by Bobi Conn
I didn’t know yet that his cruelty and coldness never had anything to do with us, with how lovable we were, how good or bad we had been. As an adult, I could intellectualize it. I could talk about his own self-loathing, about projection, about abuse and cycles and emptiness, etc., ad infinitum. Eventually, I came to have a little more compassion for myself and for my life, which always seemed to be more difficult and a little more ugly than other people’s lives. I realized how hard it is to manage a bank account and bills, and not smoke cigarettes or drink or some other form of self-medicating, when you still carry that feeling from childhood that tells you death is near, and you very well might die at the hands of someone you love, someone you need. And besides, I was reminded every Sunday in church that the world would end in decidedly unpleasant ways—probably any minute now—and that I was most likely going to Hell. It is hard to get your act together when you are waiting for the Apocalypse.
But inside, even at twenty, thirty, thirty-five years old, after becoming a mother myself and finding pity for my father who could not love us nor be loved, I still found myself hoping that before he died, I would know how it felt to have a father who loved me.
CHAPTER 4
Sunday Morning
Everyone knows, of course, that the only father you really need to worry about is the one in Heaven. He’s the one whose judgment really matters, the one who can make Hell last forever. Half the time in church, that’s what I thought about, full of fear and trembling—that some pain is endless, that some things burn relentlessly. That my heavenly father could hate me, despise me, revile me no matter what I did, because I was born into sin, and damn if nothing seemed to help, no matter how hard I prayed.
That’s the only thing that made sense after I had learned so many Bible verses and cleaned my room and even made the teachers at school proud, but still felt like something was tearing me apart from within. All the awful things I felt inside must have been because I was such a sinner, even though I wasn’t sure exactly what I had done wrong. I just knew that something was terribly wrong inside me. The hell I was in was just a promise of what was yet to come, if I didn’t fix myself. If I didn’t make it right.
But half the time, there was Jesus and the New Testament with its relative gentleness. I read most of the Bible alone, sometimes fervently preparing for Sunday school so I could win a mini-Snickers candy bar for memorizing my verses—which I was particularly good at—but mostly so I could go to Heaven, or at least have a fighting chance.
We read only from the King James Version of the Bible, which was so full of poetic language, so many thous and breadths, I was fully prepared to study philosophy and poetry in college but didn’t know that yet.
Learning Bible stories from soft, old women with white hair made it easy to believe in Heaven. But then that older boy took me downstairs to a Sunday school classroom while everyone else listened to the sermon upstairs. He took me to the room I was supposed to go to after kindergarten and sat me on his lap as he pulled my shirt out from my skirt.
The skirt was dark blue, with a red hippopotamus embroidered on it. My shirt was light blue, a button-up, and had a scalloped collar. It’s the same outfit I am wearing in a picture taken of my brother and me, a picture that hung in my granny’s house for as long as I can remember.
The boy’s grandparents were friends of my grandparents, and they called each other Brother and Sister in church. His grandfather had worked with my papaw Conn. The grandmother sang in the choir, and I loved the way she stood in front of the whole church sometimes, singing in a trembly voice: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.
I saw the boy again when I was seventeen and attending church with my granny in a rare effort to please her with my potential to go to Heaven. He sat by his pretty wife in church; she held their baby. I watched them, wondering whether he remembered that day and recognized me. I prayed that whatever had led him to touch me had faded long ago, was forever extinguished, that his baby was safe.
I don’t know that he didn’t do more on that Sunday morning. I don’t remember any physical pain or exactly what I felt other than a great, uneasy fear. I avoided that church classroom afterward, going so far as to stay in the younger Sunday school class for a year, rather than sit with the other kids my age in that room. My granny tried to convince me to go to the next class, but I claimed I just loved my Sunday school teacher too much and didn’t want to leave her, which everyone eventually accepted. I wouldn’t attend activities in that room and instead lingered elsewhere, around other Sunday school teachers, whenever all the other young children were gathered there. At the time, I didn’t consciously think about what had happened, but I knew I didn’t like the way I felt in that room. I still remember the way the tables looked, where the door was situated, the coolness of the air around us when he pulled me to him.
My parents didn’t go to church with my granny except sometimes on Easter, and they encouraged us to pray in only one situation. They would tell us to go to one of our beds—mine or my brother’s—and, in the dark, put our faces down to the bed and close our eyes. Then, as sincerely and excitedly as possible, we were to pray for Reese’s Cups. We obeyed, and you know how God is good and if you ask, you will receive? Well, within just a few minutes of our praying, Reese’s Cups would suddenly come raining down from above, and we would gather them up and take them to the living room. Our parents would ask, Did God answer your prayers? And we would say, Yes, look at our Reese’s Cups! I didn’t know whether they realized we knew they threw the candy in through the open door, and I never began to understand why they wanted us to pray for such a thing. Maybe there was some satisfaction in watching us ask for something they could deliver. I was embarrassed by the whole charade but kept it up, just like they told us to.
Despite my parents’ lack of interest, I still wanted to be a good Christian. When I was nine, I decided to get baptized—I had been saved countless times at the altar, and I thought maybe going a step further with baptism would make the good feeling last longer. I wore a flowery dress, and in front of the whole church, our preacher, who looked a little like someone from The Munsters, dunked me backward into what was basically a large bathtub with a nature scene behind us.
Granny was waiting for me when I walked out sopping wet into the back room, and she asked me how I felt. I answered her, Perfect, and she assured me, You are.
But even after being baptized, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong. After a couple of weeks, I found myself listening intently to the sermon, straining to hear God’s voice. All that happened, though, was that at the end of each service, the preacher would beseech all the sinners to give it up, walk down that aisle, and give yourselves to God. He was waiting for us, waiting to welcome us into the Kingdom of Heaven, and all we had to do was ask.
I thought he was talking to me because we both knew I was so awful inside, something wasn’t right. Maybe the devil had gotten me, or I had committed so much sin without even meaning to. So again and again, I asked. I walked down the aisle, sick with fear, and cried at the altar beside my granny, who knelt and cried there every Sunday. Sometimes we prayed together. Sometimes she gave me her wet tissues to blow my nose into. I begged to be forgiven for my sins, for all the impurities that must have been making me feel like I was being torn apart nearly all the time. Sometimes the preacher came over and laid his hand on our shoulders and prayed with us, and I thought that might help. Sometimes he didn’t, and we made our way back to the pews at the end of the service, but nothing felt different. After a while, I realized that the preacher knew my granny didn’t need to be saved. Somehow, he knew she was there for the people she loved.
I wonder now whether anyone was puzzled by my weekly trek to the front of the church—there certainly weren’t any other children up there. Did they think I was a zealot? That I was a child of God and able to hear him so clearly? Or perhaps, like my friends’ mothers and some doting teachers, they simply thou
ght that despite their concern, there was nothing they could do for me.
Growing up in a holler as we did in the 1980s and in eastern Kentucky, it was perfectly normal to get whipped as punishment. Dad often used his leather belt, but both our parents would sometimes make us go pick our own switches, and the only ones nearby were from those thorny black locust trees. The sting of the switch was accompanied by thorns tearing the skin of our legs or bare bottoms, so my brother and I were both pretty set on avoiding switchings and whippings as much as possible.
Sometimes I would stare out the kitchen window at the big black locust tree that grew there, thinking how uninviting it was with its thorns and hardness. Not the weeping willows of my fantasies, where I imagined that one day I would live with the tree spirits, despite never having been told a story about tree spirits or, at that point, having seen an actual weeping willow.
We ate like poor people in that kitchen. Lots of baloney sandwiches, lots of Kool-Aid. Sometimes, when Dad wasn’t home and we had very little, my mom, brother, and I would share a can of beans for dinner. When Dad was there, we ate cautiously, hoping not to arouse his ire. That took some finesse, though, since there really was no predicting his anger.
But I use the word poor as if it were a simple word, as if you should understand. Being poor will always be married in my mind to the other, intangible sorts of poverty that infused my childhood. One night, the large black locust tree became a site for my knowledge of poverty when my mother, my brother, and I crushed aluminum cans beneath it. I started to stomp them onto one of the cinder blocks that formed our back steps, since that was easier than crushing them on the wet ground. My mother corrected me and had me move my cans back to the ground, saying we needed to mash them where some of the mud would get into them. That way, she said, they would weigh more when we took them to the aluminum recycling place.
I didn’t know exactly what that meant about us, but I remember feeling ashamed when the large, dirty-looking man weighed our bags of cans. Surely he knew that part of the weight was from something other than aluminum. I avoided looking at my mother’s face, hoping she wouldn’t also have to feel the shame if she didn’t see it in me. After all, we needed the money to buy milk.
We always knew someone poorer than we were, though. A family who lived in a bus. A little girl who had worms coming out of her nose, she was so infested with parasites. A man who liked to burn his son’s arms with a lighter and then pull the scabs off and cover them with shaving cream. There was always something worse.
Ten years after my last whipping, a friend came to my house before we went to a party. We cooked steaks—she was on her period and craving meat. I watched them sizzle in the pan as my thoughts drifted, until I heard the zipping sound of her belt as she pulled it from her belt loops, frustrated with the constriction around her stomach. The look on my face when I wheeled around, still flinching, told her everything.
Easy, girl, she said. I’m not your daddy.
It was nice, in a way, to have someone who in that moment knew what had happened inside me, without me having to explain. Most people would have responded with a blank look, and then some sympathy after I explained my reaction with nervous laughter. If you don’t know how it feels, there is no understanding that kind of fear. She was also the first person who knew, before I even said it, that it was hard to date a man with money, someone from a different class.
The day I agreed to call my granny a whore, I didn’t get a switching, but I knew I had traded on something precious to save my self, my skin, my body. It was an impossible choice, at that age: to face my father’s rage with no one to defend me, wondering how far he would go, or to insult my grandmother, the one person who made me feel safe and loved and seen. There was shame at either end, and a great question about who I was, who I could be in such a world. About why everything was so pretty around me, yet I felt so ugly inside.
CHAPTER 5
Gifted
One day in first grade, I shuffled to the balance beam in dejection. My best friend was playing with another girl who was younger and seemed to smile and laugh a lot. Even then, I had a sense that I wasn’t as happy as other children, and most of them had a carefree air that I couldn’t quite understand. Like they weren’t always watching, on alert and taking note of the world around them.
My friend came to me and asked me what was wrong, and I told her how sad I was that she had another friend. She comforted me but told me that she could have other friends and still like me. That didn’t make sense to me, though—I knew the world as a place where there is only so much love to go around, a finite amount of attention and care that any one person can give. My friend had dimples and a sweet smile, and her blue eyes lit up easily. I had felt lucky that she liked me, and it seemed that this was the end of my good fortune.
In fact, she did continue to be a friend, but I never again felt sure that any friend was there for good. It would take years—decades, even—to understand that all my relationships perfectly met my low expectations. That it was not bad luck or a curse that doomed me to feel constant loss, but that my beliefs about the world would shape everything around me, that my childhood trauma would render it all as if through a glass, darkly.
Still, as a child, I loved being at school, and when I look back to those early years, I remember laughing with my classmates and feeling like we were all friends. In second grade, a boy in my class and I came up with nicknames for ourselves by spelling our names backward. His worked out to something that sounded like Carrie, and mine was pronounced E-bob.
Almost twenty-five years later, I looked at the county jail website and saw that he was there, still in our hometown. He probably did not do as well in school as I did and likely had a hard time finding a decent job. His parents may have abused him, or he may have been raised by grandparents, or he may still live with his parents when he’s not in jail. Whenever I look up inmates in the county jail, I inevitably see former classmates in there for burglary, robbery, methamphetamine manufacturing, narcotics trafficking, driving while intoxicated, and so on. I see grown boys I had crushes on, and I search their faces, looking for their stories.
This particular boy was a quiet, good-natured friend who had slightly chubby cheeks and a matter-of-fact air about him. In his mug shot, he stands in front of a cinder-block wall and stares straight into the camera, revealing nothing in his gaze. I search his eyes for some detail, some betrayal that will tell me how he got there. I wonder whether he is still kind or if he has come to hate the adults who failed him and now hates everyone else and himself in turn. I wonder whether he will find his way out or trudge along in a cycle of incarceration, joblessness, desperation, drug abuse, and, finally, a lonely death.
Or, I wonder, could he become a brilliant engineer or poet? Where does his passion lie? What is the spark inside him that gives him hope life is worth living and, even more, life still holds a promise of happiness in some unwritten future? I think about touching his soft cheeks and reminding him how we sat in the hallway in our elementary school, how I was studying spelling bee words, how we didn’t think of ourselves as being any different from anyone else. How laughter came so easily, how we enjoyed that moment, no matter what else was haunting us from home and no matter the nightmares that would not stay put in the darkness, where they belonged.
In fourth grade, I entered the county school system’s gifted program and was the only person from my school to do so at the time. I rode the bus alone from our little school, which sat near the same creek that flowed by my house, to the combined elementary and middle school in town. For one day a week, I went to this new place, meeting strangers and suddenly surrounded by throngs of people. I had no idea how to do anything I was supposed to do—I was constantly afraid I would get on the wrong bus and end up in another town, or I would go to the wrong room and be lost forever.
There were about fifteen other kids in the program, all from various schools in the county, and we would have our weekly gifted school day in
a room adjacent to the basement library of the elementary wing. I thought all the other kids knew each other, though they probably did not. Almost everyone, though, seemed to possess a sort of ease, a self-assurance that they knew what to do and they were certain that what they were doing was good. We had Spanish lessons, and we learned about current events. It was the first I ever heard of the Soviet Union and the man with the strange red birthmark on his forehead. We learned about other cultures and had international food days, where our teacher made a Japanese chicken dish and we all said konnichiwa.
Early in the school year, we were given “About Me” sheets to fill out so we could get to know each other. It was a list of our favorites—favorite song, favorite television show, favorite food, etc. At that time, I had never heard any music except what played on the one country music station that reached our holler, and a few of the records my parents owned—a lot of country, a little Janis Joplin. My favorite musician was Ricky Skaggs or George Jones—people my classmates had never heard of.
When I took that sheet home from my gifted class to try to tell my classmates “About Me,” I sat in my father’s recliner and read the sentences and thought about the blanks we were supposed to fill in. Tell them about me.
One of the questions asked, “If you could be any other person, who would you be?” My immediate thought was that I didn’t want to be anyone else, because if I was someone else, someone else would have to be me, and nobody else could do it. I was nine, and I gave it no further thought. I don’t remember whether I filled in the blanks so my teacher would be happy with my effort, but in that moment, it seemed imperative that I be me, and accept being me, so I could do whatever it was I needed to do. So it would all make sense in the end, this unbearable life I had.
