The Girl's Guide to Homelessness

by Brianna Karp

  Though Mom attempted to escape her abusive marriage, however, the congregation elders were having none of it. Despite the angry bruises and welts covering her from head to toe, and an “unpleasant incident” in which Bob leaped up on the hood of our van in the parking lot of the Kingdom Hall (in front of dozens of witnesses) as my mother attempted to flee and I screamed in confused terror in the backseat, they advised her to “wait on Jehovah, be a better wife and perhaps things would get better.” Divorce is scripturally prohibited for Jehovah’s Witnesses, except in the case of adultery. Even abused spouses are advised to remain in their dead-end marriages and “set a good example” for their abuser, “that he might be won over without a word.” (Read: Maybe if you’re really, really nice to him, he’ll realize what a jackass he’s been, feel sorry and repent. Even if it takes a decade or three.)

  And, they said, if he did kill her, as he threatened and she feared, she would be resurrected to Paradise. God would fix everything eventually. Just not right now.

  Despite the ire of the elders, my mother finally filed for divorce when I was two years old, amid the debacle of Molly’s operations. The congregation warned her that, though she might be legally free, scripturally Jehovah still considered her married. She was not allowed to date or remarry until Bob shacked up with another woman and admitted infidelity. Still obsessed with her, and as a particularly sadistic form of torment, he stubbornly refused for the longest time to give her grounds for a scriptural divorce in the eyes of the Witnesses.

  In the meantime, the courts ruled for weekend visitation with Bob, who had moved into his mother’s garage. I, and sometimes Molly—when she wasn’t in the hospital—would visit him on and off for another year or so (when he would actually show up for pickup). During much of this period, I suppose you could say I found myself the object of my father’s affection, the apple of his eye. Without preamble, he apparently developed a taste for some of the more repugnant, deviant acts known to man, and foisted upon me the sort of fondlings and sexual acts that are normally reserved for awkward, fumbling sixteen-year-olds in the back of cars, except that I was two and very much confused by the entire thing. I knew one thing, though. If I wanted my Happy Meal toy, I would be a good girl and kiss Daddy’s cock and let him put his fingers (and on one memorable occasion, a striped yellow-and-red McDonald’s soda straw) inside me without crying while he showed me how he could make it do special tricks, like peeing thick white globby stuff instead of regular yellow pee. Then I would fall asleep feeling oddly wrong, wondering whether that blue plastic toy camel with wrinkled knees at the bottom of the bag was worth it all. This was our special secret, though, and I couldn’t tell Mommy or very bad things would happen to Daddy. I didn’t want that, did I? Of course not. Besides, with all the attention swirling around Molly and her health since her birth, I often felt lonely, with nobody to play with. At least somebody was spending time with me again. I took it as proof that Daddy really did love me, even though he made lots of mistakes with Mommy when they were married.

  I vividly remember pointing to my mother on our front lawn one day as she watered the plants with a long, curved garden hose, and giggling at the stream of water.

  “It looks like you’re holding Daddy’s penis in your hand!” Her face clouded over, and she shook her finger at me.

  “That is not a nice thing to say! That’s not funny, we don’t use words like that in public.”

  Oops. I knew immediately that I had made a mistake. I had almost ruined Daddy’s and my special secret. I had almost precipitated very bad things. I resolved to keep my mouth shut and not let it happen again. A few days later, when my mother sat me down and explained to me about private parts and the proper words for them, and how I was never ever to let anybody touch me down there, and tell her immediately if they did, I nodded my head serenely and gave her my chubby-cheeked cherub smile. Nobody was going to trick me into giving up our special secret ever again.

  In any event, Bob soon found himself a girlfriend, Charlie, about my mom’s age and type: brunette, innocent, wide-eyed and naïve. My mom was overjoyed—she was scripturally free, and she correctly surmised that Charlie would take her place as the object of his obsession, slowly removing him from our lives. Charlie was a kind, warm-hearted person and she seemed to adore Molly and me. I liked her so much I didn’t even mind when they got an apartment together and she took my place in Daddy’s bed at night, and the attention from him quickly waned. She did sweet things like read us stories and make us sandwiches when we visited: Bob was now too busy to play with us. The visits grew further and further apart, until finally he just didn’t show up at all, ever again, without my ever fully noticing or comprehending.

  My mom went on to marry Joseph Karp, from a neighboring congregation, when I was six. Joe was the exact opposite of Bob, to a fault. He was the human equivalent of Kermit the Frog—harmlessly pleasant, somewhat oblivious, mild-tempered, sweetly goofy and a redheaded twenty-seven-year-old virgin. His day had finally come. Even as a single mom with a heretofore rough past and two young children, Linda Simpson was still gorgeous.

  After a careful year of courtship, quite prolonged according to JW standards, my mother bucked the tradition of marrying humbly and quietly in the local Kingdom Hall and instead chose to hold the ceremony at a rose garden in Anaheim, spawning a rash of clucking henlike gossip from all the high-and-mighty elders’ wives. The wedding was the event of the decade in JW-land; three hundred attendees strong. Molly and I were the flower girls, in peach velvet-and-tulle dresses and baby’s breath hair wreaths, drawing coos and “awwwwws” as we held hands and wicker baskets of peach roses, carefully preceding my mom down the aisle in her sequin-appliquéd white, mermaid-style dress and poufy curled pompadour. I was excited to have a new daddy. I had been nervous at first, hoping that this daddy wouldn’t require any embarrassing and painful special nighttime activities, but Joe did only nice things, like give me wild, bucking horsey-back rides on the fluorescent-orange carpet at home; tickle me until I screamed with laughter; and teach me how to play chess. He would make a good daddy, I thought.

  I guess it was inevitable, though sad, that their marriage would be a star-crossed affair, though not apparently doomed from the start.

  For one thing, Joe was considered pretty wishy-washy as far as the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ interpretation of the biblical arrangement of headship went. In other words, he was just too damn nice to keep his hotheaded hussy of a wife in line, as God required of him. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t seem to know what to do with herself in a relationship with such a passive man—she had gone from one marital extreme to another. Formerly, she had been fighting to protect her daughters and herself from a psychotic monster. Now she felt she had to continue fighting, even though there was little to fight over, other than Joe being something of a weak-willed, meek wuss. She believed what she had been taught all her life, that she should be “in subjection to her husband,” but she also had not a single submissive bone in her body. So slowly that we barely noticed it happening, until it seemed like one day it burst out into the open and tore our life asunder, my mother began to take on the persona of a nagging, abusive harpy.

  There were three good years of marriage between them, up until I turned nine. Prior to then, I remember my mother the way many others still do—the youngest, prettiest mommy of all the mommies in the world. A woman who loved and fiercely protected Moll and me. Even when life was rough, before meeting Joe, and she had to bundle us sleepily into our old Plymouth Voyager at 4:00 a.m. and go polish FedEx drop boxes to earn money to feed us, she found ways to make it fun, not allowing her desperation and misery to seep through the cracks and poison her daughters. Though she took discipline seriously, when we were little it was never harsh or unwarranted. We always felt loved and adored by our mommy.

  That would change.

  Chapter Two

  It was mid-January 2009, in Brea Jamba Juice, while begging my cheating ex-boyfriend not to leave me for
his costar in a chintzy murder mystery dinner theater, that I learned that my biological father had offed himself with a Remington12 gauge. I was twenty-three years old.

  One moment I was self-medicating, drinking in, like a carefully rationed narcotic, Dennis’s placid voice asking me how I was, what was new, placating me with the tired words I had come to dread: “I just need more time to make up my mind” (ask me now why I never threw a pomegranate smoothie over the asshole’s head and walked out for good—I have no answer for you). The next, my BlackBerry rang, a Los Angeles number, and I picked it up, assuming that it was a call for an interview from one of several LA jobs I had applied for.

  “Ms. Karp? My name is Joyce Cato. I’m calling you regarding a Bob Jason Neville,” the woman on the end of the line began. She had a kind voice, but I was immediately on the defensive. Oh, my god, he’s tracked me down. I couldn’t understand why or how, but he had done it. I knew it.

  My mind was a maelstrom of panic. I didn’t want to allow any of this back into my life. I had spent the previous week telling my therapist the little that I remembered about this man, about the things that he used to do to me, to my mother, and the nightmares that had burst into my head six months earlier—some long-delayed trauma reaction that forced me awake, sobbing several times a week, terrifying me so much that I couldn’t go back to sleep, setting me on edge and completely annihilating my once-comfortable relationship with Dennis, who couldn’t handle disturbances of this kind. He promptly decided that starting a relationship with some common actress (without the convenience of actually breaking up with me first) was somehow the most sensible plan of action. Mysti, I believe was her name. What the hell kind of a name is Mysti, anyway? I wondered, bitterly. I had no idea what she looked like, but in my wishful thinking she was a trampy bimbo with blonde extensions, a horsey face, fake boobs and a SoCal tan, spouting the platitudes that so many actors keep handily tucked under one arm to prove their depth to the skeptical world.

  I found out about Mysti two days before Christmas. In some subconscious layer of being, I knew, and when I asked, “Who is she?” I prayed that Dennis would respond that he hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was talking about. Instead, he looked stricken, but didn’t deny it; he later told me that, having paused for far too long before responding, he realized that he could no longer make up a convincing enough lie. I threw his Christmas present at his head. Unfortunately, it was an envelope containing two skydiving tickets (he desperately wanted to leap from a plane and I, picturing myself plummeting like a screaming grapefruit, only to splat open on the Lake Elsinore hills, had psyched myself up to do it with him). The envelope had fluttered harmlessly to the ground at his feet, and my life had officially fallen apart.

  Joyce Cato’s voice had trailed off expectantly, bringing my scrabbling thoughts back to the situation at hand, but I wasn’t biting. I remained noncommittal.

  “…Yes?”

  “Are you the daughter of Bob Jason Neville?” Well, fuck. No skirting that one.

  “I, um, sort of. I haven’t seen him for years. About twenty-two years. I don’t—I mean—my mother remarried. I don’t have anything to do with him. That’s why my last name is Karp now, instead of Neville.”

  If she was a private detective, hired to track me down so this man could reenter my life, I wanted to head her off at the pass. Perhaps she would hang up the phone and leave me alone now. That’s when she informed me that she was with the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, that Bob had passed away and that she was so sorry.

  Sorry? I wasn’t sure what I felt. I was seated with my ex at a Jamba Juice patio, there was a man smoking to our right, the fumes were bugging me a bit and, by the way, one half of my DNA was dead. Forever. Never to return. Certain questions could never be asked, certain mysteries never solved, doors closed forever. Did I care? Did I feel sorry? I didn’t know. Detachedly, I wondered if I sounded callous to Joyce Cato as I asked, “Was it an overdose?”

  Across from me, Dennis looked up suddenly, his dark eyes pooling with concern. The consummate actor. I paused, absorbing the tinny voice emanating from the phone, then confirmed, “Suicide. Shotgun. Mmm-hmm. Well, right. I guess I can definitely see that. I mean, that makes perfect sense. From what I know of him, that’s exactly the sort of thing he’d do.” My voice was flat, matter-of-fact, even a little chipper. I was cucumber-cool, could have been conducting a job interview. If anything, I imagine I would have appeared a mite too still to the casual observer. Too collected and serene, with a cruel edge, even.

  “You’re the next of kin,” Joyce Cato informed me. “His mother, Jesse, and his sister, Carol, were notified two weeks ago, when he was found. Jesse told us that there were four children and two ex-wives. We tracked down the other wife and two children fairly easily, since they shared his last name, but you and your sister were harder to find. You’re the oldest, and the next of kin. There was no will or suicide note found, so we need you to come down to the coroner’s office to take care of some things, tell us what kind of arrangements you’d like to make for the body. Unless you were ever legally adopted by your mother’s husband, in which case you would no longer legally be the next of kin. Were you adopted?”

  “No,” I whispered. “Never formally.”

  “Again, I’m so sorry for your loss, Ms. Karp.”

  “I…you know, I didn’t know him. We were never in contact. Not for two decades. Thank you for calling, but this is all very surreal. If you’ll excuse me, I think that I need to call my mother and let her know. I’ll give you a call back about coming down and seeing what needs to be taken care of.” As an afterthought, I asked when he had killed himself. She hesitated, and then said that they had found him a few days later, but New Year’s Eve was the assumed date, based on the evidence at hand.

  In this way, I learned that I had two younger half sisters, both under eighteen, and that I was to be responsible for the details of my estranged drug-addict father’s property distribution and cremation. I thanked Joyce Cato for her time and hung up. Inappropriately and without warning, I began laughing hysterically. Dennis’s eyebrows shot up in actorly alarm.

  I don’t think that death is funny, obviously. In fact, death pretty much sucks. But laughing at my worst experiences has long been a favorite coping mechanism of mine. It’s one of the myriad ways (too many, in my opinion) that I am like my mother, although it is definitely among the more useful traits I’ve picked up from her.

  I cried often as a kid, when life turned dark at nine years old and any shred of childhood that I had left abruptly vanished in search of sweeter pastures. In time, hearing Shut up and quit crying you sniveling little bitch you make me sick, as I was soundly beaten around the head with an umbrella, spatula or the occasional cutting board, rubbed off and I grew a thicker skin. Tears morphed into scathing, sarcastic wit. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of crying, dammit. Ha. How do you like me now? were the words I would spat out in my mind. I didn’t say it aloud—didn’t have to. My venomous, defiant attitude was evident in the lack of the very waterworks that my mother railed against, and the beatings grew steadily more brutal. Long gone were the days of the simple spanking with the paddle that was adorned with a picture of a fawn followed by a shambling bear cub on it. “For the little dear with the bare behind.” I hated that paddle but I would eventually come to regard it with a certain nostalgia. The good old times of a smack or two on the bum were over. Floggings will continue until morale improves, I thought bitterly. It was only after fleeing the scene and locking myself in my room that I would allow myself to disintegrate into red-faced, snot-running misery.

  My mother was silent at first when I dialed her number to tell her about the hasty shuffling off of Bob’s mortal coil. Then she asked me to come home.

  “I’m with Dennis at the moment. We’ve got some things to talk about briefly, and then I’ll come back and we can call the coroner together.” Brattily, I relished the dig a tiny bit. She disapproved of Dennis, and long before
he’d started boinking another chick, too. As a matter of fact, she disapproved of any man I dated, simply because none of them were Jehovah’s Witnesses, although I have often wondered if she would even have given her blessing had I taken up with a JW boy. To some degree, I have always had the nagging feeling that seeing me happy with any man bothered Linda Karp to the extreme. For another human being to have loved me unconditionally would have meant that her own marital discord, the blame for which had often been placed squarely on my tiny preteen shoulders, was her own fault after all. She was content to predict doom and gloom for any and all future relationships—her regular proclamation that nobody would ever love me left the deepest and most lasting welts on my psyche that I am ever likely to sustain. I continue to be haunted by that prediction: Those just aren’t the sort of words a person forgets.

  As for the Witness boys, you couldn’t have tempted me to go there if you’d paid me. They were generally self-righteous, quietly arrogant milquetoasts. Jehovah’s Witnesses advocate inequality of the sexes—the complete subjugation of women to their husbands’ every decision, even if blatantly unjust or flat-out wrong. Countless Jehovah’s Witness women have thus quietly endured every form of abuse at the hands of their husbands for years, being told by congregation elders to “wait on Jehovah” in the hopes that someday the injustice would be addressed—by God, of course. Not by, say, police or social workers. Trained and certified domestic violence authorities had nothing on a group of old men in a windowless room and the all-knowing Big J upstairs. Thinking about submitting to some soppy fundamentalist boy playing head of the house made me want to pluck out my own eyeballs like grapes off a vine and stomp on them. Luckily for me, I suppose, the fundamentalist boys in question sensed my obstinacy, because they gave me a wide berth and pursued less opinionated girls in the congregation, which was fine by me. When you’re a Jehovah’s Witness kid, and sex is verboten before marriage (and not in the usual religious “Gee, we’ll be really, really upset and/or disappointed if you have sex, but if you must, use a condom” way, but rather in the manner of “You will be excommunicated and shunned by family and friends if you have sex”), pickings are slim and marriages happen quickly. Very quickly. Courtships are rushed, flushed with the normal raging hormones, and you’d think that the other girls in the congregation would have appreciated my utter lack of interest in competing with them for a “suitable marriage mate,” but they were as disconcerted by me as anyone else. I had not had a close friend in the congregation since childhood. I was a lonely, frustrated island at each of our several weekly meetings at the local Kingdom Hall. The very words marriage mate made me shudder. It was all too clinical, too passionless for me. I wanted love. And passion. And sex. Especially sex. As an early bloomer, I engaged in frequent and urgent masturbation, which eased me through a sexless, guilt-tinged decade before I would finally throw my arms up in defeat (or triumph, depending on how you look at it) and toss my beribboned virginity at age eighteen to a pushy twenty-four-year-old, non-JW boyfriend. Coincidentally, he was also an arrogantly religious milquetoast. I guess programming dies hard.