by Byrne, Leigh
From time to time, Mama allowed me to stop and take a drink from the outside water hose, so I wouldn’t dehydrate again, and I was thankful for this. But I was still weak from the heat exhaustion just days earlier. The weeding was tough work, and I wasn’t making much progress.
I hadn’t been working long when Natalie walked up. She had on bright yellow hot pants and a white tee shirt with a shiny plastic daisy on the front. She still didn’t have the tan she wanted, but I noticed the sun had coaxed out more of her freckles.
Breaking a smile, I said, “Hi!”
“Can you believe it’s already time for school to start again?” she asked, even more effervescent than usual. “Aren’t you excited?”
“I guess.”
She pulled my arm. “You’re still dark!” she said. “Want to come over to my house and play records in my room? I want to show you the new clothes I got for school.”
“I—I can’t.”
Her eyes flashed blue sparks. “Why can’t you?”
I shook some dirt clods from a handful of weeds I had just pulled. “Mama’s making supper, and she will be calling me in soon.”
Natalie scanned the yard, as if a solution might be out there somewhere. I cringed when she looked in the direction of my pee-stained mattress that Mama had made me carry out to air that morning. She turned to me. “Can you come over tomorrow then?”
“No, I’ve got to pull weeds tomorrow too,” I said. “I have to pull them every day until I finish.”
She traced around the perimeter of the yard with her finger. “You mean you’ve got to pull all these weeds!”
“Yep.”
She darted her eyes back to me. “Are you in trouble or something?”
“I guess so.”
“What for?”
I was trying to come up with an answer when Mama’s radar detected what was going on, and she poked her head out the back door. “It’s time for you to come in now,” she said with forced politeness, aware of Natalie’s presence. “Supper’s ready.”
I headed for the house, and Natalie walked with me. “Hi, Mrs. Storm,” she said as we approached Mama.
Mama threw up her hand, and then went back inside.
Overnight, blisters the size of dimes formed on the pads of my hand from pulling weeds. When I resumed working the next morning, they popped open, oozing bloody puss.
I was both surprised and pleased when Natalie came out early and offered to help me with the weeding. She was hoping that if she helped me, I would finish sooner, and then I could go to her house and play records. Selfishly, I didn’t bother to tell her she would be wasting her time.
We worked side by side, pulling the weeds together. She didn’t seem to mind the way I smelled, or that you couldn’t tell the bruises from the dirt on my legs. And she never once mentioned my funny haircut or the out-of-style clothes I always wore. She knew about the bedwetting too; she’d seen my mattress airing in the backyard. She looked past all these things as if they simply did not exist.
She wasn’t much help with the weeding, though. She tugged and tugged at the stubborn weeds, trying her best to loosen them, but she wasn’t strong enough to pull them up by the roots, like Mama had instructed. I had to go behind her and do it for her. But still, I was glad for the company, and flattered that she was willing to work so hard to get to play with me.
When Mama saw Natalie helping me, she called me inside.
“You think that pretty girl really likes you?” she sneered. “Girls like Natalie don’t hang around skuzzy kids like you. Believe me, Weasel, I know. I was just like her, one of the pretty, popular ones, and I wouldn’t have been caught dead with someone like you. She probably doesn’t have anything else to do. As soon as she gets a big whiff of you, she won’t get around you anymore.”
I knew I smelled awful, and sometimes I even got sick of myself. I swallowed back my tears because I didn’t want her to know how much she’d hurt my feelings. I thought if only I was pretty like Natalie, it would solve everything.
Mama sent me out front to pick up gravel and rocks from the yard, and throw them back into the driveway. As I squatted and pried rocks out of the dirt with my fingernails, I hoped Natalie didn’t see me and try to help again. I liked having her around, but it was too much trouble concocting excuses why I couldn’t go over to her house and play, and the real reason was too embarrassing to reveal.
I looked up and down the street at all the neat two- and three-bedroom brick ranches that lined Maplewood Drive. Each house had a picture window, under which was a flowerbed. In spring they were full of blooming pink tulips and buttercups, and in the summer, red or white geraniums. On Halloween a smiling jack-o-lantern could be seen burning on every front porch, and at Christmastime, live Scotch pines with multi-colored lights shone brightly through the windows.
Our house blended right into the tidy row with all the others on the street. The only thing that set it apart was the front door. All the other doors had windows that were square, triangular, or diamond-shaped. Ours was the only one with three rectangular windows in a diagonal. At night, Mama turned on the amber-colored hurricane lamp she kept on a table by the front door so the light would shine out through the three windows. She said it made the house look homey from the outside.
From a glance you would have never guessed what went on inside our house. Only if you had paid careful attention as you passed by during your Sunday afternoon drive, or while walking your dog in the evenings, would you have been able to recognize the subtle ways in which number 1905 was different. For instance, even on a warm spring day, when all the other houses on the street had open windows with sheer curtains billowing in the wind, our shades were always drawn, and the doors tightly shut.
Natalie’s mama, Lana, sat on her front porch step chatting with a lady from across the street. She was holding her youngest daughter, Katie, in her lap. Lana was a striking woman with a good figure—tall, thin, and full-busted. She stirred the hormones of some of the pubescent boys in the neighborhood; they hid behind the bushes by her house and watched her sunbathing in her bikini. She was the reason Daddy rarely went out into the backyard anymore. Mama had once liked Lana, but since the accident she had become ridiculously jealous of her. She called her a slut, and said she wore too much makeup.
Mesmerized by Lana, I watched her twirl a ringlet of Katie’s hair around her finger as she talked. She smiled at me and threw her hand up when she saw me staring. I wondered if she thought it was strange that I was digging up rocks while all the other kids in the neighborhood were playing.
As far as I knew, no one who lived on Maplewood Drive ever questioned why I didn’t play outdoors like my brothers. As far as I knew, they never noticed the sadness in my eyes and the hollowness of my cheeks when they saw me taking out the trash or pulling weeds. Everyone was too busy with their own happy lives, and too intent on minding their own business. Their laughter was too loud during their afternoon barbeques and family games for them to hear the strange, bumping sounds and the muffled cries that sometimes came from within house number 1905.
That night I took the image of Lana holding Katie in her lap to bed with me, and played it over and over in my head. I dreamed of what it would be like to be held by Mama again, to have her caress me and fondle my hair, like she once had. I wrapped my arms around my shoulders, closed my eyes, and pretended she was hugging me, and that she loved me as much as Lana loved Katie and Natalie. I held on tight until sleep took my worries away.
32
After school started, I didn’t see much of Natalie. She hung out with the popular crowd, a group of girls who didn’t know I existed. But whenever we passed in the halls, even when she was with her snobby friends, she always stopped to talk, if only briefly. She may have been nice to me out of pity, like Mama had said, but I didn’t care. I was willing to accept her as my friend under any circumstances; she was that special to me. She had already given me enough of herself the past summer, and I was happy to settle wit
h whatever she had left to offer.
Things were looking up for me in the sixth grade. Daddy talked Mama in to letting me ride the bus to school, like my brothers. I was glad because it meant I wouldn’t be late for class anymore. The kindness Natalie had shown me inspired me to make some changes to better my life. Instead of passively enduring Mama’s humiliation tactics, I invented ways to counteract them. Like when she cut my bangs so short, they stuck straight out on my forehead, instead of facing the stares and snickers from my classmates, as soon as I got to school, I went into the restroom, wet my hair down with water, and smoothed back my bangs, pinning them in place with some bobby pins I’d found while cleaning the house.
Natalie’s friendship also sparked the confidence I needed to begin socializing with the other kids in my class. Some of them still made fun of me because I dressed funny, and—because Mama didn’t let me take regular baths—sometimes I smelled funny too. Every morning I used the soap in the school bathroom to wash up the best I could, but there wasn’t much I could do about my clothes. When the other kids made fun of me because of what I was wearing, instead of clamming up and sulking like I once had, I started laughing along with them. In doing this I discovered the teasing didn’t seem to be as much fun for them, and eventually they let up.
After a while, most everyone grew accustomed to my differences, and some of the kids even decided to accept me in spite of them. A few friends were all I needed to make me start to feel better about myself.
Soon I went from being an introvert and not talking at all, to talking nonstop. By then I had figured out my life at home was going to be bad, no matter what I did, so I thought I may as well have as much fun as I possibly could while I was in school. My deportment grades bottomed out, as I was always in trouble for talking too much. My scholastics fell below average too. I figured no one cared whether I made good grades or not, so what difference did it make? I liked art and creative writing, and when I felt inclined, I excelled in those areas.
At home the emotional cruelty remained consistent, the torture games sporadic, and as usual, everything was unpredictable. The whippings I got while school was in session were usually on my bottom or my back, with a wire hanger, or the buckle end of a belt. If Mama became particularly mad, she hit me with her fist, but always where the mark wouldn’t show.
As I matured, changes took place in my thought process. The delusions I’d held onto for so long—that my mama might forgive me and snap out of whatever was wrong with her—had all but vanished. I had grown to resent her for making me suffer. I could no longer see her beauty. I could barely see her as human anymore.
At the beginning of the school year, I befriended a girl named Katherine Miller, who like Natalie, accepted me in spite of my appearance. She was a funny, free-spirited, and independent girl, who didn’t care what anyone thought of her. She was strong-willed too and stood for what she believed in, and her every action was a bold, clear, testament to this.
The first time I saw her, she was in the lunchroom waving her finger at a couple of girls known for their cruel teasing and bullying. A boy whose name I didn’t know was standing behind her, sobbing. I recognized the boy as an epileptic who had recently had a seizure in the hallway of the school. When it happened, he had foamy spit coming out of his mouth, and his half-shut eyelids were fluttering. Some of the other kids were laughing and pointing, and I could hear them saying words like mad dog and spaz. I remember feeling sorry for him, rolling around on the floor in front of everybody, his body jerking uncontrollably.
Katherine was not nearly as pretty as Natalie. Her eyes were large and bulbous, and out of symmetry with her narrow face. She had bushy, brown hair that she wore long and parted in the middle, and it draped her shoulders like a dark wool cape. I liked the way she looked, though, and I was glad she wasn’t pretty, because being with her didn’t make me feel self-conscious about my own imperfections.
She was the ideal friend for me, and in no time we were inseparable at school. Still, as close as we were, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about my life at home. What I wanted more than anything else was to be normal, to fit in, and I thought if I ever revealed the truth, even to Katherine, there wouldn’t be any chance of that happening. At the same time, all the unspeakable secrets inside me were clawing to get out.
Almost every Friday Katherine asked me to go to her house to hang out or spend the night. I put her off by making excuses, but there were just so many times you could have a stomach ache on a Friday. And I had run out of dead aunts’ and uncles’ funerals to attend.
“What’s the real reason you won’t spend the night with me?” she asked me one afternoon.
“I want to, Kat, I do, it’s just that…”
“You still pee in the bed, don’t you?” she teased. I had forgotten I had once told her I wet the bed as an excuse for not sleeping over. “Big deal! Don’t worry; you can sleep in the floor. I’ll put papers down like we did with our puppy before she was house-trained.”
“That’s not the reason I can’t come over.”
“Well, what is it then? We’ve been hanging out together every day since school started, and here it is December, and you haven’t come to my house, and I haven’t been to yours one single time! We can’t even talk on the dang phone because you won’t give me your phone number!” She whipped her head to one side, slinging her hair back off her shoulders—Cher style. The hair-slinging thing was a nervous habit, a reflex, but there were times, like this one, when she did it in a cocky way right after she’d made a good point.
I wanted to tell her the real reason why I couldn’t sleep over at her house, and my instincts told me she would understand and still accept me as her friend. But Daddy had warned me that if I ever told anyone about what Mama did to me, it could break up the family.
“Honey,” he had said, in his most serious voice, “it’s important not to talk to people about what goes on in the privacy of our house—you know, about your mama’s illness and all. Let me handle it, I’ll decide what’s best for everyone.”
At one time I had believed every word he said, and my faith that he would come through for me kept me from talking. But I had since learned his promises were a big load of crap, and I had grown intolerant of him condoning Mama’s cruelty toward me. The blind loyalty I once had for him no longer existed. I’d become fed up with my situation at home all the way around, and I was ready to try to find a way out. I decided it was time to tell her.
“It’s my mama,” I stammered, searching my mind for the right words. “She’s—she’s weird.”
Kat rolled her bug eyes. “So is mine; who cares?” she said. “You don’t have to bring her with you. Just ask her if you can come over.”
In spite of the seriousness of what I was trying to tell her, she had me laughing as usual. “I can’t just ask her.” My voice squeaked from frustration. I hadn’t thought of how difficult it would be to explain my situation. “You’re not getting it, Katherine. My mama won’t let me come!”
She laughed at me.
“She hates me, okay!” I blurted out.
She kept laughing. She thought I was kidding. She didn’t think it was even possible for a mother not to love her own daughter. “She doesn’t hate you; she’s your mother, for God’s sake. Do you want me to have my mom call her and ask her if you can spend the night?”
“No!” I gasped.
Appearing frustrated, she put one hand on her hip. Her eyes were popping out even more than usual. “Well, what do you want me to do then?”
“Nothing, there’s nothing you can do.” Then I said, in the most severe tone I could muster, “I’m serious, Katherine, my mama really hates me.”
Kat studied my face carefully and then said, “You are serious, aren’t you?” She dropped her hand off her hip, and her voice softened, “You do think your mom hates you.”
“I know she does!” I said as loud as I could get by with in school. “She tells me almost every day.”
&nbs
p; “Why?”
“Well, it started when my half sister, Audrey, got sick with the flu…”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she said. “You have a half sister? You never mentioned anything about a sister. You said you had three brothers.”
“I had a half sister, but she died.”
“How’d she die?”
“I killed her.”
“What?”
“Well, I didn’t exactly kill her, but it was my fault she died.”
“Your fault, how?”
“I gave her the Hong Kong flu, and it killed her.”
“That’s not your fault!”
“Yes, it is. I was sick, and I let her chew some bubblegum right from my mouth, and she got sick, and then she died.”
“Wait a minute, something doesn’t sound right here. I had the Hong Kong flu, and I didn’t die.”
“She had polio, and her lungs were weak.”
“Then she died of polio; you didn’t kill her!”
“But I wanted her to die because I always had to take care of her, and she got all of Mama’s attention.”
“I don’t care what you wanted. Unless you got a gun and shot her, or stabbed her with a knife, you didn’t kill her!” She did her hair-flipping thing. “How old were you when all this happened?”
“Seven.”
“For Pete’s sake, Tuesday, you were a kid! Did your mama tell you she hated you because you killed your half sister?”
“No, she never said it like that. But she did tell me if I had never been born, Audrey would still be alive.”
“It sounds like she’s just hurt and looking for somebody to blame.”
“Why does she tell me she hates me then?”
“I don’t know. What does your dad say?”
“He thinks it’s because of her head injury.”
