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I hate it when I go through a fresh episode of flashbacks. It knocks me flat for days.
I just spent a week playing warcraft obsessively trying to run from it.
Two weeks ago I moved my computer from the smaller desk to the larger one. That was a nice change as I have more space now. However, I did not get around to shifting a lot of stuff that was in the niches on it.
One of those was a tiny shrine to the mother goddess. The centerpiece is a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child and raising one hand in benediction.
I shifted the shrine to my third desk, and as I put my hand on the statue, I got hit by the intensity of my memories.
No one I have ever known was as capable of rage as H. He would be literally frothing at the mouth. I always felt as if I had been in the solar plexus whenever he went into one of these rages. My mind would go blank and stunned, unable to react. The verbal abuse was always aimed with the precision of a SWAT team sniper. He knew where to hit me and he did so.
One day, out of the blue, as I was cleaning house, H caught me in the hallway and forced me against the wall to inform me that I was evil and the goddess did not listen to evil people. He said she had forsaken me.
Then he went in and smashed my shrine to the goddess, breaking the statue (which I have since replaced) of Mary. He used a brick.
Sovay was eight.
She came in to see what was going on and was there when he smashed all the delicate statues on my altar. The one that hurt her most was that statue. She burst into tears.
You see, she used to say to me while looking at the statue, “That’s like you and me, Mom. That’s how much you love me.”
And I always hugged her and told her, “Yes, just like you and me.”
Clearly the statue had come to symbolize our deep bond to her.
I felt as if my heart had been raped by the destruction. Sovay stopped talking to her father for several days, except for single syllable answers to questions.
The first thing I did when we escaped from him was to replace the statue.
The old adage that “sticks and stone may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is wrong
Broken hearts hurt far longer than broken bones.
There were too many M’s.
My mother, generally referred to as Mickey or Mitten.
My grandmother, whom we called Mama or Mama Gertrude depending on the situation.
And my great-grandmother, who insisted upon being called Mammy.
Mammy’s grandmother, as she told me when I was ten, was a ‘woman of color’ from New Orleans. She whispered and hissed the information to me as if confessing a terrible shame upon our entire family. Considering that Mammy was lily white, and adding in the fact that Mammy’s generation (she was born roughly twenty years after the end of the American Civil War) believed that even a tiny bit of dark blood made one black, my “woman of color” ancestor could have been very light-skinned.
She told me about this because I wanted to know why she was treating Mama so badly. Kids notice those things, because they have not yet developed the selective blindness of many adults.
Mama was a throwback. Dark skinned with black curly hair. Mammy was ashamed of her daughter, her only daughter.
Mammy had married at 14 and had her first child at 15. John Henry Frizzelle, her husband, was ten years older than she was. John Henry was a New Englander and a card-carrying socialist with progressive views.
There are many kinds of violence in the world. Each person deals with it differently.
Physical violence never seemed to bother me as much as the emotional kind.
Someone yelling at me, getting in my face with rage, close in on my personal space — it always produced a kind of Body Shock Reaction.
When H went into his rages, sometimes frothing at the mouth, getting right up against me, his face inches from mine. It always produced this reaction in me. I would feel as if I had been hit in the solar plexus. I could not breathe, I could not think. My head would echo and get a cottony feeling inside it.
if he tried to hit me or did hit me, my reflexes and training took over and I decked him.
However, I had no reflexes to deal with that kind of rage.
In the beginning, the trigger word was’ normal’; later it became ‘evi.’
I had therapy sessions. Every so many weeks, there would be a group therapy and the spouses were invited. I got along with the other patients and their spouses. There was one guy in those sessions that was a large Native American. He had been born with a cleft palate and been through so many surgical procedures to repair it since childhood, that he had developed a panic syndrome about doctors and one more surgery was scheduled. H came to only one of those sessions and never went back and pulled me out of them.
The reason was this: H went to that session. When it came time to talk, he said, “yes, but the this is still not addressing the fact that she’s evil. You can’t address the rest of her problems without first getting her to face the fact that she’s evil.”
The big Indian attacked H in a rage on hearing that. The other men in the group had to physically restrain him to prevent him from demolishing H.
Because I had edited so many self help books, I tried to conscientiously apply the techniques in them to get through to H. He would listen to me and then write off everything I had said with a casual, “Yes, but you’re evil.”
As the situation worsened, I went from illegal drugs to alcohol. The pattern went like this.
I would be standing in the kitchen doing dishes and he would come and watch me. Then he would begin a tirade on how evil I was that might last an hour or longer without a break. By the time he finished, I would be shaking so hard I could barely stand. I kept the bottle of cheap vodka under the sink. i would pour a double into a glass and drink it straight to stop the shaking.
When I was working fulltime, i would come home, make myself a screwdriver that as half vodka and half orange juice, drop down in front of the tv and play ninendo games and hope he left me alone long enough to unwind.
In order to sleep through and around his bouts of screaming, I would drink enough booze to knock me out. After a few years of that, the first thing I did in the mornings when I got up was pour myself a drink.
Alcohol did not take away the pain the way that the meth/cocaine had, but it deadened it enough to get through. I went back through my diaries recently and found the pages where I had made a coded chart. After all these years, I have forgotten the codes to some of the main entries. The chart happened to be one that came back to me easily.
Over the course of a year, there was only one day that he did not go off on me. There were only seven days in which he went off into a rage at me that lasted less than four hours all together in a twenty-four hour period.
The one day that he did not yell at me was because he had spent it with his current mistress.
The year we moved to Westminster was 1962. The first oral polio vaccine had just come out. School in California started on September 15th. Three weeks before school began they started having the children brought to the playground and lined up to receive the vaccine which was administered on a sugar cube. I would be in Third Grade when school began that year.
The asphalt reflected the Southern California heat, beaming it into our faces until many of the children were complaining about it. I never handled heat well. I felt dizzy and overheated by the time I reached the head of the line and received my sugar cube.
I had severe childhood pattern asthma, which was the bane of my existence, and I seemed to pick up whatever germs passed me. It may have been that my immune system was not prepared to handle the vaccine. Previous to that the vaccine involved a dead virus. The sugar cubes contained a weakened live virus in a process closer to inoculation than to modern vaccination.
A few days later we went to Disneyland the first time. I remember riding on the submarine, the sky buckets, and the Tomorrowland rocket with the pictures of outer space creating a feeling of traveling through the stars. It was the last thing I would ever do with a perfectly functioning leg.
I contracted polio from the vaccine.
I have already spoken a bit about it on this blog with the entry called overcoming limitations
The day that I came down with polio was an odd day.
Mama had one of her migrane headaches and was laying down in her room. I knew not to disturb her.
I was playing alone in the living room when I stood up and fell. My left leg would no longer support me. I tried repeatedly to stand up and fell again each time. I grew more and more frightened as evening arrived and the room grew dark, but I could not reach the light switch. I crawled around the floor, used the coffee table to pull myself into a sitting position, and felt torn between my growing fear and the need to tell Mama. I did not want to alarm her.
So when I finally crawled into her bedroom, there was a catch in a my voice as I attempted to make a joke of it. “Mama, I have the craziest leg. It won’t hold me up.”
She was out of bed in a flash.
Since my stepfather, Frank G, was Navy, Mickey took me to the clinic on the base. I think it must have been El Toro.
My leg was as cold as ice. The Navy doctor looked at me and said to my mother, “Is there something you refused to get her? A doll perhaps?”
He appeared to believe that my difficulty was psychosomatic. I thought he was calling me a liar and threw a fit.
The next day, Mama took me to the county hospital. They did a spinal tap and the diagnoses was polio. The doctors and nurses told me that I was one of the bravest children they had ever seen because I curled up obediently and did not flinch when they put the needle in.
I had not had the usual symptoms that go along with polio, fever and such; possibly because I had had previous vaccinations that mitigated it. The doctor that admitted me to the hospital was a jovial gray-haired man whose face and manner have stuck in my mind. His name was Doctor Lindgrin, and he did grin a lot.
I spent three weeks in the Contagious Disease Ward. I was placed in an isolated room all alone. I could not have visitors, but Mama could wave at me from the door so long as she did not cross the threshold into the room itself. The isolation was very hard to deal with emotionally, and I believe that was when I developed an abiding sense of loneliness that has never left me.
The rules were that anything dropped on the floor had to be destroyed and I lost a lot of hair bands that way.
The only source of real fun that I had alarmed the nurses so much that they removed it from my room. There was a bar hanging over the bed by a chain that I was to use to pull myself up for various things. I immediately put my good leg through it and used it as a swing, sailing far out over the end of the bed. Everything was fine until one of them caught me at it. They decided that I might lose my grip and go flying into a wall.
One day my bed was moved out into the hall and I could finally touch Mama again. I clutched at her, over joyed and hopeful that it meant I would finally get to go home. She had tears in her eyes holding me.
My first day home, Mama gave me an expensive pen and pencil set. It was silver and beautiful. When she gave it to me, she said, “From now on, you whip them with a pencil.”
For my first weeks home, Mickey rented a hospital bed that they placed in the living room. I could watch tv, but I could not yet walk again. My brothers decided to watch “It: The Terror From Beyond Space.” Until then, I had loved the old Universal monster movies. Watching scary movies as a child is fun when you have two good legs and can imagine running away from the monsters. Watching a scary movie, knowing that you cannot walk, much less, run, changes everything. The movie terrified me. I begged them to change the channel and they laughed at me.
I screamed for Mama. She changed the channel and comforted me.
The doctors ordered me into a heavy metal leg brace that is sometimes referred to as a Roosevelt Brace. I hated the brace. As the leg improved, I would sneak from bed at night and wall walk. Wall walking is a process of placing both hands upon the wall and using that to balance. I would drag the leg as I went all through the house, delighting in my mobility and the fact that i was doing it in secret without the brace on.
My life was irrevocably changed. I went from bold and sassy to shy and retiring overnight. I lost my self confidence. I guess you could say that I was shattered.
My first day at school in El Monte, the teacher put me in the lowest reading group in the class. I read so well, that she tried me in the middle group after recess, and then in the top group after lunch. I looked at the words on the page and started reading, “Houses, houses, houses.” She told me to look at the word again and my eyes lit up as I corrected myself, “Horses!”
I drove the play yard monitors crazy by doing things like going down the slide backwards and parcipating in turf wars with the boys in the rough grassy area in the far rear. They would knock me down and I would get up and knock them down. I liked the rough and tumble.
However, it was also the place where Mickey, my mother, re-entered my life. I had not seen her since I was two years old. The day that she came to visit, she sat me up on the counter in the kitchen. It had pale yellow tile with an edge of black tile and thick while grouting.
“I know you don’t remember me, but I’m your mother.”
I was an utterly fearless child before I had polio. That often got me into trouble.
In addition to the goat, ducks, chickens, and dog, we had rabbits. There were three rows of rabbit hutches. They stood higher than I was tall. I liked to climb on top of them and run down the rows of hutches, leaping from one to the other. This upset the rabbits and Papa was always telling me not to do it. However, it was so much fun, that I did it anyway and often had two friends, Roxanne and Mary, who would scamper over the hutches with me.
We often did it around twilight when we were less likely to get caught.
One day I misjudged a jump, missed the adjacent hutch, and landed in a bale of wire on the ground. My leg became caught in it and I got cut up badly. Every time I tried to get loose, I only cut myself worse. I did not cry and holler. From a very young age, I felt a need to be ‘tough’ and I refused to sound like a wuss by crying over the pain.
Roxanne went for help.
Papa lifted me free and carried me into the house. I begged Mama not to put merthiolate on the cuts and to use bactine instead. She said that if the medicine did not burn then it was not doing its job right. I gritted my teeth and put up with it. Afterward they took me down to ER and got me a tetnus shot.
Mama did not like whiners.
The rabbits led to another bit of mischief. Aunt Tommie was afraid of mice, rats, and rabbits. She came to visit one day and was sitting in the living room with Mama visiting.
Of all my aunts, Tommie was the most high-strung and easily upset. She was a prissy woman who talked in a high voice at a rapid rate with lots of hand gestures. Tommie was married to Mama’s younger brother, Floyd, and came from a farming family that owned a great deal of land and was full of interesting stories.
Whimsy and mischief got the better of me. I filled my arms with a bunch of baby bunnies, and turned them loose just inside the door from the kitchen into the living room. Tommie shrieked and jumped up on a chair when the baby bunny invasion was unleashed. If she was this high strung as a child, i have no idea how she survived on a farm growing up.
The bunnies scattered through the house as afraid of Tommie’s shrieking as she was of them. I got a tongue lashing from Mama and spent the rest of the day gathering up bunnies and returning them to the hutches. Many of the bunnies hid in places that the adults could not reach, so i had to climb around beneath the furniture and other spots to get them all.
Then i got a tongue lashing from Papa for terrorizing his bunnies.
Like most kids, I was all ears and picked up a lot of things that I did not fully understand. One of those was hearing about how rose hips were full of vitamin C and good for you. I did not know what part of the roses on Mama’s bushes constituted the hip, so I simply fed the entire rose to Billy.
Each morning, I would sneak out and bring Billy around to the front yard on a length of rope attached to his collar. I would stand there letting him eat the roses so he would get lots of vitamin C.
Mama remarked to Papa at dinner one evening that someone was stealing her roses. I tried not to look guilty as I realized she was talking about me. Now, Billy needed his vitamins, so I continued to feed him the roses. But I began to get a feeling that she was onto me, but could not figure out what I was doing with the roses. One morning she watched out the window and caught me and Billy.
I got a severe tongue-lashing and promised to stop.
We moved around a lot. I went to three different schools in fourth grade. Papa would change jobs and we would move. The day came when we had to leave El Monte. That meant giving up Billy, the rabbits, the chickens, the ducks, and Bebe the poodle.
Billy is the only one of those pets that I remember what happened to. He was given to Mark, the boy with the sheep I thought ate goats. Mark promised to take good care of him and that was the last time I saw Billy.
We moved back to Long Beach.
Having a goat for a pet had it’s own brand of excitement for a first grade child.
One weekend morning I got up early to play with Billy. I called and searched and could not find him. After a complete tour of the yard, including around and under the rows of rabbit hutches, I checked the gate and found it open. Billy was gone.
The majority of the kids in the area were Hispanic. One of them was a cute little boy my age who I once attempted to kiss just to hear him protest in Spanish about girl germs (he must have picked that up from the white boys as they were the biggest wusses about girls). I no longer remember his name, so let’s call him Mark.
I frantically searched the neighborhood, looking for him. Mark lived across the street about half a block down from me. He came out and stood in his yard watching me. Finally, he approached and asked “What are you looking for?”
I explained about Billy and he informed me that he and his brother had found a goat eating their mother’s flowers in the front yard that morning. Mark took me around to the gate into his back yard.
There was Billy standing next to the biggest sheep I had ever seen. In the eye of my memory that sheep looked about the size of Godzilla. I immediately began to shriek. “That sheep is going to eat my goat.”
Mark patted my shoulder and tried in vain to reassure me that sheep did not eat goats. However, I kept screaming until he got Billy out of the yard and safely away from the goat-eating sheep.
I got Billy home and made certain the gate was well closed. Afterward, I spent an hour listening to Papa explain the difference between a herbivore and a carnivore. Sheep did not eat goats. I accepted his explanation. However, I had my doubts for a long time.
Some of the happiest and saddest moments of my life were built around pets.
I almost always had a pet of some kind.
My Uncle Pete (the one I named the parakeet for) had a high-strung wife named Sunny (not to be confused with Uncle Sonny). She mellowed out as the years went by, but she was very nervous still when I was in first grade.
We moved to El Monte for a year. Back then most of El Monte was semi-rural and the houses had very large, deep backyards. I wanted a pony, but we compromised on a goat.
Billy was a good goat. He played with me and was more like a dog than a goat (although I also had a dog at the time, an idiot poodle named Bebe). In order to get him to chase me, I used to wave a small branch with leaves on it under his nose.
Sunny was pregnant with their first child. Mama had a washer, but not a dryer, so we hung our laundry on the line. One day Pete and Sunny came to use the washer. Pete, who was a wino, was soon drinking and hanging out with Papa in the garage. Usually when they came, I was required to tie Billy up because Sunny was afraid of him.
While Sunny was hanging out the laundry to dry, Billy got loose and went to investigate her. Sunny was very thin, tall, and boyishly built. Her breasts were so small that she used to wear falsies (that’s the subject of another story, which I intend to call “The Falsies in the Soup). Sunny had this sack like dress on that tended to wave a bit when she moved. It was a very hot summer and no one was really comfortable at the time, especially Sunny.
Billy came up and nuzzled her, investigating the dress. Sunny started leaping around, trying to discourage him, shrieking and flailing her long thin legs. At the same time, Sunny was refusing to let go of the clothes pin that she was attempting to pin onto a t shirt on the line. So there she was clinging to the clothes line, the clothes pin, the t shirt and jumping around. Billy decided to nibble the hem of her dress.
I struggled not to laugh at her as I rushed to the rescue. It was really quite a spectacle. I grabbed Billy by the collar and freed the hem of her dress, trying not to get kicked by Sunny who was still shrieking and jumping about.
Meanwhile, Bebe had gotten out of the house and was barking at Billy and Sunny.
Bebe was not my dog of choice. Mickey had won him in a game of guess how many jelly beans were in a jar, and dumped him on me.
Billy did not appreciate being barked at. He pulled loose from me and ran at Bebe. I soon found myself chasing the goat that was chasing the dog and Sunny was still screaming.
Papa and Uncle Pete arrived, but instead of helping me catch Billy, they stood and laughed at Sunny. I caught Billy and tied him up again. Then i put the very stressed out poodle back in the house. Mama spent a long time calming Sunny down, while Papa gave me a long lecture about tying good knots.
When I was barely into my teens, all the girls were screaming about the Beatles. The fuss appalled me and I soon rebelled by listening to nothing but classical.
I went with a friend Colleen Creeghan to see the movie Help. The theater was crowded and the audience was mostly girls. The screaming started as soon as the curtain parted and the film began to roll. My cheeks turned red and burned. The reaction of the crowd embarrassed me. I slid down in my seat and finally hid in despair.
That embarrassed Colleen. She was a tall, lanky girl with no sign of developing yet. I already had tits and was much shorter than she was. Her family had immigrated from Ireland when her oldest sister Bernadette, whom we called Bernie, was still in diapers.
She had not noticed that I was crouched on the floor until the spot in the movie where Ringo gets his finger stuck with the ring that causes all the trouble. Colleen turned to share a bit of “Wow!” with me and I was doomed.
Her Irish temper flared and she berated me back into my seat.
With great reluctance, I watched the movie and enjoyed it. I liked the songs. I thought that Ringo was really cute.
I spent many afternoons at the Creeghans. The family had four girls. Their father had died young and the mother supported the family. We used to sit at the dining table and play games. Colleen was a nice sort, although she refused to play dolls with me because I preferred to pretend that the barbie dolls were terrorists inspired by the Red Army Faction. Drove her nuts.
I wanted to be a terrorist when I grew up so that I could blow up buildings. It all seemed exciting and vaguely romantic. Fortunately I outgrew that phase.
No one is all bad.
If Mickey had treated me as well as she did animals, I think I would have been a much happier child on those occasions that she moved back in with Mama.
When I want 13, a stray cat had a litter of kittens under our house in Norwalk. Shortly afterward, the mother cat was hit by a car and killed. Mickey climbed under the house and brought out the kittens. She did not know how or what to do for them. They barely had their eyes open.
She tried pressing their faces in a dish of milk and she tried feeding them with an eye dropper. There were five kittens, but only two of them survived. Mickey was gentle and determined to save those kittens. We named the orange one Matilda and the black one Samantha or Sam for short.
Papa had aviaries and he was not at all sanguine about the arrival of the kittens. I was not allowed to keep them in the house once they were big enough to wander. I had lots of fish tanks then. Around seven of them throughout the house. Papa was raising quail. The birds were hatched in an incubator and then placed in a cardboard box in the little room off the rear hall with a light to keep them warm.
I wanted desperately to have the kittens in the house. One day I brought the kittens in. But I put the box of baby quail on the highest shelf in the rear hall. Mama came home from work and saw the box. She took it down and put it back where it belonged, not knowing that the kittens were inside.
The kittens romped through the house and havoc ensued. Sam went fishing and Matilda discovered the box of baby quail. I went looking for the kittens and discovered Sam eating my fish and Matilda — horror of horrors — with a dead baby quail in her mouth. When I checked the box, the kitten had eaten all of the baby quail.
I felt like a murderer for having let the kittens inside. The image of Matilda with the baby quail in her mouth built to the point of a nightmare that lingered with a sense of guilt for years afterward. I kept thinking how helpless and terrified the poor little quail must have been, running around in their box while Matilda grabbed them one at a time and ate them. Eventually I wrote a scene in one of the Dark Brothers of the Light books that mirrored the incident of Matilda and the quail.
Mickey grabbed the kittens, fearful that Papa would kill them when he learned that they had eaten his quail, and we took them to the pound. where hopefully someone adopted them.
I don’t keep Christmas. I observe solstice instead.
Two Christmases in my childhood stand out over the others in my memories. Mostly they were forgettable events, especially after my mother, Mickey, married my second step-father Mike.
A single image stands out from the Christmas that happened after I turned five. We were living on Turk Street (I have always thought of it as Turkey Street) in San Francisco. Mama, Papa, and I lived in a nice little apartment. The rooms had huge windows that made it very sunny and pleasant. Mama liked linen curtains and they used to flutter in the breeze on warm afternoons.
I had a playroom as well as a bedroom. The windows had deep sills that I could sit on. We were on the second floor. You entered through a narrow glass and metal door on the street, squeezed between two shops, went up to the second floor by way of a narrow stairs, but once arriving on the second floor where the apartments were, it was pleasant.
Papa had always been a weekend alcoholic. Mama disliked this intensely. She taught me early to say to his friends if they arrived wreaking of liquor, “Get lost, you’re drunk.”
Any way, Christmas.
We came home from shopping one day and there was this huge box sitting in front of our door. Mama scooped it up and took it inside without allowing me to touch it. I knew immediately what it had to be and was overjoyed.
It was my train set. I loved that train set.
Fast forward to another Christmas, I was fifteen and I was asked by Mickey what I wanted for Christmas. I told her I wanted a telescope. When Christmas arrived, there was indeed a telescope beneath the tree. However it was not for me. It was for my brother Don. They had bought me a proper present. A sewing machine. It was a used sewing machine with a nick out of one corner of the case. I could put my finger through it.
A telescope, it was explained to me, was not a proper present for a girl, but they had decided it would make a great present for my brother.
As a point of comparison and contrast. Mama had no problem giving me a train set for Christmas.
My mother decided early that my problems with my brothers were caused by an emotional instability in me.
My great-grandmother, whom we called Mammy, lived with us for several years in California. The summer before I turned 11, it was decided that Mammy would return to Texas and live with my Uncle Tid (he hated his real name and his childhood nickname was Tiddly Winks, which was shortened to Tid when he got older). The car was packed up to leave and when I got inside, I found myself sitting next to Mammy’s bedpan. It was clean, but I was still grossed out by it, so at the last minute I asked to remain behind with Mickey and my brothers who were in residence with us at the time.
Mama reluctantly agreed.
I regretted my decision within an hour. I got into a quarrel with my brothers over my toys almost immediately. You have to understand that most of my toys were boy toys, tonka trucks, the previously mentioned train set, crash cars, toy guns and so forth. Mama and Papa were not bothered by the fact that I preferred boy’s toys to girl’s toys. It bothered Mickey a lot.
Mickey separated us (I was whomping both of them at the same time and winning handily). She then announced that she had heard that the best way to get rid of anger was to beat a pillow. Sounds simple? Sounds standard?
Not the way that Mickey did it.
She had me beat the pillow in the living room until she was satisfied. And I was required to do this while she and my brothers laughed and made fun of me.
It was around that time that I began to wonder if I had some invisible taint, some sin that I was guilty of. I spent hours trying to figure out if it was something I could recognize and get rid of. I was the black sheep. It worsened with time.
I no longer remember what age I was when I started to see a shrink whose name I no longer remember. I do remember that his name sounded Jewish. I can remember his face, but not his name. So let’s call him Shrink.
He was a kind man and I had just started to trust him and it felt good to be able to tell him how much I was hurting inside. For some reason, he was required to have a meeting with my mother present. When the cards were laid on the table about what was going on, Mickey turned to me and said in his presence in an icky sweet voice, “Oh, Janny, surely you don’t really believe that any of that happened.”
When we got home I threw a fit, told Mama, and never went back. She had had no idea that Mickey was taking me to a shrink while she was at work.
When I was 14, Mickey took me out of my regular high school and placed me in a school for emotionally disturbed children run by another shrink whose name I no longer remember. I had been doing algebra and I had been told that I had an aptitude for math. They put me back to doing addition and subtraction. Beyond the intellectual and emotional humiliation, there were a couple of memorable moments.
I discovered what drug addicts were and I learned about LSD.
There were no more than 15 students at this little school. So all ages were thrown in together. One of the older kids was there because he kept getting hold of acid and tripping. He started talking to me about “bird with teeth” that he had seen. I asked him if he meant archeopteryx. He laughed at me and explained that he had seen it while tripping. I was mortified.
The other memorable thing was my attempt to fight back. I painstakingly wrote an entire essay backwards. I wrote the words backwards, and started the essay at the bottom right corner. I had been told that I could write on any subject and I wrote about Mary Shelley.
Once more I eventually tattled on Mickey and got out of that school. By that time, i had stopped tattling unless I got desperate. The fights between Mama and Mickey had become loud and angry over me. I could see how much it all upset Mama and I did not want to keep telling her. Also, when push came to shove, Mickey would threaten to kill herself and my brothers. Mama had no defenses against that. Like everyone else, she figured that Mickey was crazy enough to do it.
Just because I wanted to and liked research, I would have a summer project that took me to the library each year. I would sit down in front of the tv in the living room with my notebooks and the books I was reading. I always had a pile of erasers and several different types of pencils. That was partly because I sometimes made sketches as well as written notes.
I would get up to get something to drink and return to find some of my erasers missing. This continued over a course of months. I accused my brothers of making off with the erasers. Mickey’s response was to tell me that I was losing my mind. Eventually I came to believe her. I lost my faith in my ability to remember things.
The denouement came when Papa caught Don hiding my erasers on the farthest back corner of the fridge. By then there were twenty erasers there.
Mickey’s reaction?
She thought it was the funniest thing she had ever heard of.
Whenever Frank was out to sea for a long period, Mickey moved home to Mama.
While she was home, she always had a boyfriend … I should say boyfriends, plural.
I developed young. I got my first period at half past ten years old. I was into a C cup bra at age 13, and I could pass for sixteen without trying. I had to tell many of them to “go to hell.” A couple of them I had to hit in the face. Mickey always became upset with me for being mean to her boyfriends.
When I was 13, she began dating the man who would become my second step-father. She thought it was hilarious when he would quote Rusty Warren at me, telling me “knockers up, Beatrice.”
I started painting in oils at 12 under the tutelage of my aunt who was an artist. I had been drawing for years, watching John Nagy on tv and had his drawing sets. I stretched my own canvases. Stretching the canvas onto the wooden frame required canvas pliers. They had a long rectangular mouth to get a good grip and pull the canvas tight.
Those pliers amused Mike. He would pick them up and playfully threaten my nipples with them calling them ‘titty pinchers.’ Mickey had no problem with that. The constant sexual innuendoes and harrassment had a heavy impact upon me.
I became withdrawn. I took to wearing mostly black and navy blue in an attempt to de-emphasize my breasts. I should have told Mama and Papa about it, but Mickey ridiculed my reactions to Mike’s remarks, and I never told them.
One day, I informed Mickey that I intended to go to college because I wanted to have a career. She became very irritated with me over it. She had left high school in her senior year and gotten a job. She gave me the ‘power behind the throne’ lecture and followed that with what a woman’s proper place was.
The next day, she enrolled me in secretarial school. I went to high school during the day and secretarial school at night, learning typing, shorthand, and dictation so that I could get a proper job and stop thinking about college.
A few weeks later, she came to me smiling and said, “Janny, I just had the most wonderful dream. I dreamed that you got pregnant and the boy refused to marry you, so you gave me the baby.”
Needless to say, I was appalled and she was angry. Nearly 30 years later I confronted her and she denied that she had ever said any of these things to me. I guess the events held more significant to me and they did to her.
If I remember correctly, I started taking karate lessons when I was 14 or 15. That angered her. She said that I was only doing it to ‘beat up on men.’ The fact that my physical therapist had suggested it held no water with her.
I enjoyed karate tremendously. For the first time since I had polio, I could do something interesting with my body and became very excited about it. However, if I brought it up in front of her, my brothers, or my step-father, I was snubbed.
Over a period of time, my brother Don began trying to provoke me into a fist fight because I was taking karate lessons. Mama did not want me to fight him and I obeyed her. Over a period of months, the provocations grew to monstrous proportions. Don finally told me that Mickey had asked him to put me in my place and that he intended to do so. There would eventually be a fist fight between Don and me, but it came several years later.
By the time that I was 16, I was desperate to get away from them. Papa retired, and Mama suggested moving to Texas which would put them close to the majority of the relatives. I told her that I was in favor of it. So we moved and I then no longer had to deal with Mickey.
Mickey never wanted to grow up.
Emotionally, I regarded her as more of a temperamental older sister. My two brothers were a constant source of friction between us whenever she moved back into Mama’s home with us. They broke my things, harassed me, and generally did annoying little boy things to me. I would chase them out of my room, and Mickey would assume that I was being unfair to them. I had a very nice train set. They took the tracks and made swords of them and hit each other with them in the front yard until they broke off the tiny linkages, rendering the train tracks unusable . I tried to stop them and take back my train tracks. Mickey punished me for it.
That was typical.
She loved to go shopping, out for pizza, play games, or take me places.
However, it seemed like I could never be the person she wanted me to be. Her mood could change in the bat of an eye, leaving me confused and hurt.
I could not talk to her about my life and school and my hopes and dreams without being disparaged.
At fourteen, I told her that I would rather give her back everything she had given me over the years and never receive anything again, rather than be treated unfairly. That earned me a smack.
Years later, I discussed my difficulties with her to a therapist I was seeing and he told me it sounded like she had borderline personality disorder.
I spent part of the summer with her between fifth and sixth grades. Frank was a martinet both at home and with the sailors under his command. He and Mickey got into an argument over what she had spent $5.00 on. She took a knife and chased him through the house with it until he fled to his car and left for the day so that she could cool off.
It upset me enough that I phoned home and asked Mama to come get me. Papa drove down to San Diego from Los Angeles, and took me home within hours of my phone call, which angered Mickey. She said I was always tattling on her.
