Authors: Laurie Jean Cannady
No Peace in Dysfunction
No Peace in Dysfunction
One morning Momma woke us to what she deemed a spring-cleaning day. We hemmed and hawed, but we loved it when the house was so clean. We worked until the bathroom smelled of Pine Sol and all of the beds were neatly made. We scrubbed the floors until they almost shined like the ones in hospitals, and we even washed the concrete walls until they sparkled as well. Through the house floated the lemony smell of Pledge, which made Lincoln Park feel a little more like home. We opened all of the windows and let the sun shine through the house. It ricocheted off of the concrete walls. I breathed the clean air in my lungs and closed my eyes, picturing myself in the yellow house again. I felt like I was getting younger, like the burden of our surroundings was floating off of me.
That night I woke to a flashlight shining in my face. I yelled for Momma as I sprung up in the bed and grabbed for Mary. “It's okay, little girl,” the officer said. Once my eyes focused, I saw the badge behind the light. “Your mother fell down the stairs and broke her foot. She's in the hospital.” I wanted to cry out for Momma again, but I knew my cries would be futile. The policemen rounded all five of us up and herded us to our next-door neighbor. I couldn't understand how Momma had fallen down the stairs and broken her foot in the middle of the night. That question remained in my head as I went back to sleep. The next morning I awoke to worries about Momma, but I didn't have time to consider them as our neighbor sent us home to get ready for school. When we got into the house, Mr. Tony was sitting on Momma's bed. This was a shock to me, since he and Momma had broken up, again, about a month after we moved to Lincoln Park.
I could hear the shower running upstairs, and since all of us were in the bedroom looking at Mr. Tony, I knew Momma had to be the one showering. I wondered how she was able to stand in
the shower alone with a broken foot. How could she even take a shower with a cast on?
“Mr. Tony, how is Momma in the shower?” I asked.
He raised his hand quickly, shushing my question. There were no jokes or goofy smiles. He focused on the bedroom door. The shower cut off and Momma came out of the bathroom cloaked in an oversized towel. I watched her feet as she walked down the stairs. There was no cast and she was walking fine. Again, I didn't understand how Momma's foot had gotten better over night. Sobbing uncontrollably, she walked past us and sat on her bed. Tears joined with beads of water dripping from her hair. We made a circle of five around her and pleaded for her to tell us what happened.
“Who left the window unlocked last night?” was all that escaped Momma's sobs. “Who left the window unlocked?” still replays in my mind. We raised our hands, pointed at each other, waited for a response from Momma as she said, “Somebody came in and raped me last night.”
My world began to spin. I felt an immediate need to vomit. Momma was raped, again? I cried. All of us cried. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to hit somebody. The thought of a man walking around our house, checking to see if anyone was awake, finding Momma alone in her room, mounting her the way Mr. Todd had mounted Carmen, the way Pop had mounted Momma, the way Pee Wee had mounted me, I wanted to take my hands and wrap them around someone's, anyone's, neck. The man could have killed her. He could have killed us all.
Everybody in the Park knew what happened. They probably knew who did it. The silence I'd once relished, which made me feel a part of a group larger than myself, now choked me as I walked to my bus stop. I felt other kids staring at me and whispering. I knew what they were saying. “Her momma was raped last night. Somebody finally got them.”
I didn't want to go to school that day. I wanted to be home with Momma, but she insisted we go to school so she could get herself together. School couldn't distract me from the turmoil that
stretched from Lincoln Park to my classroom. I fought to keep out images of
him
sneaking into our home, snaking his arm through the kitchen window, touching our doorknob with his hand. I worked not to see his shadow, looming over Momma as she slept, his hand covering her mouth, her eyes squinted, then propped open by terror once she realized what was happening. What had she thought as he straddled her, pressed his body against hers and repeated, “This is the only way I can have you.” Had she feared we were already upstairs, dead, and raping her would be the end of his reign of terror in our home? I did not want to see him on top of Momma, touching her body, drowning himself in her skin. I did not want to imagine him pulling up his pants, walking out of Momma's room, into our living room, as if he were a visitor bidding goodbyes. We'd made our home immaculate that night with the smell of bleach and Pine Sol lingering in the air. He was smelling our clean, breathing our peace, and he had swept the clean, the peace out of our home as he exited.
Before I'd left for school, Momma had screamed at me, ordered me to go upstairs and change my clothes before leaving the house. I had on pink stretch pants with stirrups that pulled tightly against the arch of my feet. That pull made the pants fit like latex against my skin. The clothes I wore that day were actually Momma's, but as she looked at me, as she sat on the bed wrapped in a towel, wrapped in tears that flowed down her face, she did not see me, her young daughter. She saw my curves, my breasts that were too large for someone my age. She saw the dimples people often complimented me on, but most disturbingly, she saw the woman in me that could one day be raped, again, in the way she had been. I did not understand that then, but I trudged up those stairs anyway, with the same tears in my eyes running from Momma's.
Before leaving school that day, we were given school pictures we'd taken months earlier. I looked at the photograph of me, saw the large smile that always spread across my face when a camera was near, and the dimples Momma said she loved. I absorbed the happiness of picture day, a happiness that hadn't been tainted by
Momma's new rape. My smile in the picture was a bit wide, giving the world full view of my gums and buckteeth, but that just showed the happiness that had been beaming inside me that day. I immediately thought,
This will make Momma happy. Remembering before will bring her back to us
.
I was still anxious about getting home, but now I had a gift, a surprise that would surely allow Momma to crack through the darkness that surrounded her. Luckily, the bus was abuzz with its occupants exchanging pictures. I, for a second, forgot that I was the newly crowned child of Lincoln Park's most recent rape victim and shared my pictures with other students. The bus was filled with “ooos,” “aahs,” and “Girl, that shirt was banging,” as it made its way from High Street to Lincoln Park's Deep Creek Boulevard. I was looking at someone else's pictures when I heard one of the girls in the back of the bus say, “Oh, this is Laurie's picture.” I waited for her to say something about Momma being raped. I braced myself for the ugliness that would vault me back to the previous night, when my whole family could have been demolished, but she said nothing about Momma.
“I know Laurie has pretty eyes and everything and she's light-skinned and has that mole and dimples, but she is ugly as hell. She look like a horse in this picture.” I couldn't believe what I was hearing; first, because I knew all of the girls in the back and none of them were winning any beauty contests, but also because they knew Momma had been raped and I believed that alone made me off limits for such unkind barbs.
I turned around in my seat, put out my hand, and without words, asked for my pictures. The girl handed them to me, looked at the girl next to her, and giggled. I sat back in my seat, tears stinging my eyes. I wasn't upset the girls thought I was ugly, but what if Momma did too? What if she looked at my pictures as those girls had and saw a horse smiling back at her? All of my hopes for that day were dependent on Momma seeing me, seeing herself in that picture and remembering happiness would again be hers.
After I got off of the bus, Champ and I found each other. Now, I'm not sure we were looking for each other, but we fell in step with one another as we walked to our house. We went in through the back door, a door still covered with charcoal-like dust that outlined fingerprints, which belonged to us children, belonged to Momma, and the man who could have taken her from us. Mr. Tony met us at the door with a shadowy face.
“Your Momma's resting,” he whispered.
“Can we see her?” both Champ and I asked.
“Let me see,” he said as he went back into the room and closed the door. Champ and I stood in the kitchen as if we were patients waiting to see the doctor. Mr. Tony soon came back and led us into the room. I clutched my pictures, debating whether or not to share them with Momma, afraid the sight of my horse face might upset her even more.
When I walked into the room, there was a lump of Momma in the middle of the bed. The blankets were pulled tightly around her, and only her hair, sprawled across the pillow, was visible. She turned to us with eyes as red as Cinnamon Hotshots. Her face was pale, her hair unkempt. A haze of sadness surrounded her; yet, she was more beautiful than I'd ever seen. She looked like a baby, eyes searching for meaning, head clouded by images of things she couldn't understand. I then knew why she'd been nicknamed “Pretty.” I had no words to offer, none I believed would break through, so I handed my pictures to her and sat next to the lump of her on the bed. She took them in her hands, pulled out the 8" x 10", the one the girls had deemed horse-like. A smile appeared on her face.
Momma looked at me, tears falling from her eyes, sadness hanging tightly onto her eyelids. She placed her hand on my face, guided me to her and kissed me. Champ then gave her his pictures and the smile widened. Mary, Dathan, and Tom-Tom, once they got home, did the same. That evening, there was no homework to be done. No one fought over whether we would watch
Transformers
or
Diff'rent Strokes
. No one complained about food or argued about
who would clean the kitchen. That evening, we watched Momma. We sat around her in a circle, waiting to jump when she needed, waiting to wipe whatever tears fell as she slept. We did what we had been unable to do the night before; we were light, protecting her from darkness.
I got into one good fight while in Lincoln Park, with my neighbor and future friend, April. An adult neighbor orchestrated the fight by carrying inflammatory messages between April and me. That woman looked on with gratification as April and I squared off in my backyard. I'd been known for running my mouth, and it didn't take much for a scowl to grow on my face and for my signature line, “What you want to do?” to lead me right to April. She was taller than I was, but with a smaller frame, so I believed I could hold my own.
Between fists flying, and what Champ deemed a clothesline of epic proportions delivered to me by April, I decided, mid-fight, I didn't want to fight anymore. I informed April of this decision, in between received blows, hoping the punches would cease. I heard a clang, which Champ claims was my head running into a metal pole, but I'd like to believe it was April connecting. Having learned to absorb life's hard blows, I stood tall at the end despite my apparent defeat.
Momma beat me that night for fighting, and I later learned April's momma beat her as well. We became fast friends after that, partly because of the projects myth that girls generally became friends once they fought, and, mainly, because I didn't want to fight April again.
April was one of the only girls I knew in the park that had a daddy. Her father, Mr. Charlie, was a working man, who left every morning with his lunch box, wearing clean clothes, and returned each evening, lunch box lighter, while he, no longer clean, arrived drenched in tired. He, a kindhearted man, kept his five, April, her older sister, Betty Joe, her older brothers, Leon and Lee, and her younger brother, Charlie, close to him. I spied them Sunday mornings, coming out of the house, all spit-shined and glistening, heading to church. I wished I could have had a father like Mr. Charlie, a man whose laugh, after just one beer, became the
soundtrack for our row. He'd dance, joke with us kids, and give us a good word or two. He loved his wife, in the way I wished men had loved Momma. I never saw Mr. Charlie put his hands on any woman, never saw his eyes following Momma or Miss Betty as they walked by, and I never saw his children hungry, searching for sustenance outside his home.
April's older brothers, Leon and Lee, like their father, weren't the typical Lincoln Park residents. They often sat on the porch with us, laughing, as we sang Club Nouveau's “Lean on Me” and Shirley Murdoch's “As We Lay.” They offered commentary and many jokes, critiquing our disjointed moves and struggling high and low notes. Just as Mr. Charlie was my row's version of a father, Leon and Lee were our older brothers, with watchful eyes, beckoning us to safe spaces when they sensed something going down. I never witnessed either of them traveling Lexington, forty ounce attached to hand, shooting dice, palming the crotches of sagging jeans with A-shirts tucked into underpants.
Two weeks after my eighth-grade year, my Lincoln Park family forever fractured when we learned Leon, who'd worked for the city, had been digging ditches with coworkers when a power line fell in water puddled around his legs. He was killed instantly. The day of his funeral, the Harris family prayed in front of their house, no longer a home, because a piece of home was missing. They stood shoulder to shoulder, fingers interlocked, heads bowed. I watched from my window, afraid to venture outside and interrupt their mourning. I mourned with them, confused, questioning. Leon had done everything right. He worked, stayed away from violence and criminal activity. Still, Portsmouth had swallowed him whole. None of us were safe, not even his brother, Lee, who five years later, would be riding his bike, rushing home after a long day of work. He too would be swallowed. A man-child, one Lee had probably watched grow as well, robbed him, shot him, then left him dying on the street, streets he'd never pounded, streets he'd never laid claim to, streets he'd worked so hard not to be swallowed by.