Around midnight I heard the garage door open. I thought about what to do or not do. At the last minute, I decided to push the dresser back to its place on the wall because if my dad tried to come in, finding the dresser there would make him so much madder.
Brandy stood up and thought about barking but I whispered, “Shhhh … please don’t bark. Just be quiet. Let’s both just be quiet. Go back to sleep. It’s just Dad.”
I heard him come into the house. My heart pounded. I promised myself no matter what he did to me, I wouldn’t tell where she’d gone. I heard him mount the stairs. I hoped he’d leave me alone and just go to bed. He was at my bedroom door.
“Sidney, unlock this door.”
I didn’t want to make him madder. I got up. Brandy jumped off the bed. We opened my door and there stood my father with his three-piece suit all rumpled, the vest unbuttoned, his tie loosened and crooked, his eyes red. He took off his horn-rimmed glasses he always wore and started wiping them on his untucked shirttail.
He walked into my room, pushing past me and Brandy. I couldn’t remember when I’d ever seen him inside my bedroom and I was afraid, but I was angry too and the anger was winning out. I could feel by his demeanor that he felt sorry for himself. I hated his weakness after being a bully. I thought of all his perverted undertones and his psychological twists in every argument designed to trip up my mother or my brother or me. I steeled my heart against feeling pity for him.
I clenched my fists and I screamed in my brain, “You brought this on yourself. You brought this on all of us.”
He looked around my room and I realized he was hoping she was hiding in there with me. Then he sat down on the edge of my bed which he had never done in my life and I could see he was breaking.
“She’s gone, isn’t she,” he whispered in a sincere tone that I’d never heard out of him ever before.
“Yes.”
My heart went out to him. I felt like putting my arm around him and consoling him and helping him to solve this and get it all back on track. I knew he loved her with all his heart. But this was the man who had done so many awful things. My mind raced through all the terrible memories of his brutality toward my brother—the many times I put my body between him and my older brother, because my brother wouldn’t defend himself against his beloved father. I watched as my dad browbeat his son mentally and physically so many times. My brother loved our dad so much. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had seen too much. This grown man, defeated, on the edge of my bed in the middle of the night was a stranger to me now. I couldn’t put down my pride, my self-protection, my anger and righteous indignation and comfort him.
His shoulders shook. He was slumped over in a way I had never seen him. He was sobbing. I watched him and my heart was torn, my arms yearned to hug him.
Instead I steeled myself and spoke, “Dad, I have school in the morning. I have to go to bed.”
He looked up at me suddenly as if seeing me for the first time.
“What? How can you just stand there watching your own father cry and not want to comfort me? What is wrong with you? You’re a monster! You have no feelings for anyone but yourself.”
He stood and stared at me. I thought he might hit me and my heart pounded in my chest but I stood still and said nothing. Then he walked to the hallway.
He turned around with his hand on the doorknob, “I won’t do anything for you. You remember this when you want anything from me. You better get yourself a job because you are cut off.”
Then he slammed the door.
MONEY AND WHEELS
If the phone rang in the kitchen, I dashed to answer before my slumbering father would hear it because I didn’t want him to get up and come out of his room. This morning it was my mother on the phone as I was always praying it would be. I missed her. I was afraid. I was lonely and miserable. I was worried about her.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Oh, Sidney, how are you doing honey?”
I almost started crying because I wanted somebody to care so badly.
“I’m okay. I’m fine. How’s it going?”
“It’s a beautiful morning up here. The weather is warming up a little. The truck is finally working … Sidney, I want you to know that we have a friend who is helping us. I don’t want you to be worried. We have a friend.”
“What are you talking about, Mom? What friend? Why are you talking like that?”
My mother had a creepy way of delivering cryptic lines that made me think she was the most evil person in the world. I had no idea who or what she was referring to. In one way, it was very comforting that she sounded so surprisingly well acclimated. In another, it was entirely unexpected and disconcerting. My love and hatred were in perfect balance. I listened halfheartedly as she kept saying the same crap. There was no talking to her about my situation or my plans. She said goodbye promising to call again soon. She really didn’t even ask me what was happening with me.
May had come, and the school year was almost over. I couldn’t get checks out of my dad any more so I just stopped going to my flute lessons. We didn’t have answering machines or anything, so I didn’t know whether my flute teacher tried to call me. I saw a handwritten bill for the last month’s worth of lessons. My dad just kept throwing all the mail away. If I answered the phone and it wasn’t for me Dad had instructed me to say he wasn’t there and that I would be happy to take a message. I usually just hung up on anybody who asked for my dad. No one ever called asking for my mom. A few times I got disgusted if my dad was standing right there in front of me in the kitchen and I’d say, “Yes, he’s right here” and attempt to pass him the receiver but he’d get so mad that I was afraid he’d hurt me so I usually just let him hiss at me—“take a message, I’m not here” and then I’d have to write some number down that I knew he was never going to call.
My dad was obviously struggling. He was driving a taxi at night and going to the stock exchange during the day, trying to make a miracle happen. I knew there was more to it that I didn’t understand. The papers were gone from the kitchen table and no one was telling me anything.
One morning I came downstairs ready for school, and he was ironing his dress shirt in his sleeveless white undershirt and pin-striped trousers. He looked at me with tragically sad bloodshot eyes and I could barely look back. To see my father so defeated was heartbreaking and frightening. I felt so guilty. I had the terrible feeling that I had brought this all on us by sending my mother on the Greyhound bus.
“Don’t look at me like that. Don’t look at your father with pity in your eyes. What are you doing to help? Do you have a job? Have you picked up a dust cloth? Do you even know how to run the vacuum? Look at these shirts I’m wearing! They’re threadbare! Do you think I want to dress this way? Look at my suits, they don’t even fit me any more. My pants don’t even stay up. I’m wasting away. What are you doing to help out around here? Sitting around at night jacking up the phone bill, whispering to your mother, your boyfriends, your spoiled gossipy girlfriends. Where’s that little bitch Sophie these days? She doesn’t want to come around now, does she? Fair-weather friend. Those people you surround yourself with, none of them care about you. You’re a fake. You don’t have anything. Have you told your teachers what’s happening here? Are you telling people your mother has run off and left us?”
“No Dad, the people I talk to do care about me. I do have real friends. Sophie is a real friend. The teachers don’t know me well enough for me to say anything to them.”
I tried to defend myself. I tried to think of things to say to change the way my dad saw me. But he wasn’t listening. He didn’t care. He put on his dress shirt and before I knew it he headed out to the garage. The garage door opening. The car door. The car engine. The garage door closing.
Alone in the deserted kitchen, I tried to think about my dad and his family. Dad was Italian, raised in the city by an Italian father and a half-German mother who didn’t speak to their families and were decidedly not Catholic, never went to
church at all. They seemed to harbor strange secrets, and I knew only conflicting information. They lived near us for a while and then something happened between my father and his parents. After that his sister and her family, including their daughter, my cousin Cindy, my only close friend when I was little, and all the rest of them suddenly moved to Florida and never spoke to us again. I got the idea, maybe true, that my dad had lost some or all of their retirement money in the stock market and they couldn’t forgive him. But then I heard that my grandparents had a pool at their new house in Florida, so they couldn’t have been completely broke.
The last time I saw Cindy was in the autumn a few years ago. I walked home from elementary school right past the junior high where she was in the eighth grade. She was getting on the school bus when I spotted her. We were both wearing the purple, wool, fringe ponchos our grandmother had bought us the year before. We used to get cute matching outfits that I loved because she was older and so beautiful and I felt so happy being her little cousin. There she was climbing the stairs of the bus with her pretty long yellow blonde hair smooth down her back and I called to her. She looked very pained to see me, the poignancy of us seeing each other after so long and in the same clothes was not lost on her I imagine, and she stopped on the steps of the bus and turned after I called her name for a third time. I knew she had to hear me, other kids in line were looking at me.
“Sidney, I’m not supposed to talk to you … ”
I said, “What? What are you talking about?”
She answered, “We’re moving away. We’re going with Grandma and Grandpa and we’re all moving to Florida.”
Then she disappeared onto the bus. My heart sank. I was so alone. I loved her so much. I felt invisible. I did not matter. I was alone. I walked home and thought about what had happened during the early years.
Cindy had an older brother just like I did. When I was nine, Preston spent a summer hanging around with Tommy who was a year or two older. We hadn’t known these cousins much because they used to live further away in the city and now they had a new house near us in our same suburb. Preston thought Tommy was weird but I think he liked that Tommy was older and that’s about it. One Saturday morning I was sitting in my little pale blue nightgown that I loved because it had a family of embroidered yellow ducks marching across a pale-green velvet ribbon over the chest. I had floral-print underpants underneath. I was nine years old. I was watching cartoons. Our parents had gone grocery shopping together because they were having people over for dinner. Preston never talked to me. He never even looked at me. Suddenly as I was curled up on the family room sofa watching cartoons on television I noticed Preston looking at me with a strange keen interest that I had never seen on his face.
“Hey little Sid, how you doing this morning?”
“What? I’m fine. What’s the matter with you?”
“Hey, guess what Tommy told me. He said that Cindy’s been playing a weird game with him at their house down in the basement. He said they’ve been painting her with sparkle paints and stuff and it’s weird but it’s really fun.
“What do you say we try it? There’s this little game called Get that they play.
“Here, come here.”
Preston sat down right next to me, right up against me.
“Tommy says you just take your hand and you just put it right here … see like this … I’ll do it … isn’t that nice … you just keep your hand right there and then I just move my finger like this … there see … good … Sid … good … that’s right … just enjoy it … isn’t that nice … it’s nice right … I just put my hand on your panties so I can play Get with you … like this … mmmmmmm … that’s right … you love it don’t you … we can do this whenever you want … I’m gonna do it faster … yeah … good … just stay right there … just stay still … good Sid … good … oh … oh … yeah … oh … ”
Then Preston abruptly got up and left the room and shut the family room door, which nobody ever did.
I just sat there. Then I started watching the cartoons again.
I didn’t tell Cindy about this the next time I saw her. But Preston told Tommy. The next time Cindy’s parents came to our house for dinner and brought their kids along, everyone stayed up late but I was youngest and I was tired so I went to bed in my room with my door shut. It was a Sunday night and I had school the next day. There was a tap on my door. I didn’t answer because I was already asleep and I didn’t want anyone to come in. Cindy’s mom had driven her home so she could get to bed early too, so I knew it wasn’t her and she was the only one I’d be happy to wake up for. So I didn’t answer but I heard my door open. I thought it might be my mom checking on me, which would be extremely unlike her. I heard Tommy’s voice whispering right by my ear. “Sidney, are you awake? Shhhhhhh … don’t make a sound … Preston told me what you like to do … I’m gonna do that for you … shhhhhh … just close your eyes … ”
I was so flattered that Tommy who was so old and cool would ever pay any attention to me that I stayed still and pretended to be asleep. I guess that what they did—putting their hands on my panties and moving their fingers back and forth—seemed pretty harmless and it felt great, giving me a feeling of overwhelming love for them. I knew nothing about anything sexual, and had no conscious interest in it. I didn’t know whether this was something everyone did or no one did. My cousins seemed very conventional to me. Cindy was a very pretty, quiet, reserved young girl. Their parents, my aunt and uncle, owned a small office-supply company and went ballroom dancing. Their family seemed more normal than mine. If this was what their kids did, then it was probably okay. That’s what I thought.
Preston approached me one more time to play the little game. I was in my bedroom and he came and sat on my bed right up close to me when I was in my nightgown getting ready for bed. This time, he really got into it and it lasted longer. I felt like I was going to cry. I felt this great overflowing love for my brother and I opened my mouth and said the words, quietly and sincerely, “I love you, Preston.”
My brother awoke from his reverie as if lightning had struck him. He jumped up, knocking me from the bed where I was perched with my legs apart so he could get closer to me. I tumbled to the wood floor and watched him flee my room, slamming my door. We did not speak again.
I felt shame for the first time in my life. I felt that I was wrong to tell him I loved him. I felt I had ruined it. I also felt for the first time that what we were doing was wrong.
I started thinking about that feeling a lot after that, whether it was wrong or otherwise. I wanted that feeling. For whatever reason, I did not think it was right to do that to yourself. I think my parents had always told me not to touch myself there. I felt that I could try to get other boys to do it for me and I could be more careful not to say the wrong thing and scare them away. After that I looked at every boy as a potential conquest, as a potential partner. It was subconscious, I think, but it was real.
All these memories ran through my head when I was thinking of Dad. The legacy from his side of the family was definitely pretty dark. I made a concerted effort to put them all out of my mind.
I let Brandy out to go to the bathroom before I left for school and then headed out with my backpack. I could thankfully walk to my high school from our house. By the end of that year, many kids were driving to school. I knew that many were going to get their driver’s licenses.
There was no way I was going to ask my dad to take me for the test. I had taken the in-school mandatory driver’s ed class and barely passed with a D, the only bad grade in my academic career. The instructor was a former drill sergeant with a flat-top crew cut and a mean face. He would lean right up next to your right ear as you were coming down the entrance ramp onto the Dan Ryan Expressway and start shouting “Pick It Up! Pick It Up! Merge! Merge!”
The teacher’s approach was in stark contrast to my mother’s modeling of driving etiquette. On the rare occasion when she decided to brave the expressway, she would drive ont
o the ramp, start to accelerate and then get really scared and start saying, “Oh God, oh my God, Sidney, Sidney, hold my hand … ”
I would give her my hand, which she would clutch mercilessly, crushing my bones until she maneuvered the car into a lane. I would want to say, “You should have both hands on the steering wheel,” but I was too afraid of making her mad or having us crash, so I just closed my eyes and screamed on the inside. Despite the barely passing driver’s-ed grade and bad modeling from my mom, I was determined to get a license and a car. The Jaguars had both mysteriously disappeared over the winter. My dad was driving a used car—a green hatchback Opel with a manual transmission that he complained was ruining his left knee from working the clutch.
I was thinking a lot about Dad saying I needed to help out. I wanted a job, but I had to get the license and the car first. There wasn’t anything within walking distance of our house except the school. Sophie worked at an ice cream parlor across town and she said she could get me a job if I could get transportation worked out.
By some miracle, I was in my driveway with Brandy one morning, when Jenny came out with her mom. I hadn’t talked to her in months. She got rides to school with her older siblings and never walked like I did.
“Hey Sidney, are you getting your license soon? We’re going to take the driver’s test.”
“I don’t know. I don’t really have a way to get it right now, I guess.”
A Girl Called Sidney Page 3
