My mother remembers. She told me once about something my father said to me. And I remember some other things. He threw me once, but before and after that, not a hand. My mother would smack us with wooden spoons, but I think well enough of her, and I was wicked until seven or eight. It's strange that I stopped being punished when my sister was born, or maybe it isn't. She never hit my sister, who seemed always wicked.
The doctor I saw after my blood test was nice. She wore the lab coat that was standard at the Student Clinic, a shiny frog pin on the lapel. Her hair was not short, not long, but was that cut and color of brown that applies to most suburban women her age. Her stethoscope dangled around her neck. I had always thought doctors kept them in the fridge. I almost liked her.
"Why did you think you needed to see someone?" She held her pen at the ready, her pad on her lap.
Her office seemed typical of her profession, sterile but with lame attempts at reaching out. Perhaps posters lined the walls, I'm sure they did but I took no real notice of their messages. There was a kitten hanging from a branch, desperately trying not to fall. You never knew what was under that cat, and I had always wondered who had left the animal there to hang in the first place.
I fingered the nubbies on the wooly chair; already she was looking at me. As if she were trying to see through me. "I've been having trouble sleeping, well, I'm tired all the time. But I sleep a lot. Just not at night, naps and stuff."
She sat in chair across from me, unlike mine it swiveled and reclined. I sat stiffly in my scratchy chair, knowing that I wouldn't start squirming until she pinned me like a bug with questions.
"Umhm. And why do you think that is?"
"Uh, I don't know, stress?" I plucked at the balding chair.
"Do you think you are stressed?" I saw her write something, maybe a word.
"I guess. At times."
I started to toss the lint slyly to the side but stopped myself, afraid she would see. I instead put the clumps under my right leg to hide them.
"Umhm. And when did this all start?"
"I think it got really bad after Thanksgiving." I didn't like her looking at me. How could she write when she's looking at me?
"Your form says that your father is an alcoholic, does he still drink?"
I stopped fretting at the chair and picked up a pencil. I twirled it like a drumstick, like the Iceman, Val Kilmer, twirls quarters in Top Gun.
"No, he had to give it up. I don't think he's drinking. He can't."
"Umhm."
"I really don't think they allow that in rehab."
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Sometimes, when my parents were still together, my sister would be downstairs, and I could hide in my room and read. Movement outside, a bird maybe, would sometimes distract me. Once, I wondered whether or not a fall from my window would kill me, or would I spend my life in a wheelchair? I didn't want that. I had a friend who was in a chair. I thought she smelled like pee and rubber. I liked her well enough, actually, she was my best friend, but I couldn't bear the thought of anybody helping me go to the bathroom.
In between pages, I was looking out the window, and I saw that one of the bushes in the front yard, the ones that were there when we moved in, had a limb that was almost broken off, it was just hanging there, halfway off the bush. I went back to my book, but I just couldn't seem to make connections with the paragraph I was reading and the one that went before, I decided to cut the branch. Recalling that yard work is always somewhat of an ignored chore around my house, I figured the clippers had probably rusted.
I left my book lying flat on its open pages, the due dates so close to each other from repeated checkouts that I figured I should just go ahead and buy the book. My bare feet picked up the dust from the unfinished wood floors and I gingerly walked down the stairs. I even managed to avoid the trick step that day.
The toolbox was a large chest on the porch. My parents bought it at the fair, which is held across the street every year. They got it as a package deal, with the rest of the porch furniture.
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I had a picture of me with my father on the porch that I kept upstairs in my father's house. In the picture, I am young, I don't think I look like myself. His skin is sunburned red, not yellow like it is now. We were listening to the bluegrass playing across the street at the Community Center Gazebo and eating barbeque, which was on my face and fingers, but my dad still has his arm around me. You can see the toolbox in the left bottom corner. I wondered if there was a bottle in it then. Probably not, my father was holding his drink as well in the picture, a large one, rather openly. He was a very social drinker, and of course every occasion was social.
The week the picture was taken we went to the same Chinese restaurant we always visited, we only stopped going when my parents separated. Actually, about a year before, as the restaurant was found serving animals not usually on American menus. My father read in the paper that the owners claimed that they never served cats to customers, they cooked them for themselves.
My father would always let me order his drink for him.
"A double vodka martini, very dry and with a twist." My father would smile at me from across the table and order me a Shirley Temple.
I later learned that this meant with a lemon, but the bartender at The Hawaiian always put in an olive. Before he drank it, he would give me the olive. I would eat it, burning and sour and bitter, but I still wanted it. My father said it was an acquired taste.
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I opened the tool chest, hoping to find the clippers there so I could cut the branch and hurry back to my book. The bottle in the chest was about half empty. I have to admit it was a good hiding place. It was a fairly recent thing then, I guess, this hiding, and I'm sure that my father resented it. He had fulfilled his part of the bargain, a home, food, and clothes. My mother wanted him to give up his favorite pastime when he had so obviously earned it.
I debated telling my mother about it, I had already shown her the bottles in the pantry. By then I was spending a lot more time in the pantry, but I didn't do a lot of gardening. My father remarked that a girl my age, who wasn't dating and didn't have a boyfriend in his day, had something wrong with her, and the pantry was what was wrong with me.
Or so my mother said he told me. She said he was cruel, but I just don't remember many of those occasions. My mother said it was his "problem", and I can remember the booze, because I would find bottles of it squirreled around the house. And now outside.
There was a gas station not far from my home, I could walk there and back before he woke up. How much for half a bottle of gas? I sniffed the vodka. It smelled like paint thinner, I thought he might not notice the difference. I wondered if he would speak of it to my mother, would he blame her? No, he would not mention it. I put the bottle back, walked off the porch and ripped the hanging branch off with my hands. There was fur stuck to the bush where the branch had been.
Inside, my father noticed that I was bleeding. He gestured towards the kitchen with his glass, where my mother was. I could go to her if I was hurting. I realized that my father would never sit with his arm around me anymore, but that he would always have a drink in his hand.
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I rubbed the back of my hand on the chair. "My dad's work made him go to rehab last month. Or he'd have to quit. Well, they'd make him retire."
"How did his going into AA make you feel?" I think she was drawing instead of writing; it didn't look like she was writing.
"I don't think I care about that. He made his decisions. My mom gave him a choice."
"How did their divorce make you feel?"
"I was fine with it. I had been telling my mom to leave him for a long time by then. I was always talking back to my dad. I was the only one."
"Why do you think that was?" A very annoying doctor.
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My father was making fun of me again.
"I don't see why you're not going to the dance. You never go out."
I was sitting under the sink in the kitchen radiator cupboard. The cats would sleep in there when it was cold and during thunderstorms. It was starting to get uncomfortably snug, but I refused to give up the seat that let me be underfoot and still out of mom's way. My father towered over me. The ice clinked in his glass.
"They're stupid. Nobody dances and I don't like the music. All the stupid girls go cry in the bathroom because their boyfriends always dump them. Besides, Loree and Christina can't come, and I wanted to have them spend the night instead."
"When I was young, I always went to the dances! You're never going to meet people if you don't go out." He spread out his arms, the tinkle of ice. "You won't have any friends."
I looked for my mother, but she was setting the table in the dining room.
"I have friends, I don't like the people who go to the dances. They're stupid snobs. They don't even talk to me." The radiator was digging into my back and I shifted in the cupboard.
"You have 'friends'. A fat girl and a cripple. Some friends."
For some reason, I finally got sick of him. Here was a man with no outside contacts. He never did anything and he didn't have any friends. And he was making fun of mine. I had never stood up for myself, but I couldn't let him tear apart my friends. I jumped up, hitting my back on the counter.
"You're fatter than Christina. Your stomach sticks out so much you look pregnant. So just shut up!" I got ready to storm out.
He said nothing. But the grip on his glass tightened, and his red face turned purple. My mother was in the doorway, looking stunned, and as I tried to push past her my father reached out and gripped my shoulder tightly with his free hand. I looked back at him, into his eyes.
"Screw you, Dad." I thought he was going to hit me. His grip tightened, but then he let me go.
"Go to your room."
My mother later came up to tell me I was grounded for a week. My father probably made a mistake by not punishing me harshly. I didn't go to the dance.
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"I was happy when my mom left. She met this great guy who's now my stepfather. He's really cool. We get along really well."
"Do you see your father very often?" Doctors always concentrate on him.
"No, I don't like visiting him. It's depressing. He looks so old. And he's got no friends and nothing to do." I kicked at the floor. "My family always guilts me into seeing him."
"And how do you feel about that?"
I rolled my eyes. "I hate it. I don't owe him anything."
She looked at my face. "Umhm."
"And now he's probably dying."
She nodded. And scribbled.
"Let him die. He drank his grave, let him stew in his own gravy."
"But it seems to be making you upset?"
I looked at the floor and rubbed my temples. I wished I hadn't used up all my chair lint.
"He made me hate myself. And anyone who knows me knows how I cut myself down. But I hate him, too."
"Why do you hate yourself?"
I spread my arms out. "Well, just look at me!"
She was quick to disagree. "You're a very pretty girl." She put her hand on mine.
"My father was right about my looks. I am not a winner."
"Now, that's not true. And besides, being an interesting person is more important anyway."
I was almost crying. "Oh, I have such a greaaaat 'personality'." She was finally listening to me, had stopped answering me with more questions.
I would not cry. I would not come back after this visit. I didn't deserve the comfort that she believed in.
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Shortly before my mother left him, my father's fits of temper would flare up for the most trivial of reasons. I had long since learned to stand up to my father, and in a way I think that he feared my ability to do so, as if my strength was a preview of what was to come with my mother. But, like my father, I also possessed a violent temper and he and I would rage at each other, always trying to push back harder than the other.
My sister and I shared a room, and before her second year, we had shared a bed. When my parents finally got tired of hearing me complain about rolling over on the cold spots when she wet the bed, they bought us identical, white daybeds. They were a package deal. Underneath both beds was a trundle bed, which my mother told me could be pulled out to use as a "whole 'nother bed!" What my parents didn't realize was that the room was so small that there was no conceivable way of pulling out one of the trundles without removing the other bed. So the trundle beds just stayed underneath, their mattresses wrapped in the original plastic. Except for my sister's, which would have to be rotated sometimes, because she didn't like rolling over on the cold spot either.
The year before my parents split, I decided to reorganize my room. The first thing to go would be my trundle bed, I wanted the storage space.
The mattress was covered with a layer of dust, and I was soon coated with it as I dragged it down two flights of stairs to the basement. My father noticed me when I dragged it in front of the TV.
"Where you think you're taking that thing?"
"I was gonna put it in the basement, it's taking up space in my room."
"You're not putting it down there, it'll get ruined." He still sat on the sofa, looking around the mattress to the game on TV.
"It'll be fine. It's still in plastic." Our basement was not finished, and would flood occasionally.
"Just keep it off the floor."
"Well, duh." I quickly pulled the mattress from in front of the TV and he went back to his game.
I went back to my room for the metal trundle, but found moving it to be difficult. I got it to the top of the stairs and couldn't move it down the flight of stairs to the first floor. My father must have heard the noise.
"What the Hell are you doing now?" He was looking up at me as I struggled to keep the trundle from sliding.
"Well, I can't use the space if this metal thing is there!"
He shook his head and went back downstairs. He returned without his drink, I hadn't noticed he had one until he put it away. My father grabbed the other end of the bed roughly and started pulling it forward. I almost dropped my end.
"Watch it, dammit, you'll make me drop it!"
"Don't you swear at me, I'm trying to help!" He started pulling again.
"You're screwing it up!" He was so useless.
"Don't make me come over there!" He pushed his glasses up with his free hand.
I laughed at the idea of him trying to crawl over the trundle. He started towards me.
"You even touch me, and I'll kill you."
"No, I'll kill you." It was the first time my father had threatened me in awhile.
I looked at him, straight in the eyes.
"I don't think so." I made a pushing motion with the bed and he wobbled on the steps. "Higher ground."
My father looked scared, upset. He looked away quickly.
"Let's just hurry up." He waited for me to move the bed first.
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I had a dog once. Well, I had two dogs. But Ivanhoe came later. We got Harry from the priest at St. John's Church when he left. We were good Catholics; we didn't miss mass. My mother and I sang in the choir. My brother was an altar boy, though the only thing he ever really did religiously was smoke pot. My father taught bible school on Sundays. But I never read anything in the bible that said, "Thou shalt look after Father Murphy's dog." No one said anything about it. Still, Harry was a sweet dog; she liked everybody. Golden Retrievers are usually nice.
One day there was a tornado warning out, but I didn't know until later because we didn't have power, the storm had already knocked it out. There wasn't any rain, but I remembered that Harry was tied up to the doghouse out back. So, I set out to get her. My mom stopped me on my way through the kitchen.
"Stay in the house." she said, putting her arm in front of me. "I don't like the looks of the storm."
"What about Harry?"
"Harry will be fine in the doghouse, it's new."
I didn't like how she looked.
She nodded towards the back door. "She'll just stay in there. I'll get her after I settle Becky down."
She went to go take care of my sister, who was crying because her Gumby or My Little Pony or Care Bear crap wasn't on because the power was out. And I walked out the door. The skies opened up, and a sheet of rain came down so hard that I could hear the grass flatten. I ran to get the dog and suddenly I was drowning in rainwater. It was being blown by the wind, actually going up my nose. The wind started pushing me, and I almost fell.
I couldn't really see, but I could hear Harry barking. She hated thunderstorms. She would usually sit in the corner, breathing heavily and steaming off the wallpaper, crying for hours. I knew she was terrified. I don't remember much about the scramble back to the house; Harry practically dragged me with the leash. It burned my hands and I let go, but we both made it.
I had never seen my mother so furious.
"What were you thinking?" She looked terrified. My sister and my brother were crying because of her panic.
"Don't you know you could have been-- you could have gotten hurt!" She looked nervously at the storm, which was leaving as quickly as it had come. My punishment was drying the dog. Harry couldn't stop licking my face, it was the first time she had done so in a long time.
I later heard my mother speaking to my father about her side of the incident when he got home from work. When I had gone outside and the wind and rain started she heard a huge noise and then the maple in the front yard was ripped from its roots and thrown across the front lawn.
She had run for the basement with my brother and sister when she noticed I had gone out to get the dog. She was yelling for me, but I didn't even hear it. When I reached the dog, untied her, and started running back to the house, my mother saw one of the trees in the backyard behind me get split by lightning. She said she had never been so scared, and then she saw whole branches being thrown through the air around me. But, I didn't have a scratch on me. The only thing that touched me was water. After the storm, people took pictures of our house. The tornado had gone right through the yard, and had just missed me; our creek had flooded twenty feet up the bank by the end of the day.
My father said it was a stupid thing to do. That was before I stood up to him.
My dog trusted me completely after that. So years later, when we took her to the vet to get euthanized, I got to go. She was so happy to go on a trip with me. Harry trusted me. I hated myself for that. Because I was glad for the end of the stinky doghouse, the seasonal flea infestations, her chronic skin problems, her tumors, her getting old while I watched. Her loving me, making me love her, and then watching her die.
Doctors always think they know someone. But they don't listen. Doctors always think it is about you, they don't understand that some bad things have to happen. They always look in your eyes for some hint of weakness that will magically present the answers and they don't really pay attention to the words, which are usually answer enough. And they always ask me the same questions.
"I think we should focus on your negative self-image." The doctor had turned me off again.
"I am ugly, it does not matter." I had reached my own conclusions, without her.
"You're a very pretty girl, and it really is the inside that counts." She nodded her head and leaned towards me.
I shifted in my chair.
"I had a dog once. I took her inside in a storm. Before the storm, Harry had feared me. My father would make me clean up her shit and I would walk back and forth over an acre of yard looking for dog poop, and I hated it. If he ever stepped in any crap, I would catch Hell for it. And he would make me walk her, and she would always drag me. Once, I fell and ripped up my knee, I still have the scar where the rock came out. She would never listen to me, she was a stupid dog. People and animals never remember anything unless something bad happens. One day my dad yelled at me to walk her. Ha, the bastard yelled at me everyday for something."
"Anyway, then I had to go take stupid Harry to go do her fucking, pardon my French, business, and watch her crap all over the yard. I walked her back past the tree that would be split by lightning in several months, towards the creek that would swell dangerously during the storm. She saw a rabbit and tried to run after it, dragging me and her leash burned my hand."
"I can't really say what I was thinking when I threw her leash over a low hanging branch and lifted her off the ground until she whimpered. I did this a few more times. I really don't think that I WAS thinking at all. But she didn't drag me on the way back."
"I would do this once or twice a week. I wouldn't set out to do it, somehow we would just end up at that tree. After awhile she even started heading for it, as if it was necessary and she really just wanted to get it over with. I saw the fear she had for me, and how grateful she was when I stopped."
"I suppose it could have gone on. Maybe I wouldn't have done such a 'stupid thing' later during the storm if I had never stopped hurting her. But one day, a neighbor caught me. She yelled at me and threatened to tell my parents. I ran back to the house, feeling ashamed. Was I ashamed because I had a conscience or because I got caught? After that, when Harry would head for the tree, I would direct her elsewhere. I never hurt her again, but when I would reach out to her for anything, she would flinch and I would see the fear and only the fear. It made me miss hurting my dog."
The doctor opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She had nothing to say. I sometimes think that we're ugly on the inside.
I got up to leave. "Now, doctor, how does that make you feel?"