by Amy Asbury
As much as my mother hurt me with her dead eyes and cut off communication, my bad feeling started to gravitate toward my father. I started to feel uncomfortable when he kissed me. It wasn’t the little dry pecks he gave me as a child. It was different. When he kissed me, I felt his moustache and a bunch of blubber in my lips and mouth. It was slobbery. I had to tighten my mouth and shut my eyes very hard. I would wipe off my mouth afterward, making sure he saw me do it. I felt disgusted and angry. It built up like a volcano inside me.
One day he held his eyes on mine from across the living room and fumbled with his crotch. I felt furious. I winced and twisted up my face in disgust. I couldn’t talk though. That’s the weird thing. My mouth wouldn’t say stop. My arms could never push. My legs couldn’t run. He was my dad. I kept thinking…No…I must be taking this wrong...this can’t really be occurring. This is too bizarre.
He started to wear these Capezio dance shoes and was always tapping his feet and shifting around anxiously. I thought he was going to break out in a tap dance like Gregory Hines or something. His moods became erratic. He started acting extremely haughty, arrogant, and full of himself. He seemed to think he was very wise and started quoting Bible verses that my sister and I didn’t understand, as if the verse were some sort of code that we best figure out soon. We would be like "Huh?" His logic was usually lost on us.
Sometimes he had a lot of anger and couldn’t express it, but his eyes showed it. He tilted his head very far back and got a very serious look on his face and had his eyebrows up. His words wouldn’t come to him at those moments, but something was streaming through him that was thick and electric and angry. It looked to me as if he wanted to say something to really, really hurt me. Other days, it seemed he had an overwhelming urge to physically hurt me. I didn’t understand. He had always loved me so much. He was always so much fun and so sweet to me when I was little. I couldn’t understand what had changed between us.
My dad was angry one time and took my lavender chair and smashed it in a million pieces over the desk in my room. It was my special desk, where I wrote my plays and commercials. I shrank back, covered my face, and curled inside myself. He felt terrible afterwards and kept bringing it up. He said he would make it up to me. I winced. I just wanted him to stay away.
On another day, he said he was taking me somewhere special and it was a surprise. I felt totally uncomfortable at the thought of being alone with him but there was nothing I could do. My mother wouldn’t make eye contact with me and I couldn’t even identify my thoughts if she had. I couldn’t let myself have the thought that kept tapping at my mind. NO! No. No. That is too weird. I felt trapped and miserable. I can barely remember the night. I was so full of disgust and anger and fear, I couldn’t speak. I don’t think I said two words. We were driving in the dark for a really long time when I finally realized we were arriving at Disneyland. It was my very favorite place. But I didn’t want to be there with him. I was thinking, Why the heck are we arriving here in the dark? It is nighttime. This place is about to close down. I thought it odd, because we wouldn’t be able to go on many rides at such a late time in the evening.
He took me to dinner at my favorite spot in New Orleans Square and got me my favorite dish, a French dip. After dinner, he wanted to walk around holding my hand and I felt very uncomfortable. Everything was so serious and quiet. I felt like his date. I wanted to just…run. I wanted someone to save me. There was no one to protect me. I can remember none of what we talked about, only that I was squirming inside and couldn’t wait to be home. I looked at my makeup in the mirror in the car on the way home and my eyeliner had slid down my face, making two black eyes. I was mad that he let me walk around like that the whole night. He said something about not caring, that he loved me no matter what. Part of me thought, What if he really was just trying to bond with me? and I felt bad. But my gut instinct told me I was in danger.
Not too long after that, my dad pulled me aside at my grandmother’s house, knelt down to me, and told me he loved me more than he loved my sister. I felt disturbed and confused. Why couldn’t he just be normal?!
Okay, so there I was, twelve years old. Something went down about six months prior that required someone removing my underwear and changing my clothes and now my parents were acting really, really weird. If I were to acknowledge what was going on, I would not survive. What was I to do, run away? Go out and get a job at twelve years old? I had to go on. I depended on my father for a roof over my head, for food, for clothing. My mother was completely shut off from me and even if she weren’t, I doubt I would have confided in her because my trust level was at an all-time low. The boundaries in my life were being smeared all over the place, like paint on a canvas. It was as if suddenly everything that meant security and protection had crumbled. My perception of reality was whirling, twirling into a hurricane, piercing the blue sky and ripping it open to show a dark place. It made me feel crazy.
I started to fall into a depression. I didn’t feel safe in my house. In order to avoid running into my father, I decided that staying in my room was the safest thing to do. That room was no safer than the rest of the house, but I didn’t have many options. I completely took myself out of reality when I was in my room. I read books at a feverish pace, escaping into the stories. I pretended I was the characters I read about and made up games by myself. Sometimes I was a scullery maid on creaky floorboards talking to mice. Other times I was a child living in a manor on the English countryside. I wanted to be anywhere but in my own life.
I regressed to playing like a child again. I set up my stuffed animals as a little family and talked to them and had tea parties with them. I pretended they loved me and could hear me and listened to me. I know that sounds all “Oh, poor me,” but that is what I did. I also talked to my doll Holly as if she could really hear me- normal for a five-year-old maybe, but not for someone in junior high school. I hung with my sister if she was home and I spent time with my childhood friend Karen, but I didn’t make any friends at school because I rarely spoke. I no longer went outside. I wouldn’t join my family when they went out to dinner. I did have my days where I was okay and most days I was a normal preteen, thinking about boys and movie stars. But inside I felt…off. I didn’t want anyone looking at me. I felt like everyone could see inside me. I didn’t want anyone to see I was damaged and bad in my core. I wrote in a journal:
I keep ruining everyone’s time. That isn’t something I would normally do. I am not doing it on purpose. It’s just that I keep doing it, no matter how bad I don’t want to. I don’t want to swim or eat or play video games. I just can’t have fun anymore. I feel like everywhere I go I am holding my breath. I don’t like Disneyland anymore or Knott’s Berry Farm. I don’t like going to eat or joining anything. I hate going outside in the front yard or any public places, even walking to the store. I even hate the beach. I hate everywhere, except for the homes of people I know very well..
One thing drew me out of my room that year. My family went to the drive-in movie theater to see Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I was excited to see the movie because I could be cool at school by knowing some of the lines. I thought that maybe I could impress Mark Poletti. There was tension between my parents on the drive over, but I ignored it. I just wanted to see cute Matthew Broderick and his crooked grin.
We parked, and the next thing I knew, my dad was punching me with a closed fist. It was quick and swift and without warning and he wouldn’t let up. He was punching, punching, punching. The look on his face was terrifying, like a killer must look. I saw hate, disgust, and anger. My mother sat there looking straight ahead. My sister was crying. My father finally gave me an idea as to why I was being hit. It seemed like he just came up with it on the spot: it was for not eating what my mother cooked for dinner.
Shit, it was technically true. I hated her vegetables. I had a gag reflex for canned French string beans. But she hadn’t cooked in ages. Several months, at least. I thought, Wait...this couldn’t be why he is punching
me. He couldn’t have that much anger toward me for not eating some shitty string beans. Finally, my mom said, “Well, I don’t exactly cook these days…” and he stopped pounding me for a second. I thought, Oh thank God...my mother is coming to my defense! But then she said, “Even if I did, she wouldn’t eat it anyway.” He started punching me again, as if I were a man.
I tried to cover my face with the pillow I had brought from home. I thought…Wow...this person has a very serious anger toward me. Both of them do. I had done something really, really wrong to make them not like me anymore. I felt like I was being blamed for something really big. I remember feeling so confused that my mother just sat there and did nothing while he beat me. I hated both of them. When I look back, I think that my mother might have been angry with my father for not sticking by her when she tried to discipline us, and he was trying to make an effort at that time.
My sister says:
“It just turned you inside out and you became the official family ‘problem.’ I was your playmate everyday though and I remember you as a kid. Up until then you were great – you were smart and involved and creative and fun. You were always cool and nice. I don’t see how all of a sudden you were the devil. All of a sudden, I started seeing hostility when it never existed before. It was a little shocking.”
One day I was really sick in my room and couldn’t move out of bed. I needed my mom for something and she couldn’t hear me because she was screaming in the living room at the top of her lungs, singing “Too Low for Zero” by Elton John. I kept calling for her, but she couldn’t hear me. She was having a nervous breakdown. There was a definite problem in the family that no one was talking about. It was just eating everybody and nobody would do anything about it. It just festered, right there in our house. Right there in suburbia. Right there in a family that had gone to church and ate popsicles and had camping trips.
I didn’t think about my weight at all until one particular overcast day. My dad was in one of his unpredictable moods and I was lagging on getting laundry out of the dryer. He angrily told to get off my fat ass and get the laundry. Then he smacked me in an angry, puppy-kicking way. I looked at his eyes and they were full of anger. Fat. He said…fat ass. Was I… fat? Is that why they were mad at me? I wished I could just be a kid again. I was hurt by my dad’s comment and immediately started to cry. Then I got angry.
I didn’t know if I was mad about the fat thing or him smacking me. It wasn’t some big fiasco where I was being beat to a pulp, by any means. But regardless, I gathered myself by my T-shirt and went up to him and looked him straight in the eyes. I said in a thick, sobbing voice, “If you ever touch me again, I am calling the police.”
He backed off a little and looked at me. We locked eyes. My eyes said I meant business.
He got the picture. I saw it click in his head that I wasn’t just talking about being smacked on the butt for not getting the laundry. I was talking about him crossing a line with me. I was so scared that I started to shake uncontrollably. I thought my legs would give out. I sat down in a dirty, faded brown director’s chair on our patio and sobbed really hard. He tried to console me and I snatched my arm away from him.
I would love to say I felt much better after standing up to him and defending myself, but I didn’t. I felt very alone. I really just wanted to end my life. I wanted to die more than anything. I went into the bathroom, took out a bottle of Windex, and thought…I should just drink this. Then I would be dead. But of course I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I tried to find other ways to hurt myself instead, like carving in my skin with a knife or a pin. I cut into my arms and cried and cried and cried. When I felt that horrible, I would repeat to myself over and over, You are not really a part of this family, you are completely separate from them and you are not even from here. You are here for future reasons that have nothing to do with today. Your reason for existence has nothing to do with this family or these times. I know, that sounds crazy. But that is the message I somehow got in the back of my brain. I used it to comfort myself when I thought I couldn’t go on. I remember not being clear on where I was supposed to be ‘from,’ so I made up that I was from Jupiter, so I could at least have a visual. But being from Jupiter was the least of my worries.
When I look back on it, I sometimes think, Was this just puberty? Was this what normal teens did when going through puberty? Was I getting a lot of hormones, maybe? But then I realize that it was a combination of that and something else. I couldn’t admit it or even think about it for years because it was so gross. My father had been behaving sexually toward me, before all of the anger and terror started. That was the main problem, and it was too late to take it back. Then there was the secondary problem: the lack of protection from my mother. Why wasn’t she there when I needed her? I wouldn’t let my mind think about that either, until several years later, when I told her about my suspicions in a long letter.
The letter was five pages long, listing all of the things that I remembered about my dad’s inappropriate behavior. I pictured her reading the letter. I thought she would first have a heart attack and then wake up and become hysterical. She would climb to the top of a mountain with a rifle in her hand and vow to kill the man who dared touch her child. I pictured her in a prairie dress, cocking a rifle and wiping back tears. I pictured her putting the rifle to my father’s crotch with a fierce, unwavering look in her eye and telling him: “Nobody touches my child and gets away with it. Now you have me to deal with,” and pulling the trigger.
But that’s not what happened.
What did happen was this:
I received a letter in return, containing exactly one paragraph. In the paragraph, she wrote that she believed me. Oh…Okay, good. That is good, I thought. Then I read on. It said that she had suspected it. That took a minute to absorb.
Wait…wait…she…suspected it? She…was aware? What the fuck?
I picked up the phone and called her, pressing her for more details. She admitted that once, before they had us kids, he looked at an album cover of a shirtless child and said it was “hot.” Then she told me about another time when she caught him in the nude while my sister and I were in the next room playing, and he purposely didn’t cover himself. There was another time when he called out one of our names during a romantic moment with her. There was the time that he watched a bunch of older boys have their way with a ten-year-old girl on his street. I didn’t know how old he was when it happened- was he the same age as the girl? Was he older? My mom then mentioned that there was a time that he bragged to his friends about having sex with a twelve-year-old (cue the sound of tires screeching to a halt) WHAT?! I was taken aback with the information my mother gave me. Who was that twelve-year-old? Was it me? Did it happen when he was twelve? When he was younger? Did my father still crave twelve-year-olds? Is that why I woke up the way I did just before my twelfth birthday? Is that why I felt danger around him? It was so disturbing, I couldn’t process it. But there was something that I could process. My mother thought something horrible could have happened to me, her child, and she never once asked me if I were in danger, if I needed help or if I were okay. Not one peep. She would have taken it to the grave had I not brought it up myself.
I sat down. I was furious; dizzy with rage. I didn’t know who I was more angry with, my perverted father or the fact that my mother could have helped me and didn’t. Not only did she turn a blind eye to her child being in danger, but she purposely avoided me! How could she have turned on me? Why was I not worth helping, saving, rescuing? Was she told that I had some part in it? That it was my idea? I will never know. And she will never tell.
So if that right there didn’t drive me to become completely nuts, I don’t know what could have done it. Needless to say, I hated both of my parents with fervor. But that was later. At this point in my story, I hadn’t put it all together in my head yet. I felt confused, disgusted, scared, and angry. I didn’t say much. I came off as moody and pissed off at home and shy and isolated at school. As m
uch as I hated Middleton at first, I was beginning to prefer being it to being at home.
Okay, let’s get off this deep dark subject because I am getting depressed just writing it. (Sighs.) So while that all sucked majorly, something even worse happened that June. Something that made me think the world was ending. (Takes deep breath…)
Wham! broke up.
Yes, Wham. I literally wept at the thought of losing two bronzed, highlighted ass-shakers from my TV screen. How could they do that to me? To the world? It was probably more important to me at the time than my lame parents.
In all seriousness though, I somehow trudged through the school year, making the best of my situation. I had fun with my friend Karen on the weekends. I loved watching MTV and making up dances. I still read a lot of books. I accepted that I was not popular at school and I was okay with it. I would never be one of the girls that the boys liked.
But then one day, one sweet day…my luck changed. Let me start by saying that spending so much time in my room had allowed me to figure out how to do my hair (Aqua Net sprayed into my bangs and the sides of my hair to make them stick out like puppy ears). It also gave me a lot of time to practice my eighties makeup and change things around a little (pale metallic pink lipstick and peach cream blush). I got some better fitting clothes in light pinks and light blues. I laid off the body spray. I got a little bit of a tan. I didn’t look as much like a Dance Party USA cast off.
The next thing I knew….(drum roll)….my crush… Mark Poletti…. (screams) appeared to be interested in me! ME! I thought…No…this can’t be! I like a guy and he…likes me BACK? This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me! No way!
One of the popular girls, Christy Schmidt, tried making conversation with me. She said, “What do you think of Mark?”
I don’t remember what I said- I probably said something safe, like, “He is nice.” I thought I must have misunderstood, that she couldn’t really be talking to me.
