Friday afternoons so that it would be clean for Monday. The subject was not reopened until nearly the end of the school year.

Cathy Carlisle, one of the geeky kids but a kind-hearted, sweet-natured girl, had started school mid-year as a transfer student. Now in possession of a gym uniform and a bra, she felt more like she belonged, but the other girls had long, long memories…that first week of school had permanently ostracized her. Cathy, however, was a new student and, being a mid-year transfer student, was assigned a locker by availability rather than alphabetically by surname…which is how Carlisle came to have the locker beside Janssen, Cathy having taken the locker Linda Johnson vacated when she moved away.

Cathy was nice. She liked Cathy, even if she was one of the quiet, studious girls who didn’t “get” teen society. She got it, but after that first couple of weeks in gym and a few other, equally embarrassing, episodes during the school year, it didn’t matter. She was permanently and irrevocably ostracized. But Cathy didn’t seem to care.

As the school year was coming to a close, Cathy came to class one Monday with a brown paper sack in her hand. “I hope you don’t mind…aren’t offended…” she began awkwardly, then proffered the bag. “My father took me shopping for new lingerie this weekend,”…Cathy’s mother had died when she was small and her father was a devoted father who also just happened to be one of the top cardiologists in Las Brisas… “and Daddy suggested that I give these to someone who might be able to use them.” Cathy coloured a rosy pink. “I noticed yours was a little small…”

She opened the bag and saw, nestled in the bottom, several bras, all of them in excellent condition, every one high quality, expensive, and very, very pretty. She had envied Cathy her lingerie from the first moment they had suited up together. She looked up, incredulous.

“I hope…” Cathy stammered… “I mean, I didn’t intend to offend you…” The girl reached out a pale hand as if to take the bag back.

“Oh, no!” she cried. “Oh, I’m happy to have them! Thank you so much!” It was all she could do to keep from throwing her arms around the girl and hugging her.

The moment she got home she tried them on. They were a tiny bit too big, but before long they would surely fit her. She had gone from looking like a boy to more than an A cup in just this school year, so it shouldn’t be long before these would fit as well. Wouldn’t Mommy be pleased, six beautiful, expensive bras for free!

Mommy wasn’t pleased.

“You were begging, weren’t you?” Mommy sneered. “Playing on some snotty little rich girl’s sympathy. You should go on the stage, you know that? You are such a good little tear-jerking actress!”

“Noooo, Mommy,” she pleaded. “She just gave them to me. She has the locker next to me in gym and…”

“Don’t lie to me, you little bitch, or I will slap you to sleep!” Mommy face was heating up red. “This is expensive stuff…nobody just gives stuff like this away!”

“But she did!” she cried insistently. “She did!”

Mommy fetched her a stunning slap that knocked her backwards two or three steps. Before she could even raise a hand to her burning cheek, Mommy slammed her other cheek with a backhand and she staggered into a wall and slid down to the floor.

“Don’t you try to get away from me, you little bitch!” Mommy screamed. Her scalp was suddenly on fire as Mommy grabbed a huge handful of hair and yanked her up to a standing position where she was nearly spun around with the force of the next blow.

“I’ll teach you!” Mommy shrieked, dragging her towards the kitchen. “I will teach you once and for all! I have had it with you and your whining, poor-little-victim act, always trying to make people feel sorry for you, like you were some pitiful little wretch!”

Her face burned, her scalp burned but neither of them held a candle to the sudden lash of white-hot fire that curled around a bare leg. Mommy had somehow gotten hold of the strap!

“Noooo!” she cried. “Noooo…it wasn’t like that!” she screamed.

“I don’t know why I put up with you!” Mommy shrieked, snaking the thin leather strap around her other leg and leaving a long, red, angry welt. “You are the most ungrateful, disgraceful, disobedient, difficult child God ever put on this earth, and why I had to end up saddled with you I will never understand!” whoosh! crack! The strap wrapped itself around her again. “What were you thinking, humiliating me like that? Begging cast-off underwear, for God’s sake, from some rich little bitch?”

She could not answer. She could not even cry. She was numb, inside and out, with only the endlessly repeating sting of the lash penetrating her consciousness. And then, another ear-ringing slap.

“Now look what you’ve done!” Mommy was barely coherent, holding up her right hand and peering intently at the palm. “You’ve made me break a blood vessel in my hand! You bitch! You bitch! I’m gonna beat you within an inch of your life!”

“Mommy! Mommy!” she heard Brother’s voice in the background. “Mommy! Telephone!”

She shuddered as she heard Mommy pick up the phone and in the sweetest, calmest, most precious voice ever say “Why, hello, Bettie, how are things with you tonight?” How could Mommy go from being nearly hysterically, bouncing-off-the-walls crazy mad to sweet and lovey-dovey the next minute? It was terrifying, that lightning fast switch! She didn’t move, not having been given permission to do so, but crouched huddled against the kitchen cabinet awaiting Mommy’s further attention.

“Go to your room,” Mommy finally said. “And stay there!” She got up and started for her room, reaching out to take the brown sack full of lacy, expensive brassieres. “Leave it,” Mommy said tersely. “I’ll get rid of them.”

The girls in gym class whispered behind their hands as she stood at roll call the next day, the red stripes on her legs certainly the topic of their conversation. But no one mentioned her legs or the brightly coloured bruise on the side of her face…in fact, no one spoke to her at all. And in the evening, when dinner was over and the dishes were done and Mommy was getting dressed to go out “bar hopping,” as she called it, her mother strolled out into the living room for her cigarettes, dressed in her slip and bra. A familiar bra. An expensive, pretty, lacy bra.

She pretended not to see.

Bus money

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:38:00 +0000

“Frank,” she whispered. “Frank, wake up, please.” She was whispering so she wouldn’t wake Mother.

“Hmm?” Frank mumbled, opening his eyes to a squint. “What?”

“Frank, I need to borrow a dollar for bus fare. Can you loan it to me until I get paid?”

His eyes flicked in the direction of her mother, who lay snoring gently to his left, then back to her. “Sure,” he said softly, patting the bed beside him for her to sit down. “Hand me my pants.”

She sat. She had known Frank for ten years…since she was six. Frank had owned the house on the dirt road that Mother and Daddy bought as their first house when she was in the first grade. Frank used to come by the house every month to collect the house payment, and often he brought his little black poodle, Duchess, who was friendly to the point of sloppy affection. She liked Duchess, especially after Mother had given Duke away and there were no more dogs.

Mother and Frank had been friends for a long time…at least she had thought they were friends…hindsight being clearer, she was pretty sure now that they had been something more…probably much more. When Frank and his much younger, pretty-enough-to-be-a-model and smart-enough-to-hire-shark-lawyers wife, Meggie, broke up he faced losing a great deal of property and several businesses in the divorce. She had often overheard Mother…who was a bookkeeper and who could be very creative when she needed to be…and Frank discussing ways for him to retain his assets while shedding the acquisitive, spendthrift Meggie. And Mother, true to her conniving ways, had come up with a brilliant idea…and Frank happily jumped out of the frying pan into the fire by selling all of his assets to Mother for one dollar, thinking to save himself from Meggie’s rapacious divorce attorneys. He hadn’t considered, apparently, that Mother would then own all of his assets, leaving him even more penniless than Meggie’s attorneys were trying to make him. Mother, ever alert to an opportunity, had parlayed this one into what she believed was a financially secure marriage… and, of course, control of Frank’s little empire.

The one good thing, however, was that Frank didn’t have a lot of patience with Mother’s behaviour and, being twenty years older, was seldom intimidated by Mother’s temper and outbursts. She could thank him several times over for aborting Mother’s run up to a beating by saying “That’s enough, Georgia. Leave the kid alone.” He could shout louder than Mother could and didn’t seem to be the least bit phased by Mother’s control of his assets. She wasn’t sure, but she suspected Frank had resumed ownership at some point in the relationship…maybe when they got married... From what she heard when they argued, which, because of Mother’s contentiousness, was often, Frank had resumed ownership of at least some of the assets, but Mother had some kind of financial control. She shrugged inwardly…it didn’t matter, as long as Frank could loan her a buck until she got paid.

She had a job after school, working in a hospital kitchen. While the work was boring and repetitious, she now had a legitimate excuse for being out of the house from seven in the morning until after eight in the evening, which just suited her fine. She had a study hall in which to do her homework, no difficult classes to study for, and only had to be home to sleep and change clothes...she ate lunch at school and dinner was leftovers in the hospital kitchen. But she had to hand over her pay check to Mother, who would then give her $5 for bus fare and school lunches and keep the rest. When she had objected, Mother archly informed her that the law said a parent was “entitled to the fruits of a child’s labour,” which explained a lot of things to her, including why she could pick beans and strawberries all summer and never see a dime of the money once Mother got into the picture. Nana had taken her shopping at the end of this last summer, a week-long shopping orgy in which she bought everything from underwear to a new coat and everything in between. She had only $10 of her picking money left at the end of the summer and Mother was so mad she was almost cross-eyed with rage, especially since Nana “lost” the receipts and nothing could be returned for a refund. Now, Mother said that she was “saving” the wages she was confiscating for things like senior pictures and announcements and a prom gown, but she knew better. She would never see a penny of that money and although Mother would pay for those things items, Mother would keep all the left-over money for herself. She had no illusions about how Mother’s mind worked…she hadn't for a long while.

She bent and retrieved Frank’s trousers from the floor and twisted her body to hand them to him. “Take out my wallet,” he whispered. As she busied herself removing his wallet from the back pocket, she felt his hand slide up her skirt and rest on her bare thigh. Shocked, she sat stiffly still for a second, then tried to pull her leg away. His hand tightened around her thigh. “Sssst,” he hissed softly. “Sit still. You don’t want to wake up your mother, do you?” She shook her head. “Take the money you need,” he said, his hand sliding around to her inner thigh and moving upward to touch her panties.

She snatched a single dollar and tossed his wallet down on the floor next to the bed and tried to get up again, but his hand gripped her slim thigh tightly and his eyes flicked meaningfully over his shoulder. “What do you think she would say if she woke up right now?” he said softly. She ceased resisting and allowed his fingers to roam, frantically trying to think of something to say that would make him simply let her go without waking Mother. When she felt his finger start to penetrate her, she gasped, then blurted “I’m going to be late for school!”

His hand ceased its predations and she saw him look up at the clock. Nodding once in agreement, he withdrew his hand from under her skirt, but as she leapt up from the side of the bed he grabbed her wrist. “If you tell your mother, I’ll tell her you started it. She’ll believe me, too…you know that, don’t you?” She nodded mutely, straining against his grip.

He smiled, releasing her wrist slowly. “You don’t need to pay it back,” he whispered hoarsely as she hurried to the bedroom door. “And you can borrow money from me any time you want.”

First Kiss

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 05:26:00 +0000

There was this boy at school…Kenny Woodruff…who liked her. Trouble was, she didn’t like him. Not even a little bit.

He was nice enough to play with when they were younger, and he lived in one of the big, older houses in the neighbourhood with a second story and old, big trees that were very cool for climbing. His front yard had a really big old pepper tree with a swing and a platform that could be accessed by climbing up slats of wood that had been nailed to the trunk and bigger branches like ladder rungs. You could sit up there alone like a princess in a tower and read or just daydream, hidden away from those mere mortals who congregated below to argue over whose turn it was to play on the swing.

The trouble was, he really liked her. In that kind of boy-girl way that really wasn’t hugely interesting to her. She actually liked his younger brother, Kevin, better. She and Kevin were the same age and Kenny was two years older, even though he was in her grade. He had been held back a year in elementary school and she had skipped a grade. He should be in the ninth grade, she should be in the seventh…they were both in the eighth, although they really didn’t have any classes together…they hadn’t since starting junior high. They’d been in the same fifth and sixth grade classrooms, but in junior high she was in the advanced classes and Kenny was not. But she saw him every day on the school bus and he took it upon himself to walk her to and from the bus every day, despite her attempts to discourage him. It was a blessing when Kevin got to junior high because now he joined them, despite Kenny’s attempts to discourage him. She was, it seemed, the object of Kenny’s romantic dreams, her own feelings notwithstanding.

This was one of those rare times when it was very useful to have a famously difficult mother. She could easily ditch Kenny at the front gate simply by saying that her mother would kill her if she let a boy in. It took him several months to wonder how her mother would know and when he suspiciously asked, she just shrugged. “The neighbours spy for my mother,” she said, nodding in the direction of the house directly across the street…the first house on the block to have a true plate glass picture window, and home of the most notorious gossip on the block, Carolyn Reede. “My mother plays pinochle with Mrs. Reede,” she told him. “And you know Mrs. Reede knows everything that goes on in the neighbourhood.” He had left with a closed, sullen face, but at least he left.

Kenny had grown a considerable amount in the past couple of years, and he was a taller, thicker, beefier version of his brother, Kevin. Nearly platinum blond and extremely fair skinned, when something bothered Kenny it was easy to tell…one merely looked for his face to suffuse with blood and turn beet red. He seemed a bit excitable to her…a bit like Brother, who was annoyingly fidgety and simply could not keep his hands off of anything that attracted his interest, no matter who it belonged to…and she found this unnerving at times. Kenny was not the cheerful, affable boy his brother was, and sometimes his hulking intensity scared her.

She was beginning to notice that some boys were cuter than others, even allowing that she might find it nice to actually kiss one or two of them. There was Nick Phillips, who liked to work out on the bars during lunch break…he was very cute and could do some amazing things on the bars…and he was very nice, too. But her friend Bernadette had her eye on him, was flirting with him, so she kept her interest to herself. But Kenny Woodruff? Kenny was hulking where Nick was muscular, Kenny was blunt and bumbling where Nick was respectful and well-mannered, and Kenny was, while not actually stupid, lacking in the kind of intelligence that would advance him either academically or socially. And his single-minded pursuit of her was more than just a little scary.

But she still went over to his house. She liked sitting on the platform up in the tree, above the rest of the world, remote, unseen, untouchable. Up on the platform, hidden in the long, feathery limbs of the pepper tree, she felt safe from the rest of the world. It was the closest thing she had to a sanctuary.

They weren’t supposed to go out after school, but she and Brother had come to an unspoken agreement…once their chores were done and Mommy had called and checked up on them, they would go out to play…and they would not tattle on each other. She had no idea where Brother went and presumed he had no idea where he might find her. But ten to fifteen minutes before Mommy was expected, they would each scramble home and take up their posts in their respective bedrooms, doing something suitably innocuous like reading or homework. Mommy did not allow them to watch TV, play outside, or have friends over to the house when she was not there. Theirs was a daily ritual.

On a warm spring afternoon she heard the creaking of the slats nailed to the tree trunk, an effective announcement of an impending visitor. Expecting Kevin, who like to read as well, she was disappointed to see Kenny’s blond crew cut appear. Without waiting to be invited…it was his tree, after all…he heaved himself up onto the platform and sat, cross legged, entirely too close to her. She wriggled away.

“Don’t you like me?” he said to her without preamble. “You’re always trying to avoid me.”

She didn’t know how to deal with this, and he was sitting too close again. She wriggled further away. “I don’t know what you mean, Kenny,” she temporized. “I like you fine.”

“Do you like me like a boyfriend?” he asked bluntly, moving closer again.

“Ummm…” she hesitated a moment, then shook her head. “No, Kenny, I’m sorry. I like you fine as a friend, but not like a boyfriend.”

She began to grow alarmed as she saw his face begin to colour. “But you like Kevin, don’t you?” he said, his voice tense, ugly. “Don’t you? You like my little brother but not me!”

She shook her head, edging toward the side of the platform where the slats were nailed. “He’s just my friend, Kenny. Like you…just my friend.”

He was beside her again, so close she could smell the soap his mother used to wash his shirt. She made a swift move for the edge of the platform but he blocked her and grabbed her with one hand behind her neck and other gripping her head. Then, horrifyingly, he pressed his mouth to hers. She struggled, beating against him and trying to twist away, oblivious that she was on a platform in a tree, fifteen feet above the ground. His lips were disgustingly slack, sloppy and wet, and he nearly sucked the breath from her before he thrust his repulsive tongue nearly down her throat. Flailing and gagging, she could not dislodge his superior weight and, desperate for air and freedom, she did the only thing that came to mind. She bit down on his tongue with as much force as she could muster.

He bellowed and thrust her away and before he could recover and renew his grasp, she scrambled down the slat ladder and sprinted home, dashing in the door and slamming it behind her. Panting for breath, she went to the bathroom to clean up…if Mommy saw her sweating and winded, there would be ten kinds of hell to pay. A few minutes later she heard Brother come home and, checking the mirror to make sure she looked as if nothing had happened, she left the bathroom, headed for her room.

It wasn’t Brother who had come in the door. Kenny Woodruff, his face glowing red with rage, was in the hallway outside her bedroom, advancing on her.

“You have to go, Kenny,” she said desperately. “My mother will be home any time and you can’t be here.”

Kenny said nothing but continued to slowly advance upon her, like a cat stalking a mouse. She remembered how strong he was when he had hold of her up on the platform, and her heart began to hammer as she edged toward the exit from the hallway that led to the living room…if she could get there, she could make the front door and run to one of the neighbours for help.

“You’ve got to leave,” she said again and looked quickly into Brother’s bedroom to try to distract him as she darted the other direction for the living room.

She almost made it. But he grabbed her by her long ponytail and dragged her to him. “Look what you did to me!” he roared at her, the veins in his eye gone red with his rage. “Look what you’ve done!”

Confused, terrified, she struggled to get free, but he had her ensnared by her long hair and with one had he was forcing her head down, to look at the floor. “Look what you did to me, you goddamned little tease!” His other hand had opened his trousers and in the brief moment before she squeezed her eyes shut, she saw only a mass of engorged, terrifyingly red flesh protruding from the open fly.

“Look at it!” he raged, shaking her head back and forth by her hair. “Look what you did! And now you have to take care of it!”

Attempting to control her feeble struggles had caused Kenny to move them into the living room, but now he started dragging her towards her bedroom. Keeping her eyes tightly squeezed shut, she tried to go limp, make a dead weight of herself, and alternately dig her heels into the cheap thin carpet. She was able only to slow his progress and he inexorably moved towards the bedroom, alternately cursing her and blaming her for his condition.

Then suddenly she was free. “Take your hands off my sister!” she heard and her eyes flew open in surprise. Brother! Her brother had a stick of some kind and he was whacking Kenny over the head and across the back and shouting at him to leave their house and never come back. She began to cry in relief. “Don’t ever touch her again!” she heard him roar to Kenny’s retreating back. “Don’t even talk to her!”

“Oh, thank you!” she sobbed, trying to hug Brother for his rescue, but he pushed her away.

“Go wash your face and comb your hair,” he said, taking the stick and heading towards his bedroom. “Mommy will be home pretty soon and I don’t want her asking a lot of questions that will make us both have to stay home in the afternoon.” He closed his bedroom door.

Little Girl Lost

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 06:34:00 +0000

It had not been an easy pregnancy.

Annie was only three and Jakie was just a year and a half, she was unemployed, and desperate enough to let Rod back into her life, despite having left him five months ago after he had nearly strangled her to death. How was she to know she was pregnant at the time? She lay on the sofa, swollen feet propped up on the arm, and stared at the stained ceiling. How had her life come to this? Two toddlers, an abusive drunk for a husband, a shabby tenement with a leaking roof and rats outside big enough to saddle and ride, in a place where it was bitterly cold in the winter and suffocatingly hot and humid in the summer?

Her hand rested on her swollen abdomen. Poor baby. Like she could offer this child any more than the first two had…much as she hated to admit it, Mother had been right. Love just isn’t enough…raising kids takes money, and that was something that was always in short, short supply. At least they had enough to eat since Rod moved in…there had been stretches of days where she had eaten nothing but plain oatmeal so what little food that remained in the house could be fed to the kids. They didn’t like powdered milk and Annie was mortally offended by being offered split pea soup for a meal, peas being probably her least favorite food in the world, but faced with hunger or pea soup, the peas won out.

She sighed. Four months to go. An August birth…this would mean trying to keep a new baby comfortable and rash-free in the suffocating humidity of the summer weather while she recuperated from another Caesarean section. It was dead certain that Rod would be no more help with this child than he had been in the past…and with her entire family on the West Coast, there would be no help from that quarter. She shook her head ruefully…as if there had been any help in the past. When Annie was born, Mother had fetched them from the hospital…the military had sent her husband off to Vietnam…drove her to her little converted garage cottage and dropped her off without so much as a by-your-leave. And there she had been left alone with a ten-day-old baby…it was the day after her 18th birthday, she had nearly died in the hospital of an infection, she had a Caesarean scar on her belly that would not stop aching but, because she was breastfeeding…a positively scandalous choice forever labelling her as hopelessly low class…she couldn’t take any pain medication.

Things had only been marginally better with Jakie’s birth. Rod’s mother hated her…she wasn’t Italian, she wasn’t Catholic, she was from the wrong side of the country, and she had had the temerity to marry her precious only son…but Rod’s stepmother, Eva, had at least agreed to keep Annie while she was in the hospital for Jakie’s birth. But before the little guy had been even ten days old, she was back in her own freezing flat, healing from surgery, and caring for two children under two years of age…and a husband who was more demanding that the two babies put together.

Rod’s voice penetrated her reverie, demanding that she make him some coffee. Like he couldn’t get off his lazy ass and make himself a cup? But she knew better than to release the retort that quivered on the tip of her tongue…he hadn’t hit her since he had returned home…he hadn’t ever hit her when she was pregnant, actually…but there was always a first time. She struggled up to a sitting position, fatigue wrapped around her like a suffocating blanket, and heaved herself up off the sofa.

The next few moments were to be forever a blur in her memory. She felt dizzy, she reached out to steady herself on the nearby doorframe and suddenly a warm, wet gush of liquid cascaded down her legs, forming a spreading pool on the scarred wood floor.

“Rod!” she screamed, and the urgency in her voice must have penetrated his self-absorbed haze because he arrived at her side before her second scream had fully left her throat. Taking one look at the situation, he told her to sit back down, then ran downstairs to use the neighbour’s phone.

Amazingly, the hospital sent her home. They acknowledged that her water broke, but did nothing more than tell her husband to take her home and put her to bed, and to call her obstetrician after the holiday weekend was over. Why did she always have to choose holidays to have emergencies? she wondered, riding home in the back of a taxi listening to Rod grumble about the cost. She’d had an impacted, infected wisdom tooth on Labor Day weekend when she was eight months pregnant with Jakie, and the emergency room didn’t want to give her pain medication. Instead, they gave her a penicillin shot to which she had had a violent allergic reaction, waking up the next morning hot, red, and swollen all over, puffed up like poisoned pup. The oral surgeon who took out the tooth didn’t seem to have any compunctions against anaesthesia, but she had had to suffer for the three days before she could get the tooth extracted. Now it was Patriot’s Day weekend and she just had to go to bed and wait for it to be over.

The two flights of stairs to their attic apartment were daunting, but by taking her time, she was able to mount them. Jeanine, the teenager from the first floor, greeted them at the door and, bless her heart, refused to accept any money for watching Annie and Jakie while she and Rod were at the hospital. The little sweetheart had even washed the accumulated dishes, sparing her the back-breaking chore. Slowly, she waddled to the bedroom and stretched out on the bed and fell into an exhausted sleep.

By the next morning it was apparent that she and Rod had differing opinions on the definition of “bed rest.” She expected to stay in bed except to get up to use the bathroom; he expected her to lay in bed between accomplishing her various household tasks. Like cooking. Cleaning. Minding the kids. He conceded that grocery shopping was out and offered to do it, but her agreement was reluctant. Once out of the house without the mitigating presence of her and the kids, he would head for the nearest tavern and come home eight hours later with a loaf of bread, a quart of milk, and a belligerent attitude.

Two mornings later she awoke very early with a back ache. Too much time in the bed, she decided, and crawled out, headed for the bathroom. The first cramp seized her like a hammer blow in her lower back and she actually went down to her knees, the hollow “thud” awakening the household, sending the children into howls of alarm. “Jesus Christ!” Rod bellowed from the bedroom. “Do you have to be so clumsy?”

She struggled to stand but the pain in her back was snatching away her breath. She felt dizzy, light-headed. She thought she heard herself gasp “Help!’ but she wasn’t sure. She curled on her side, knees drawn up, and whimpered until the blackness claimed her.

She woke up in the stairwell. She was strapped to a kind of chair, two strangers carrying it down the stairs, a lot of echoing noises bouncing around her: crying children, whispering voices, bellowed commands. She couldn’t make sense of any of them. She surrendered to the blackness again, the next time opening her eyes and looking up into the face of a strange young man who had one of her eyelids pried open, a bright flashlight searing her retina.

“What’s going on?” she managed to say, but her lips felt thick and fat, and her tongue refused to be properly controlled.

Somehow the young man understood. “We’re on our way to Women’s Hospital,” he said. “You went into labour and it appears you blacked out and maybe hit your head. Just hold on and we’ll get you there in plenty of time.” He continued his probing.

“I’m five months pregnant,” she said thickly. “I have Caesareans.” His eyes widened momentarily, then he turned towards the front of the ambulance and said something she could not quite understand, her hearing as grey and fuzzy as her sight. She felt her eyes close and when they opened again it was to the punishing grasp of a giant hand digging into her lower back. Her arms and legs were too heavy to move and she could only moan at the ever-increasing intensity of the brutal grip. The ambulance bounced and bumped over sidewalks and traffic islands, the screaming siren mingling with the rushing sounds in her ears. She looked questioningly at the attendant, her ability to speak seeming to have been reduced to slow motion.

“Patriot’s Day,” he said, nodding at the window. “Opening day of baseball season, and we’re in the middle of the traffic headed for the stadium.” She nodded and closed her eyes and bit her lip against the pain, which was finally starting to subside.

She was beginning to feel a little like Alice in Wonderland. Every time she opened her eyes, everything had changed. Now she was in a little white-sheeted cubicle and someone was standing beside her, torturing her hand. “Owww!” she managed to say, feebly attempting to pull her hand free. She could see a stranger’s hand holding a cannula that looked as big as her smallest finger, and the puncture mark on the back of her hand where the stranger had tried to insert it. Before she could move or protest, a second pair of hands appeared in her field of vision and restrained her wrist and forearm while the first pair of hands jammed the thick tube into a vein on the back of her hand. She tried to scream, but her throat was too dry, her tongue too thick. What on earth was the matter with her?

When she opened her eyes the next time, the grinding pain in her back had returned. She writhed on the bed, grabbing at the bars of the headboard, and gasping for air. She heard screaming, shrieking, and terrifying howling, only to find a white-garbed nurse suddenly standing beside her and admonishing her sternly to hush, she was disturbing the other patients. “The pain,” she gasped. “Something for the pain…”

The nurse looked at her down a long, thin nose, then sniffed. “It’s too soon for pain medication,” she said, her thin lips making a prim line. “And besides, you are only having a miscarriage, it’s not like you were in real labour.”

She learned that biting down on a wad of sheet would help her ride the waves of pain. Was this labour, then? She’d had no labour with Annie and Jakie…Annie had been nearly a month past due when the doctor booked her for a C-section, and Jakie was born ten days early via scheduled C-section. Was this what labour was like, then? She had expected the pains to be in her abdomen, not in her lower back. This was excruciating! Another wave overwhelmed her and she gripped the cool steel bars of the headboard, sheets between her teeth, and twisted her body trying to escape the surge of agony that clawed at her back.

She opened her eyes to a funny sensation, a bulky feeling low in her abdomen. Almost like she had to use the toilet, but more forward. She moved her left leg experimentally and found her thighs feeling rather pushed apart and suddenly she knew…it was the baby. “Help!” she cried to the white curtains surrounding her bed. “Help me!”

That same lemon-sucking nurse snatched back the curtain. “I’ve had about enough out of you,” her bloodless lips were saying, but she interrupted.

“Something is wrong. The baby is coming. I can feel it…”

“Nonsense,” the nurse replied. “You’ve got hours to go. You were barely dilated when we checked you.”

“Look!” she cried, feeling another surge of pain gathering in her back. “Look!” She gasped suddenly, “Oh, God, it’s coming now!” She closed her eyes against the rush of pain that gripped her, clawing at the mattress with her free hand. “Oh, God. Oh, God!”

There was a cold rush of air as the sheet was snatched abruptly away from her upraised knees and the nurse started yelling. Confused, blurry images swirled around her as her bed was suddenly careening out the door of the room and rolling at an alarming speed as voices in the background made such sounds as “…get the doctor…” and “…delivering in the hallway…” She closed her eyes against the dizziness that made her want to vomit, knowing that this nurse would not appreciate having to change pukey sheets.

She was suddenly seized with what felt like a cramp. It raised her upper body off the mattress and caused her to audibly suck in air. She could not speak, but her eyes bulged in sudden terror, having no idea what was going on. Then the pain abruptly vanished and she fell back onto the sodden pillow, something wet between her thighs. She closed her eyes.

The hushed noises around her made her open them again. Like Alice, she was again in a place unfamiliar, but she recognized the green tiled walls and the massive reflective overhead light fixture…she was in an operating theatre. From the corner of her eye she could see a rubber-gloved hand extend a white cardboard carton, about the size and shape of a quart ice cream container, and then into the container was deposited a tiny, limp, wet and bloody form. Her baby.

“A boy or girl?” she managed to force out through thick lips.

“It’s not important,” that same nurse said. “It’s dead.”

“Boy or girl?” she repeated insistently, agitatedly.

“A girl,” came a soft voice from the other side of her.

“She’s dead?” she queried weakly. “Too premature?”

The thin-lipped nurse put the cover on the little white cardboard carton and set it on a stainless steel table next to the soiled towels and bloodied instruments. “From the look of things, it’s been dead for about three days.”

The day her water broke. Her baby had died that day. And they had done nothing to help her, just sent her home to rest. She closed her eyes, too tired to even cry.

A rattling, rustling sound awakened her. The person entering her room was dressed all in surgical scrubs, complete with mask, hair cover, gloves and booties, and was carrying a cardboard tray covered with disposable dishes. What was this all about?

“Oh, you’re awake!” the voice was that of a young woman. “I was beginning to wonder what colour your eyes were!”

She shook her head to clear it a bit and tried to sit up, but found she could barely move. Her tray-bearing visitor came to the bed and adjusted it to a sitting position. “Are you hungry?”

She shook her head. No, not hungry at all. In fact, she didn’t feel anything at all, except a vague sense of dread. “What’s going on here?” she asked, looking around and noting that she was alone in the room…a private room… She was a Medicaid patient…she should be in a ward.

“You’ve been very sick,” Tray Lady said. “You came in with a massive infection and for a few days there, we weren’t sure if you were going to make it.”

“You must have me confused with somebody else,” she said, shaking her head. “I came in…I was in labour…a miscarriage…at five months…”

Tray Lady nodded. “That was almost a week ago, Mrs. Martinelli. You’ve been unconscious most of that time, unconscious and on IV antibiotics. You had a massive infection…you nearly died.” She reached over and lifted a thick paper cup, “Here, try some broth.”

She shook her head. “Why all of this?” she gestured weakly to the woman’s garb and the disposables.

“Isolation,” the visitor responded. “You were so sick we were afraid that if you were exposed to anything else, it would be the end of you. Now please, eat. You need to start regaining your strength.”

She shook her head again. “My baby,” she said softly. “What happened to my baby?”

The woman shook her head. “I have no idea. Probably down to the Path Lab to find out the cause of death.” She held out the cup of broth again.

“I want my baby,” she said miserably, shaking her head. “I just want my baby.”

The next two days were days of one horror piling atop another. Nobody could find out what had happened to the baby’s body. No one could tell her if it had been baptised or given Last Rites. A nurse told her than because it was born dead, it was not necessary, but the priest who came to see her was not so encouraging. Limbo, he said. Unbaptised babies spent eternity in Limbo. She closed her eyes at his words, slow tears leaking onto her cheeks. Her room was on a maternity floor and she could hear the wailings of babies as they were taken to their mothers for feedings, each little cry stabbing into her heart like so many sharp shards of glass. Her breasts would swell and ache with remembrance, and her entire body would pulse with pain. Her baby, her tiny 15 ounce baby girl, who had no name, whose little body had disappeared and could not be baptised or even given a decent burial, was gone. She would never see sunshine, or pluck daisies or feed the squirrels on their Sunday outings to the park. She would never run barefoot in the grass or splash in puddles or taste snowflakes on her tongue. It was as if she had never existed except in her own mind. The whole thing made her feel a little bit crazy.

There was a telephone beside her bed…apparently standard issue with private rooms…and on her third day awake, it rang. At first she ignored it, knowing it couldn’t be for her, but it was insistent and she finally succumbed.

“Hello?” she said hesitantly.

“Well, it’s about time you picked up the phone,” Mother’s voice bored into her ear and yet, she felt a surge of hope, of anticipated relief.

“Oh!” she cried, tears spouting from her eyes. “Oh, Mother, the baby’s dead!” she wept. “It was a little girl and she’s dead!” She had not truly cried since coming to the hospital, and now she suddenly felt sobs forming in her throat.

“Stop blubbering,” Mother said. “I can’t understand you.”

She checked herself. The tears stopped but the sobs remained stuck in her throat as thick lumps.

“You need to pull yourself together,” Mother admonished her. “This is the best thing that could have happened, even if you don’t believe it at this point. The last thing you need right now is another brat hanging on your skirts. If you can’t keep your legs closed, get yourself some birth control. I don’t want that low-life husband of yours calling me again, complaining that you are goldbricking in the hospital and making him take care of the house and the kids besides his job, do you hear me?”

She nodded slowly. “Yes, Mother,”

“I know how you can con the doctors and elicit sympathy from them…I put up with it long enough, you know…”

“I almost died from an infection!” she interrupted. “I almost died!”

“Yeah, and I expect you will milk that one for all it’s worth, too. Well, it never worked with me and I’ve warned that husband of yours, so you might as well give up the game and get your ass back home to the two kids you do have and take care of them, do you hear me?”

Numb, she suddenly felt completely numb. “Yes, Mother,” she finally said into the phone. “I hear you.”

The McKenzies

noreply@blogger.com (Violet) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:14:00 +0000

“For the love of Christ, Georgia! Get down from there and mind your own damned business!”

She stood just inside the kitchen door, agog. Daddy was yelling at Mommy!

“Shut up, Eddie!” Mommy hissed at him. “They’ll hear you!”

Daddy put his hands around Mommy’s middle and tried to drag her down from the wood and steel milk crate upon which she was standing, but Mommy grabbed on tight to the top panel of the redwood fence and hung on. “Stop it, Eddie!” she hissed at him again. “Keep your hands to yourself!”

“Georgia, what goes on in the neighbour’s house is none of your business, now get down and go in the house! You are making a spectacle…”

“Oh, all right!” Mommy was exasperated. “The whole goddamned neighbourhood has heard you by now…” She stepped down off the milk crate and Daddy moved it back to its normal place by the clothes line pole.

“What in the hell did you think you were doing up there, anyway?” Daddy asked, his voice sounding very annoyed. “You can’t go snooping on the neighbours like that!”

Mommy lit up a cigarette and blew a smoke ring. “Eddie, you should hear the way she lights into those poor kids! Screaming at them like a banshee! And have you seen how skinny they are? I don’t think she ever feeds them!”

“Georgia, it’s none of your business. The kids look fine to me and everybody yells at their kids once in a while. Leave it alone!”

Mommy scowled but didn’t say anything more.

Connie McKenzie and her sister Nellie were big girls…at least sixth graders. They were very tall and very skinny...Nellie said they were going to be models when they grew up...and they got to stay home alone at night because their mother was a nurse and she worked nights like Daddy sometimes did. Nellie was the oldest, she was already big enough to wear a bra…you could see it under her school blouses…and Connie was just a year younger. “My little stair steps,” she had heard Mrs. McKenzie call them. Connie said Mr. McKenzie had died in the war, he was a tail gunner, whatever that was, and that she didn’t remember her father at all. How sad!

She liked Connie and Nellie. They always had some kind of delicious afternoon snacks that their mother made for them and they were always willing the share. And they were nice to her. And they recognized Brother for the annoying little pill that he was, too, which was also very nice. And they had a cute little dog that was more hair than dog, and Connie said Coco even was allowed up on the bed with her and her sister. Life in the McKenzie household seemed a lot more attractive than in her own.

“You stay away from those girls,” Mommy said to her one afternoon after she had been playing with Connie in the front yard. “And I don’t want you in that house, either. The place is unsanitary. It’s a sty.” She nodded her agreement…did she have any other choice?...but puzzled over Mommy’s indictment of the McKenzie household. She’d been there, it was clean enough, as far as she could tell. What was Mommy talking about?

But she stayed away and she didn’t tell Daddy that Mommy got up on the milk crate every evening he was at his second job and watched and listened to what was going on in the McKenzie household. She didn’t tell Daddy that when he was at work on Saturday, sometimes Mommy would actually jump over the fence and peek into the windows of the McKenzie house. And she didn’t tell the McKenzies, either…Mommy was so busy with the McKenzies, Mommy was leaving her alone!

Mommy’s friend, Betty Moran, lived across the road in a small bungalow with a huge, gnarled pepper tree in the front yard. Betty had three kids and a new boyfriend, so she didn’t get out of the house much, but she found time almost every evening to talk with Mommy on the phone. And these days, the talk was always about Mrs. McKenzie and how bad she treated her girls.

“She’s a nurse, you know,” Mommy told Betty one evening over the phone. “I heard she was a drug addict, that she steals stuff from the hospital. No, really! That must explain the bruises I saw on the inside of her arm when I went over to complain about the way she keeps her front lawn. It’s bad enough living next door to her and all her weeds…what an eyesore you have to see through your front window!”

Over the course of several weeks she learned, through Mommy’s conversations with Betty, that Mrs. McKenzie wasn’t really a widow, that her husband had left her for a “cheap chippie,” whatever that was, that Mrs. McKenzie had her water service cut off and the couldn’t flush the toilets so the house was a health hazard, and that she was a nurse so she should know better!, that the dog had had her puppies in the middle of Mrs. McKenzie’s bed and nobody had done anything about it, and that she was starving those poor girls. Having been in the house several times, she was astounded to learn all these things. Why hadn’t she seen any of that?

The final straw came one night when Mrs. McKenzie was yelling at one of her daughters. Mommy picked up the telephone and called the police, reporting Mrs. McKenzie for beating her children. It was a chaotic scene for the next couple of hours, the police parked in the street, Mrs. McKenzie arguing with the police officers, Connie and Nellie begging to not be taken away, and Mommy standing in the shadow of the big Japanese fatsia in the front yard, watching the whole drama unfold.

A week later she saw a “For Sale” sign in the front yard, and when she went to ask Connie why they were moving and where they were going, the girl slammed the door in her face. Surprised…and very hurt…she knocked again. What had she done that Connie was mad at her? This time Nellie answered the door.

“We aren’t supposed to play with you or even talk to you,” Nellie said, a rather sullen look on her face.

She didn’t understand. “Why? What did I do?”

“Our mother went to jail and she almost lost her job and Connie and me had to go to a foster home for a whole week,” Nellie said.

Her eyes were round with surprise and shock. “Why?” she breathed.

“Because of your mother,” Nellie replied. “Your mother has had it in for my mother ever since you moved in.”

She shook her head. “That’s not true!” she said hotly.

“Oh, yes it is,” Nellie said, her curls bobbing. “We just don’t know why. But your mother has been spying on us and snooping and looking in our windows and making up lies about us ever since you guys got here and now my mother is tired of it so we are moving.”

She looked down at the door stoop, shame flooding her. What Nellie said was true…she had seen Mommy snooping on them and heard her telling stories to Betty over the phone. And they were all lies, to make Mrs. McKenzie look bad. But why?

“I’m sorry, Nellie,” she said. “I’m sorry my mother has been bad and is making you move away.”

“It’s OK,” the other girl said, giving her a thin little smile. “It’s not your fault, you’re just a little kid.”

The walls in her house were paper thin and if she lay quietly and breathed softly, she could hear every sound in the living room as if she was actually in there. She could listen to the TV and imagine the pictures playing on the insides of her eyelids. Tonight she could hear Mommy on the telephone with Betty.

“She’s moving!” Mommy was crowing. “The old biddie is moving! Put her house up for sale and is taking those sacks of bones she calls kids and they are getting out of town. I heard she got fired from the hospital for being a drug addict and God only knows how she got those children back from the foster homes…slept with some judge, if you ask me.”

There was a pause while Betty said something, and then Mommy resumed. “Thank you,” Mommy said to her friend. “It feels good to rid the neighbourhood of such a bad influence, you know? With any luck the new people will be decent folks, the kind who will keep the yard kept up and the house maintained so they don’t bring down our property values like that old bitch did…”

Was that what it was all about? she wondered. Mrs. McKenzie had no husband to cut the grass and fix the house up, so it looked kind of shabby…was that what it was all about? Or was there more to it than that? She shuddered, despite the warmth of the evening, wondering what was going to happen now, with the McKenzies no longer there to monopolize her attention.

What was going to be Mommy’s next “project”?