I felt like I was moving in a different direction now; I had found a new job working at a fish processing plant, and now that I was settling into life in Biloxi I began thinking I might have a future. All I wanted was to be good and live a peaceful, quiet life—and maybe even discover the real me who had been hiding inside, waiting to come out.
Then along came Gary Pottete.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
After living with my father for two months, I met a completely different type of man than I usually met, or so I thought. Actually, he had a lot in common with the rest of the men I had known. I’d figured out a little about myself by that point, and I knew that if there was a man with a problem in a room full of well-adjusted men, I would find him. I just had not learned how to avoid meeting him, not yet.
Gary wasn’t bad looking; he was of average height and had brown eyes and hair. The best thing he had going for him was his body. He was smoothly muscled and tanned from all the time he spent outside servicing the cars at the go-kart track on the beach near my father’s home.
I had heard stories about Gary’s alcohol addiction and abuse of his former girlfriend, but we had fun together, and he’d never tried to hit me. When I asked him about it he told me his ex was crazy and drove him to it.
I’d seen the girl one afternoon when she stopped by the go-kart track where Gary worked. She was petite, with tiny features and brown hair, but what struck me was her face; her nose had a big twisted lump in the middle. Obviously it had been broken, and I knew Gary must have been the one who disfigured her. But I felt no sympathy for the girl. Instead, I grew angry with her for coming around the track looking for Gary. I was jealous of their past relationship and wanted him all to myself.
Gary and I decided to move in together fairly quickly, and we found a small cottage near the Gulf on the side of the interstate. I learned it was called a railroad cottage because its rooms were long and narrow and went back in a straight line: first the living room, then the kitchen and the bathroom, and last of all, way at the back of the cottage, the bedroom. I painted the kitchen pale yellow and the bedroom bright blue and covered the furniture in the small cottage with colorful throws and blankets. The place was small but it was ours, and I loved it. It felt like home.
This was the first long relationship I’d been in since Moses and New York—which had not been a real relationship at all. Everything felt so new and different to me that I decided I wanted to change other aspects of my life as well.
I liked to imagine myself working in an office or maybe even a school somewhere, but I knew I needed to continue the education I had left behind in the sixth grade. Although I felt embarrassed that the only choice I had was to prepare for my GED instead of graduating from a regular high school, I decided to do it so that I could get the diploma I needed to go to college.
I spent weeks studying, worrying, and taking pretests over and over. Even though I had no encouragement from Gary or anyone else, I was determined to push myself forward and take control of my life. And when I finally felt I was ready for the real GED, I passed—with high scores in reading comprehension and history, though very low scores in math.
I was so proud of myself for passing that test. Moses had told me I was a “dumb ho” and tried to prevent me from getting my hands on any books, but I had always found a way to read anyway. Reading those books all those years had most likely helped me to get high scores in reading comprehension, scores so high that I even got a letter from the community college, asking me to apply to one of their programs.
I didn’t begin college right away; after passing the GED, I realized that I needed to take some time to figure out what I wanted to do next. But it was an exciting time. I was on the way to furthering my education. Even my nerves were calming down a little bit. I was sleeping more, and although I wasn’t crazy about the humidity, I thought maybe I could live in Mississippi for good.
One night I was in bed asleep and dreaming of my future when Gary came home from work late. He woke me by grabbing my arm and pulling me violently out of bed.
I jumped to my feet. “What’s wrong?”
In response, he punched me directly in the eye and knocked me down to the floor beside the bed.
For a split second I thought I was back in New York, and that Moses was standing over me, beating me because I had not made enough money. When I remembered where I was, I frantically tried to figure out what I’d done to make Gary hit me in the face. Never once did I think that he was wrong, not even when he began his senseless beating.
I ran outside in my terror, and Gary followed me, yelling and hitting me again and again. I fell back on my left elbow, smashing it down into the concrete sidewalk. I heard the bones cracking as my arm hit the ground, and when I stood, my arm was dangling by my side at a weird angle. Screaming, I ran past Gary and to the nearest pay phone at the convenience store on the corner. Gary followed close behind me, shouting at me to stop and calling me names.
The man behind the counter stared at me like he had seen a ghost. He glanced from me to Gary and back again, but he never said a word to either of us. I managed to ask the incredulous man to call a taxi, and when it came the driver drove me to the hospital in nearby Gulfport.
When I reached the emergency room, I looked so terrible that the intake person swore I had been in a car accident. She was shocked when I did my best to explain that a person had done this to me. The hospital staff rushed me onto a stretcher; I needed to have major surgery to correct the multiple broken bones in my left elbow.
Gary came running into the hospital as I was being wheeled away for surgery. When I saw his twisted face through a small window in the elevator door, I started shaking and screaming in terror. I was sure he was going to kill me.
The nurses swarmed into action and shouted for security. “He’s the one who did this to her. Get help, help!”
Someone called the police, and Gary fled the hospital. The police took photos of my disfigured face, black eyes, and broken arm. The beating was so severe that Gary was eventually charged with attempted manslaughter. Later I found out that he was convicted and spent several months in jail, and left Biloxi for the town of Water Valley to live with his mother.
I never figured out why he pulled me from my bed that night, and I probably never will. Alcoholics do things that make no sense, and the people in their lives are left with the impossible task of trying to understand their actions. But I carry the memory of that night with me still. Because of the severe trauma and resulting surgery, my elbow has never been the same. Bending my left arm completely is impossible.
***
I was in the hospital for several days. The nurses encouraged me to call my family to come visit me, but I was almost too embarrassed to do it. Neither of my parents had approved of my relationship with Gary, and they had been right. I had no idea how to pick an appropriate partner; I’d spent my teenage years with men who were interested in only one thing. I knew nothing about boundaries or how to be involved with someone in an adult relationship.
My mother began to cry when she saw the shape I was in, and my father remained stonily silent, hardly looking at me. I didn’t look at either of them. I lay on the white sheets and blankets that covered my hospital bed and tried not to feel the pain coursing through my entire body. My face was swollen and bruised purple and black, my eyes were blackened, and my left arm was held in a sling that covered the heavy white plaster cast reaching from my wrist to my shoulder. I felt like such a disappointment. I had been on the right track for a while, but there I was, lying there all banged up and looking and feeling horrible.
Instead of talking about what had happened to me, or how I felt, my mother began telling me about my uncle in Virginia and a course he wanted me to come up to Virginia to take. She didn’t say a thing about Gary; his name wasn’t mentioned at all while they were there with me at the hospital.
“Barbara, this course will help you. I know it will. It helps people find out what’s bee
n missing in their lives. It’s called Lifespring.”
As she rambled on and on about the course, I closed my eyes. I didn’t have the energy to argue with her. My inside matched my outside; I felt like I would never be anything good in life. Why else had I been beaten again and again? Maybe others saw what I really was. Maybe I would never be able to make something of myself.
“Barbara? Please?” my mother was saying.
I wanted to make her happy. Besides, I figured that I needed to get out of Mississippi at this point and start over someplace else. “Okay, I’ll go.”
My father had stayed out of the conversation; he barely said a word while he was in my hospital room. But before I left Mississippi, I found out that he had taken his pistol and gone out to search the beach area for Gary. I don’t know what would have happened if he had found him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I stood outside on the little cement balcony of my new apartment, looking out over the trees and the street below. The sun was setting, and in the distance I could see the pink and deep purple clouds gleaming over the white stones of the Washington Monument. I was so proud of moving into my first apartment all by myself. It meant so much to have a place where I could be myself, whoever that turned out to be. A place where I could breathe
I stepped inside and pulled the sliding glass balcony doors shut behind me, my eyes adjusting from the glowing sunset outside to the quiet, darkened living room. My feet slid across the hardwood floors as I crossed the room in my socks, walking around the velvety peach sectional sofa and toward the kitchen. I’d slowly been picking up pieces of furniture whenever I could afford them, which hadn’t been very often, but I planned on furnishing my new home only with pieces I really loved. So far the place looked pretty sparse, but it was slowly filling up and reflected my taste alone, not anyone else’s.
The Lifespring course I had come up to Virginia for was a pyramid scam hyped as a self-improvement course. After I found out about the complicated system that required attendees to recruit more and more paying audience members, I hadn’t gone back. But one good thing had resulted: I was able to meet some local people and befriend a young man and woman who helped me get on my feet. I moved into my apartment, found a job, started school, and began following my dreams.
I’d finally decided what I wanted to do. I’d had so few mentors in my life, but I remembered clearly what people like Anita had done for me. Then, while recuperating after my elbow surgery at the Gulfport hospital, I’d been impressed by how kindly the nurses treated me, never judging me because of what I had been through with Gary. I wanted so badly to help others, too. I thought that I could counsel drug addicts because I had gone through all of the same problems.
After moving into my Washington, DC apartment, I had enrolled in the Northern Virginia Community College’s counseling program. I was frightened beyond belief—I hadn’t been inside a classroom since the sixth grade—but when I went to my first class, I was amazed to see a wide range of ages. True, most were right out of high school, but there were some who seemed in their mid-twenties, like me. Better still, the class didn’t look at me like I didn’t fit in. It was a wonderful feeling.
I had always loved to learn and I jumped in headfirst, devouring the books and the classes. One of the first words I learned was “incongruent,” which means when things don’t match. I understood that well.
I loved my new life and independence, but life in the real world was scary, too. The problem was that I didn’t know where I fit. Other than Anita, I had never told anyone about my life in New York, and keeping the secret was taking its toll on me. Sometimes I felt like I had come back from the past in a time machine. I had gone from being a child of twelve to a woman in her twenties and had missed all those years in between, all the learning and experiences that make a person a person.
I wanted to erase those ugly years and put something good and clean there instead. I would see families in the mall or a mother rushing around the grocery store to find healthy food for her family. I would see fathers and children playing in the park or splashing around the swimming pool, having a wonderful time. And I knew I wanted that. I knew it was good and fine and normal and square—like those same squares that Moses had hated. Moses had made fun of them and told me to take advantage of them, but those people were the ones I wanted to be. They were the good ones. Moses was wrong.
From watching television I figured out that I was supposed to find a partner somewhere, get married, and have a baby—so that’s what I set out to do.
I met Jose Manual while I was out one night in DC. I’d discovered the 1980s dance club scene and all the attention a blond-haired woman could get in a Latin club. We danced several times and exchanged numbers, and we began to see each other almost every day.
Jose lived in nearby Falls Church, Virginia, close to the same area where I’d lived as a child. He lived with his mother and brother in a one-bedroom apartment and worked as a plumber while his brother attended the nearby high school, and his mother worked as a nanny in Washington, DC.
He and his younger brother had come to the United States from Guatemala when they were seventeen and eighteen. Their mother had been living in the States for many years, sending money back to Guatemala to support her family back home. She had brought them both to live with her when she felt they were old enough.
Jose never knew about my past—not my years with Moses or even my drug addiction. Honestly, the fact that he never questioned me much about my life before him was one of the things that made me comfortable with him. The fact that he was a non-talker and that English was his second language were good things for me, and Jose seemed to really care for me even though he really knew very little about me. I suppose that can happen in a relationship; we love what we think someone is without getting to know the real person.
I loved Jose’s family, too. The first time he took me to meet his mother, I drank a couple of shots of tequila for courage; I didn’t know what to expect. But I needn’t have worried. Jose’s mother was a small, black-haired woman who smiled at me and seemed to honestly want me there with her son—even inviting me to spend the night. In fact, she helped me understand the whole idea of what a real family was supposed to be like. Jose, his brother, his mother, and a cousin all lived together in a small apartment, but the family was close. I could tell by the way they looked at each other and smiled and joked.
A few days after I met Jose’s mother, she called me to ask if I planned on marrying her son. I thought she was joking. She wasn’t. At that point I hadn’t given our future much thought, but after she mentioned it I began to think about it more and more. I knew that his mother was going through the lengthy process of getting a resident alien card for Jose and his brother, and I wondered whether she was anxious to marry off her son to an American because she wanted to ensure his resident status and get him a green card.
Ultimately I decided that green card or not, I did want to get married. We had fun together, we got along well, and I loved his family and how they treated me. I could see us having a good life together. Jose agreed, and I quit school because I thought that was what I needed to do. It took me years before I began to understand that my own goals and plans for the future mattered as much as other people’s.
About a year after we met, Jose and I were married by the magistrate in the nearby Alexandria, Virginia courthouse. No one from my family even knew I was getting married; we weren’t really in touch at that point in my life. I think that after being gone for so many crucial years during my youth, I never really found a way to fit back into the family. Those times I had tried—in Philadelphia, Pullman, and Biloxi—hadn’t worked out so well. Telling my parents and siblings that I was getting married didn’t seem right. To me it felt almost as if I would have been sharing the news with strangers.
***
A few years after our little marriage ceremony, Jose and I started to talk seriously about starting a family of our own. I’d never been pregnant befo
re, and until Jose I honestly hadn’t given the possibility much thought other than being glad that Moses always supplied condoms. I had heard horrible stories of other girls who had become pregnant and searched out ways to have abortions on their own, so great was their fear of what would happen to the baby if it ended up in the hands of their pimp. I knew one girl whose four-month-old child was already being abused by the man who controlled her. A baby wasn’t something I’d ever expected or wanted to have in my future. Now that I was married, I felt differently. A baby seemed part of the square life, and I wanted that for us.
Jose and I tried to get pregnant for quite a while, but without success. With the added pressure of his mother asking for a grandchild, I decided to visit my doctor to ask some questions of my own.
“It seems that you have some scar tissue that could be blocking your fallopian tubes. There is also severe scar tissue in the vagina.” My doctor was so compassionate as he explained his findings and what he would like to do with my case. Even better, he told me he could correct the problem with lasers, and I would be able to conceive. And he was right; the surgery was done in June 1988, and by July, I was pregnant with my baby girl.
I cried with joy the day I lay in the darkened exam room and looked at the small blinking light of my baby’s tiny heart on the ultrasound machine. The fact that a baby could grow inside me at all amazed me. I had worried that my body was poisoned and toxic inside from all of the abuse I had suffered; I couldn’t imagine how a pure, innocent little baby could grow inside something as ruined and polluted as me.
It was an incredible feeling to know that I held a life inside me, a beautiful, growing life that depended on me. I felt like it was a miracle.
Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t so horrible inside.
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