The Best American Essays 2011 Read online

  I was the first to hold my oldest daughter, before the doctor, before my wife. We were on the fifth or sixth floor of the hospital, and I could see the city stretched out below, dingy in winter but ringed with blue hills all around. Her eyes were not open and she was crying as only a newborn can, but I held her near the window as if to show her the world she had come into.

  The first year of her life is chronicled in pictures, and in each one I am holding her, or my wife is, or my mother or father or brother, each of us with a hand cupped gently under her head. She grows larger in each one, until she is standing, holding on to the edge of a chair or the coffee table, then walking unsteadily from parent to parent. There are pictures of her fine blond curls, of her riding a tricycle in the driveway, of her standing by a Japanese maple I planted in our front yard.

  While she is growing, my mother comes to our house every day to see her. My father makes strange faces at her and babbles like an idiot, something I have never seen him do. When I make fun of him for it, he tells me to shut up, then hugs me with enough strength to compress my ribs and kisses me on the forehead, as if I am two years old. When we move to North Carolina, my parents fly in three or four times a year. By this time my wife and I have a second daughter, and our oldest starts kindergarten. We stand outside one hot August morning and watch her get on the bus. As the bus pulls away, my wife cries for several minutes, holding our youngest and kissing her repeatedly.

  When they are gone sometimes, when the morning is quiet, when my parents have not flown in unexpectedly, when I am turning some old memory over and over, trying to make sense of it, I dig through an old shoebox of photos. I go through the pictures one by one, seeing the linear and vertical progression of my daughters’ lives, or myself, looking slightly older in each one, yet somehow less wise as the years go past.

  In the pictures in my mind I see a house, a carport, a man coming home from work. His stepson is crying. The man is tired. He wants a drink and to sit in front of the TV, but the child is crying. The rattle doesn’t work. The cartoons the child watches don’t work either. The teething ring, the blue one with fishes on it, also does not work, so he reaches for the child, and what were cries before become something else entirely. Outside, the crunch of ice under tires.

  Once before my nephew’s death his stepfather brought him into the grocery store where I worked, near closing time one night. Keith was crying, throwing his head back and screaming, and the stepfather had little idea what to do.

  I was a teenage boy then, and many years later, I would grow up to be a writer who spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the past. The stepfather looked frustrated or angry or even lost, so I held out my arms and Keith came to me and stopped crying. There were few people in the store, so I wandered around talking to him while his stepfather bought cigarettes. He smelled fresh and clean and I thought we had something in common, though at the time I couldn’t put a name to it, couldn’t see that what we had in common was the life that lay ahead of us, both of them just beginning. In a few years I would be a young father holding a daughter for the first time, worried and scared for all the things in the world that could happen to her, but of course I knew none of that then. Winter had just set in and the dark came early and no one knew Keith had only a few months to live, and when I handed him back to his stepfather he started crying again, though it would have been impossible, I am sure, to have known the reason why.

  Beds

  Toi Derricotte

  FROM Creative Nonfiction

  Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside us in the absence of an empathetic witness.

  —Peter Levine, The Unspoken Voice

  I.

  THE FIRST WAS A BASSINET. I don’t remember what it was made of; I think it was one of those big white wicker baskets with wheels. When I couldn’t sleep at night, my father would drag it into the kitchen. It was winter. He’d light the gas oven. I remember the room’s stuffiness, the acrid bite of cold and fumes.

  My father didn’t like crying. He said I was doing it to get attention. He didn’t like my mother teaching me that I could cry and get attention. Nothing was wrong with me, and even if I was hungry, it wasn’t time to eat. Sometimes I screamed for hours, and my father—I do remember this—would push his chair up to the lip of the bassinet and smoke, as if he were keeping me company.

  After a few nights, he had broken me. I stopped crying. But when he put the bottle to my lips, I didn’t want it. I was too exhausted to drink.

  II.

  My second was a crib in the corner of my parents’ room. We moved to the attic when I was eighteen months old, so it must have been before that. I still didn’t sleep at night. I’d see a huge gray monster outside the window, swaying toward me and side to side. I was afraid that any moment it would swoop in and get me. But I couldn’t wake my parents. What if it wasn’t real but only the huge blue spruce outside the window? If I woke them for nothing my father would be angry. I was more afraid of my father than I was of the monster. If I just kept watching, it couldn’t get me.

  III.

  My aunt brought home a present for me every day when she came from work. I’d wait by the kitchen door as soon as I could walk. Sometimes she’d fish down in her pocketbook, and the only thing she could find was a Tums, which she called candy. But mostly she’d bring colored paper and pencils from the printing press where she worked.

  When I was two or three, I began to draw things and to write my name. I wrote it backward for a long time: I-O-T. I drew houses, cars, money, and animals. I actually believed everything I drew was real; the house was a real house, as real as the one we lived in. I held it in my hand. It belonged to me, like a chair or an apple. From then on, I did not understand my mother’s sadness or my father’s rage. If we could have whatever we wanted just by drawing it, there was nothing to miss or to long for. I tried to show them what I meant, but they shrugged it off, not seeing or believing.

  (This sideways escape—the battle between my father’s worst thought of me and this proof, this stream of something, questioned and found lacking, which must remain nearly invisible—pressed into what leaks out as involuntarily as urine, a message which must be passed over the coals, raked, purified into a thin strand of unambiguous essence of the deep core.)

  IV.

  When I was seven, we moved to the Forest Lodge. We lived in D12 on the fourth floor. My mother and father slept in the living room on a bed that came down out of the wall. I slept on a rollaway cot kept in the same closet and pulled out at night. I helped my mother roll it into a corner of the kitchen, push the kitchen table back, and open the cot, its sheets and blankets still tight. (Whatever I had, I kept nice. I had to. My bed was my bed, but it was in my mother’s space. If she needed the space, my bed would go.)

  Someone had given me an easel-shaped blackboard with a sheet of clear plastic that you could pull down and paint on. In the morning, my mother would set it up in a small area between the dining room and the kitchen. She didn’t mind if the colors spilled, if a few drops fell on the newsprint she had put down. After she scrubbed every Saturday, she liked to put newspaper over the linoleum to keep it clean of our footprints. Wednesday, halfway through the week, she’d take the torn, dirty papers up, and underneath, the floor was like new.

  V.

  Most times I liked my food. I didn’t mind eating until my daddy started making me clean my plate and either struck me off my chair if I didn’t or lifted me up by my hair and held me midair if I was slow. He wanted me to eat faster; he didn’t have all day.

  He’d hold me off the floor until I pleaded. I’d sputter in fear and humiliation—I don’t remember pain—but I had to button up before he put me down to do exactly what he had told me to do, fast.

  Slowness was a sign of insubordination. If I missed a pea or a crumb, I was trying to outwit him. I must have thought he was stupid. And if I pleaded that I hadn’t seen the pea, he’d know I was lying. “Your story is so touching till it sounds
like a lie.”

  I swallowed it down; I wiped that look off my face. But still he would notice my bottom lip beginning to quiver. This was a personal insult, as if I had taken a knife and put it to his face. If my brow wrinkled in a question—“Do you love me, Daddy? How could you hurt me like this?”—this implied I was pursuing my own version of the truth, as if I were his victim.

  It was a war of wills, as he so clearly saw, and these were my attempts to subvert him, to make my will reign, to plant my flag.

  He was the ruler of my body. I had to learn that. He had to be deep in me, deeper than instinct, like the commander of a submarine during times of war.

  VI.

  Thinking was the thing about me that most offended or hurt him, the thing he most wanted to kill. Just in case my mind might be heading in that direction, here was a stop sign, a warning: “Who do you think you are?” But the words weren’t enough. They’d bubble out of him like some brew exploding from an escape hatch, a vortex that pulled in his whole body, his huge hands, which grabbed me up by my hair.

  Where could I go? I was trapped in what my father thought I was thinking. I couldn’t think. My thinking disappeared in case I had the wrong thought.

  It was not the world that I needed to take in, but my father’s voice. I had to see exactly what my father saw in me—and stay out of its way.

  VII.

  In the morning, I’d fold up my bed and put it away. On those days and nights when my father didn’t come home, we didn’t need the space in the kitchen for breakfast or dinner, so we didn’t put my bed away. I’d make it without a wrinkle, the pillow placed carefully on top, and it would stay in the little space under the window.

  Maybe the black phone had rung saying he’d be late. Or maybe she had put him out.

  I didn’t know how they slept in the same bed because they never touched. Once, I saw them kiss. Maybe it was her birthday or Mother’s Day. They blushed when they saw I saw them.

  VIII.

  Those caught in such a vicious abuse-reactive cycle will not only continue to expose the animals they love to suffering merely to prove that they themselves can no longer be hurt, but they are also given to testing the boundaries of their own desensitization through various acts of self-mutilation. In short, such children can only achieve a sense of safety and empowerment by inflicting pain and suffering on themselves and others.

  —Charles Siebert, “The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome” New York Times Magazine, June 11, 2010

  I am trying to get as close as possible to the place in me where the change occurred: I had to take that voice in, become my father, the judge referred to before any dangerous self-assertion, any thought or feeling. I happened in reverse: My body took in the pummeling actions, which went down into my core. I ask myself first, before any love or joy or passion, anything that might grow from me: “Who do you think you are?” I suppress the possibilities.

  IX.

  My mother used the small inheritance she received from her mother to put my father through embalming school. He moved to Chicago for the few months of training at Worsham, the college for black undertakers. She hoped to raise us up—her mother had been a cook—to become an undertaker’s wife, one of the highest positions of black society. But when he came back from the school, my father wouldn’t take the mean five dollars a week his stepfather offered him to apprentice. He wouldn’t swallow his pride. He also wouldn’t take jobs offered by his stepfather’s competitors. That too was a matter of pride, not to sell out the family name.

  My father never did practice undertaking for a living. Though sometimes, when I was young, friends would ask him to embalm someone they loved and my father would acquiesce. He would enter the embalming room at Webster’s Funeral Home, put on the robe, take up the tools, and his stepfather would step back. His reputation grew in this way. People who saw the bodies he had worked on—especially the body of the beautiful and wealthy Elsie Roxborough, who died by her own hand and was buried in a head-to-foot glass casket like Sleeping Beauty—marveled at his art and agreed he had the best touch of anyone.

  People praised him for conducting the most elegant service; for knowing exactly what to say to comfort the bereaved, for holding their arms and escorting them to the first funeral car, for convincing those who needed to cry that it was all right, yet knowing too how to quiet them so there were no embarrassing “shows.”

  My father knew the workings of the heart; that’s why so many people—my grandmother; his stepfather; and even his best friend Rad, whose heart he had crushed—loved him even after he let them down completely and many times, even after he abandoned them or did the meanest things. My father was with each of them, holding their hands, when they died. My handsome, charming father, the ultimate lover, the ultimate knower of the heart.

  X.

  My father knew all about the body. He had learned in embalming school. For a while after his mother died, he stopped smoking and drinking and came home at night. He’d get out the huge leather-bound dictionary (Webster’s—the same as our last name!) that my grandmother had given him when he graduated. He would open it to a picture of the bones in the middle of the book, which had three see-through overlays: on the first, the blue muscles; on the second, the red blood vessels; and finally, on the third, the white nerves.

  He loved the body, loved knowing how things worked. He taught me the longest name of a muscle, the sternocleidomastoid, a cradle or hammock that was strung between the sternum and mastoid. He’d amaze me with long, multisyllabic words; then he’d test me on the spelling.

  My father always explained. He always showed me the little smear on the plate that I had set to drain before he’d make me do all the dishes over again. He’d explain how he had studied hard so he knew where to hit me and not leave a single mark. He’d brag about it. He wanted me to appreciate the quality of his work. Like any good teacher, he wanted to pass it down.

  XI.

  During the summer when my mother and aunt were cleaning and wanted me out of the house, I would go out to the side of the house with a fly swatter and command the flies not to land on my wall. There were hundreds of flies, and though I told them not to, they continued to land. I don’t think I said it out loud. I think I said it—screamed it, really—in my mind. Sometimes I believed that the things in the world heard your thoughts, the way God heard your prayers. When I was very young, not even out of my crib, I’d ask the shades to blow a certain way to prove they had heard me.

  The flies were disobeying me. Whenever one landed, I would go after it with the fly swatter. I was furious that they would do what I had commanded them not to. I knew they understood, or would understand finally. I killed tens, hundreds—didn’t they see?—but they wouldn’t stop.

  I knew I was murderous, and yet, was it murder to kill flies? My aunt and mother never stopped me.

  XII.

  Before my grandmother died, when I was ten, she had three dogs. Each had a short life. Patsy was the “good” dog, who died of a chicken bone in her stomach, and Smokey was the “bad” dog who growled at people and would jump over the second-story banister on the porch and walk around on the outside of the rail. When my grandmother and grandfather were downstairs in the undertaking parlor, they would leave me alone with Smokey. I was about seven, and I had learned the voice the nuns used to say cruel things to the children who were slow. Sometimes the nuns hit those children over the knuckles with a ruler, but mostly they just humiliated them, made them sit in the back and never called on them to do errands. I tried to teach Smokey to stay behind the gate to the pantry. I would open the gate and tell him to stay, and when he went out in the kitchen, I’d hit him with his leash. I believe I hit him hard, maybe as hard as my father hit me. I wanted to feel that power.

  I did this two, three, or four times, and though it seems impossible that my grandparents didn’t know, no one stopped me. One time I came over, and my grandmother said Smokey had escaped, jumped over the second-story banister to the street, and di
dn’t die but ran away. He was never seen again. Was he that desperate to get away? I felt sad and responsible. I felt glad.

  XIII.

  I was nine when we moved to a bigger apartment on the first floor. Now my father had only one flight to carry me up by my hair. He didn’t mind going public—the stairs were right in the lobby—but he refused to allow me to scream in terror when he grabbed me. Not because he was afraid people would see. My screaming made him furious because I knew he was only going to carry me up the stairs and scream at me, only beat me on the thighs and calves (where it wouldn’t show), and only until I made every look of pain, confusion, and fury disappear from my face. He knew I knew that. So what was all that broadcasting, as if something really bad was going to happen, as if he was going to kill me?

  XIV.

  Life is something you have to get used to: what is normal in a house, the bottom line, what is taken for granted. I always had good food. Our house was clean. My mother was tired and sad most of the time. My mother spent most of her day cleaning.

  We had a kitchen with a little dining space, a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and two halls, one that led to the bathroom and the bedroom and one that led to the front door. There was a linen closet in the hall between the bedroom and the bathroom. My books and toys all went into a drawer that I had to straighten every Saturday. There was a closet in the bedroom for my mother’s clothes, a closet in the front hall for my father’s, and a closet off the living room that held my mother’s bed.