All That Is Bitter and Sweet (36 page)

The atmosphere in our shabby farmhouse careened between utter quiet—the kind of quiet that can only be caused by abandonment and neglect—and raw drama. Although they eventually married in 1989 and mostly settled down, during the Del Rio Pike years, Mom and Pop were locked in a toxic cycle of jealousy and betrayal, breaking up and getting back together. Periods of Pop’s extended absences were punctuated by his returns to Del Rio Pike, when we would play family. We’d have more meat with supper, and Mom would tell us girls to cheer up and act right when he was around. A horrific reality for me was that when Pop was around I would have to listen to a lot of loud sex in a house with thin walls. The tall wooden headboard of their bed would bump against a door between our rooms, which was excruciating to hear night after night. (As a result of treatment, I now know this situation is called covert sexual abuse.)

While Pop was away, Mother would steam open his mail and secretly follow his tour bus out of town, sometimes catching him with other women. She’d throw him out and then send my sister to talk him into coming back, or she’d compose lengthy letters for Sister to read to him on the phone, while she sat silently by and semaphored, coaching Sister’s performance. Their fights were epic. Sometimes Mom would go for her revolver, and several times Sister called the cops to break it up. I heard and watched all of this, every bit of it, and I never understood why the police didn’t take me with them when they left. How I remember standing barefoot on the back porch in my nightgown, watching the officers’ backs as they returned to their squad car, and the quiet of their leaving.

One of my behaviors during this period was to plan my time at home in meticulous detail. While the school day was winding down, I would write out the flow of my afternoon and evening in quarter-hour segments, deciding in advance how to spend each successive fifteen minutes, desperate to fill the long, empty hours or keep myself busy and out of the way while the dysfunction played out. Once, when I just couldn’t stand it anymore, I ran over a mile to our closest neighbor’s house, people I had never met, intending to shout at them, “Help me! There are crazy people living in my house!” I rang the bell, chest heaving, out of breath, and their giant, terrifying dog bounded out, snapping its jaws at me, eye-level. It was the most frightened I have ever been in my life. My knees buckled and I nearly fainted on the spot. By the time someone answered the door, I was completely broken; the wind was out of my sails. The neighbor drove me home without me saying a word.

It was about this time that I took to playing with Mom’s gun, trying to decide if it would be worth it to shoot myself. I don’t remember the first time I did it, but soon there were many days after school when I was sitting cross-legged on the floor on my mother’s side of the bed, facing a long, narrow window that looked out into the side yard. I would expertly check the chamber, load bullets, give it a spin, and with a jerk of my wrist click the chamber into place, cock the trigger, and then hold the gun to my right temple. To me, the way my family lived was already killing me. This sort of death often seemed preferable, the only escape I had available to me. I tried to tell people what it was like to be me, what being here felt like. My reality was that no one listened, no believed me, and even if they did pity me, no one acted. Episodes of suicidal ideation to cope with searing emotional pain continued into my adulthood, and to this day I have no clue how I survived, other than by the grace of God, especially in the form of angels intermittently put in my path who showed some interest in me. They kept me going.

I returned to the dream that maybe Papaw Judd and Cynthia would try to rescue me, if they only knew what living on Del Rio was like. So I wrote a long letter casually describing the details of my everyday life, the craziness of the relationship with Pop, the days and days I spent alone, the way I never had a ride to or from school or my activities, thinking they would take the hint. But the letter never reached them. I found it on my mother’s dresser. I looked askance at my mother, who had obviously opened and read it. “Don’t you ever talk bad about me to my daddy again,” she said. From then on, I kept my various plans of escape to myself.

The irony is that if you’d met me at the time, you would have thought I was an all-American kid, and in some ways I was. I was a cheerleader my freshman year in high school, was voted vice president of the student body as a sophomore, went to the prom with a well-liked football player, and had lots of friends. In a way I was living a double life, keeping my loneliness and my deepening depression to myself. If I mentioned it to anyone at home, I would be given a speech as to how difficult Mom’s life was, in which she would dominate the narrative with her own hardship. I eventually learned how to act “normal” in an abnormal world, developing scrappy coping strategies and survivial skills that helped develop both my resilience and my dysfunction. Everybody thought I was a well-adjusted, adaptable kid, an overachiever who earned good grades and was going places. I was not so sure. When people liked me, I didn’t know why. When their parents approved of me, I felt empty, because I knew I was lying to them. If they’d really known what was going on with me, the sorts of things that happened in my household, they would not have allowed me to darken the doors of their homes.

In a random stroke of fate, one day a man from New York City knocked on the door of our secluded rural home. He was a print ad producer, in the area scouting locations to shoot a cigarette billboard. He was interested in the fields around our house for the ad and was looking for the property owner. Instead, he found a fourteen-year-old girl, home alone, to whom he blurted out, “Have you ever modeled?” I thought nothing of inviting him inside, sitting on the floor with him on my mother’s bedroom floor, and showing him our homemade modeling head shots. He encouraged me to enter a modeling competition in New York City, sponsored by one of the top agencies. It was something I wanted badly, but I didn’t have the money to make the trip. I shared the exciting information with my godmother, and she stepped in to help me.

Piper McDonald Evans is one of the powerful people who were miraculously put in my life at crucial times, times I otherwise might have endured a worse fate or perhaps not even have survived. Apart from my grandparents, she was the first and most influential of these guardian spirits and someone who still holds a treasured space in my life. She was born Linda Ann McDonald, and grew up across the street from my mother in Ashland. In fact, she had introduced Mom and Dad on their first blind date. Her brother played with my uncles; our families were “yard kin,” as I like to put it. Piper had gone to the university, pledged a top sorority, and graduated with impeccable grades. She moved to San Francisco before I was born and became a woman of the world, versed in art, literature, history, and fashion, always displaying considerable intellectual gifts as well as a fantastic sense of humor.

When Dad and I made our road trip to Oregon years earlier, we stopped for a while to visit her in San Francisco. I was in awe of her and spent much of our time in the car with my windshield visor down, looking in the mirror, trying to arrange my hair to look like hers. She has often popped up in our lives at the most auspicious times. When Mom decided to move to Marin County, Piper was there to meet her at the airport (wearing a mink coat, of course) and helped her out while she looked for an apartment. Piper had an inkling of how chaotic our lives were, but there was little she could do except be there for us when she was needed.

Over the years we grew closer, and she became a safe haven for me in my adolescence, much as Mamaw and Papaw Ciminella had been in my early childhood. I don’t remember if she called me or I called her, but one day after school when I was about fourteen, and I was sitting there beside Mom’s bed holding that gun, I ended up talking on the phone to her. While I didn’t mention that I was actually playing with a gun, I did share that I was extremely miserable. Because she knew my mother, she both believed me and did not judge anyone involved. Instead, she expressed her confidence in me and thus gave me something else to focus on: the novel idea that someday I could live differently.

She later gave me a book entitled
Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers
, and in her inscription she wrote, “If you have the kind of life I think you are, you’re going to need this!” One of the many things she taught me was how to be at ease with all kinds of people, because she was inclusive, celebrated diversity, and honored everyone, even though, paradoxically, she could be an unapologetic and incorrigible snob when it came to society stuff. She later took me to France and Italy, where for several years in a row we blissfully spent the month of May. She opened up the world to me.

When Piper learned I had a chance to compete in the competition, she offered to pay for the trip and accompany me to New York. It was a magical experience for me. We stayed at the Waldorf Towers, and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Algonquin Hotel, where the famous Round Table originated, and the fountain at the Plaza where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald took their drunken midnight dip. She took me to dinner at La Grenouille and Odeon. She met the man who had knocked on my door in Tennessee, telling him, as well as her New York friends, about my bright future, a future that, until those conversations, I had been unaware I even possessed. I had read
Cosmopolitan
and
Vogue
magazines and thought myself very sophisticated for a fourteen-year-old. I had almost grown to my full height of five feet seven, and I suppose I had just the right look for the agency’s talent scouts, because I won in all the categories. The prize was a paid two-month contract to model in Japan.

Two weeks after my fifteenth birthday, I walked off the plane at Tokyo’s Narita Airport. Having no chaperone assigned, I looked around the gate area for someone from the agency to meet me, but there was no one. I had no idea what to do or where to go. The signs were all in Japanese; it was the week of the emperor’s birthday and thus a big national holiday. I saw an American couple on the airport bus that I had randomly decided to take (hoping to wind up at a hotel) and tentatively explained my predicament. But my story must have sounded fishy—a kid babbling about a modeling contract and no place to stay—and they muttered something and turned away. They did not help me, and they made me feel that my predicament was my fault.

After giving up on trying to read a Japanese phone book and discovering their equivalent of 411, I finally figured out how to make a call and placed one to Piper. Always thinking, she had put some yen in my wallet before I boarded the plane in San Francisco. She told me to phone her back in a minute, and in the meantime, she booked me a room with her credit card at the only hotel she knew in Tokyo: the five-star Imperial Palace. I arrived at the posh hotel, a bewildered unaccompanied minor out of the United States for the first time, and ordered room service for two days—weird-tasting hamburgers—and wandered the Imperial Gardens while she straightened things out. The problem was my name. My passport and plane ticket were in my legal name, Ciminella. But the agency was expecting to pick up Ashley Judd, and when they didn’t see that name on the manifest, they didn’t think I was coming. It was a confusion I’d lived with for many years. Depending on which parent I was living with, I was either Ashley Judd or Ashley Ciminella. My last name was another piece of the battleground where Mom and Dad waged their wars. My school records zigzagged between the two names. As a late teen, Ken Stilts, Mom and Sister’s manager, told me I needed to legally change my name to Judd for contractual reasons, as a Judds TV special was being negotiated in which I would take part. I believed him, but I remember how when I went before the judge, he grilled me paternalistically and clearly did not like my story—and neither did I. I was allowing myself to be pushed into something rather than making a choice I felt comfortable with. I loved both my last names and the branches of my family they represented. It never felt good when one parent tried to leverage their name at the expense of the other.