Many nights, as I lay in bed, I could hear my parents fighting with each other, their muffled, angry words piercing the walls. I was never exactly sure what they were fighting about, but I was certain it was connected with me.
Later, after they would go to sleep, I would slip into their bedroom and in the soft light from the bathroom nearby I would stand next to their bed and look down at them. I would stand very quietly and count my toes:
One, two, three, four…why are they fighting about me? Five, six, seven…I must be very, very bad. Eight, nine…what is wrong? Am I missing something? Ten. I am okay. Nothing is wrong with me.
After I had counted my toes, I would creep quietly out of their room and back into my own. One night as I stood next to their bed, my mother turned in her sleep and startled me out of my counting routine.
“Barbara? What are you doing? What’s wrong?”
I didn’t answer, and she went back to sleep. The next morning she didn’t remember that I had been in her room at all.
Like I was no one.
CHAPTER TWO
With each passing day, it became harder to face my friends and teachers at school. I was embarrassed, certain they’d know the truth as soon as I set foot in the classroom. They would see my face and realize how awful I was. They’d see all my secrets.
I told my mother and father I didn’t want to go to school anymore. Oddly enough, they didn’t seem to mind so much when I made the announcement. My mother halfheartedly tried to wheedle me into going, but I was adamant and stayed in my room until she gave up and left. My father just pretended the whole situation hadn’t happened. I was used to being ignored, but now it felt as though the only time he wanted to be around me was when he was hugging me.
The school district finally sent a teacher to the house to help me make up my schoolwork. He was tall and thin, with brown hair, and wore glasses and a tweed suit. I peeked out my bedroom window and saw him looking at his watch as he waited on the porch. He rang the doorbell. I immediately ran into my closet and hid.
I tried my best not to move, hoping my mother wouldn’t hear me. The air in the closet was thick and hot; I could smell the minty scent of the mothballs from the box above me on the shelf. Breathing hard, I brushed away some sweaty tendrils of blond hair and tried to still my pounding heart. I was curled up against some of the toys that I had crammed into the corner of the closet. I was really tall for my age, almost five foot eight, so I had to hug my coltish, gangly legs close to my chest so I would fit in the small space.
“Barbara?” My mother was calling me. “Where are you? Your teacher is here!”
But I stayed where I was. How could I face him? I felt sure he would look at me and see my secret. And what if he wanted to hug me like my father did?
After the teacher left without seeing me, I grabbed a piece of thick stationery that had my name written in cursive across the top. It had been a gift from my parents; maybe it was time to use it.
Pen in hand, I started scribbling. Words that had been pent up in me for so long, yearning to burst out, appeared on the page: “He’s touching me, Mommy, he keeps touching me.”
That’s all I could manage to say. I couldn’t even bear to write “Daddy,” because it was just too scary. Writing anything was terrifying, but I was so tired of feeling alone. I was sure my mother would understand. She would cry over me, kiss me, rock me, and make it all better. Just like I always dreamed she would do.
I folded the letter neatly and ran into the living room, where my mother was sitting.
Her eyes narrowed. “Where were you this whole time? It was so embarrassing! I had to send your teacher away.”
I felt tears collect in my eyes. Shoving the note into her hands, I ran back to my room and closed the door.
But what happened next I could never have predicted. Instead of seeing the horror in her own house, my mother didn’t understand at all. The teacher was fired, and I never saw him again.
***
Three weeks later, I was at home with my three siblings. My parents were away at one of the many cocktail parties that they were invited to. I liked it when they went out; I felt like I could breathe again when my father was out of the house. I loved to read books, and when my parents were away I would curl up in my room and read to my heart’s content.
Jeff was asleep, and Pat and Bill were fighting over who would get the car the next weekend. For the first time, I was relieved I wasn’t part of their conversation. I looked back and forth between them as they argued, as if it were a ping-pong match.
Suddenly Bill turned around, grabbed the stuffed bear I was holding, and ran into my bedroom, laughing. “Hey, I’m gonna pull off his tail!” He wagged the toy in my face.
“Please, Bill! Don’t do that! It’s my bear!” It was my favorite stuffed animal, and I was terrified that he would actually take it apart. At the same time, I was sort of flattered that he was paying me attention. Both Bill and Pat were in high school and usually had little to say to Jeff or me.
I sat down on my bed, still begging him to give me my stuffed bear back. Before I could reach over to grab it, my brother jumped up, slammed my bedroom door shut, and pushed me down so I was lying on the bed.
At that point I thought he was still teasing me, so I started giggling. But as he pulled up my nightgown and slid off my underwear, I realized that something different was happening, and I became deathly silent.
That strange sensation that I always felt when my father was hugging me happened again. I started floating above Bill and me, watching from the ceiling as if I were a spectator.
I watched Bill as he unzipped his pants and started grunting and moving over my body. Suddenly a warm moisture on my thighs jolted me back into my body. It was over in less than a minute. I felt no pain, just surprise.
As he rolled off me and straightened his clothes, I said, confused, “What was that?”
“Pussy,” Bill said with a smirk as he rushed back out of my bedroom.
Pat was in the hallway outside, and as I watched from my room I saw them exchange a strange, fast look that seemed full of a meaning I did not understand.
I looked down at myself. My nightgown was wet. I decided to take a shower and put my pajamas in the laundry basket.
When my parents came home, my mother asked, “How was your night?” as she was putting up her coat.
I don’t know why I spoke up then. Maybe it was because it was just my brother, not my father, so it was less scary to tell her. “Bill—he grabbed me and kept hugging me,” I said, cringing at having to say the words aloud.
A strange look fell over my mother’s face. She blinked and then her expression cleared, and she plastered a smile across her face. “You must have misunderstood,” she said. “He was just being nice; that’s how men are sometimes.” She turned and closed the door after her.
CHAPTER THREE
More and more each day the urge to find anyone, just anyone who would listen to me grew stronger and stronger. Finally I realized that if no one would listen to me in my own home, then I would have to go find someone myself, no matter how hard it might be. I was eleven years old by then, and I was sure I would be able to take care of myself. I decided to run away.
I planned to do it on my twelfth birthday as a gift to myself. I didn’t have a suitcase of my own, so I packed some clothes in the closest thing I could find: my blue record player case. There wasn’t much room inside because of the record player handle and the base, but I knew it would have to do. I hid it under my bed and waited for my birthday to arrive.
That day I felt braver than I ever had before, and so sad at the same time. My heart tightened at the thought of saying good-bye to my home, my cat, my dog Honey, and all my nice things. But I walked out of my neighborhood that afternoon and out onto Route 50, stuck my thumb out, and hitchhiked into nearby Washington, DC.
It was 1968, and the entire country mirrored my own inner turmoil. The anti-war movement was in full swing, with demonstrat
ors carrying signs and people playing guitars and singing. Women were wearing jeans or long, flowing dresses. One guy had on a military jacket, and a colorful headband was tied over his long hair. I saw a man wearing a suede jacket with a long fringe down the sleeves, and I remember wanting one just like it. There was a cloud of marijuana smoke hanging in the air. Everyone seemed much cooler than me; I wanted to be just like them.
I ended up in Dupont Circle, where there was a small park with a fountain in the middle and lots of grassy areas and cement benches. The people there welcomed me and offered me food, the drugs they were using, and a place to stay. There seemed to be crash pads and communes and people sleeping together all over the city. I thought I could be happy there, until an older man who lived at the commune realized my true age and called my parents. I was returned home very late the same night.
That first time I ran away, my mother and father looked frightened and made a fuss over me when they saw me. But when the heavy silence fell around us like a cloak, I understood that things wouldn’t really change. I knew if I stayed there much longer, I’d suffocate.
The second time I ran away, I wore my favorite fringed purple suede jacket that I somehow had gotten my mother to buy. I loved the feeling of walking into Dupont Circle wearing my bell-bottomed jeans and my new jacket and pretending to read my sister’s I Ching, a mystical-looking book that I had taken from her room and brought with me. I felt cool, almost as if I belonged—until my precious jacket was “borrowed” by another runaway and I was returned home once again.
None of it stopped me from running away, over and over, even when the abuse at home finally stopped. I didn’t know why it had stopped and was happy it had, but I couldn’t make the memories go away with it. Whenever I felt bad, or experienced the floating feeling I got when I thought about what had happened with my father and brother, I ran away,
Or I took drugs. They were everywhere—acid, LSD, marijuana, speed, hashish, even heroin. I tried it all, and found out immediately that they made my bad memories and feelings disappear. The stronger the drug, the better I felt. I especially loved doing acid because of the way it made the street lights look like lollipops. It was odd that this was the happiest I had felt in my entire childhood.
***
The police eventually stopped returning me home and took me instead to a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia. The center was by I-395, and as I lay in my cell at night I would listen to cars racing up and down the highway and wish I was speeding far, far away. One night I could hear the sounds of a carnival coming from the nearby shopping center. People were screaming as they rode the carnival rides, and I wanted so badly to be out there with them, part of the crowd.
While I was locked up in the detention center, a staff member brought me to a local doctor for a checkup. I knew it would be too hard for me to even try to escape from the doctor’s office; the receptionist’s desk was in between me and the only door to the outside. Instead, my eyes wandered around the exam room. It was small, with a paper-covered table in the middle and some magazines in the corner. There was a white desk where I assumed the doctor would sit. Bored, I rummaged through its drawers and found a syringe, which I slipped into one of my pockets. When the doctor finally came into the room, I put on my best smile. He never knew, and I was sent back to the detention center with a clean bill of health—and the syringe.
I practiced shooting up with sugar water in my cell at night. I had heard somewhere that it would give you a good rush, and it was decent, though not as great as the drugs I was used to. Still, it would have to do for now. I also figured it was probably pretty safe. People ate sugar every day. What was the harm?
I told Stacy, the girl in the nearest cell, the next time she told me she was bored.
“Me too,” I said. “But I do have something to keep me occupied.”
I heard her shift in her cell. “What do you mean, girl?”
I lowered my voice so no guards would hear what I was saying. “I got this syringe from the doctor’s office. I can shoot up sugar water to give me a buzz.”
“Really?” There was great interest in Stacy’s voice. “That does something?”
“Yeah,” I said, wanting to impress her. “I can let you borrow it from time to time.”
I could almost see Stacy smiling. “Yeah, girl, that would be sweet.”
The next few days, we alternated using the syringe. Stacy told me that she was surprised how well it worked, and I felt pleased and proud. She was only six months older than me, but I saw her as one of the big girls. She was scheduled to go to Bon Air, a reform school in Richmond, Virginia, and now I was dreading the day. I had finally made a friend.
A couple of weeks later, as I waited in the lunch line in the cafeteria, Stacy called out to me from a nearby table. “Thanks. I’m so happy for what you did for me,” she said.
Was she being sarcastic? Or was she actually pleased with me? I froze, hoping that it would become clear.
“I can’t go upstate now, ’cause I got sick. I got hep, and they’re sending me to a hospital instead, so thanks, girl.”
I had heard many scary things about Bon Air, but what was hep, and why was she thanking me? I still didn’t get it until I started to feel nauseated and tired myself.
When I finally saw a doctor, he asked me if I had used any intravenous drugs. I didn’t know what he meant, so he explained that if several people shared drugs delivered by a needle without any sort of sterilization between uses, different diseases could be passed from person to person.
I was shocked. I had thought that shooting up with sugar water was the safest thing that I could have done. But instead it made me sicker than any of the drugs I had taken before.
I was sent to Fairfax Hospital, where I was diagnosed with infectious hepatitis. I was hospitalized for weeks. When people visited me, they had to wear face masks as well as long hospital gowns covering their clothes and shoes, because I was so contagious. The nausea and fatigue dragged me down, and the pale-yellow tint of my skin was horrifying.
When my parents came to visit me, they didn’t say much, like usual. My illness wasn’t discussed with me; I suppose my parents and the doctors felt I was too young to even talk to. But they didn’t need to say anything. I told myself that I never wanted to feel like that again, and that I was going to become a better girl from that point on.
Weeks later, when I returned to the detention center, I looked through the clear glass walls of the office at the big chalkboard listing all of our names and release dates. If a girl was being sent to another institution, it was noted on the board. Next to my name it said “CTS.”
I nudged the girl beside me. “What does CTS mean?”
She shook her head. “You’re screwed, girl. You’re committed to state. They own you now.”
That was how I found out that my parents had been advised to let the state take over, since they couldn’t control me. While I was in the hospital, they had relinquished their parental rights and committed me to the State of Virginia.
CHAPTER FOUR
The state quickly decided it didn’t want to deal me either. I was locked up in a mental institution in Maryland, where I shared a room with three other girls my age. One of my roommates cradled an imaginary baby in her arms all day, another had scars all up and down her arms from cutting herself, and the last girl was a runaway like me. At least they were my age and not adults like the other patients in the admittance building where we were. Most of the adult patients seemed to be drugged all the time; they just sat around or stood looking out the window. The only time I ever heard a sound out of any of them was at night, when someone might start yelling from a nightmare.
I ran away from that place, too, and was sent to Tekakwitha, a boarding school in Pennsylvania for troubled girls. It was run by Catholic nuns.
The school looked like a castle from the outside: big, dark, and ominous, with turrets and high walls. The inside was even worse. The ceilings were so high that the d
ark wooden walls seemed to go on forever. The floor was dark stone or marble. But it was not dirty; Tekakwitha was kept very clean because the nuns had a secure cleaning crew, we girls who were under their control.
I couldn’t keep up with the horrible cleaning schedule of the school. Our keepers had all of us clean the floors with toothbrushes as punishment, and I began to pull out my hair, piece by piece, until I had a small bald spot on the top of my head. I also started to have very heavy menstrual periods, and the loss of blood made me feel extremely weak. I knew I couldn’t survive there, so I did the only thing I knew how to do to take care of myself. I ran away.
When I fled the evil castle, like a princess in a twisted fairy tale, the state decided to up the ante. I was sent to the Bon Air reform school in Richmond, the very place that my friend Stacy had been thankful she couldn’t get transferred to because of her illness. Apparently, getting hepatitis was better than going to Bon Air.
I had never thought I could feel more alone or scared than I was in the previous places I had been sent, but Bon Air was a new nightmare. The reform school was nothing like a regular school; it was a penitentiary for children. While I hadn’t committed any real crime, I was still considered incorrigible, unable to be reformed in any other way. The irony was that at Bon Air, I learned more about breaking the law than I ever had on the streets.
Doris, the girl who shared my cell at the school, had been in juvenile court for solicitation multiple times. She had café au lait skin and large, soft eyes, with a gentle way about her, and she was much shorter than I was even though she was older than me by several years. I was happy she was my cellmate at Bon Air. I knew I could have gotten a girl who was a lot harder to get along with than Doris.
“What’s soliciting?” I asked the first night, as we lay on our bunk beds in the cell. Doris had been in Bon Air for several months by the time I arrived, and she had taken possession of the top bunk when her cellmate had gone home.
Nobody's Girl Page 2
