The Best American Essays 2011 Read online

  It was a huge metal apparatus that somehow swept out on a hinge. I can’t imagine how my mother and I, as small as we were, brought it out and put it back every night and every morning, for my father was hardly ever there. We just grabbed on, exerted a little force, and pulled it straight toward us. It seemed to glide by itself, swinging outward around the corner; then it would stand up, rocking, balancing, until we pulled it down.

  XV.

  My father and I shared the small bedroom, and my mother slept on the pullout in the living room so that she wouldn’t wake us when she got dressed in the morning to go to her new job. We slept in twin beds she had bought us, pushed up close together.

  I had special things given to me, special things she paid for: the expensive toys I got for Christmas that took a whole year to pay for and the clothes I wore from Himelhoch’s while my mother wore an old plaid coat for eleven years. Now I was a big girl moving from a little cot in the kitchen to my own bed in a bedroom. My father and I always got the best.

  XVI.

  My mother shopped after work every Thursday, so my father would come home and fix dinner for me. He’d stop at Fadell’s Market and get a big steak with a bone in it. He’d bring it home and unwrap the brown paper, slowly, savoring one corner at a time, like someone doing a striptease or opening a trove of stolen diamonds. He’d brag about how much money he had spent. He’d broil it right up next to the flame, spattering grease, fire, and smoke, only a couple of minutes on each side, cooked still bloody, nearly raw, the way we liked it, he said—different from my mother. He’d say he liked it just knocked over the head with a hammer and dragged over a hot skillet. His eyebrows would go wild, and he’d rub his hands together like a fly.

  XVII.

  Once my father took me to the movies. We walked downtown to the Fox Theater on one unusually warm Thursday evening during my Christmas vacation to see Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary’s. My father frequently promised things he didn’t deliver, like the time he promised to come home and pray the family rosary every night for a week when I carried the huge statue of the Virgin home in a box as big as a violin case. He never came home once. When I turned the Virgin back in at school, I had to lie to the nun. After that, I rarely asked for anything. But going to the movies was his idea.

  I was never happier than when I was with my father and he was in a good mood. He liked to tease me and make me laugh. He was so handsome that I felt proud when people noticed us. I thought they were thinking that my father really enjoyed me, that I was a very special girl. I acted like a special girl, happy and pretty, until I almost believed it. I had dressed up, and we stopped for a Coney Island and caramel corn, which were his favorites.

  XVIII.

  By this time, my father didn’t come home most nights. Sometimes he and my mother wouldn’t speak to each other for months. Sometimes they wouldn’t even speak to me when we were in the house together, as if we had to be quiet, like in a church, and respect their hatred for each other.

  My father thought I hated him like my mother did or else he didn’t think I was worth talking to, for he’d often go months without speaking even when we were in the house alone.

  I tried to make him change. I’d make up special names like “D-dats.” “Hi, D-dats,” I’d meet him at the door when he came home at night. I knew he liked to feel young and hip. I’d make my voice happy. I actually was happy when I was with him—I had to be! He could see inside me. He could tell my moods. My unhappiness blamed him.

  Maybe all that silence and beating was because he thought nobody loved him, not my mother and not his mother. He told me how his mother had knocked him down when he was a grown man. He told me how my mother always picked up his ashtrays to wash them as soon as he put his cigarette out. I tried to make him feel loved. Sometimes we played “Step on a crack you break your mother’s back” when we were coming home from his mother’s house, the two of us in cahoots.

  XIX.

  Once, when I was ten or eleven, he came home for lunch, and I asked him if I could dance for him. I had seen Rita Hayworth dance the Dance of the Seven Veils. I had stayed home sick and practiced. I liked to dance on the bed so I could see myself in my mother’s dressing table mirror.

  I wore old see-through curtains and my mother’s jewelry on my head like a crown. I must have had something underneath for I knew some things mustn’t show. I thought maybe if he saw I was almost a woman and could do what beautiful women do, he might find a reason to love me.

  At the end, I spun around and around until most of the drapes, towels, and my mother’s nightgown fell to the floor. I don’t remember what remained to cover me.

  XX.

  Sometimes, on the nights he came home, I’d sneak up on him while he was reading the newspaper and pull off his slipper.

  He’d put the paper down very deliberately, put on his “mean” play-face, and say, “Oh, you want to play, huh?” And he’d grab me up like an ogre. He’d hold me down and jab his fingers into my ribs.

  “No,” I’d scream, “I’m sorry,” and I’d plead that I would pee if he didn’t let me up.

  Finally he’d relent. “You’re not going to do it again?” And he’d tickle me more.

  “Never, never,” I’d scream.

  “Are you sure?”

  As soon as he picked up the paper again and seemed to turn his attention away, I’d go back.

  My father could make me laugh. He knew just where to hit the funny bone. Always, my father was the only one who could make me swallow pills or sit still while he administered burning iodine. When I fell or took the wrong step over a picket fence, I’d come to him, crying. “I’m going to have a big scar and nobody will love me.” And he’d tease, “Oh, my poor little baby, all the boys are going to call her ‘old scar leg,’ and she’s going to be alone for the rest of her life”; but he’d do what had to be done, hold the leg in place, put the iodine on the raw spot, right where it was needed, direct and quick, without flinching, never afraid to cause the necessary pain.

  XXI.

  On Saturday mornings, my mother and I would have toast and coffee in her bed. She let me lie there while she planned our day. She’d get up barefoot and put the coffee on and make me sugar toast. I loved those Saturday mornings near her: her big bed, her cold cream smell.

  I had always thought my mother was frightened of my father. She never seemed to fight straight. She got him by going the back route, like the look on her face when she got in the orange and yellow truck that he bought when he started the egg business. She sat on the orange crate—he called it the passenger seat—and never laughed, never joined in on the fun as he took us around Belle Isle. He had been so happy when he jingled the keys, but you could tell she thought that old truck was nothing to be proud of, as if even a joke about such a poor thing was in bad taste. Then one Saturday morning, I spotted a big roach, a water bug, on the living room floor. I jumped up on the bed and started screaming; she came from the kitchen, grabbed her house shoe, and got down on all fours. The thing charged her from under the chair like a warrior. I was screaming like crazy. I realized she was my last protection. And she started punching at the thing, punching the floor, anywhere she could punch. She didn’t stop until it was flattened.

  I had never seen my mother brave. I had never seen that she would fight to the death. It was a part of her she never showed. I had thought she didn’t stop my father from beating me because she was afraid. I was confused by her braveness.

  XXII.

  My mother was sad. She didn’t feel appreciated. I didn’t do enough to help. She hurt inside. Her body suffered. Her feet swelled black with poison. She had a dead baby. She had womb problems. They had to take the knotted thing out. The doctor rubbed her stomach for hours until she went to the bathroom. She got TB. She got a goiter. She shouldn’t clean so hard; she should rest, at least late in the afternoon. But she wouldn’t. She had to keep doing what hurt her.

  My mother and father were at war; whoever loved the o
ther first would lose.

  XXIII.

  Nobody thought the little marks were worth looking at. I cried and showed how they went up my arm all the way to my elbow, ran all over my ankles and the tops of my feet, even up my thighs. I could see them, but when anyone else looked, the marks disappeared.

  Maybe they didn’t itch. Maybe they weren’t serious. Maybe I was causing trouble. (I had an active imagination, my mother and father said.) I couldn’t sleep because something was happening in my bed—a misery—and everybody acted as if it wasn’t. It didn’t hurt after a while. I could take my mind off it and put it somewhere else.

  I think the only reason my mother finally believed me was because I kept showing her that Monday mornings, after I had spent the weekend with my aunt, I didn’t have the marks, but Tuesdays, after I had slept in my own bed, I had the marks again.

  In an instant of recognition, she raced into the bedroom, flipped my covers off the bed, and saw the little bits of blood. She turned over the mattress, and there, in the corners, were the nests of a thousand bedbugs, lethargic or crawling. She looked close. They had gotten so far inside that the room had to be sealed with tape, a bomb put in.

  He had been sleeping with another woman. He had brought her dirt into his own home (though he said the bugs came in egg crates).

  Bedbugs were what poor women had, women who couldn’t do better, women who didn’t matter. Some other woman’s bedbugs were making my mother the same as that woman.

  He had brought in everything she hated, everything she couldn’t control: the helplessness of slavery, bad births, poverty, illness, and death. Everything she had risked her life to clean out of our apartment.

  My mother had reason for outrage.

  I only had reason to itch.

  XXIV.

  The living room was off-limits. There was too much that might get messed up or broken. I guess he chose rooms to beat me in honor of the sacrifices my mother had made to make our home beautiful.

  In the bedroom, where could I go when I fell? I wouldn’t fall on the wooden footboards. There was an aisle between my mother’s closet and my father’s bed. That was too narrow. On the left side of the doorway was my mother’s dressing table, where I’d sit and put on necklaces, earrings, and nail polish and look in the mirror. There wasn’t room for me to flail around, so my father had to be very specific about the direction in which his blows would aim me.

  If my cousin was visiting, he would inform her, his voice sincere but matter-of-fact—“I’m going to have to take Toi to the bathroom.” He preferred the bathroom when she was visiting, except when my mother was in on it, and then we needed a bigger space. If, for example, my mother had told him I talked back, he’d say, “We’re going to have to speak to Toi in the kitchen.” He’d pull me by my arm and close the kitchen door, which had glass panes so that my cousin could see.

  But she said she averted her eyes, knowing it would humiliate me. She remembers him sliding off his belt; she remembers me pleading each time the belt hit; she remembers him telling me, as he was beating me, in rhythm, why he was doing it and what I shouldn’t do the next time. I would come out, trying not to show how I had been afraid for my life, how I had pleaded without pride. I thought these things would have made her hate me.

  I remember the hitting, but not the feeling of the hits; I remember falling and trying to cover my legs with my hands.

  I remember the time I came home with a migraine and begged him not to beat me. “Please, please, Daddy, it hurts so bad.” I could hardly speak. I had to walk level, my head a huge cup of water that might spill on the floor.

  Why couldn’t he see my pain? My head seemed to be splitting open, my eyes bleeding. I didn’t know what might happen if I tipped my head even slightly. He saw me walking like that, as if someone had placed delicate glass statues on my arms and shoulders. I begged him, “Not now.” I knew I had it coming. I had gone out with the Childs, and he had left a note telling me not to go out.

  The Childs lived on the fourth floor. Sometimes they brought down the best rice with butter and just the right amount of salt and pepper. They had no children. They had a little bubble-shaped car. We all seemed glad to roll the windows down and go out to their niece’s house. She turned her bike over to me. It was so much fun pumping it up and down the hill, letting my hair fly. I forgot my father, as I had forgotten the bug bites, as I forgot what it felt like to be beaten. I just thought, I’m pumping harder so I will go faster and let the air hit my face and arms, and then I’ll stop pumping at the top and fall down and down, my feet up off the pedals. And I didn’t feel fat: my body lost weight—it just went with everything going in that direction, and the wind flew against me in the other direction. Though it blew in my face and began to sting, I couldn’t stop pumping, couldn’t stop trying, one more time, to bring myself to that moment of pleasure and accomplishment right before I’d let go.

  I had never felt such power, earning it by my own work and skill. I could ride it. I was the girl in charge; I had the power to bring myself there.

  XXV.

  Shortly after I was married, we had a dog that kept shitting on the floor. Once I took a coat hanger and was going to hit her with it, but she drew back her lips and snarled at me in self-defense and fury. I had no idea that she would defend herself. I was shocked. I thought she was going to attack me, and I put the hanger down. I respected her in a different way after that.

  She lived for sixteen years and was a great mothering presence in our household. Every dog and cat that came in the house had to lie beside her, with some part of its body—a paw, the hind—touching hers. Once I heard a strange noise during the night and went to investigate. A kitten my son had found on the railroad tracks was nursing from her, and she was sleeping, as if she expected to be a mother. When I would come home, after I had been away for a while, she’d jump up on the bed and curl her butt into my belly, and I’d put my arms around her and hold her like a lover. When she died, I missed her so much I realized that she had been my mother too. She taught me it was beautiful to defend yourself—and that you could be unafraid of touch.

  I remember how, occasionally, my father’s dogs would pull back and snarl at him when he was viciously beating them. His anger would increase immeasurably. They had truly given him a reason to kill them. “You think you can get away with that in my house?” he’d ask, the same as he’d ask me.

  Once, to get away from him, one of his dogs leapt through the glass storm door in the kitchen and ran down Fourteenth Street bleeding to death.

  XXVI.

  You would think that the one treated so cruelly would “kill” the abuser, throw him out of the brain forever. What a horrific irony that the abuser is the one most taken in, most remembered; the imprint of those who were loving and kind is secondary, like a passing cloud. Sometimes I thought that’s why my father beat me. Because he was afraid he would be forgotten. And he achieved what he wanted.

  In the deepest place of judgment, not critical thinking, not on that high plain, but judgment of first waking, judgment of the sort that decides what inner face to turn toward the morning—in that first choosing moment of what to say to myself, the place from which first language blossoms—I choose, must choose, my father’s words.

  The twisted snarl of his unbelief turned everything good into something undeserved, so that nothing convinces enough—no man or woman or child, no play or work or art. There is no inner loyalty, no way of belonging. I cannot trust what I feel and connect to; I cannot love or hold anything in my hand, any fragile thing—a living blue egg, my own baby—in the same way that I never convinced my father I was his. And I must rest on it, as on bedrock.

  XXVII.

  The time I had the migraine, after my father had beaten me, he made me bathe. He drew the bath, felt the water with his fingers, and made sure it wouldn’t burn. He told me to go in there and take off my clothes.

  The water, when I put my toe in, was like walking in fire. I stood there, holdi
ng myself.

  And then—instead of letting my father kill me or bashing my own head against the tile to end all knowing—I crouched down, letting the lukewarm water touch me.

  Oh, water, how can you hurt me this bad? What did I do to you? I was whimpering. I don’t know if I still had hope he would hear me, or if I just couldn’t stop the sound from leaking out of my body.

  But my father came and lifted me out of the water in his arms, took me naked, laid me on my bed, and covered me lightly with a sheet. Then he went away and left me in the dark as if to cool down, and he brought cut lemon slices for my eyes and a cool towel or pads of alcohol to put on my forehead. He bathed me in tenderness, as if he really knew I was suffering and he wanted me to feel better.

  I wondered if he finally believed. If he realized from within himself that I had been telling the truth, that I wasn’t evil. Maybe he had some idea of how much he had hurt me. I knew that sometimes men beat their women and then make up. I didn’t know which daddy was real.

  Afterword:

  I hear in myself a slight opposition, a wounded presence saying, “I am me, I know who I am.” But I am left with only a narrow hole, a thin tube of rubber that the words must squeak through. Where words might have gushed out as from a struck well, now, instead, I watch it—watch every thought. It wasn’t my father’s thought that I took in; it was his language. It is the language in me that must change.