In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

  I felt ugly already—hideously, terribly ugly. Sometimes my classmates would tease me for my flat chest and for wearing glasses. My haircuts were always home jobs, and my uneven bangs reflected something unsteady in my mother’s scissors-wielding hands. I was rail thin, and god only knows where my mother got my clothes—sometimes the dollar store, sometimes secondhand stores. In my teens and early twenties, I took great pleasure in visiting those stores and wearing the most ironically uncool clothes I could find. In middle school, though, there was no irony.

  I would go to our middle school dances and spend the entire time crying in the bathroom, being consoled by a friend or two, heartbroken over the boy I liked and by my loneliness, which bore a poverty of its own. It was the perfect distillation of all my fear and confusion, and this unrequited love was a way to finally make some sense of how awful I felt, at least for a while.

  Throughout middle school, I took advanced classes rather than leaving for the weekly gifted program as we had done in grade school. I was in those classes with most of the same people I already knew from the fourth and fifth grades. They weren’t quite as interested in teasing me as they had been, but I was always waiting for the cruelty. Sometimes it seemed like they treated me as their equal, sometimes I seemed to have a companion who was also at the bottom of the pecking order, but mostly I just felt alone.

  We had all our advanced classes in one particular classroom, and as a group, we were the most obnoxious kids a teacher could have. We had a literature and writing teacher in the sixth and seventh grades, and she let me write a longer story for one of our assignments, something I was so excited to write but terrified to read out loud to my classmates, which she insisted on. After I finished reading it, I heard one of them muttering about me just copying the Odyssey, but some quiet, defiant part of me knew that my teacher’s opinion was more important.

  One other teacher was responsible for our other subjects—advanced science in sixth grade, math, and maybe something else all the way through eighth grade. That teacher was an older woman, overweight with iron-gray hair and thick calves, always clad in an old-fashioned floral dress. For some reason, we decided to give her hell all the time.

  She would walk into the classroom to find that we had turned every piece of furniture upside down, including all the long tables we sat at. We couldn’t turn her desk upside down, so we carefully turned over each object that sat on it. On another day, she could walk in to find that we had the lights turned off and were all hiding—in cabinets, behind bookshelves, and even under her desk. I was under her desk once, hiding with a boy, when she sat down, apparently too unmotivated to cajole us out of our hiding places. We stayed there, studying her pantyhose and laughing silently, until she finally moved, and we scrambled out.

  Sometimes we would sit on our tables and pretend to meditate, ignoring her pleas to sit in our chairs; other times, we would pretend we were asleep, and no matter how much she threatened us, no one would move or give up our positions unless she started talking about getting the principal. We often convinced her to take us to the break room during class, where we would get chips and pop and candy, which I’m sure greatly improved our classroom behavior. We had pizza parties more often than the regular students. At least once, we made her cry with our obstinance. We were quite horrible to her, yet she was terribly patient with us. I don’t know whether it was because she thought we truly were gifted children, or she thought we were acting out and needed to express ourselves, or she just didn’t know how to deal with a room full of bratty kids who didn’t appreciate how lucky they were to be in an accelerated learning environment. Whatever it was, that was a highlight of my middle school experience.

  For a while, the lowlight of middle school was my obsessive crush. I thought constantly about how he did not like me, and sometimes I would fret over working up the courage to call him. Once, I phoned him and asked him why he didn’t like me. He was probably quite taken aback and assured me that he did like me as a friend, that he would talk with me at school, and so on. I asked him the most uncomfortable questions, desperately wanting to figure out what made me so repulsive. He gave me kind answers, and eventually, in high school, we occasionally spoke to each other like friendly peers. In retrospect, I am sure that any number of our middle school classmates would have told him how obsessed I was, and he probably had no idea how to interact with me, knowing I idolized him.

  I outgrew the crush by the time I entered ninth grade, and it is a good thing, too. He had an older brother who somehow met my father. By that time, with no woman in the house, Dad had a strange array of friends who would visit him on a regular basis. There were lots of college girls who came up, and it seems now that they were probably doing pills and getting weed from my dad. There was one, though, that my dad seemed to particularly admire. He said she was studying psychology at the university and wanted to be around him so she could try to figure him out. I wondered at her curiosity, but my dad seemed to think it was funny and would talk about being crazy or being able to convince people he was or wasn’t, depending on his goal. That was one of the things that frightened me most about him—I never knew whether he meant to be crazy, whether he truly was, or whether he really just had control over everything, over everyone.

  When I was thirteen or so, I went to my father’s house and met that older brother once. He was even more good looking than his younger counterpart. My dad made me do his laundry sometimes, and I would find myself folding that young man’s underwear, unsure how that fit into the larger story of my old feelings for his younger brother, and even more unsure how my dad could approve of me folding another man’s underwear.

  Unfortunately for him, that young man shared my father’s taste for painkillers and went into Dad’s bedroom one day, thinking my dad was either gone or safely occupied elsewhere. According to my father’s telling, he came into the house to find the boy in his room, looking through the junky mess on his dresser and stealing pills. He forced the young man out into the yard and called my uncle, who drove to his house and held the boy while my dad beat him senseless. Later, I found out that the boy’s mother—the mother of the boy I had adored—accused my father of beating her son with a shovel. My dad laughed that off and held up his broken hand, wrapped in a white cast—he had broken it by hitting the nineteen-year-old repeatedly.

  CHAPTER 12

  Out Loud

  While I was still in middle school and for a short time in high school, I attended the youth-group meetings at our church every Wednesday night. Granny would be upstairs, having Bible study, singing and praying, while I was downstairs with a room full of kids and an adult or two. Christianity was falling apart for me, and everything else was also falling apart as I grew a little less flat chested.

  I asked questions that fully irritated the youth-group leaders, a married couple who looked like they probably had never fought it out on a gravel road. I asked them how the earth was populated by just Adam and Eve, when that meant someone would have had to commit incest pretty early on. They said that obviously God had made other people along the way, and I asked what other parts of the Bible were not literal or what had been left out. I asked how I could believe any of it, why I should take any of it literally, when there were important things left unsaid?

  I wanted them to make it make sense, but I was too cheeky about it, and they told me to stop asking questions or stop coming to youth group. Part of me was triumphant—I knew that I was right, that things didn’t make sense, and that they didn’t have any good answers. But the comfort I had held on to for so long was gone, and I didn’t know how to tell the youth-group teacher that if he couldn’t give me that back, I wouldn’t have anything else to assure me that somewhere things made sense, that there was a reason for my dad and his world, and that even though I felt so terribly lost, I would someday be safe and loved, and everything would be okay.

  Eventually I ended up praying in my own way, saying things like, God, if you’re anything like what I imagin
ed for the first ten years of my life, you know what I’m up to, and you know that I’m trying. Just let me know if I need to do something differently. And I heard his holy response, You’re gonna be all right, girl. You’ll be okay.

  The summer I turned thirteen, I started my period while with my granny, who was visiting another older lady in a clean-looking trailer park. I lay on her friend’s carpeted floor, holding my belly in pain, wondering what new hell I was in.

  Around that time, my dad started a relationship with a new woman who had three kids of her own and was kind to me. She and my father had a history, but I didn’t know exactly what it was and didn’t ask. I started going to his house more often, even though my old room was taken by one of the girls, and my new room in the addition he mostly finished never felt like mine at all. I almost always enjoyed the company of the other children and the sound of laughter, even the disagreements. It felt like we were a family. We even called each other family—Dad’s girlfriend was my stepmom, and her children were my stepbrother and stepsisters.

  My mother had dated very little, that I knew of. I woke up one night to hear her crying in our living room. Since there were only two bedrooms in the trailer, she slept in the living room. I was at the end of the trailer, but the walls were paper thin. I lay there, scared to move, not knowing who she was talking to. I listened to her sobs, and because the person she was talking to was not yelling, I eventually felt it was safe enough to go back to sleep. In the morning, I asked, Did he hit you? She told me no, but she was still so traumatized by what my father had done to her, she was uncomfortable around men.

  Still, not too long after that, she ended up going to Las Vegas to visit a man she had met through a mail dating service—they had written letters back and forth. She came home with a ring on her finger and announced that our new stepfather would be there in two weeks.

  When Frank arrived, he immediately set out to establish the rules. We were to respect and obey him without question. It seemed like he criticized everything we did, everything our mother did. Frank implemented new rules all the time and announced them to us as if he were the emperor of the two-bedroom trailer we were suddenly crowded into together. Our mother went along with everything he said, and it felt like she forgot that we children were there, that we had enjoyed a brief respite from having a tyrant in our home. Maybe she was just relieved he didn’t hit her.

  It wasn’t long before Junior moved back into our father’s house, unable to stand living with Frank. In every other situation, I had always been the more argumentative one of us, but somehow, I managed to hold my tongue enough to live with this new man who immediately expected us to respect him, obey him, and call him Pops. We called him by his first name.

  Throughout the summer, my father and his girlfriend took us swimming at a lake in Bath County, which always seemed poorer than our county as a whole. A concrete pad sat maybe a hundred feet away from the shore. We were able to duck our heads underneath the edge and bob back up into the roomy pocket of air. When the water was high, it would drain into a deep, empty tunnel that we could look down into. I grew to love that place and taught myself how to dive from the top of the concrete pad. I would climb back up the ladder, over and over, to perfect the arc and to make sure I kept my legs straight and together.

  There were often a handful of unemployed men who fished or drank on the bank in the afternoons. One day, one of the old men told my father that he must be proud of me, with my nice little body. I did not know why we left so early that day, but I found out soon that I had done something wrong to solicit that attention. The whole ride home, I sat in the back of the truck with my brother and the other kids as a weight grew heavier in my stomach. We all knew that Dad was mad, and he had only said a couple of things to let me know it was something I had done. I bet you’re happy with yourself, aren’t you. You just love getting attention. I hadn’t thought about other people watching me, but I burned with shame, and my father’s girlfriend did not look at me.

  When we got home, he made it clear—my careful falling, the only moment in which I felt graceful and perhaps even talented, could serve no end other than to seduce the drunk grandfather at the lake, so it had to stop. Wearing a bikini was suddenly a disgrace, and I was trying to show off like some whore. I couldn’t tell him, No, no, I just love the way it feels to swim and dive and feel so free and maybe be good at something. I didn’t hear that man, and that’s not my fault, and what kind of old man compliments another man on his daughter’s body? I couldn’t say anything. I stopped my lovely falling. I tried to hide myself better, knowing that Dad would be watching from then on and that my summer days at the lake were no longer for me to enjoy.

  For a short time, I had a friend who lived in that same county. I met her through my dad’s girlfriend, somehow, and loved her instantly. She was pretty and funny and seemed to like me despite me not being as pretty or quick to laugh as she was. I went to her home only once, and we hung out in the woods behind her house, running around with a happiness that I had never felt before. We found a patch of mayapples and I ate the fruits, not knowing I should make sure they were ripe, but someone was watching out for me and I did not get sick.

  When she felt like it was close to time for her mom to get home, we made our way back to her house, and her stepdad got there soon after. For some reason, he was instantly angry at her and began yelling. To my surprise, she yelled right back and didn’t show fear even when he yanked his belt off and began hitting her with it. She backed into her bedroom and shrunk into the corner while he hit her. I watched from the doorway, not knowing what to do. She didn’t cry, but screamed and glared at him with disgust until he finally stopped.

  I stood there and stared, knowing I should help her and wishing I could protect her, but I was unwilling to take that whipping myself. Unsure how far he would go, what would happen next. I knew afterward I had failed her. There was no one else who could have stepped in, but my helplessness showed me once again how little I could do for the girls and women I loved. How little I could do for myself.

  When she was able to stand up, we left the house and ran back into the woods. She decided she was going to run away, and I decided I would go with her, believing we could understand each other’s suffering. As it grew darker, though, I started wondering where we would go and how we would survive. I voiced my doubts, and she insisted she wasn’t going back, though I was free to go without her. I mentioned her mom and how scared she would be. My friend didn’t care but slowly softened as the sun set. We made it back to her house to find her mom talking to her stepdad, and they decided I wouldn’t be spending the night after all. My dad picked me up a while later, and I told her goodbye, still happy I had a friend who wanted to run through the woods with me, who had her own wildness, and we could run free and wild together in the sacred forest. I called her a couple of times after that, and sent her a letter, but never heard from her again.

  I think of her now and wish I knew her last name. But I know if I found her, I would ask: Did you hide your wildness away, keep it safe until no one else could control you? And I know the likely answer.

  That fall, I spent one night with a friend I considered family, who was a year or two younger than me but already had the body of a woman. She lived in Elliott County, in a small, grimy trailer in a small, rundown trailer park. Most of the time when I was there, the adults were pretty much gone, or we were out walking around the tiny town. She had an older cousin who showed up at their trailer that night, someone who had been or was related to her through marriage or a former marriage—it seemed like a murky relationship. Even though he was really cute and six years older than I was, he appeared to like me. He put his head on my lap and said things that made me think maybe he wanted to be my boyfriend, even though it seemed like my friend was jealous and might want him for herself, cousin or not.

  Her mom’s boyfriend, Louis, and a friend of his walked in at some point, and it was clear that the cousin’s company wasn’t completely
welcome. I had spent time with my friend, her mom, and Louis during the summer before, and Louis was always particularly nice to me. Once that summer, he had driven to Morehead and saw me and a friend walking from the movie theater. He called out, Hey, honey! to me, and when I recognized him, I was surprised at his friendliness and said it back to him. I thought of him and his girlfriend as new parent figures, and I would write her letters, though she never wrote back. They seemed to have a lightheartedness that extended to me when I was around, and it was a relief to feel likable.

  That particular evening, Louis wasn’t as friendly as usual. He sat on the love seat in the living room, asking pointed questions of the cousin, whose head was still on my lap. Louis’s friend sat on the couch across the room from Louis, mostly watching the television that droned on in the background. Eventually, Louis told me to get up and come sit next to him. I didn’t want to leave the sweetness of sitting with the older boy but was afraid to say no, so I reluctantly sat on the love seat, next to him.

  He took my hand in his and interlaced his fingers with mine, the entire time talking in an oddly threatening manner that seemed to come from nowhere. I tried to pull my hand away, and he held on tight, so I dug my nails into his hand, hoping he wouldn’t react too harshly if I kept my tone light. He acted like his feelings were hurt and asked why I wouldn’t hold his hand. I told him he was too old for me, and he said he was only thirty, definitely not too old. He eventually pulled out his wallet and handed me his license, which showed he was thirty-two. I stared at the picture of him, with his light-blond hair and dark eyes, wondering what I could do to get out of the situation. He kept grabbing my hand, and I kept pulling it away, defying him with as much humor as I could muster, though it seemed like even the air around me was changing.