by Bobi Conn
CHAPTER 10
Fish out of Water
One of my friends in grade school lived in a new double-wide trailer on a hillside—her family seemed to have lots of money, and they gave her clothes to me when she outgrew them. I was always excited when I went through the garbage bag of hand-me-downs, knowing I would have something that had been in style. One time, I discovered her leather jacket in the bag, and I wore it to school with excitement, although it turned out no one else was still wearing them that year. Instead of making me look more like them, the jacket marked me again as the one who did not belong, who could not be like the others.
This friend’s family let me spend the night often throughout grade school and middle school, though I don’t remember her spending the night at our house much. She liked doing her hair and putting on makeup, which were things I was not good at or interested in. Sometimes I tried to pretend I enjoyed it, but I felt like it sucked the life out of me to watch her paint her fingernails, and I sure as hell didn’t want to paint mine.
When I spent the night with friends or cousins, there were times we heard their parents argue. I still remember several of those moments vividly, though with a little more experience under my belt, I can now safely say they were minor arguments.
At the time, I was alarmed, and while my friends said, I hate it when they argue, they looked confused when I asked, Is he going to hit her? And they would say no with a strange look, as if they didn’t understand the language I was using, as if the question made no sense, while I found a place to make myself small in case the screaming came close, in case the anger exploded and suddenly we were all potential targets, in case men were all the same, everywhere. My friends would continue playing or watching cartoons while everything tightened inside me, while I prayed and took shallow breaths and feared for our lives.
My child world grew stranger, more uncertain and complex, but remained that esoteric place of meaning and simplicity. Maybe the living world around me—the forest, the streams, the breathing plants and animals—pulled me back from becoming too lost in my confusion. I thought the story of Hansel and Gretel got it backward—you don’t get lost in the woods, because that’s the safest place to be. No one eats children or lays traps for them out there. The real danger is where people are comfortable and cloaked and never truly laid bare—in their homes, in their cities, in their churches.
I began hiding food in my dresser drawers—candy bars and bags of chips—thinking I could prepare myself in case we ran out of food again. I alphabetized my books and carefully arranged my treasures on my bookshelf. The plastic monk piggy bank—mostly empty—I had found at Great-Grandma’s old house. The 1905 Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalogue I found there as well, full of toys and advertisements that even I could recognize as quaint. The rock I found in our creek, completely covered in imprints of fossils, more beautiful than anything else I owned.
I found that I had a ritual for entering the bathroom, touching the bathtub and the sink and the toilet-tank lid just so, in perfect order. And the towels—the stack of dingy towels had to be touched, too. When I walked into the house, I tapped my fingers in a pattern on the back of my father’s recliner, each time daring myself to break the pattern, skip a tap, but always returning to the chair to finish the pattern if, in a moment of bravery, I tried to defy it.
At night, I lay in bed unable to sleep, trying to count sheep, which seemed like something from a silly fairy tale, but I couldn’t stay focused. I wondered who came up with counting sheep and how on earth that was supposed to help anything. So I memorized the alphabet backward night after night, until I could say it as quickly that way as I could say it forward.
When I closed my eyes to surrender to dreaming, refrains from songs started playing themselves over and over. I tried to end the incessant-but-broken singing by imagining a record needle dragging across the album, stopping the sound, silencing everything, but that didn’t work, and I heard the same phrases from songs playing over and over, a torture that twisted melodies into taunts and jeers. He stopped loving her today / he stopped loving her today / he stopped loving her today / he stopped loving her today.
When we did have a window air conditioner, we weren’t allowed to keep our bedroom doors open. That way, the cool air would stay in the living room, and Dad could be more comfortable. For most of my young childhood, there was no cool air in the living room, either. I remember lying in the heat of my bedroom, the still air sitting outside my open window as if it were waiting for something. No breeze flew over me, no fan was there to cool me. I lay there and cried, no longer struggling against the heat but knowing there was nothing for me to do, no respite to be found.
Sometimes my dreams were not like dreams at all, but empty spaces that I was drawn into. There were sounds like whispers that reverberated through my mind, excruciating in their quietness. I woke up feeling broken, like I had been lost in another world, a fun-house world without color or depth or dimension, but where every moment was cruel.
In one nightmare, my father is dragging my mother into their bedroom, and she is pleading with me to help her. She is crying and saying no, and I am standing there watching, knowing he is going to beat her, but this time it will be the worst, or he is going to fuck her and beat her—and there’s a word for that, rape, but this is the 1980s, and that doesn’t happen in marriage. I run to the phone and finally decide to ask someone to help us, so I call 911 or the operator, but the lady’s voice on the phone says only, The number you are trying to reach is not in service, and then I hear the warning-siren busy signal that says, Hang up the phone, you’ve done something wrong, and I realize at last that there is no way out, no one coming to rescue us or to save us or to sit my father down and tell him once and for all that what he’s doing is not right.
One summer day before eighth grade started, after I had spent the night with my friend in her double-wide, we went to the local park to watch her brothers at their baseball game. We were sitting on the bleachers when my mom showed up, which she had never done before. My friend’s mom walked away with her, and they chatted for a few minutes, then returned to tell me I would be spending another couple of days with them. That suited me just fine, but when it was time to go home, I went to Grandma Wright’s instead. I finally found out that Mom had left Dad, and I asked whether we were going back. Not this time, she told me.
Unconvinced, I wondered what made this time so different. My brother told me what he had seen, and later, my mom told me the whole story. They had left Junior at home, asleep on the couch, while they went to town for something. Dad got mad at Mom on the way back and began screaming at her while she was driving them to the house, then screamed at her all the way to the front door. She fumbled for her keys as he screamed at her to open the fucking door, and when she dropped the keys, he lost it. He began hitting her in the back—always where the bruises would be hidden by her clothes—and kicking her, finally kicking her through the front door, which he broke open, still locked. There on the couch, my brother awoke to see her falling through the doorway and onto the floor and then watched the beating as it continued. When Dad finally stopped, Mom grabbed my brother and drove away as fast as she could, somehow knowing that next time, my father would kill her.
And this time, she didn’t go back.
For whatever reason, Grandma softened her stance against helping my mother, and we were allowed to stay there for a week or two, until we moved into a house in town, old and big and drafty. My cousin had lived there throughout a good portion of her childhood, so I always associated it with her and her nice things, her confidence and style. Somehow, she didn’t seem scared of life and was full of sass even though she once told me she saw her dad drive her mother’s head through their fish tank. That was my father’s brother, and it didn’t surprise me. I wondered, but never asked, whether the tank was full of water and what happened to the fish and how a woman gets her head out of a broken fish tank and how a daughter pretends everything is okay.
CHAPTER 11
A Long Way from Home
All my life to that point, I was quick to take out my frustration on Junior, though I always seemed to get in trouble even when I wasn’t trying to hurt him. But suddenly, Junior seemed to take a particular delight in tormenting me in our big, strange home. The first year we lived in town, he locked me out of the house over and over while Mom was at work. I would get to the cordless phone through a window and call her, full of anger, but really afraid that I would hurt him if given much of a chance. Sometimes he would pick up the other house phone while I tried to talk to a friend, interrupting us and taunting me, apparently unaware of how much rage I felt and how much I wanted to direct it toward something, someone.
I didn’t understand the agony within me, either. I was just a child, twelve years old, reacting to the traumas that continued to haunt me even after we moved out of the holler. The things that tormented me never rested—the kids at school, my brother, my father, the growing discomfort of living in my own body—they all seemed hell bent on reminding me I was worthless. I never felt safe to defend myself or to claim any right to be treated differently. I hated being around the people who were so relentlessly cruel, their jokes and sneers replaying each day like the record skipping over and over in my mind from when my younger self had tried to fall asleep. I felt helpless to respond to the things that made me angry, when anger would have been the healthy response. For years, I shoved it all down as much as I could, but it felt like it took on a life of its own, until it became yet another thing I was afraid of.
After we moved away from the holler, I often jerked awake from nightmares—in them, Mom always went back to Dad, and he was hitting her or raping her again. Sometimes in these dreams, she came out of their bedroom and looked at me, disgusted with me for being so afraid. I was almost always frozen in space, unable to move my own body to run to the door and save her. What would I have done?
When I awoke from the nightmares, I would find Mom in the living room, her makeshift bedroom. After we left the holler, we never lived somewhere with enough bedrooms for everyone. She would always assure me she was not going back this time, but I didn’t believe her. About a decade later, I started finding myself in makeshift bedrooms of my own.
I had taken all the pain from the holler with me to the drafty house we’d moved to in town, but there was none of the beauty of the forest and streams and phlox to greet me, to reassure me that some good things do persist. I couldn’t walk to my granny’s or run to the woods. Here, there was lots of pavement and traffic, lights from cars driving in front of my bedroom at night, and memories of the people who had lived in that house before us.
We had to go up to Dad’s every other weekend and usually rode the bus there after school. My brother never seemed scared to visit there, but I dreaded being at my father’s house. I begged my mother not to make me go, but she said she could not keep me from him. Every time I went, I was afraid I would never be allowed to leave, worried he would force me to stay with him and clean the house and wait on him. I felt that same fear every time I visited him from then on, throughout adulthood.
One night, he left me alone in the house for a few hours. I called my mother and pleaded with her to come get me. She refused, as she refused to even drive on that road ever again once we moved out. She offered to send the police, but I knew there would be hell to pay for that, and nobody ever had to tell me that the police were not coming into our holler to rescue me. So I just cried on the phone and told her that he was crazy, that I was scared of him, and that I hated being there. We hung up when I heard his truck door slam in the driveway, and he went straight to his bedroom without saying anything to me.
I sat in his recliner, prepared to pretend everything was okay until he came out of his bedroom with a tape recorder and told me there was something he wanted me to hear. I did not know what to expect until he pressed a button and I heard myself talking, crying, begging—he replayed my entire conversation with my mother for me, then demanded to know why I had called him crazy. I sat there, trapped, saying as little as possible, wondering how I would make it out of there alive. I should have guessed that my father still tape-recorded phone conversations. It may have even been the same tape recorder that I had been whipped for long ago—with the missing battery cover.
After that night, my mother and I devised a code: if I called and said nothing, but just coughed, it meant she needed to send the police for me. But the one time I coughed my plea to be rescued, she asked whether I was sure until I no longer was, and we never spoke of it again. She hadn’t left him until she knew he was going to kill her. She wasn’t sure he was going to kill me. Neither was I. And that became my measuring stick for relationships from then on.
My mother had been working for the city for a few years by this point. When we were still living with Dad, he would accuse her of dressing well for someone else, and of being brainwashed. I had wondered what he meant, knowing that no one could possibly convince Mom that Dad was any worse than she already knew.
After school, I usually rode the bus or walked to her office at city hall, and during middle school, I typed a couple of stories on a spare computer there. Dad also liked to accuse whoever was at city hall of brainwashing my brother and me, but we mostly just looked for mini bagels in their break-room freezer and played hide-and-seek in the enormous walk-in safe that protected old cardboard boxes.
Around the time of the summer before my freshman year of high school, Mom moved us to a small trailer in the park that was owned by the city—rent was cheap and utilities were free, in exchange for keeping an eye on the park. The trailer was right next to a hill, and I could walk to a little wooded area next to the picnic shelter or go hiking up the hill behind our house. The city pool was also next to the park, but I was losing interest in the pool by that point. Still, it felt good for a while. Our mother sometimes brought McDonald’s home for dinner, and for a time, I had only my own anger to live with.
My brother met some of the boys who lived in the government housing apartments nearby, and sometimes I talked to them, too. One of the boys always had a smile on his round face, and I liked him the best. Another boy always seemed awkward and strangely ready to fight, and my brother let him show off his nunchucks but told me much later that the awkward boy eventually killed someone and put the body in the trunk of his car and drove around with it for days.
After we moved to the trailer, I started thinking that Junior was having a harder time than I was. Boys at school made fun of him—his shoes, his name—and for some reason, I believed it was harder to be an unloved boy than an unloved girl. When it came time to buy school clothes, I asked our mother whether she could buy him some Nikes—I thought that having name-brand shoes would show the other boys he was important after all. She told me she couldn’t afford to buy us both nice shoes, so I told her to get him the Nikes, and I would take whatever she could afford after that. By that time, I thought it was useless for me to try to look nice anyhow. Junior got the Nikes, but what really helped him socially happened one day when he rode the bus to our father’s house. A boy tripped Junior as he tried to leave the bus, and Junior fell down. When he stood back up, he turned around and hit that boy on the head a few times. After that, everyone liked Junior.
I never did find a way to make friends with the people who picked on me. No simple fistfight could change my relationship with those who had tormented me whether I was nice or cold, whether I tried to interact with them or not. Some part of me always knew that no matter how angry or hurt I was, violence was not an option I could choose. For my brother, fighting back showed the other boys that he wasn’t weak, and so they accepted him as one of them. As a girl, there was no way for me to convince the other kids that I wasn’t weak—I had never seen a girl fight back. Everything I tried just seemed to make it worse, to make me a bigger target. It was better to hope I could disappear.
Dad showed up to our trailer one warm day and asked to borrow Mom’s watering
hose. Mom never spoke to him and would not exchange pleasantries—sometimes he would ask me during visitation why she wouldn’t speak, meaning why wouldn’t she wave at him when they saw each other out driving somewhere. He made it impossible to ignore him this time, so she told him no with fear in her voice.
He kept pushing her to lend him the hose and eventually stepped inside the trailer, though she tried to keep him from coming in, and I felt all the familiar violence follow him. She kept saying no, and I watched him grow angrier, until it dawned on me that despite having not hurt her for a long time now, there was nothing inside him that would keep him from doing it again. She had backed up toward the couch as he moved toward her, so I stepped in between them. I told him, Don’t do this. Leave her alone. And he said something else to her, a few words to let her know that he was still in control, but I did not move, and soon, he turned around and left. Mom called the police so they would patrol the park for a while, and I peeked out the window several times to see whether he would return, perhaps with a gun, but he didn’t. To my surprise, he never spoke of that day.
I had a crush on one boy in the fourth and fifth grades, the son of one of our elementary school teachers, though I was never in her class. I adored him and, at the same time, learned to despise him because his family had money, according to my dad. Dad hated rich people, or anyone associated with a wealthy family, and constantly reminded me that they were our enemies, that they were somehow corrupt and thought themselves superior to us. I still had my crush, but by the age of nine, I knew that the little boy would never like me, and I did silly little-girl crush things—lots of staring, giggling, and pining away dramatically with my best friend.
In middle school, there was a different boy—a country boy with light eyes and a set to his jaw. I became obsessed with knowing everything I could about him, but I wouldn’t talk to him. I listened and remembered all the little things he said, as if that knowledge would somehow compensate for the closeness we didn’t have.
