The Skin Above My Knee

by Marcia Butler

  A master of defiance, Jinx was irritating and a difficult sister to like. During those overheard battles I sat very still, silently raging—not against my father but against Jinx. Couldn’t she simply negotiate an acceptable settlement with him, as I had? But she just wouldn’t back down, and her answers were always a deafening no.

  One very bad night I woke up, hearing banging downstairs. Racing to the top of the stairway, I looked down to see my father charging at Jinx like a heavyweight prizefighter. My view from the top showed only his broad back as he pushed her into the corner of the stair landing below. He cocked his right arm back and punched hard, almost putting her eye out. The right angle of those two walls joining on the stair landing held her solidly, at just the right position for his fist. That sound, fist on orbital bone, startled me—it sounded like a very thick stick not wanting to give way but finally snapping in two.

  “You bitch.”

  He said those brutal words, too calmly. I didn’t know what a bitch was, but I knew it must have been an awful thing to be. Crumpled into the corner, squatting on her haunches, her feet on the carpet, pigeon-toed to give her traction, she took it all without a struggle.

  I stood back as Jinx ran up the stairs past me, straight into the bathroom. Suddenly there was no sound anywhere in the house, as if all living matter had been sucked out. My father was still on the landing, his arms braced against the wall, his head hanging down with his chin at his chest. I shifted my weight, hoping to just go back into my bedroom unnoticed, but he heard me. As he slowly turned around, our eyes met. He was expecting to see his obvious victim. Instead he saw the secret one.

  “Bob?”

  My mother was offstage, downstairs in the living room. Her voice dead calm, terse. My father snapped his head toward her as if surprised. Realizing she had witnessed this, too, I felt stomach bile come up, quickly. But I swallowed.

  “Mom?”

  “Go back to bed, honey.”

  We had always been a family of the fewest possible words, scraped clean.

  Jinx’s skin had been ripped open, leaving a searing red slash of bare pulp. She needed stitches, but my mother let it go, allowing the exposed flesh to slowly heal itself into a flat beige scar. My mother wouldn’t or couldn’t take the risk to intervene, perhaps working out her own peculiar standoff with my father.

  I didn’t cry that night. But somewhere there’s a memory I can almost access: guttural sounds—sobs—terrible inhuman wails. I lay awake all night, plotting what I should do—ruminating on a Band-Aid to stretch across a rampant epidemic. The next morning I marched defiantly into school, walked up to my homeroom teacher, Mr. Firth, looked him in the eyes, and asked point-blank:

  “Can you call the police on your own parents if they are beating up someone in your family?”

  He didn’t skip a beat.

  “Well, it depends on the severity.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if it were within an inch of the child’s life, I would say yes. Anything other than that, it would depend.”

  “Depend on what?”

  My eyes widened with a horrified internal reckoning. I really got it now: there would be no help. I was unprotected, marooned; hanging onto some kind of capsized sailboat while the spectators on shore watched through binoculars. My short exchange with Mr. Firth was the only time I risked exposing the hell inside my house. The way he shut me down felt like the final cutoff of a symphony, but minus the applause.

  The brain is a marvelous organ, able to cleverly stratify the forces it can barely withstand. I know, in retrospect, that I appeared mildly vacant, almost concussed. I began to bear up. I took whatever came, yet I remained publicly palatable, albeit flattened out. As I conserved my internal grit, lists were made, stacks were straightened, plans were dreamed of, and rough edges were pounded down and rounded out. I was the strange one who blew the oboe and shunned a typical teenager’s life, and adults and teachers seemed to give me the space I needed. I had a different kind of best friend, other kids would learn, and it wasn’t a human being. I eschewed people for a stick of granadilla wood.

  Day after day I listened and practiced. I absorbed and learned. I grew up under the cover of music’s nonviolent and nonsexual realm. Kirsten continued to stand in as my understudy mother and helped me harmonize and orchestrate my atonal world. Nailing my head next to the stereo all day and night now, setting the needled arm on repeat, I remembered what Mr. Proud said.

  You’ll be fine. Just keep practicing. You’ll be okay.

  Shut Up

  You’re onstage. You’ve nailed your part in the practice studio. You have a great reed for the performance. The music on the program is familiar, like an old friend. What a great way to make a living! You feel so very lucky.

  Not that luck has much to do with it. You can’t live unless you practice the oboe every single day of the year. Year after year after year. Because you know in the pit of your belly that something terrible will happen if you take even ONE. DAY. OFF. It sounds strange and desperate. But why tempt the Fates? You’d rather just keep doing it, exactly the same way.

  Then you look up and see the guy standing on the podium and begin to worry. For about thirty seconds before the concert starts, you allow yourself a little mental rant. Why is this guy even up there? He can’t do his job even half as well as 99 percent of the musicians in the orchestra staring back at him. If he had to endure the same scrutiny you do on a daily basis, he’d be digging ditches in Detroit. Sure, he waves his arms around and looks good, at least to the audience. But the orchestra knows that his movements don’t mean much at all, because they don’t articulate his interpretation of the music. That’s his job, by the way: interpreting the music.

  You bring the reed close to your lips: fifteen seconds now. You think back to the four days of rehearsals prior to this concert. Every time he needed to give instruction, he actually stopped the orchestra to talk about it. Every time he had a note to an individual player, he had to silence the orchestra and verbalize his thought. And you want to scream, “Shut up! Just show us. Use the baton or your arms or your hands or even tell us with your eyes! Because if you can’t show us in a nonverbal way during the rehearsals, how the hell are you going to do it in the performance?”

  You think, for instance, what if you had to stop playing the oboe and explain verbally what you meant every time you played a phrase in a particular way? Well, first, you physically couldn’t—the instrument is in your mouth. And second, you’d be fired on the spot or at the very least never hired again. You have to be a good enough player to communicate your musical intention through playing. Sounds reasonable, right? Not for that guy standing in front of you.

  Yes. Year after year after year. No matter where you are in the world, you pull that oboe out of the case and practice. Just to keep the mouth flexible and supple and strong and familiar. Just to keep the fingers moving. Just to be crystal clear about your musical intention when playing. Just to be certain that you’ve done your very best. Just to keep on living.

  The Move

  I WAS IN total control of my tenterhooks life. If worries bubbled up, I’d practice, sleep, or put a record on the stereo. Or if the trusted balancing act felt askew, I’d just go to my father to even things out. I could always put a few lap visits in the bank for a rainy day. Or so I thought.

  My father received a promotion within General Electric, his lifelong employer, and was transferred to the New York City Lexington Avenue office. We bought a house in St. James, Long Island, and prepared to move the summer before I entered the ninth grade.

  Jinx would not be joining us. The epic one-way battles between her and my father’s fists had continued to escalate in frequency and intensity. Flagging from the strain, my parents chose an action that was surely baffling and inconceivable to most: they relinquished their legal parental rights to their daughter. The mighty Commonwealth of Massachusetts stepped in and sent Jinx to a reform school, where she was housed for a year
with all manner of recalcitrant girls. I will never know if this decision was easily made.

  This punitive warehouse for bad girls was the worst of places: grim, dirty, and for the most part nonrehabilitative. Some girls had committed serious crimes, and most had very rough backgrounds. And then there was Jinx. I didn’t like my sister much—we had nothing in common and virtually no sisterly camaraderie. Indeed, we barely spoke. But the ease with which she was deposited into this place felt like a nasty sleight of hand, because I was not told about their decision until just a day or two before she left.

  With this underpinning of uncertainty in the air, I was on guard. Like any young girl, I was scared to death to go to a new town and a new school, but not for the reasons you’d imagine. I had few attachments and none that were deep. Losing the bond of girlhood friendships was not a particular worry. My more immediate concern centered on my potential inability to resurrect my carefully crafted eccentric life.

  With Jinx out of the way, the summer was a blur of packing and boxes. My mother, if at all possible, seemed ever more distant. By contrast, my father exuded an almost jocular pretense. The frenetic activity heightened my sense of dread, destabilizing my orbit. I worried that my bargaining chips would disappear. Even that was a concern.

  I had a shameful secret that I allowed myself to acknowledge only when I was feeling very fragile and sad. This secret helped soothe me and cope with what I understood would most likely be a terrible new life. I was actually thankful that Jinx was not coming with us. Hallelujah. Finally, there might be some version of peace in our house. I wouldn’t have to think about her defiance. What booze she was drinking. What classes she was cutting. And finally, I might no longer be a captive audience, a listening witness to the beatings that raged mostly behind bedroom doors. In a quiet house, my oboe would be the loudest sound.

  Having said a stoic good-bye to Mr. Fulginiti, I began the ninth grade in St. James, where so many things were new, the least of which was a newfangled teacher who actually played the oboe. Lessons with Mr. Kemp, now more than an hour away, were improved, with a new attention to technical depth. I also began to learn the art of reed making. With these higher stakes, I was grateful that one old agreement remained ironclad—Wotan and I still tangoed. I sat, and he drove. The familiar and comforting stability of my father’s urge deflected the many new unsettling shifts in our house.

  Pucci

  AS I SPENT more time in the car with my father, my mother’s left-turn aversions reared up anew with frightening roads like the Long Island Expressway and the Northern State Parkway snaking their way dangerously close to our house. This dauntingly complex tangle of highway systems nudged her into a secret spending habit called catalogs. The packages arrived from mysterious places like Lord & Taylor and B. Altman, and up they went into her bedroom. One of the dresses that came via the post was a black-and-white number with a loud Pucci-like print, fashionable in the ’60s. It was floor-length with a tight waist and a tasteful flare at the bottom. The silhouette was decidedly Grecian. Think Mrs. Robinson out at the pool, at night, perhaps with Benjamin.

  That black-and-white dress! On nights she and my father attended neighborhood parties, it transformed my mother into the hopeful young woman I had worshipped in her college yearbook: Margery Bloor Wenner: Brains and Beauty. As they prepared to leave for the evening, she floated around the living room swathed in the dress, loose-lipped, already filled to the brim with whiskey sours and smelling of the Shalimar perfume I begged her to let me use.

  “Mom, I love that perfume. Can I wear it to school tomorrow?”

  “No, honey, it’s too grown-up for you.”

  “But Joette Delia wears it to school. Her mother lets her.”

  “Well, Joette Delia’s mother is an idiot. Honestly.”

  Living on Long Island, and in closer proximity to New York City, offered me more places to play music. The St. James ladies’ club, apparently always on the lookout for fresh talent, called one day and encouraged me to audition for a concerto competition that was being held by the Suffolk Symphony, a local professional orchestra. Word had spread quickly about my talent; it was unusual for an oboist to compete in a competition that usually drew pianists and violinists. One of the ladies’ club members played the piano fairly well and offered to accompany me during the competition, and she also volunteered for the arduous job of picking me up and driving me to her house so we could rehearse.

  These driving arrangements felt hushed and secret, and I don’t recall one conversation with my mother about how I would get places. The kindness shown me in the area of getting anywhere was stunning. Cars simply appeared, and I was transported. People did not whisper. People did not gossip. But they must have known about my peculiar mother, and they were nonetheless very, very kind.

  I won the competition. The next day that black-and-white dress appeared, spread out on my bed.

  “Honey, this’ll work for the concert.”

  “No, I can’t wear that dress.…It’s not right…. Not for a concert.”

  “What do you mean? It’s perfect, and we’re just about the same size now. Try it on. You’ll see.”

  “But Mom, it’s not right for a concert.…It’s too…”

  I searched for the right word. Sexy was the right word. Instead I chose glamorous.

  “You know what I mean. Glamorous.”

  “Just try it on.”

  Her voice turned flat. This felt important to me. She wouldn’t let me spray myself with Shalimar; why this dress? I let it blow.

  “Mother. I want my own dress. It’s a special concert, and I deserve it.”

  Tilting her head up, eyes canted down, she looked my way with doubtfully raised eyebrows. Okay, maybe I didn’t exactly deserve it, but I kept on, now with a more cloying affect.

  “Why can’t I have my own dress?”

  Silence.

  “Okay…just give me one reason.”

  “The one and only reason is that if it fits, and I think it will, there is no good reason to spend more money.”

  I knew what this was really about. If she relented and agreed to take me shopping, she’d have to either make left-hand turns or spend hours in the car avoiding them. God knows my father wouldn’t do it. Our agreement didn’t include that shopping clause. My mother was expedient, if nothing else.

  “I need to wear my own dress!”

  The words poured out. I ranted and raved and begged and pleaded. Finally I tried on the dress. Much to my chagrin, it fit like a glove.

  “Honey. Look. It’s perfect on you. There’s absolutely no need to buy something new.”

  “This is unfair! I won’t play the concert. I want my own special concert dress. Please. Please. Please? I’ll pay for a new dress out of my Christmas money. I’ll do whatever you and Dad want.…”

  With those words, my mother turned and walked out of the room.

  What Dad wants.

  My guts seized up and left me staggered, then rigid: my father liked that dress very much. He had complimented her in that dress just the week before. I was now in competition with my mother over a dress I hated. I didn’t ask for this kind of audition.

  What Dad wants.

  I wore that dress for the concert. I inhabited my mother. I became her mystery. I filled out the bodice. I looked very grown-up. I got some glances. And I played very well.

  A man approached me after the concert for an interview for the local newspaper and asked which music school I would be attending after high school. Somewhat nonplussed by this new idea, I gave a vague answer that must have been planted somewhere in my subconscious.

  “Oh, one of the New York City music conservatories, I imagine.”

  Being dressed in a fake Pucci gown had heightened my sense of sophistication. The man chuckled.

  “I imagine you will!”

  The Lone Sock

  ONE AFTERNOON MY mother returned home from teaching Latin classes at a junior high school a few towns away from St. James and trudg
ed up the stairs. I stood at the top of the stair landing, anxiously waiting for her arrival home.

  The bedroom behind me looked as if a hasty thief had trashed it, with all the closet doors open, hangers bald. My mother walked in and looked at me, perplexed. She couldn’t quite glean the meaning of the empty space.

  “What’s this? What’s going on in here?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “What do you mean? Where’s Jinx?”

  “She’s gone. All her clothes are gone.”

  I opened an empty chest of drawers to press my point.

  After spending almost one year in the girl slammer in Massachusetts, Jinx had eventually come home to St. James and our new house. She returned docile and pliant, her facade weathered and less assured, less quick to anger. Something massive and surely disturbing had to have shifted her demeanor so drastically—but once home, she refused to speak about it; not that anyone asked in more than a passing manner. As far as my parents were concerned, that meal was chewed and digested.

  A suspicious calm had engulfed the house during the first weeks of her return. I listened carefully, on watch, waiting for a knockout fight. But it never came. When my sister entered a room, my father left. Her rumpled room was what remained of her brief homecoming.

  Now, scanning the room, my mother seemed to be calculating her next move. A single knee sock lay on the floor, balled up, without a partner. Jinx’s bed was stripped of the bedclothes, which lay in a pile in the corner of the room. The mattress was slightly offset from the box spring by about twelve inches, not evened up. I tried to put myself in Jinx’s frame of mind—why take the sheets off? She never made her bed, let alone changed her own sheets. Perhaps some vestige from the reformatory, one of the many punitive rules she must have obeyed for a time.