After a little while Larry came back in the house and Mama went out to talk to Daddy. The rest of us, again, watched through the window but tried not to be seen. We were afraid he’d hit her again. He didn’t, but instead started that sweet talk of his, telling her they could start fresh, that he would change, that he loved her, that they belonged together, that they couldn’t throw away so many years together. I couldn’t hear him, but I know that’s what he did. She gave in to him. All of her resolve to change our lives disappeared in less than an hour that afternoon.
I didn’t understand adult relationships then. I’m not sure I understand them now. But I do understand that when you love a person, you hold out hope until you can’t anymore. It tears your heart apart to tell them no, regardless of what they’ve done. It’s a hard thing to do, to say no, especially when your thinking is so warped by living in the situation for so long that you don’t have the sense to get away. Mama couldn’t do it, even when Daddy beat her up. I don’t understand that about her except in the way that I understand fear and shame. I don’t know if Mama and Daddy were still in love with each other or just codependent and addicted to their relationship. I never got to see what was beautiful about it. They never showed us.
That evening, we loaded everything back into the car and we went home to Frankville. Then we unloaded it and put it all back in the house, as if nothing ever happened.
HE WOULD SOMETIMES STALK AROUND THE HOUSE LIKE he was looking for something or someone, and would come in the room where Sissy and I would be watching some show or another, stand in the middle of the room, and say, “Phooey.” Phooey? Phooey from a man that could throw around more shits, hells, and goddamns than anyone I ever heard before I got out into the world? My sister and I are first-rate cursers. We get it honestly.
I would watch him as he sat in his chair in front of the television. He would sometimes raise his arm and turn his hand over as if to say “Hell if I know.” And no one would have said anything to him to provoke such a thing. Maybe he was reacting to something in his mind. Maybe he was reacting to something he saw on the screen. Maybe he was reacting to nothing at all.
He would sit in his chair and scrape all of his hair forward with both of his hands almost violently. He said he was resting it.
How did he not see how scared we were of him? If he did see it, how did he live with himself? If he did see it, that’s sad and miserable. If he did see it, then fuck him.
Fuck him for making his daughters grow up scared to death of their father. Fuck him for making me scared of men. Fuck him for making me always try to please them, for making me always try to please him, for making me always try to please him through them.
It all gave Sissy and me just enough rope to be enough like him that we both walk through the world feeling like we don’t fit into it. And we both know that it’s not cool to try to fit in, that it is good to be different, and that we are individuals and don’t go with the pack. We wouldn’t dream of it. That’s a complicated and messy kind of inheritance, because we find out all the time that the world doesn’t take kindly to different, just as he did. But we couldn’t help it if we tried, he made sure of that.
Neither Sissy nor I would’ve thought it was a normal thing to do to write a song or sing it onstage, on television, and to the world had he not shown us it was. I never would’ve put pen to paper and tried to tell a story had I not seen evidence of him doing it—had I not known the literature he thought I should know.
Katharine said that he told her I’d be all right, that I was smart, that I’d figure out how to take care of myself. He was only partly right. I tend to have too much of this thing and not enough of that one. I inherited that too.
Some Mornings
There are mornings when I wish I’d gotten something more from him. More words, more love, more grace. In my weary moments, dragging myself out of the warmth and into the world to do this thing or that, whatever the thing is that day, and standing in my kitchen surrounded by absence. I wish I’d gotten at least a little more time.
I feel cheated. I then feel glad that I was cheated out of more lessons from him in exchange for what he couldn’t have ever seen his way clear to give. It’s for the best, I think. That I think that makes me heavy and sad. I hate that I think it’s best that he’s gone.
WHAT DADDY DIDN’T REALIZE—MAYBE BECAUSE HE’D forgotten what it was like to be a child, as many parents seem to, or maybe he just always thought it was good to be an outsider—was that I didn’t want to be different. I just wanted to be the same as everyone else. I didn’t want to be singled out as strange or unusual. Strange and unusual doesn’t make life easy for a twelve-year-old girl. Strange and unusual isn’t how you get along. I desperately wanted to be more normal.
I impatiently waited for the cheerleader training and tryouts I had signed up for. They finally came. Everyone who wanted to try out practiced for five days in the athletic field of Gillmore Elementary School in Jackson. I caught on pretty quickly to all of the cheers and jumps, and though I was not the most coordinated or athletic girl by any stretch of the imagination, I had rhythm and I worked at it. I wanted this. This was not at all like the saxophone.
Tryout day was the Saturday after the five days of practice. I picked out a special outfit for my audition—a pair of chambray shorts that Nanny had made for me, and a pink-, white-, and turquoise-striped polo shirt that had been handed down from Sissy. My friends from the cool group at school, Laurie and Deena, were already cheerleaders, so they were certainly shoo-ins. I was given a number—25—in the lineup of around thirty girls. When the judges called me in that Saturday afternoon, I did my best at what I thought were the three coolest cheers we’d learned that week and herkie-ed and cartwheeled my heart out. I hadn’t yet perfected my toe touch so I stayed away from that one.
Parents weren’t allowed into tryouts to watch so after it was over I walked out to the parking lot where Mama, Daddy, and Sissy were waiting for me. I found the car, opened the door of the right-side backseat, and slid in with a smug smile. They all looked at me expecting an announcement but I didn’t say anything until Daddy said, “Well?” I nodded my head yes and said I’d made it. He put the brown Ford LTD in gear and we drove away. I wasn’t going to have to play the hand-me-down saxophone anymore. I was pleased with myself for succeeding and for latching on to something, even something as inconsequential as cheerleading, that had nothing to do with the rest of my family.
Then Daddy finally landed another job, in Irvington, Alabama, about twenty miles southwest of Mobile. That meant we’d be moving and changing schools again. I had already learned about how things can change. I’d already figured out that things change a lot, sometimes in the middle of a Saturday afternoon or maybe a Wednesday when someone picks you up from school. You look up and things are different. Someone has decided something. Someone has done something. Someone tried something that didn’t work out like they hoped.
New York City is a long way from Frankville, Chatom, Jackson, Irvington, Monroeville, and all of life down there. I hate having to tell this part of the story even worse than the others. Moving away from Frankville was some sort of turning point. It’s a marker of time in my mind—one that signifies they would be gone less than two years later.
I push myself to keep going. When they come to life in my mind I know I’m going to have to watch them die again. I’d go so far as to say I have to kill them myself. Some days, sifting through it all feels like self-imposed punishment.
Tree Limbs
In addition to the one he picked up to throw at me when I was seventeen months old, there is the one that Daddy hit Sissy in the eye with when a stray dog wandered up into the side yard one Saturday afternoon. A sweet little girl dog. We were all outside doing something—what, I don’t remember—when she came up from the road. Sissy was standing too close to Daddy’s arm. When he drew back the limb, it hit her just outside of her right eye. Daddy stopped, panicked, and he and Mama fretted over her, forgettin
g about the stray. Sissy’s face was cut and probably needed a stitch or two. She still has a little scar there.
Mama kept Sissy on the couch all day instead of taking her to the hospital thirty miles away. Mama was scared she had a head injury and wouldn’t let her take a nap.
I begged to keep the little girl dog. She had a white-and-tan coat. When you talked to her she’d turn her head in your direction and bare her teeth into not a threatening face, but the best grin she could muster without exactly looking at you. Daddy let her stay, probably out of guilt over hitting Sissy with the stick, but he never would have anything to do with her and always called her a n****r dog. I named her Trixie.
Sissy was always too close to the middle of things. Nothing like that ever happened to me.
There is the one I would like to take to him for beating on animals and my sister and my mama. My anger over that will not dissolve no matter how I try to break it down. What a pitiful man. What a coward to beat up on people smaller and weaker than he was. What a coward to beat on anyone or anything at all. I have to assume he never thought about what sort of rage that would install in his daughters. I have to assume he never thought about how it would make us downright dare anyone to touch us at all for years, even with a gentle hand. How it would make us both think we were tough enough to take on anyone or anything. Especially my big sister. I would like to take a limb to him for putting that angry recklessness in her.
There is the one over which he threw the Halloween ghost that he made one year. I think I was eight. An old sheet over a kickball and a scary face he drew with a Magic Marker, a rope under the ball to make the ghost a neck, and then thrown over the branch of an oak that sat in the fork of the driveway up to the house. It landed with a thud on Teddy Beech’s windshield when he drove up with his daughters to trick-or-treat. Teddy threw his car in reverse and hightailed it out of there. That made Daddy take off the ball cap that was on his head and slap his knee with it. He did that when something really tickled him.
THE TRAILER THAT DADDY AND MAMA BOUGHT TO GO ON the grounds at the school—I don’t recall him being that fond of living on the property and do remember him resenting having to be there on the weekends but it was part of the job—had a hallway that ran down one side of it. It stopped at my bedroom, which was on the end of the trailer. My bed was situated so that when I lay down I could see all the way into the kitchen.
I woke one morning when it was still dark out, it had to be three or four, and saw him standing in front of the refrigerator in his boxer shorts sucking down a can of Budweiser. I’d always heard about folks whose drinking was so out of hand that they had to get up in the night to keep their blood alcohol content from dropping, lest the withdrawal set in. I’d heard Nanny say that when someone got that bad there was little to no hope. When I saw him in front of the refrigerator sucking down that Budweiser, it was as if it drowned the little that was left in my heart. Seeing him there wasn’t a shock, but it was a confirmation. I knew he wouldn’t get any better.
He started teasing me about my body around that time too. The curves that were emerging from my previously slim hips must have alarmed him. I don’t suspect he realized I started counting calories the first day he ever mentioned my weight. I don’t suspect he realized he would make me hate my body and myself in general for a long time because of his comments. I don’t suspect he realized he would make me think my appearance was my only worth. I still look in the mirror and see fat where there is none. When I step on the scale I hear the echo.
“How much you weigh now? 140?”
The Scale
I haven’t had one for most of my life. I know having a scale is dangerous. If the number I see isn’t satisfactory to me, and nothing over 120 ever is, then I will chide myself for eating anything and plot and scheme not to. I think about how to avoid food. I look forward to the times when H. can’t watch me or ask me if I’ve eaten. I look forward to the times when he will praise me for how my body looks and know how fucked up it is that I learned from my father how important it is to be aesthetically pleasing, to be thin and preferably downright skinny, to not take up too much space, to never be outwardly unhappy or loud or demanding, to not be too opinionated.
I am opinionated, I am sometimes unhappy and loud and demanding, I take up too much space sometimes, and sometimes the number is over 120. I hate myself for all of those things. I try to shrink like he taught me. I hate myself for it. Like he would’ve hated me for not doing it.
I stay busy hating myself for him and filling in his spaces.
I DON’T CARE SO MUCH THAT HE KNOWS WHAT HIS WORDS did to me now, because the only reason it would make a difference would be to keep him from saying them to someone else, and he’s dead so what does it matter except to me? And it only matters to me that I know what they did so that I will have a framework for what otherwise would’ve come out of nowhere. I’ve tried not to blame him for the results of his fear, but it’s difficult. I never heard anything like “How much you weigh now?” out of Mama.
I know the changes that took place after we moved away from Frankville weren’t just about my getting older. He was on a path to an even darker place I didn’t really understand. The days of him telling me too much church was bad for me or making me lock the gate twenty-five times after I left it open and the cows got out were over. As bizarre as his sensibilities might’ve been, he imparted some decent lessons here and there. But he seemed to lose or abandon what was left of that concern and fell into an unconscious consciousness that left no room for those sorts of considerations. He was getting worse and getting there faster than ever.
Shortly after we moved into the trailer, Daddy built a porch onto the back of it so there would be a stoop at that door, his choice of entry. He also liked to park his truck back there. I don’t know if he just found it preferable to the front, but I suspect he thought parking back there made it harder for his comings and goings to be detected, since we lived at the school and he didn’t trust our neighbors—Jenny on one side in her trailer and Bob on the other in his—not to rat him out. He’d slip in and slip out like some alternate-universe superhero beamed down to keep the bars in business.
Daddy liked some things about living in Mobile County. It wasn’t dry, for one, which meant it was easier to get a drink, and it also meant there were more places to hear and play music. He went out a lot, though I can never be sure about what he did. Sometimes he’d take Sissy’s jambox with him so he could tape the latest songs off of a jukebox he’d found—we’d left our stereo in Frankville so we didn’t have anything to play records on. He would leave at night without saying anything to anyone. He’d just go out the back door.
I wonder if Mama knew where he was. I wonder if she cared by that time. There was part of her, I’m sure, that was just relieved to have him out of the house and to have some peace. But there was always his inevitable return. Sometimes he’d come home unnoticed and unheard. Sometimes it didn’t go that way at all.
Wham! I was thrown out of bed. Daddy rammed into the trailer, on the end where my bedroom was, in the middle of the night. Because he parked behind it, he had to drive around the side to get there. I think it’s safe to say that he drove drunk pretty well, otherwise he’d have died way before he did or left a trail of casualties in his wake. It wasn’t that he was anything but careless. I had witnessed his wildness firsthand, riding home with him from this party or that gathering for my entire childhood. There was always either a beer or the avocado-green insulated tumbler with the white rim full of Jim Beam and water between his skinny legs, redneck cracker that he was, and if he ran out of either he’d stop and refresh it from the stash he kept in the toolbox of his truck. He’d drive so fast down two-lane, dark-as-pitch, nowhere country roads that my fingernails would grip the vinyl seat beneath me or the door handle to my left or right if we were in the car as I feared we’d all die in a fiery crash worthy of a movie of the week.
Should I be embarrassed to say that sometimes I wished we w
ould crash? And that only he would die engulfed in flames like the demon he sometimes was? I’m not.
He must’ve misjudged the clearance around the trailer that night. He rammed right into the corner. Mama used to say that you wouldn’t be able to hear the devil if he drove up when Sissy and I would, on occasion, get loud. I thought that might’ve been what had happened when I woke up on the floor.
I stumbled into the living room to see what was going on. He came in the back door, after having backed up and then successfully navigated the corner, and just shuffled his cowboy-boot-clad feet toward his and Mama’s bedroom. I shuffled back to my bed. The next time it happened it didn’t knock me out of bed. Maybe I had learned to brace myself, even in my sleep, by then. I don’t remember Sissy getting up either time. Maybe she slept through it all since her bedroom was closer to the kitchen.
How does a person drive into the side of their house and not get the message that something’s wrong and needs to change? Was that when he called Leon Harris asking for help for a friend? Was that why? Hit the house once? Okay, maybe you can let that slide. Laugh it off. Ha. Ha. But twice?
He was losing it, more every day. He did his job, he played music at night, but he was only holding it together in what anyone would consider a haphazard way. His drinking seemed to be at an all-time high—he was dying a slow death and there was an air about him that suggested he knew it.
After Bullet went missing during the Airway restaurant months, we didn’t get another dog for a while. Trixie had wandered off too I suppose. I don’t know how we talked Daddy into it because he always said he didn’t like little yappy dogs, but he let us get a cockapoo on Easter Sunday of 1985. We named the puppy Whitney, probably after Whitney Houston. We loved that little puppy so. Daddy didn’t.
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