Implosion

by Elizabeth W. Garber

  My father’s answer came swift as a stroke of a guillotine. “You will not pierce your ears. Your body is not your own until you are twenty-one. After that, you can do what you choose, even though I don’t approve of pierced ears.”

  I was stunned. My body was not my own until I was twenty-one! It was his? I glanced at my mother, but she was staring down at the table, slowly shaking her head. Claustrophobia closed in around me. The conversation had been closed with a slam.

  I looked down at the table, my eyes stinging. Then I glanced at my brother Wood and rolled my eyes. “He’s so controlling,” I muttered.

  “What did you say, young lady?” His words lashed me.

  “I said that you were so controlling.”

  “You are god damn right I’m controlling.” He glared at me and sweat gathered in the wrinkles on his forehead. “I’m an architect. I have to watch every detail every moment on my buildings. If I let down my guard for one moment, if I make one mistake, someone could die or a building could collapse.”

  I resisted rolling my eyes, and thought, “Yeah, right.”

  Then he pointed his finger at each one of us. “I watch you kids like a hawk too. For your own good. Somebody’s got to do it around here.” He glared at my mom. “I don’t want you kids going down the tubes like all the hippies I see all day at the University. Getting into drugs. Dressing like sluts. No work ethic. I won’t have it. No child of mine will look like that.”

  My mother became numb and silent at the table. She stared down at the table like we did. We didn’t get mad at her, or expect that she should stand up to him or fight. She was our sanity, our safe place, our kindness in the glass house. We were devoted to her, feeling like she saved us from him all the time, even when she went silent and froze up and couldn’t help us. Sometimes it felt like she was one of us. She was trying to survive, just like us, trying to keep out of his line of fire, just like us. Her father had also been a tyrant, lecturing at the dinner table, and our mother slipped back into her childhood survival strategy of the invisible daughter. She was one of us, slowly becoming rebels, each in our own ways, against our dad.

  Then he glared at Wood. “We’ve got to cut your hair, young man. It’s getting too long.”

  I was relieved to have the pressure off me, but shrugged at my brother, gesturing “sorry” with my eyes.

  In my father’s childhood in the 1920s, only prostitutes and lower class women pierced their ears. No one from the middle and upper classes would ever pierce their ears—it was “unclean.” Women’s clothing and lives were under the lock and key of their fathers. Strangely, my father was fiercely enforcing the doctrines of his childhood. Even though he claimed to be Modern and Liberal and Radical, he was determined to squelch any signs of the new revolution in our family. He kept cutting my brothers’ hair too short with his electric clippers.

  Under the accelerating pressure of the late 60s, as the Tower loomed over us before it was even built, my father was turning into more than an echo of his patriarchal German father. Our grandfather Frederick was known for swiftly thwacking the back of the carving knife onto the elbow of any son of his who dared lean his elbow on the table. Children were to be controlled and lectured into submission.

  I knew I’d complain to Linda about my dad’s rules and we’d laugh it off. She’d say, “Your dad is such a character.” But the claustrophobia stayed with me, made me feel sick. Years before, when my father showed us the finished plans for our modern house, there was my room, with two single beds, the desk, the closet, the bookshelves to be built in. Even the half moon of a chair was drawn in. My room was all planned out. Everything in this house was his design. Couldn’t I have any place that was just mine? I felt the pressure closing in on me as I looked down at the dinner table. My body was not my own, but his. Little did I know yet, what this could mean for me.

  Something had happened to our family after we moved to the glass house. Now we were trained to never say no to him. We knew we could not speak the truth. We gave over our freedom, because there was something fearsome in him we dared not challenge.

  MY FATHER CHANGED the subject and turned to my brothers. “This summer, boys, keep an eye out for groundhogs. I’ll get the gun out so we stay on top of them this year. We can’t let them get into our gardens.”

  My brothers looked at me and grinned.

  “Groundhogs,” I groaned.

  My brother, Wood, had read that groundhogs are hard to trap since they have a lot of tunnels. If you chase them down one hole they are likely to come up any number of other holes. Last summer he’d waited, watching a hidden entrance. When the mother came out and sat on her haunches he put a clean shot through her head with the.22. He ran up to the house, calling to me, “I don’t know if I got it. Will you come look?”

  I said, “You aren’t going to trick me into looking at any dead groundhogs this year.” They all laughed, remembering my screech when I saw the trickle of blood and chased Wood back up to the house. Even though he liked playing a joke on me, when he saw it dead, he felt sick about it and stopped hunting them.

  My father eyed him angrily. “You aren’t going to wimp out on shooting groundhogs this summer, are you? Remember all the work we put into growing all our seedlings and planting them.” All spring, between the table and the living room area, my father had set up a huge metal structure, with layers of shelves and grow lights that made it look like a glowing space ship in the window. Dayglo-green forests of baby leaves rose toward the light. He was scientific about their temperature and watered them with special fertilizers. Then we’d hauled all the trays out to the garden, transplanted them and watered them regularly until they got established.

  Eight-year-old Hubbard piped up immediately to distract him. “I’ll shoot them this year.”

  “That’s my boy.” My father patted his youngest son on the shoulder. “You are such a great hard worker, Hub. You put your brother and sister to shame. They just don’t have the same work ethic you have.” His young face beamed with the compliment yet glanced at us with an embarrassed shrug. We reassured him with a glance. We acted like we didn’t care what the Old Man thought of us.

  THAT SUMMER WE went to Mexico with another architect, his wife, and two children in a long camping van. We five kids played cards as our parents rotated driving thousands of miles, coast to coast across Mexico. I kept a journal and recorded our expenses and mileage. My mother tried to cook while we drove, but she clutched her still painful scar as my father took winding curves too tight, throwing us out of our seats. We climbed over newly-poured concrete buildings at the university in Mexico City, and over ruins in the Yucatan. We climbed up steep temple steps, and stared at carved faces on stone walls. We bought tortillas by the kilo, bargained at the market, and made bowls of guacamole in our camper bus. I loved my embroidered blouses and silver earrings from Taxco, hoops and dangles with screws to hold them tightly to my earlobes.

  WE CAME HOME to August’s heat and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where protests against the war in Vietnam became a bloody battle against Mayor Daley’s police and the National Guard. My brothers and I sat with our mother in front of the television at the edge of our parents’ bed every night watching the convention. On the black and white screen, we watched riots, shootings, tear gas, police with dogs attacking long-haired hippies and clean-cut college students not much older than us, who ran away with blood running down their arms and faces.

  My father snarled at the television, “Just shoot them all,” and stormed into the living room to put on big band jazz, a wall of horns loud enough to drown out the ominous rumbling of soldiers hitting batons against their shields before they turned them on the students.

  She stayed up for the eleven o’clock news. I woke up to the muted sounds of gunfire. I stood in the doorway to their room, saw my mother’s face, pinched and drawn, shaking her head, her face haunted.

  My father listened to the chanting students’ voices saying, “Kill the pigs.”
His voice boomed, “Bunch of freaks. They deserve what’s coming to them.”

  My mother watched him. That was the moment she knew: the marriage was over. But it would take years before she had a plan, the courage to leave our glass cage, and a way that she could support herself and us.

  One afternoon, my mother and I were weeding, our backs curved as our legs straddled the rows of green beans. The garden had overgrown with weeds when we were in Mexico. Working side by side, we moved down the row, talking as we pulled out handfuls of waist-high pigweed towering over the beans. She asked, “Remember that game your dad played, where you had to guess the color of the stone?”

  A game with stones? I was shocked. I thought the stone game was something he played just with me, something special he and I shared.

  “He told me to close my eyes and handed me the stone. How the hell would I know what color it was?” She had started swearing a lot more since I’d become a teenager.

  She continued, “So I said ‘Green.’ But when I opened my eyes, it was this boring grey stone. I just didn’t get it. Here I was with four children under six, with three in diapers, a dying child, and he wanted to know what color a stone was when it was clearly grey!” She stood up straight, shaking her head with irritation. She stretched her back to see how many more rows we had to weed.

  I felt sick. My favorite childhood memory lurched into an uncomfortable new awareness. I yanked on a tall pigweed and it broke off in my hand.

  My mom glanced over from her row. “Pull it slower so you get the roots.”

  I kept my face down, feeling nauseous. How many people had he handed a stone, asking them “What color do you feel in the stone?” I thought that was our special game. I grabbed and pulled another weed, steady and satisfying as the long roots released. I tossed it in the bushel basket and grabbed another weed. Was this game one of his many tests? To see who could play creatively with him? I had passed my father’s test and my mother hadn’t. What made me feel sick was that, years ago, I had wanted to win. I wanted my father to think I was smarter and more interesting than my mother. But now I didn’t want his special attention anymore. I never even thought to let my mother know what this had become.

  THAT FALL, MY mother started going to meetings about social change and the criminal justice system. She’d leave dinner on the stove for us to eat when Woodie got home from the office. My brothers and I cleaned up the kitchen. He read in his Eames chair and played records while we did our homework. At bedtime, he said good night to my brothers. One night, he stood at the door to my room. “Time to finish up with your homework. You know you need a lot of sleep if you’re going to be any good on your test tomorrow.” I agreed.

  I hurried to the bathroom to brush my teeth and change into my nightgown. I tried to slip into bed and turn off the light before he noticed. But he came back, his white shirt unbuttoned at the collar from taking off his bowtie after work. He turned the light back on before he sat down on the side of my single bed.

  “Let me give you a back rub to help you go to sleep.” His voice was thoughtful, like this was a good thing I should appreciate. Back rubs had been part of our life with our father since I was a little girl.

  I REMEMBER SUNDAY mornings when my brothers and I climbed onto our parents’ bed. My father and I would look at architectural magazines and the boys would drive their little cars across the covers. One day Dad said, “Let’s see how sensitive you are.” He took my hand and with the tip of his index finger, he touched mine. “See how your fingertips rise in little mounds. That’s very good.” I looked at my fingers and saw tiny mountains I have never seen before. His fingers touched my fingertips and I felt little tingling fires in my skin. Looking at my fingers up close I saw little swirls like brush strokes across my skin.

  He explained, “Not everyone has sensitive fingertips like you do. Some people have flat round fingers and don’t feel much. I always make sure my new architectural students have sensitive fingers. You can’t design buildings without sensitivity.” I thought of all the things his students had to be good at.

  Daddy said, “I know you are very sensitive because of your fingertips.” I felt special, but a little worried. What if I didn’t have little tips on my fingers? Would he still have loved me?

  He taught me. “You can take your fingertips and touch someone’s back and it feels really nice.” He moved his fingertips across my arm. “See how good that feels. Now you can try doing that on my back.” He turned over, naked under the covers, and re-arranged the sheets. I practiced moving my fingers in little circles and lines around the moles and freckles on his back. He said, “That’s good, Sugar.” But after a while I got bored and looked out the window. He said, “Pay attention to what you are doing. Make your fingers lighter.” When our mother came back from the kitchen with coffee, he thanked me before sitting up to drink coffee with her.

  When my brothers and I were older, we sat around my father lying down on the big bed, each of us running our fingers over his wide back. Sometimes they ran little trucks or cars over his back, making rummm-rumm noises. When they went too fast and started crashing into each other, Daddy would say, “Enough of the cars. If you want to get a massage, I’ll time how long you massage me.” We built up credit. For every five minutes we massaged his back, we got one minute. It took a long time to save up for our massages. Sometimes on weekends, we got bored and looked at the funny pages with one hand while we made circles and lines on his back waiting for it to be our turn.

  When it was our turn, we pulled off our pajamas and lay on our tummies. His big warm hand moved from our head in long strokes down our backs, across our bottoms and down our legs to our feet. He was careful not to tickle our feet. Then we rolled over and he gave us a front rub over our chest and belly, skipping around our pee-pees and going down our legs. Then it was all over. We called out, “Are you sure our time is up?” “I’m sure,” he said. Then we ran off to our rooms to get dressed.

  When we get older and lived in the modern house, my brothers stopped going in to my parents’ room when he lay in bed all day. Then he would call out to me, “Lilibet, come give me a back rub.” I always went. I had already learned, without ever being told, that I could never say no to my father.

  Now I was fourteen and he said he was going to give me a massage. He said, “Let me help you with your nightgown.” He lifted it off over my head. I lay down on my belly, shivering as he pulled the sheet and cover down to my feet. He stroked his wide palm over my back, buttocks and legs in long slow sweeps down to my feet. Even though massages are supposed to be nice things, I couldn’t relax. I held myself tight. I hoped it would just be a back rub and not a front rub. But after a few strokes down my back, he always told me to roll over. Of course I did. I was trained to be obedient, compliant, to do what I was told. We all were. Obeying what he told us to do for a few more years.

  Now I had to look up, the light above my head shining down on my desk. I didn’t want to look at his face. I stared at the ceiling. He sat beside me, his hands stroking from my shoulders down around my breasts over my belly, along my hip bones down my legs.

  He said things in such a normal way. “Your body is developing so nicely. Your hips are filling out, which will be good when you have a baby.” I tried to shrink my breasts away from his touch. He spoke like he was doing a good thing. “I won’t touch your breasts or your nipples. You don’t have to be afraid. You have a beautiful body. You should feel good about being naked.”

  I stared at the ceiling, saying in my mind, I hate this, I hate this. The voice in my head got louder. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.

  His hand circled my belly, and moved close to my pubic hair. I jerked away. “Don’t worry, Sugar. I won’t do anything to arouse you.”

  I said to myself, I won’t feel anything. I will freeze my body so I don’t feel anything. He stroked down my arms, the hollows of my shoulders and back around my small breasts.

  I said, “I really need to go to sleep now. Th
anks for the massage, Daddy.”

  “You’re welcome, Lilibet.” I sat up and lifted my arms so he could put my nightgown back over my head. I pulled the flannel gown down to my ankles. He tucked the sheet and blanket around me, and kissed me on the forehead. He walked to the door, turning out the light. “Night night, Lilibet. Love you.”

  “Love you too, Daddy.” I pulled the sheets and blanket tight around me. I pulled my arms on either side of my body, making my body rigid. I wouldn’t feel anything. I stared up at the ceiling, holding my body like a frozen princess. Once I heard my mother’s VW come in the driveway after her meeting or class, I fell asleep.

  This became a ritual that started when I was fourteen, and continued, when I was fifteen, and continued, when I was sixteen. Each time it happened, I would forget it in the morning. I wouldn’t think to tell anyone, never my best friend or my mother. It was just one of the weird things that happened in our family. It was just something I had to endure until someday I would leave home.

  AMNESIA

  All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

  —PHILIP JOHNSON

  EVERY TIME I WALKED AWAY FROM A BAD EN-counter with my dad, a strange amnesia wiped the slate clean.

  If I had a week away from home or even a day’s distance from my dad, the old script, the memories of my adored father, stepped in and it was as if nothing bad had happened.