The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  After it was all over, I kept trying to find a corner of my bed that felt safe after that, but no corner was safe and everything was cold. Even when I put all the pillows on top of me, I still felt cold. I couldn’t sleep enough to make it all go away. I thought Walter had gone crazy, and I was afraid he was going to go crazy again. There was no sleep which would drive the nightmare away.

  When my mother came home she was angry at me because my underwear had been ruined by my blood; I had put them back on afterward. She informed me that I must have hurt myself with a toy car.

  To this day, I still have flashbacks when I see anyone behind me in the mirror.

  Walter was never held accountable for raping me. Not by Marion and not by anyone else. In our family, no one ever dared to get angry with Walter for his actions. Marion would scream at him, of course, but she screamed at everyone, so she was not holding him responsible for any particular thing. It would have been out of the question for her to say anything about what he did because he was sick, therefore he was not responsible for his actions.

  Walter portrayed himself as being weak and helpless, and a victim of many different things. Anyone who was angry with him was just another victimizer, and I certainly could not act like one of those evil people, especially because he already saw me that way. I could never permit myself to be angry with him because it’s not nice to be angry with poor sick people.

  Even now.

  Chapter 12: I Start School, and Reap the Whirlwind (1971–1972)

  “…Mama’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true

  Mama’s gonna put all of her fears into you

  Mama’s gonna keep you right here under her wing

  She won’t let you fly but she might let you sing

  Mama’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm

  …Of course Mama’s gonna help build the wall”

  —Pink Floyd, Mother

  When I was 22, I read an essay that my mother had written when I was five years old. She wrote about how tragic it was that I was so different, and how she was certain that the public schools would destroy a “green monkey” like me: the normal monkeys would tear me apart. My mother painted herself as a tragic heroine who was powerless to prevent the utter and inevitable destruction of her allegedly extraordinary daughter.

  I was furious about the essay in the light of her conduct. She knew exactly what would happen to me before she put me into public school, and she put me there anyway. My mother was firmly sold on the value of public schools and felt that they needed to be supported, even if the collateral damage included me.

  Before I started school, my mother had my IQ tested as a matter of course. Never mind about the results—she declined to tell me anything about my IQ for many years, at which point she told me the range I was in, and continued to conceal the actual result until I was 18. Suffice to say that my IQ test confirmed all her worst fears and fondest wishes. I was as bizarre as my parents had always hoped I would be; like them both, I am a member of Mensa.

  Another mother might have made sure that I was put into a gifted school, or made sure that there would be adequate intervention if things did not go well for me. After all, if you own a cat you must buy cat food, and horses eat hay. She and my father had deliberately bred me to be gifted, and once she had her confirmation that their experiment had succeeded, it would only have made sense to make sure that I could become what she seemed to want me to be by putting me in a school where I would have an appropriate education.

  I could speculate unkindly that doing anything to make certain I stayed out of the hell she anticipated would have avoided the hand-wringing tragedy of it all, or simply conclude that she did not feel she could afford a gifted school for me. The fact of the matter is that she did not approve of gifted schools or any kind of private schools for any reason.

  Where I would have benefited mightily from a school where there were other children like me, she could not stand the idea of sending me to one. For her, any kind of private school was a place where rich, snobby kids were dropped off in gold-plated limousines by their personal valets, and spent their weekends flying about in diamond-encrusted private jets, snacking on foie gras, and flinging hundred-dollar bills out the windows of their sports cars.

  My mother was never going to let me turn into a snob, whether an intellectual snob or an upwardly mobile one, even if that meant I would undergo the harm she knew I faced in a normal school. She was not only anti-elitist, but ambivalent about the concept of giftedness even though she had gone along with my father’s eugenics experiments and even belonged to Mensa before she met him. I do not think she questioned her own intelligence, but resented other intellectuals who were not her or my father.

  I believe my mother objected most to the idea of an IQ-based meritocracy, understandably preferring to value actual accomplishment over mere capability. Mother had also been different in school, but for her school had been a dream, an escape from farm chores and hunger and her abusive father. Her school was small and rural, and she didn’t tell me about having been teased anywhere nearly as much as she did about other children’s complaints about how she had messed up the grading curve for them. School, for her, had been a resounding success.

  One thing Mother knew: a proper heroine fulfills her objective no matter what. Now it was up to me to live up to her proud example. Would I succeed?

  Not like she did. Not on a tintype.

  When I started kindergarten at P. S. 5 in Staten Island, I was so excited to finally be allowed to go to school. I already knew how to read and I had been bored silly at home. In my naivete, I thought all the other children would be like me. As you might expect, the other kids detested me. I was different and I caused problems for them. I was outspoken and brash, I asked and answered too many questions. I talked funny, more like an adult, with way too many words in my vocabulary. Even back then I remember discussing with my brother how we could talk more like the other kids.

  The school had no idea what to do with me. There was nothing for me to learn in kindergarten. So I sat in class drawing dolphins and otters while the other kids wrestled with more age-appropriate Dick and Jane: “See Spot Run. Run, Spot, Run.” When we had show-and-tell, I brought a carriage I had made out of a five-gallon ice-cream container, and two green wine bottles wearing crepe paper dresses I had made; this also did nothing to improve my popularity.

  I got teased for my speech, my name, and mygrades. “Einstein” was a popular epithet, though I only had a vague idea who that was and I didn’t understand why they called me that. When the teasing escalated to violence, I became frightened. I began searching for anything I could do to reduce my visibility. Still, a lot of the blame for the disaster of school was my fault, although at the time I had no idea how to stop it, how to prevent it, or how to fit in.

  I did everything I could to minimize my strangeness but it was never enough. My mother actively opposed any effort I made to fit in. Dressing like the other kids was impossible, since my mother dressed me out of a second-hand store, and there was no money for new clothes. But more importantly, Mother despised the very idea of my trying to fit in, even to save myself from violence. If I had dared to mention such a thing, she probably would have feigned a heart attack from the shock. After all, I was Different, and That Was What Mattered. And since I was there to live out her fantasies, my difference was to be maintained at all costs.

  I changed my name very shortly after beginning school. It was obvious no teacher or student was ever going to be able to pronounce Moira, and that it was going to continue to make me visible in a bad way. So, I went by Dorothy until I was 18, at which time I decided I didn’t care whether other people could pronounce my name or not.

  The school figured out that something was wrong, and moved me to second grade. After all, most kids do not get harassed by other kids to such an extent that they change their names in order to try to reduce their difference. They would have allowed me to skip me more grades, but they were worried a
bout the social consequences—they thought my being several years younger than my classmates would not be good for my social development.

  Eventually, I came to terms with being different and realized that the people who hated me and hurt me were actually trying to help me in their own fashion—to shame me into conformity, a very human, if misguided, instinct. I am not claiming that what they did was right, only that it was understandable.

  Chapter 13: Greenwalls, Greyhaven, and the Basement (1972–75)

  “The little blue-painted girl who had borne the fertilizing blood was drawn down into the arms

  of a sinewy old hunter, and Morgaine saw her briefly struggle and cry out, go down

  under his body, her legs opening to the irresistible force of nature in them.”

  —The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

  On Columbus Day, 1972, I was sitting in class when I was called into the office and taken out of school from P.S. 5, thankfully forever. My mother and father put my brother and me on a plane to California: they were going to drive the moving truck themselves and we would stay with my grandmother at her house called Greyhaven. My brother and I were escorted to the gate and onto the plane, and everybody was very nice to us. We landed in San Francisco, and then we got onto a helicopter to go to the Oakland Airport.

  My grandmother was there to meet my brother and me, along with her friend, a lady named Mrs. Hodgehead. I do not think my grandmother drove. My grandmother was a gentle, kind woman who kept her book-filled attic spotless. It was a comfortable landing place for generations of children. I would see her after school every day when I was small, and I can still remember the smell of her homemade banana bread.

  We stayed at Greyhaven for the next few weeks while my parents drove cross-country from Staten Island to Berkeley. It is an enormous, dilapidated mansion of sorts in the Berkeley Hills, a block from the Claremont Hotel. It is five small stories, built on a steep slope. The bottom two stories are, or were, unfinished basement, while the third story is the main floor with the kitchen, living room, dining room, a bathroom, a bedroom and an underground pantry room. The fourth story has a bathroom, several bedrooms, and an outdoor terrace looking onto the garden and the entire Bay Area. The fifth story is actually two levels, and it amounts to its own apartment: a lower room and an upstairs with a kitchen, a small bedroom, and a balcony surrounding the entire apartment with bookshelves nearly all the way around.

  When my parents arrived we moved into a house on Hamilton Place, up a steep flight of stairs in a really dismal part of Oakland. There was nothing much I remember about the house, except that it was small, narrow, and under the story we lived on there was a huge, vacant, completely unfinished basement. The neighborhood was not good and my mother wanted to live closer to my grandmother.

  So rather than enrolling us in an Oakland school, my brother and I were enrolled in John Muir School, a few blocks directly downhill of Greyhaven. Mother would drop me off there in the morning and I would walk to school. After school, I would walk back to sit upstairs to do my homework with my grandmother. Mother would pick me up and take me home later in the day.

  When my brother and I were at Greyhaven we would play with my cousins Ian and Fiona. Ian was a year younger than me, and Fiona two. As noted, my brother was fourteen months older than I was. Ian was the son of Diana and Paul, who were not married, and Fiona was the daughter of Paul and Tracy, who were. At that time there was one other cousin, the baby Robin. He was the son of Don and Diana, who were married, and he was later discovered to be autistic. He was disabled to the point of never developing speech, although once when he was small my uncle Paul thought he heard him say “I want some of that.” He ended up institutionalized, because as he got older he became harder and harder to handle. We could not really play with him, even when he was young.

  I was at John Muir to finish second grade, and my brother was in third grade. I was smaller than the other people in my classroom, as before; I still talked funny, and I had developed an awful temper. I was brought into a theater class, and since it was after the beginning of the term the school play had been cast already. I wanted to be the lead and I threw a gigantic tantrum when they told me I could not be. I think I ended up with a part, despite my dreadful conduct.

  Not everyone was as forgiving of my strangeness and bad temper as the drama teacher was, though. One day, off in the trees on the downhill side of the school, a kid threw a big block of wood at my head, hitting me in the forehead. I still have the scar. I was unconscious until after the end of school that day. Three girls found me and I woke up with them standing over me. They took me to the office, where the principal, Mr Baugh, mopped the blood off my forehead.

  My head wound had bled. It was less than an inch long, and did not need stitches, but it was deep. I remember him telling me I needed to have some gauze to put on it. At the time, I had no idea what “gauze” was, and even more confusing it sounded like he was saying “gaws.” I recovered well, although the scar offends my vanity.

  When I was at Greyhaven, I had some unfortunate run-ins with an individual from the Pagan community named Isaac Bonewits. Some people called him the “Pagan Pope.” He was a frequent visitor to Greyhaven and a friend of my parents. I hated Isaac, and refused to be in the same room with him, even if the only way I could articulate my objections to him was to say “he tickled me!”

  One day Isaac came to my mother when I was six years old, and told her he wanted to have sex with me. He told her that there was a girl just my age at the commune he lived in and she had had sex with all the men there, and she was so “free” and so “uninhibited” that it would be “good for me” to do the same thing with him. Her response was one I have heard her repeat so very many times in front of a variety of audiences:

  “She won’t have to do anything, she won’t have to be anything. All she’ll have to do to get attention is to open her legs.” She seemed to think that saying this to a man who wanted to rape her six-year-old daughter would somehow educate him and show the world that she was a Great Feminist Thinker.

  I have heard her repeat that story again and again. It was so humiliating to me, and it showed me just how little she cared what happened to me. Yes, she’s a great feminist thinker. Yes, I must never allow myself to think I can get male attention by getting raped, and instead I must Create because Creating is my only purpose in being alive.

  And she does not care what he does to me. I am dead. Why am I still alive?

  I do not like talking about what happened with Isaac, and so I am going to say as little as I possibly can. In fact, rather than spending a lot of ink describing a long list of this and that which will turn me into a gooey weeping mess, I am going to give only the barest outline of one event:

  The upper level basement floor was cold and concrete. My mouth bled. I smelled things I did not want to smell, and tasted things I did not want to taste. The bare wall frames with no sheetrock had cloudy, clear plastic wrap across them that had been partly shredded with age. There was a lot of dirt on the floor, which was not really level. I couldn’t breathe. And I hate him with every fiber of my being.

  By the time I was six years old, I was absolutely convinced that my parents were both unreliable and dangerous. I felt my mother was deliberately cruel and dangerous, and that my father was oblivious. Even if he loved me, his idea of what “love” was left very little room for my bodily integrity. I knew I needed to look to other people for help and sanity, and a better example.

  I knew my uncle Don was an artist, so I used to collect snail shells for him because I was certain he could find something artistic to do with them. To his credit, he never laughed at me or showed disdain for what I had brought him.

  Sometimes on Sundays when Greyhaven had afternoon tea, I used to walk to a bakery called The Bread Garden across from the Claremont Hotel on Domingo. I befriended the bakers, and I would tell them about what was happening at home. I remember hearing Ann Murray’s “Snowbird” playing in t
he bakery while they made these huge chocolate cookies with gooey white frosting inside.

  My mother asked me why I was hanging out at the bakery. I told her, bluntly, that I needed someone to tell my troubles to, and she was absolutely incensed. You might think I had told her I had robbed a bank. She seemed to think that I didn’t have any troubles and if I did, I had no right to tell them to anyone.

  When I was seven, a man named Serpent came to live at Greyhaven. He was cooking for the family in exchange for a place to stay. He had jokingly called himself the “Humble Servant,” but perhaps because he was very tall and quite thin, this had gotten changed into the “Humble Serpent.” His real name was Robert Cook. He was highly artistic, and he had a much better mind than most of the people I knew.

  Serpent and I became fast friends and he became my first informal foster father. He used to give me “page lessons” where he taught me to cook and to make things, with the objective of having me play a page at the Renaissance Faire and the Society for Creative Anachronism. I don’t know if I mentioned that the SCA and the Faire always involved the study of real-life skills.

  Eventually, Serpent got a girlfriend, Catherine. She was beautiful: blonde curly hair and a smile that lit up the room. She was strong and capable and kind, and I adored her—I still do! She took one look at me and said “You’ve got to make her a girl. She can’t be a page.”

  So he made me a Henry VIII-era Tudor dress that was spectacularly beautiful, with a black velvet bodice trimmed with gold and red stitching, a gold underskirt, and let me be a girl. Catherine and Robert Cook married and were a gigantic blessing in my life. Catherine became the mother-figure who essentially showed me that I could be a girl of another sort than my own mother was.