Every now and then I will commiserate with friends about the horrible scars one acquires during their most vulnerable and formative years and my friend Rae, in particular, will smile at me and muse, “And how many times did your dad hit you, Cheryl?” She loves that story.
I was about ten, I believe. It was in the dead of summer when daylight extended on halfway through the night and we children would be sent to bed while perfectly good play hours lay wasting in the evening. My bedroom was directly over the family living room, connected umbilically by an open-air register that let up sounds from the television and, for the determined and easily contorted, sometimes even somewhat distorted images. First I was sent to bed hours before I was even sleepy, then I was sent back to bed from the register where I had lain on the floor and watched angled television, and then I was warned of dire consequences if I did not fall asleep immediately.
Exasperated by the shortsightedness of my parents downstairs, I fashioned my own amusement out of the bottom half of a miniature ginger jar and a red stick that had probably been the handle to something. I don’t remember the point of the game anymore (beyond not sleeping), but it involved twirling the ginger jar on the top of the stick while rolling gracefully across my full-sized bed. Something went horribly wrong with the plan, however, and the ginger jar jumped off my stick and rattled incredibly loudly across the linoleum floor of my room, directly over my parents’ heads.
I heard my father mutter bad words under his breath downstairs, and then I heard him lunge up the stairs and stalk into my room, where he grabbed the red stick out of my hand AND HIT ME IN THE BUTT WITH IT.
I was mortified.
My own father HIT ME WITH A STICK!
I disowned him on the spot, there was no doubt about it—I would hate him forever.
“How many times did he hit you, Cheryl?” Rae always asks here. A middle child of seven, a child of divorce with multiple remarriages of dubious merit on the sides of both parents, she finds the story of my abuse and misuse . . . funny.
“Once,” I reply icily, because as far as I’m concerned, once is way more than enough.
“Once that time,” Rae muses.
“In her LIFE,” my Beloved corrects her, and off they launch into even greater gales of glee.
“He used to kick me, too,” I say sullenly in my own defense.
“Like this?” Rae asks, and kicks at the air as if it were inhabited by a rabid dog.
“He would sort of . . . propel us along with the side of his foot,” I mutter. “Ask any kid who was ever around him, they’ll tell you.”
“You had a rough childhood, Cheryl,” Rae commiserates with me, but it’s hard to believe her while she’s laughing.
Beyond the Stick Incident, our parents rarely used physical violence to make their point. Our mother didn’t need a stick—she had fingernails as thick as carp scales sanded into shape like talons. Anytime she sensed she did not have our full attention, she would grip us by the cheeks and bore holes through our souls with her yellow-green eyes. I was often tormented as a child by nightmares about this oddly maternal monster that howled at the moon and jammed raw meat down my throat whenever I cried.
My parents rarely drank, and when they did they became giggly and oddly childlike and then they went to bed. Often—with a great deal of shushing—they hid this behavior from us, although I could not always tell what exactly they had been doing because they fell into the same elaborate shushing behavior whenever they misbehaved. They were devout midnight fans of a woman comedian named Rusty Warren and often when we were supposed to be asleep they would gather with their friends in the kitchen or other places where they believed we could not hear them and listen to this woman tell jokes. It never bothered me in the least that they did this and it had nothing to do with my being dissatisfied with my childhood—I only tell you that because my mother would be mortified that I told you she liked blue humor.
My mother loved blue humor.
I told our mother the second dirty joke I ever heard in my life. We were not supposed to know dirty jokes, and we were particularly not supposed to understand them. We were to avoid bad words (which prevented me from telling the first dirty joke I ever heard). But our mother loved jokes and she loved to tell jokes, and what point was there in living with five little parrots if they did not fly home once in a while with usable humor? She laughed, and then she told me whatever people said before they started saying, “It’s not appropriate,” and she told me I shouldn’t tell it a lot. I would lie awake at night huddled around the edge of my spy register and listen to her tell my joke to all of her friends.
I could not huddle
over
my spy register, where I could see better and hear perhaps more clearly, because sooner or later someone would murmur something about the comparative size of the ears on my mother’s pitcher collection (as if her pitchers even
had
ears, big or little) and someone would yell at me to get back to bed. In bed I could hear the adults laughing and carrying on, but I could only rarely make out what they actually said—and I could see nothing.
I think I can safely say that whenever anything interesting, fun, or good was about to happen in our house, we were all promptly sent to bed.
When trying to force us to sleep through childhood didn’t work, our mother reached for the teakettle. Someone had apparently told her that boiling her children would prevent colds. In particular I was prone to chest congestion and respiratory infections, and she steamed the wallpaper loose from the wall of my room. When more than one of us were sick she would build elaborate sheet tents around us and we would drift in and out of consciousness to the steady bubble of the teakettle on its hotplate beside our beds. Moss grew on our sheets. The Wee One grew tiny slits in her neck, just behind her jaws, and as a teenager she could swim two or three miles underwater before needing to come up for air. What she could not steam our mother baked with a drawing salve about the consistency of peanut butter, which she spread, hot, over our naked chests like cake frosting and then covered in gauze. (I’ve never been sure whether she was trying to keep our sheets clean, or maximize the degree of burn.) And what she could not steam or bake, she boiled in hot Epsom salt water until it healed or fell off.
While I am anything but stoic by nature, I learned not to flinch, limp, or otherwise show signs of physical injury or distress around my mother. She was apparently impervious to pain herself. I don’t know how many times I watched her pour boiling water into a pan, ram her hand into it, and say, “See—it’s NOT that hot,” and grab whatever gaping open wound I might have accidentally let her see and ram that into the boiling water. A half a mile up the road the neighbors would shake their heads at my screams and say, “Oh, it must be that Eloise Peck boiling one of her kids again—you know, she still has five . . .”
Nor was she particularly understanding about my pain tolerance. I can remember sobbing hysterically at the very thought of blistering the hide off yet another innocent limb while my mother would roll her eyes up to the heavens and say, “Cheryl, I swear to God . . .”
Once out in the gravel pit behind our house, probably half a city block from civilization, I rammed a rusty nail into my bare foot. I felt it go in. I looked down at my foot, and there was a rusty two-inch nail hanging out of it. I hobbled on one foot and two toes over the natural bridge, around the bottom of High Horse Hill, past the snake pit, down the walkway between the North Pond and the Big Pond, all the way across the back yard and halfway up the back steps. A small herd of sympathetic angels ran along ahead of and behind me shouting for help and offering encouragement while I sniffled and upsucked my way home to my loving mother. “Mom,” the herd of angels called, “Cheryl has a nail in her foot!”
I probably have not mentioned that there was some stupid rule about (a) going into the gravel pit (do not, I believe it may have been), or (b) going into the gravel pit barefoot (especially do not, it may have been). Like every child in the world, I assumed that if there were varying degrees of do-nots, then none of them could have been all that important.
My mother appeared out of the house where she had been either baking cookies for her loving children or perhaps reading one of the many novels she forbade us to touch. She picked up my foot.
I suffered in anticipation.
She aimed her talons for my nail.
I shrieked in sheer self-defense.
She slapped my leg and said, “Hold still.”
She SLAPPED me, her own wounded child. I puffed up in righteous indignation, ready to point out that, had it not been for my noble courage and fortitude, hobbling as I had those many agonizing feet through the feral wilderness behind our yard, she herself might have been forced to venture out of the house to find me . . .
She handed me the nail. She laid it, like a small trophy, in my hand. “Why didn’t you just pull it out?” she checked.
“What?”
“It barely broke the skin, Sherry—it’s a wonder you didn’t really hurt yourself, limping on that all the way back here . . .” She stood up and brushed off her hands as if they had recently been exposed to something unbelievably dirty, although all she had touched were my feet. “You’d better soak that,” she resolved. “God knows what you’ve been walking through with that . . .”
I was probably my mother’s most obedient child—certainly the only one who accepted, for its sheer substantive logic, the argument
because I said so
—so I never fully understood why injuries were so problematic for me. I had to hide the fact that I could barely use my left hand for two weeks not because I was afraid my mother would make me soak it but because I had accidentally impaled myself on a stolen pocketknife. I knew it was stolen because it had belonged to my grandfather shortly before it became mine and he had not been present when the transfer of ownership occurred. I felt badly about that, but he had a small collection of them and I knew in my heart that my life would have more value and be far more entertaining if I owned just one pocketknife. I had been walking through the gravel pit, admiring my new pocketknife, when a stone leaped up and tripped me and I fell down and jabbed my own knife into my free hand.
The fact that I wounded myself while under the spell of bad behavior would have so delighted her that none of us could have lived with her for months. Even worse, she would remember sooner or later that she had banned the ownership of small weapons in order to demilitarize our intersibling relationships and she would ask, “Where did you get it?”
I was not a stupid child.
I was not about to admit I stole something from her father.
My little sister had stolen a candy bar from a local store once and our mother had forced her to walk into the store, admit to her thievery,
give it back
, and apologize. (She is still bitter.) I would have died of gangrene before I copped to any of that.
Fortunately my grandfather did not keep his pocketknives particularly sharp and it was a shallow cut that healed quickly. It did leave a scar, which my mother had also never seen.
Probably the most contentious issue between my mother and me was that of shoes. Shoes were the bane of my existence. In my prime I could walk across hot asphalt in August while the tar was bubbling and never feel a thing. I could walk barefoot on gravel, small stones, crushed glass, beds of rusty nails—I didn’t care. Shoes, on the other hand, kept getting lost, or wet, or soaked in horse manure, all of which deeply offended my mother. I remember being sent out into the dark and nether regions of the back yard where the shadowmonsters lurked because I had lost my shoes and I would not be allowed home again until I found them. My mother lectured me about the cost of shoes, the value of shoes, the care and keeping of shoes, and provided me with a never-ending list of the horrible and maiming things that could happen to the feet of small children who failed to wear their shoes . . . As far as I was concerned the only good shoe was the shoe tucked safely under my bed where it couldn’t get me into any trouble and I could find it quickly if I had to.
And so it came to pass, shortly after I impaled my left hand on a stolen pocketknife, that a pair of new shoes wore a blister on the top of my right little toe. This was somehow my fault—I had committed yet another shoe crime—and I was deeply reluctant to take this injury to my mother because
it hurt.
The idea of soaking it in hot salt upset my stomach. It was a fine blister, as far as blisters go, covering the entire top of my little toe and weeping some crusty yellow stuff with an unpleasant smell, but what bothered me the most was the pain. It pulsed. Throbbed. It felt as if an elephant were rocking back and forth on my toe, and I retired to the privacy of my bedroom where I could inspect this phenomenon in peace. The blister was angry and red and swollen, and there was a thin red line that appeared to be traveling up my foot.
I loved my mother. I never believed she intended to harm me, but I did harbor a slight trust issue. I spent much of my early life feeling like the cat in the elephant house and I spent a lot of my time places where she wasn’t likely to be. And I was afraid of her temper, which for some odd reason seemed to go off whenever one of us got hurt, as if we just went out willy-nilly and wounded ourselves to make her life difficult. So I didn’t tell her I had blood poisoning in my little toe because she would have been mad at me. I decided to cut her right out of the loop of my medical care and I pulled out my dull and not terribly sanitary stolen pocketknife and cut off the top of my toe. Whittled that blister right off. It didn’t actually hurt any worse than the throbbing it had been doing anyway. And I never told her.
Most farm kids my age were steamed as children. My Beloved’s family was rich—they owned a vaporizer. (The Goddess only knows how many siblings she should have had—the rest are gone without a trace.) When I finish telling my harrowing stories of being boiled alive in the interests of my health, most of my contemporaries join right in with stories of their own about mothers who numbed their hands washing dishes and doing laundry all day, versus children who still had feelings in their extremities. And when they have finished their own stories, they smile and look expectantly at me and they ask, “Why were you so miserable?”