Authors: Liz Murray
“Girls, wake up.”
“Where’s Ma?” Lisa asked.
“She went to the store for a beer. She’ll be back in a little while.”
I’d never seen Ron dressed in shorts before. Why had Ma left us behind?
“The store is far from here, so it will be a bit. She asked me to look after you both; she said you needed a bath,” he told us, clasping his hands together and lowering his chin with a seriousness that seemed insincere.
Given that it wasn’t uncommon for me to go a month or two without washing or brushing my teeth, this struck me as strange. One time, while I was helping to hang up test sheets in class, my teacher noticed a patch of dirt on my neck and told me that when I showered that night, I should make sure to scrub extra-hard there. Though our clogged tub prevented me from showering, I was embarrassed enough to take a washcloth and scrub my neck when I got home. Bits of dirt had rolled off into my hands.
Considering the uselessness of our tub at home, I thought maybe Ma wanted us to take the opportunity to bathe here.
Ron watched us from the toilet, while Lisa and I sat together in the soapy water. Not only had I never seen Ron in shorts, I’d also never seen him without his tweed jacket before. In the steamy bathroom, I saw that underneath it, he was even thinner, in an almost feminine way, with large nipples that showed right through his shirt. I wished he would put his jacket back on and go. The white tiles were shiny clean and the bathroom lemon-scented. As we washed, he kept his eyes just below our necks. Something about that look made me cover myself. I curled into a ball, pulling my knees to my chest. Lisa had a look on her face that bordered somewhere between worry and anger.
“Your mother wants me to make sure that you girls wash every part now,” he said. “I want to see every part get squeaky clean. Let’s see those feet,” he said. “And those legs. Above the water, or else it’s not really clean.”
Under his instruction, Lisa and I lifted our feet, ankles, calves, and thighs above the water to scrub clean.
“Now, one of the hardest parts to wash is your privates, so we need you girls to stick that way up high in the air and clean every crevice. Come on, I want to see them clean.”
“How?” I asked.
“Come on, use your hands to lift yourself up and push your privates above the water,” he said eagerly.
“I know how to take a bath,” Lisa said, scowling. “You don’t need to watch us.” Ron swallowed and his eyes darted all around the room; it was the first time he’d taken them off our bodies.
I had already lifted my crotch way out of the water and was washing when she’d spoken up. In a way, I wondered why Lisa didn’t say something sooner. I could feel her anger when he first made us get in the tub.
“Now, Lisa, I’m just making sure,” he said cautiously. “Liz knows that, don’t you, Liz?”
I didn’t know anything other than the fact that Lisa was mad, Ma wasn’t back yet, and I was getting nervous about the way he kept staring at me.
“Get out! We’re fine by ourselves!” Lisa suddenly yelled.
“Okay, then. I suppose big sister is going to make sure that everything in here is taken care of, then,” Ron said, backing away.
“Get the hell
out
!” she screamed.
With that, he closed the door behind him. Together, Lisa and I dressed in complete silence.
Five weeks later, Ma had her first mental lapse in more than six years, and Lisa and I were hauled into family services for examinations, during a night I can recall only in fragments.
Lying flat on my back, I watched the doctor take one latex glove from a box—one, not two. It made a snap when he put it on. I’d never seen anyone do that before, wear just one glove. I was going to tell him he forgot the other one. But before I got a chance, he turned away and went back to talking with a blond woman. I couldn’t see past them to the counter, where they were fidgeting with something. I just saw their white uniforms, the white walls, and the white papers covering the counter that read my name—Elizabeth Murray—and next to it, my birth date, September 23, 1980. I’m six, I thought, proud of how I counted so quickly. Elizabeth, not Lizzy. No, here my name is Elizabeth.
“Elizabeth, are you hungry? Have you eaten anything today? Would you like some soup, a sandwich? Elizabeth, you can tell us, honey, does your father touch you?”
The night had already been so long; the weeks leading up to it even longer. Ma hadn’t been herself. It started with the crying fits. Unprovoked, she’d scream accusations into the air or threats to no one in particular: “Get your hands off! I’ll kill you!”
Then one day she just stopped, wrapped all those shouts and tears into her ankle-length bubble coat where she lived, a single member of some far-off world. If you tried to talk to Ma, she’d snap up the ends of the collar with her skinny fingers. Her eyes became electric, a warning to be heeded. She no longer recognized any of us.
When the police came to load her into the ambulance, she thought they wanted the coat. The struggle was brief, no more than two swift hits, methodically placed—a demonstration of the officer’s academy training. Our building’s hallway filled with her ghostly cries for help. The neighbors’ doors creaked open in succession from nearest to farthest. Soon after, when the chaos moved to the windows, locks snapped shut the same way.
“The doctor’s just going to do a test. Okay, Elizabeth? It won’t hurt; it’s just a little uncomfortable. Hold still and be a brave girl, okay?”
A breakdown, I heard someone call it. Not her first, Daddy reminded me; maybe not her last. Lisa and I were placed in a police car—without Daddy—that followed the ambulance carrying Ma as it drove in silence, its signature red light piercing the night as we made our way up University Avenue.
I kept my eyes shut tight the entire time.
I never told anyone that Ma’s breakdown was my fault, that I had brought it on by telling what happened. When Ma returned to Ron’s house from the store with a six-pack, Lisa called her into the bathroom with us. I thought she would tell, so I did it first, and I watched Ma’s face fill with horror. Ma ran out of the bathroom angrier than I’d ever seen her. I could hear her hit Ron across the face. Then she took us home on a long, long train ride, where Lisa told Ma about one time at Tara’s when Ron had asked to take Polaroids of her. The conversation embarrassed me. My hair still wet from the bath, I remained totally silent and went to sleep on Ma’s lap. For days after that, the questions didn
’
t cease.
“Lizzy, tell Ma about every time Ron made you feel bad, baby. You can tell me, pumpkin, please.”
The shame was so heavy, I couldn’t look Ma in the eyes, and my throat ached when I told her how afraid I was in the bath, and how worried I was when Ron pinched
Stephanie
’s chest because she’d misbehaved. Then I told Ma about the time he helped me with my zipper, privately, in Tara’s room, his fingers scraping against my skin. I couldn’t move throughout the whole thing; I froze and could only stare up at the wooden ceiling fan, listening to the click it made on each go-around, counting them as he thrust his fingers inside me painfully. Held firmly in place by Ron’s free hand, my privates burned. I bit ridges into my bottom lip to keep from wailing.
I told Ma all but one detail—the fact that I knew it was wrong. I knew that all I had to do to end it was to call out for her. But I didn’t, because Ron made things better for Ma, for Lisa and me. I didn’t want to ruin that, so I failed to call out. When he’d finished and slipped back into the kitchen with Ma and Tara, I’d used Vaseline from the bathroom cabinet to soothe the pain.
This was how I knew I had driven Ma crazy. I could have stopped Ron before anything worse happened, but I didn’t. Then, later, I told Ma about what Ron had done. It was the last straw. Ma snapped.
Now a voice in the doctor’s office said that she had brought the breakdown on herself with all her “drug abuse”; that she never gave her schizophrenia medicine a fair chance to work. Only I knew they were wrong. “Check the kids,” another woman in clicking heels ordered a nurse. “You should have heard what their mother had to say about their father. Find a doctor and check these kids. We have to find out what’s been going on.”
With two fingers pointed skyward, like a priest’s blessing, the doctor applied a kind of jelly to his glove. The nurse drew metal stirrups out of the table. Each made its own metallic snap when extended.
“Elizabeth, honey, this will be over soon. We just need you to put your feet here for now. Be a good girl and stay still.”
My heels rested, caged in cold metal. My legs frogged open to form a diamond, raising the hospital gown into the air—a paper sail to catch flight above the goose-bump breeze that pricked my skin and cooled my thighs. A chill ran over my naked pelvis as the doctor pulled his chair in close.
Lying there, I wanted Ma, the soft feel of her hair in my fingers, the reassurance of her hand holding mine. As the doctor positioned a warm lamp on me, I longed most for her protection, for things to go back the way they had been. If only I had told her sooner.
A sharp pain shot through me as the doctor began his examination in the place Ma and Daddy told me no one should touch, a place I myself had never touched. A place where, even if no one believed it, Daddy had never touched me.
I felt a metal rod tearing me open. I managed only the faintest whimper as his fingers entered me. The doctor’s intrusion made a dull ache that sent my back arching. The nurse’s press-on nails pinched as she held on to my shins. Tears rolled into my ears.
“That’s all, Elizabeth. We’ll be outside. You can get dressed now, honey.”
A tree of pain throbbed and grew through my abdomen. I descended from the table slowly and carefully, a bright strip of blood coloring my thigh.
Somewhere, in a room nearby, my sister was enduring the same.
I lifted myself back onto the noisy paper to take a look, curling my body into a C. To my horror, the source of the blood was an angry, red gash between my legs. Fear shot through my chest. My eyes raced across the empty room for something to bandage the hole with. I quickly plucked several gauze pads from a blue-and-white medical box. My trembling gave way to panicked sobs.
Tears fell onto the paper gown in spots that expanded on impact. I cried to the ceiling and held the gauze tightly to my wound, unable to imagine ever feeling normal again.
FOLLOWING HER 1986 BREAKDOWN, MA’S MENTAL ILLNESS PROVED
to be more menacing than any of us expected. All together, Ma suffered six schizophrenic bouts in just four years, each requiring her to be institutionalized for no less than one month, no more than three. Initially, I regarded Ma’s attacks as something to dread for the ways they changed her and for the haunting images her episodes replayed before me.
Ma in a conversation with the characters flashing across our TV screen, the uniformed police officers dispatched to our living room to take her away, standing among our furniture, their boots pressed down on our carpet, their crackling walkie-talkies clipped tightly to those tough leather belts. Curled up on our couch, I passed the corner of my pink nightgown through my fingers over and over, watching when they pulled Ma’s wrists together for the handcuffs, as she never went voluntarily.
The beige tiles of the mental ward’s stain-resistant floor; Ma’s life made uncomplicated, in her assigned room with a bed for sleeping, a square cabinet for “personals,” a sink for washing. Ma’s big blank eyes unfocused, wide as two boiled eggs, staring ahead at nothing.
As time passed, Ma’s drug abuse doubled, then tripled in frequency. The addiction became obvious in every part of her, from her diminished ability to string together whole sentences to that overused spot on her forearm that became perpetually infected, as dark and raw as a cracked plum. I began to think differently of her months in the mental hospital. As long as she was able to, Ma would get high; the breakdowns were the only thing that stopped her.
The posters at school called drug abuse a slow form of suicide. At the pace Ma was going, I was beginning to feel that the mental hospital was all that was saving her. And with each hospitalization came the hope, however futile, that she could remain sober.
On each of her returns from North Central Bronx Psychiatric Ward, Ma seemed ready for a healthy, drug-free life: thicker around the thighs and waist, the dark circles gone from underneath her eyes, and her beautiful black hair shimmery and thick again. She’d make regular trips to Narcotics Anonymous, and over those weeks, the glass jewelry box from Daddy quickly filled with optimistic piles of rainbow-colored NA keychains marking her steps toward sobriety in increments of one day, one week, or one month clean. But they always seemed to halt there.
As inevitably as a shift in seasons, Ma would start to show the signs of another oncoming lapse, beginning with her absence from meetings. She’d linger in the living room too long, flipping channels until six p.m. came and went; she’d miss one meeting, then two, then three, and then when her SSI check arrived, she’d go on a weeklong drug binge that ran us broke. Then she’d sleep that off for days as the phone rang and rang with unanswered calls from her NA sponsor. As it turned out, the coke had a way of counteracting the effects of Ma’s psychiatric medication, and enough bingeing would always land her back in the psychiatric ward, leaving Daddy to fill in as a full-time single parent.
Daddy rose to the occasion. Just as Ma had found it easier to manage our finances when Daddy was in prison, so it seemed Daddy was able to stretch the monthly checks in a way I hadn’t realized was possible. I learned with some degree of relief, as well as hurt, that all three of us could go an entire month eating dinner each night, and usually with something to eat during the day as well, on that same check that I’d spent years watching Ma and Daddy deplete in only days following its arrival. Had it been possible to feed us this well all along? Humming tunes from his favorite oldies songs, Daddy spent evenings sweating over the oven, cooking up two-dollar steaks with mashed potatoes or pasta for sides. On the two days a week we visited Ma, Daddy gave Lisa and me four quarters each. I always saved half of it in my Pooh bear piggy bank; not so much for any future purchase, but just to be able to drag my hand through the growing pile and know it was mine. Toward the end of this four-year stretch of Ma’s hospital stays, I realized that I could measure Ma’s time away by counting the quarters. By the middle of the year in 1990, more than once, I had accumulated over twenty dollars in change before Ma found and stole my savings. “Crazy quarters,” I had called them, for Ma’s craziness. Daddy had more money then too, because he used drugs more conservatively, no more than seven or eight times a week, when Ma was away. In her absence, there were no more multiple drug runs either. Daddy seemed almost content to be sober the rest of the time.
And finally, there was the brief period just after Ma came home, before both of them fully let drugs back in, when they were semi-sober together. The four of us saw movies at the Loew’s Paradise Theater, Ma braided my hair, Daddy orchestrated day trips to the library, and the rug got vacuumed.
Though, like a pendulum, I knew Ma and Daddy to be either all to one side—social, approachable—or on their way toward the other—totally removed, inaccessible in almost every way. It was a relentless back and forth, the momentum of their switch determined by the different stages of Ma’s mental illness. That was until they broke the pattern in the summer of 1990, a time that marked an alarming eight months of their most severe drug abuse ever. This overlapped, not coincidentally, with the lowest point in their troubled marriage. Their relationship seemed to worsen as Ma lingered in her longest period of sanity in the last four years. The slump went on for so long that not only did it feel permanent, but it also left me wondering about my love for Ma. I found myself wishing, almost daily, for her to lose her mind and be committed again, so that something,
anything
would clear away the haze that had settled over us.
That was the summer before I turned ten, when, after a series of daily shouting matches and sometimes violent arguments, mostly instigated by Ma, that lasted for all of June, Ma and Daddy began sleeping separately. Their most recent fights were based primarily on vague suspicions Ma held against Daddy, declaring him “no goddamn good.”
“It’s just
him
,” she’d say. “He’s
conniving
.”
Though Ma’s doctors deemed her recovery from each breakdown as “full,” over her last three or so releases, Ma retained an irrational, vague, but consistent image of Daddy’s having something “off” about him.
“It’s just his character, Lizzy. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
Unlike so many of the things Ma’s mind created because of her sickness, part of me wondered whether or not she had reason to mistrust Daddy. When Ma would go on one of her rants about him, I defended him, but part of me would think about all the time he spent out of the apartment with no explanation as to where he’d been. And sometimes, this one fuzzy memory about Daddy would surface.
In the memory I was maybe six years old and Lisa was about eight. Daddy walked with us down a Manhattan block and I could see that we were heading toward a park. As we got closer to the park Daddy let go of my hand and pushed me toward Lisa. I remember that there was something about him that made me anxious.
“Go with Lisa, Lizzy. She’s gonna take you to see Meredith.”
I wondered where we were going and why Daddy wasn’t going to come with us to the park. With my free hand, I reached for him, but Daddy backed away. His hands were shaking.
“Come on, Liz,” Lisa said, pulling on my hand. “Let’s go see Meredith. She’s right there.”
A teenaged girl stood across the street in front of a path leading into the park. She had brown hair and she was waving at us, smiling in a way that implied we were familiar with one another. Years later, Lisa would confirm this memory and tell me that before he met Ma, Daddy had another daughter. We had a sister, named Meredith. Daddy had abandoned her when she was barely two years old.
I don’t recall Daddy ever talking about Meredith at home or in front of Ma. She never came to visit. Sometimes it felt as though I made up the memory of her, but I knew I hadn’t. And every now and then Lisa and I would talk about how we wanted to meet Meredith again, and get to know our big sister. But no one talked about Daddy’s other life before us, or our other sister. And with all the time Daddy liked to spend out of the house, it made me wonder what else I didn’t know about him. The feeling this gave me was one of Daddy being somewhat mysterious.
Whether or not his mysteriousness was the actual cause, Ma was often furious with and suspicious of Daddy, and she expressed herself freely, shouting at him, provoking fights. Daddy was more laid-back, having grown indifferent to Ma’s fits. “You can take it for only so long before you tune out,” he’d tell me, an attitude that only deepened Ma’s mistrust and anger. It was hardly a surprise when they finally stopped functioning as a couple altogether. In a way, Ma’s moving to the couch felt overdue.
The living room took on a bedroom feel with the addition of Ma’s things; cigarettes, matches, keys, and underwear littered the coffee table, among old magazines and crust left behind from food stuck to a fast-growing collection of dishes surrounded by an ever-present swirl of flies. During the day, while she slept and Daddy was downtown, I walked the softest steps past the couch, stopping only to shut the window and keep the draft off Ma, or to cover her naked body with a sheet. Coming in close, I could smell the aroma of sour beer breath circulated by Ma’s snoring. When she was awake, Ma walked circles through the apartment and found everything depressing. She made multiple daily runs to the bodega for forty-ounce bottles of Budweiser, which she drank in heavy gulps, breaking occasionally to burst into tears.
Getting high became one of the last things Ma and Daddy did together. When they weren’t shooting up, Daddy read by his nightstand, sometimes laughing so loudly I’d hear it all the way from the bathroom. Daddy staved off the fighting, shielded by his newly private bedroom and his books. The only real concerns he expressed were over very particular things. As long as everything was together—his aging, faded magazines stacked in some private but vital order, the empty Sunny Delight bottle beside his bed so he could avoid regular trips to the bathroom at night—Daddy could lie there uninterrupted for hours. He’d have no trouble relaxing, he said, if only everyone would just remember to screw the goddamn cap on the Pepsi,
tight
; or if he could understand why anyone would think two slices of turkey didn’t make a sandwich; and if he knew, for certain, that all the oven’s knobs were switched
off
.
Whenever Ma and Daddy’s fighting became too bitter, Lisa and I locked ourselves in our own rooms at opposite ends of the apartment, her with her music, and me with my books. I sat at my desk, where I could read for hours. I read very slowly through Daddy’s true crime books, his biographies and his books on random trivia. Eventually, I began reading fast enough to get through one of his books in a little over a week. And though my attendance at school remained spotty, this made the year-end exams passable. Even if I hardly showed up for class, I could make sense of most literary material put in front of me. After consistently earning high grades on my exams, I was always promoted to the next grade, whether or not I really learned anything in school.
Still, it wasn’t long before I looked for an outlet outside of school, outside of reading and our apartment. Right after the first grade, I’d begun making daily rounds throughout the neighborhood in search of something to take my mind off my family. In July 1987, this search had led me to Rick and Danny. Brothers born two years apart, they were mistaken for twins everywhere we went. Both had the same caramel skin, toothy smiles, and identical close-cropped haircuts. I was one year younger than Rick and one year older than Danny, a fact that made me feel I could have been their sister, aside from their Puerto Rican heritage.
We first met on a morning when Rick and Danny were playing on a mattress in the trash on University Avenue. The moment I saw them there, I thought that they were different-looking from the kids at school—dirty, almost wild, like myself—which made it easy to reach out to them.
“Can I get on your trampoline?” I asked Rick as he and his brother bounced up and down in front of me. “Yo, be my guest,” he answered, moving aside, smiling. The three of us spent over an hour that day playing together and talking. We were in awe of our similarities. Danny had had the same kindergarten teacher I had at P.S. 261. Kraft macaroni and cheese was their favorite snack, too. Rick also liked hide-and-seek better than freeze tag, and we had the same birthday, even if he was one year older. A few hours later that same day, I found myself in Rick and Danny’s squeaky-clean, three-bedroom apartment surrounded by their family, which consisted of their older brother John, little brother Sean, their stepfather, and their mother, whose name was also Liz. She was a kind woman who smelled of oregano and smiled warmly at me as she scooped generous servings of rice and beans onto my dinner plate. Afterward, in the boys’ room, Rick, Danny, and I competed fiercely in video games late into the night. Someone had draped a blanket over me on the bottom bunk, where I fell asleep with my sneakers still on.
In the three years since, I’d dug my own half footing into Rick and Danny’s crowded family. Through countless sleepovers and Spanish food dinners at their place, family trips headed by Liz to theme parks and to the Bronx Zoo, I’d forged my way into numerous appearances in family photo albums and home videos. It was a quiet pleasure I took, to think that any stranger or new friend of the Hernandezes who might be presented with family memorabilia could see
me
there, in the pages of their albums, posing naturally beside the boys at communions, or with my arm slung around their grandmother at casual family outings, Rick, Danny, John, and Sean there with me, aging together as the pages progressed. My favorite images were of Rick’s and my mutual birthday parties. Liz always remembered to have the bakery write both our names in scripted frosting along the top of the pineapple Valencia cakes. Dozens of pictures captured the two of us blowing out double the amount of candles, Liz clapping wildly over us, her hands frozen in a streak of motion, vivid and persistent as hummingbirds’ wings.