by Julie Barton
“Girls can’t dance at parties like that, Julie. You basically just told all those guys that you are ready and willing to have sex with every single one of them. You’re lucky I got you out of there.” Slowly, tears came and I put my face in my hands. It was then, finally, that he started the car and squealed out into the street.
I wept quietly the whole way home. He didn’t speak. Just clenched his teeth and writhed his hands around the steering wheel. When we pulled up to the house, I went straight into my room and quietly closed the door. I climbed into bed. I didn’t take off my clothes, just kicked off my penny loafers and slipped under the flowered sheets.
I had shamed and embarrassed myself, and I understood the gravity of what I’d done. In bed, I planned my penance. I would never dance at a party again. I would decline invitations to parties. Remember this, I told myself. Remember this awful feeling. I tried to imprint in my mind that the best decision would always be to stay home, stay safe, and spend the night alone. I became known as the runner, the athlete who was always training, could never really party, who rarely went out, and always had everything under control.
BOTTOM
LATE MAY 1996
It had been three weeks since the fishing trip, where I’d seen that small but bright flicker of happiness. Within a few days of returning to Ohio, the light had extinguished entirely. I was home. Dad was back at work, preparing for another very stressful bet-the-company trial. If my dad succeeded at his legal argument, the company would survive and hundreds of people would keep their jobs. If not, they all faced unemployment and major losses. In my dad’s absence, my mom tiptoed around, asking nothing of me. I was the precious vase she didn’t disturb for fear that a slight tremor would send me off the shelf and into pieces on the floor. She fed me when I accepted food, but otherwise we merely coexisted. There was a sour fog of failure around me; I felt it. I could almost smell it.
My brother was living about five miles away in an apartment with two other guys. He had a fiancée named Megan now, was madly in love, and couldn’t wait to start living with her. I don’t remember Clay coming home that summer. It is very likely that he did see me in my malaise, but I don’t remember. Perhaps the sight of him shut me down? Perhaps I was too embarrassed about my condition to leave my room and say hello? Or, most likely, we saw each other and I acted as if everything was fine. The part of me that craved the instantly gratifying ease of denial loved pretending things were fine, while the part of me trapped in childhood trauma raged silently beneath my quiet exterior.
Those long, dark weeks, I stayed on the couch, sometimes watching television, but mostly sleeping and then waking and staring at the couch’s back cushion. It was maroon, a wide stitch, full of bodily smells from years of evening escape into the television. Day after day I would wake up, walk from my bedroom to the couch, fall asleep, wake up, stare at the couch cushion, maybe weep or think about going to the bathroom before drifting back to sleep. The pattern quickly became irresistible.
It was late spring. The weather was warm and bright, and I lay inside completely inert. I hoped to die. I hoped for a heart attack that would send me to the hospital where nurses would tend to me with care and ask me what was wrong. What I felt was more than sadness. It had become an irresistible blackness. I began to love falling into that dark place. I clung to the awful feelings because they were so familiar, so honest, so intoxicating, and they shut out everything else. There was no room for considering that I could try again at life, that I could try even though I might fail, that someday I could feel better. I fantasized about dying, then sat frozen with fear that I would indeed someday cease to live.
“Do you want something to eat?” my mom would whisper, rubbing my back gently.
“No,” I’d mumble.
“Do you want to come with me to the store?”
“No.”
“Okay, well, I’ll be back in about half an hour,” she’d say, a slight exasperation in her voice.
The days like this became endless, merged into one long, bleak existence. I had never experienced this kind of gravity. The thought of getting up and going somewhere, doing something, exhausted me. So I didn’t do a thing. For days. My mom’s school year had ended, and she was home with me each day, but that made no difference. My favorite place was officially the dark crease between the cushions on the back of the couch. My face felt best pushed deep into that crack. Sensory deprivation had become the only way to comfort myself. I needed to be alone with no light, no sounds, no smells, and as little air circulation as possible. The breeze from an opened door hurt my skin.
I don’t know how many days I spent like this. Five? Ten? But finally, one afternoon, my dad came home from work at about two in the afternoon. Maybe my mom had called him in desperation. Maybe he’d seen me there on the couch for too many days and the sight made him unable to focus at his desk.
When he walked into the family room at around two on that average afternoon, there was no noise, just me trying to keep breathing. He walked over to me and said, “Julie?” I didn’t have the energy to respond. “You’ve got to get up,” he said.
Eventually I replied with a muffled, “No.”
“Yes,” he said. “Come on.”
“I can’t,” I mumbled. I started crying.
“Yes, you can,” he said, putting his hand on my back. I pushed my face into the cushion and sobbed. My hair was a matted, tangled mess. I could feel the clump of hair shift as I shook my head no. I wanted him to leave; I wanted him to never leave.
I felt his hands push under my body, and he began to pick me up.
“No, no, no, no,” I wept. I didn’t want to be carried anywhere. I could only exist there on that couch. That was my only place left.
“We are going outside. You need to get outside,” he said.
“I can’t,” I said in a whimper. “Dad, I can’t.”
“I’ll help you,” he said, quietly. “I’m here, and I’ll help you.” I put my arms around him and buried my face in his neck, his smell encoded in me, cologne and skin and father. “Dear, get the door,” he said. I heard my mom’s slippers rush to the front door, and he carried me down our front step and onto the driveway. “Can you stand?” he asked. I couldn’t imagine letting go of him. I believed that there was no way I could actually stand up, especially outside. But I felt him letting my legs go, and I put one foot on the ground, then the other. He held me on our driveway, said to my mom who was watching, “It’s okay, honey. I’ve got it.” She went inside and closed the door gently. This was a moment for only my father to witness. It was as if he dipped his arm down into the burning depths of hell and would let it burn if only I would please, please take hold of his hand.
“We’re just going to go for a little walk, okay?” he said, in a voice that was easy-going. Simple. A you can do this voice. He was still wearing his suit pants and a red tie. He’d loosened his collar a bit and rolled up his sleeves. “Just a little stroll,” he whispered, like a meditation. “Just down our driveway, to the next driveway, then we’ll turn around. You talk if you’re ready. You tell me what you need. Tell me anything.”
I leaned on him heavily and he held me with his strong arms. I focused on his strawberry-blond arm hair as we walked. He’d been a redhead as a child; I’d been born with red hair. We were kindred spirits. I wanted to be more of a priority in his life. I didn’t feel worthy. I felt terrible at this very moment for making him miss work to tend to stupid, worthless me.
We made it to the end of our driveway, my feet moving mindlessly beneath me. I used to sprint down these roads, my legs so strong and my future so full of promise. Now here I was, feeling lucky that I’d walked 300 feet.
The air outside lifted me just an ounce, made me remember I could move again. It felt miraculous that just walking down our long driveway took some of the blackness away. As we reached our neighbor’s driveway and turned around, I finally
opened my eyes and squinted in the sunlight.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Dad,” I said.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”
“I don’t know if I will,” I said, weeping now. “I really don’t.”
“You’re still you,” he said. “You’re still beautiful and smart and strong.”
I couldn’t talk anymore, just nodded and wiped the tears streaming down my cheeks. He granted me a merciful silence, just held my waist tightly as we walked, like I’d been in a car accident and these were my first steps since the bones had healed. I closed my eyes and let him guide me back up the driveway. He asked if I wanted some dinner. I said I was too tired. He took me to my bedroom, put me in my bed, slipped off my shoes, and pulled up the sheets. “I’m proud of you, princess,” he said. “You did good. I love you.”
I closed my eyes, exhausted by the walk, ready for a solid night of sleep. But I felt a bit different, like the blanket of sorrow had transformed from lead to wood.
• • •
They say that people don’t choose their dogs—dogs choose their people. I like to imagine that at this point, Bunker knew to wait for me. Other families had come to the farm and taken away his three sisters and one brother. Each time new people arrived, he gave them a thorough sniff, concluding that they were not the one he was waiting for. Then he proceeded to ignore them or run away when they bent down to pet him, maybe even lift his leg to pee on one man’s nice leather shoe. I like to think that when I was at the bottom, Bunker was fighting to make sure he found me.
TELLING BROTHER
SUMMER 1994
The summer before my senior year in college, before New York, I worked as a hostess at a restaurant near Ohio State. For a month or two, I lived in my own apartment, but I moved back home the morning after someone was shot on the sidewalk in front of my one-story building.
Being home wore on me. One day, when the feelings took over, I took a knife from the butcher block, ran to the basement and pressed the blade into my skin until I felt pain. That same day, my mother made me come to a birthday dinner for Clay at a fancy restaurant. She was scared to leave me alone, so I was forced to sit, looking disheveled, with Clay and his latest girlfriend as my dad and brother made jokes that struck me as wildly sexist and rude. On the way home from that restaurant, I tried to jump out of my dad’s car while he sped along the freeway at 70 miles an hour.
The next day, my mother made my first-ever appointment with a therapist. I went with curious reluctance to her office, sat down in a depressing brown room and heard, for the first time, a professional say, “Your parents tell me that they’re worried about you. Can you imagine why that might be?” I explained my circumstances, then couldn’t stand listening to the therapist say in a sickly sweet tone, “An older brother is supposed to protect his younger sister. He’s supposed to help her, teach her, be kind to her.”
“On TV, maybe,” I scoffed. “Whatever. All siblings fight.”
“Yes, but not like this, they don’t. Not like this,” her tone shifted and I wondered if I’d exaggerated the stories.
“Julie, you have every right to tell your brother that what he’s done to you has affected you.”
“Sure, but you don’t know what he’ll do if I confront him,” I said.
“Do you mean that he’ll harm you if you bring up the fact that he hurt you both physically and emotionally when you were a young child?” Her nostrils flared in outrage.
“No. No,” I said, laughing a little. This was getting ridiculous.
“I doubt he realizes how his treatment affected you,” she said. “He needs to know, for his own sake.”
“Why?” I asked.
“He’s got to know how you feel, that he hurt you, that his treatment was intolerable. That he can’t go around treating people with such disregard.”
“I would never say that to him,” I said. “Intolerable. He would laugh in my face. Besides, he’s not awful to everyone. Just me.”
“Julie, you need to remember this: His treatment of you has nothing to do with you,” she said, so sure of herself.
What? It had everything to do with me. He really hated me, which in turn, made me hate myself. He was my older brother, my role model, the male with whom I spent most of my waking hours. And he hated me. This was what I knew, deeply, at my core. How was I supposed to learn that I was anything other than what he told me? Asking me to stray from the knowledge that he hated me would be like asking a baby born in zero gravity to walk. No matter what inflated praise my father infrequently showered upon me, or how often my mother made me a nice meal, I wanted, above all, for Clay to love me. Instead, he hit me, insulted me, knocked my door down, stepped on my head, argued with me, then pushed me to the ground until I submitted, and this left me dead inside.
Over three sessions, my therapist convinced me to confront him. I rehearsed what I would say. I practiced in the car and in the shower. That weekend, when he stopped home for a visit, I asked him if I could speak to him alone in my bedroom. This itself was unusual. We both acted nonchalant, though we knew this was something we did not do—talk.
I sat on my bed and waited for him to come to my room. He arrived eating chips, a handful cupped to his stomach. “I’ve been talking with my therapist,” I said, shaking slightly, squeezing my flattened, sweaty palms together. “And I want to tell you that the way you treated me over the years has really hurt me and she says it even qualifies as abuse. Like, sibling abuse,” I said. Looking back, I don’t know what I was expecting him say: Oh! You’re right! I’m so sorry! What an ass I’ve been!
I was so caught up in actually getting the words out that I flinched when he started yelling. “Fuck you!” he screamed, potato chips flying from his teeth to my bedspread. He swallowed hard, then hissed, “Jesus Christ, you fucking bitch!” He walked toward the door, cursing under his breath, “Holy fucking Christ!” I sat with my mouth open mid-word.
What I saw in that moment, in his reaction, felt like a revelation. He was hurt. And it wasn’t because of anything I said; it was because of something in him. Something made him feel so terrible that he took it out on me. His overly emotional reaction pulled the first veil off of our troubled relationship. I was old enough to see that his hurting me stemmed from his own pain. For a split second, I was curious. I was a growing woman examining her hurting older brother. But when he turned around and screamed, “See if I invite you to my fucking wedding!” I was a child again. I nearly fell backwards. We’d never truly fought as adults, except for once when he pushed me to the floor because I thought we should boil our corn on the cob and he thought we should grill it. But now I’d been banished from his future, theoretical wedding. I’d been punished with exile.
He left the room, continuing to curse and mutter down the hallway, and I sat quietly in my room, watching out the window. I heard him slam the front door and drive away. My mom padded down to my bedroom. “What on earth happened?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Sheesh,” she said, shaking her head and walking back to the kitchen.
I instantly hated the therapist and decided to stop seeing her—summer was almost over anyway. I lay on my bed wondering if he really would exclude me from his wedding. Could he do that? No. My parents wouldn’t let him. I berated myself for my stupidity, thankful that the next week I was due to leave home and go back to college. I couldn’t get out of my house fast enough, and spent the next few days packing my room, meticulously cleaning it, as if I were leaving and never, ever coming back.
DOCTOR OF PSYCHIATRY
MAY 1996
The morning after I walked down the driveway with my father, my parents asked me to see a psychiatrist. I said I would, but added that no doctor or therapist had ever helped before. What made them think this would be any different? “This woman is an MD,” my dad said, “and she comes very highly reco
mmended by Jon at the firm whose daughter is anorexic.” I wondered about my father’s life at his law firm. Were they a more satisfying family than us? Did he sit in their offices and talk about his troubles because he could never really relate to any of us at home?
“I wish I was anorexic,” I said. “At least I’d be fucked up and thin.”
“You don’t mean that, Julie,” my mom said.
“Whatever,” I mumbled.
“You have an appointment tomorrow at 10,” my dad said. “Here’s the address.” He handed me a yellow piece of paper with an address scribbled in his bubbly cursive. The fact that my father had participated in the acquisition of my health care meant that the situation had officially turned dire. A numbness came over me. My ears buzzed. I closed my eyes.
“Okay?” he asked, taking my knee and jiggling it.
“Fine,” I said.
My mom glanced at my dad with relief, and he crossed his arms and watched me as if I were a puzzle he had yet to solve.
The next morning I looked forward to the appointment with the shrink. I didn’t shower before going, just pulled on black pants, a black shirt, and my steel-toed boots and got in the car. I drove to the building, a glossy, black-windowed office tower in a characterless suburban office park. I sat for a moment after killing the engine, preparing myself. I felt like a boxer entering a ring. This lady had no idea what was about to hit her. I skipped the elevator, took the echoing stairs, and checked in at the yellow Formica front desk.
I flipped through a National Geographic, stealing glances at all the other crazies in the waiting room. There was an obese woman with buzzed hair minus a thin braid that she kept about three feet long. She fiddled with the braid and stared at the wall.
“Julie?” a voice said. I stood up and smiled instinctively, then remembered that I had promised myself not to fake anything. I had to be honest this day. My life depended on it.
