Part 2 (2/2)

VII.

In the morning, I'd fold up my bed and put it away. On those days and nights when my father didn't come home, we didn't need the s.p.a.ce in the kitchen for breakfast or dinner, so we didn't put my bed away. I'd make it without a wrinkle, the pillow placed carefully on top, and it would stay in the little s.p.a.ce under the window.

Maybe the black phone had rung saying he'd be late. Or maybe she had put him out.

I didn't know how they slept in the same bed because they never touched. Once, I saw them kiss. Maybe it was her birthday or Mother's Day. They blushed when they saw I saw them.

VIII.

Those caught in such a vicious abuse-reactive cycle will not only continue to expose the animals they love to suffering merely to prove that they themselves can no longer be hurt, but they are also given to testing the boundaries of their own desensitization through various acts of self-mutilation. In short, such children can only achieve a sense of safety and empowerment by inflicting pain and suffering on themselves and others.

-Charles Siebert, ”The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome” New York Times Magazine, June 11, 2010 I am trying to get as close as possible to the place in me where the change occurred: I had to take that voice in, become my father, the judge referred to before any dangerous self-a.s.sertion, any thought or feeling. I happened in reverse: My body took in the pummeling actions, which went down into my core. I ask myself first, before any love or joy or pa.s.sion, anything that might grow from me: ”Who do you think you are?” I suppress the possibilities.

IX.

My mother used the small inheritance she received from her mother to put my father through embalming school. He moved to Chicago for the few months of training at Worsham, the college for black undertakers. She hoped to raise us up-her mother had been a cook-to become an undertaker's wife, one of the highest positions of black society. But when he came back from the school, my father wouldn't take the mean five dollars a week his stepfather offered him to apprentice. He wouldn't swallow his pride. He also wouldn't take jobs offered by his stepfather's compet.i.tors. That too was a matter of pride, not to sell out the family name.

My father never did practice undertaking for a living. Though sometimes, when I was young, friends would ask him to embalm someone they loved and my father would acquiesce. He would enter the embalming room at Webster's Funeral Home, put on the robe, take up the tools, and his stepfather would step back. His reputation grew in this way. People who saw the bodies he had worked on-especially the body of the beautiful and wealthy Elsie Roxborough, who died by her own hand and was buried in a head-to-foot gla.s.s casket like Sleeping Beauty-marveled at his art and agreed he had the best touch of anyone.

People praised him for conducting the most elegant service; for knowing exactly what to say to comfort the bereaved, for holding their arms and escorting them to the first funeral car, for convincing those who needed to cry that it was all right, yet knowing too how to quiet them so there were no embarra.s.sing ”shows.”

My father knew the workings of the heart; that's why so many people-my grandmother; his stepfather; and even his best friend Rad, whose heart he had crushed-loved him even after he let them down completely and many times, even after he abandoned them or did the meanest things. My father was with each of them, holding their hands, when they died. My handsome, charming father, the ultimate lover, the ultimate knower of the heart.

X.

My father knew all about the body. He had learned in embalming school. For a while after his mother died, he stopped smoking and drinking and came home at night. He'd get out the huge leather-bound dictionary (Webster's -the same as our last name!) that my grandmother had given him when he graduated. He would open it to a picture of the bones in the middle of the book, which had three see-through overlays: on the first, the blue muscles; on the second, the red blood vessels; and finally, on the third, the white nerves.

He loved the body, loved knowing how things worked. He taught me the longest name of a muscle, the sternocleidomastoid, a cradle or hammock that was strung between the sternum and mastoid. He'd amaze me with long, multisyllabic words; then he'd test me on the spelling.

My father always explained. He always showed me the little smear on the plate that I had set to drain before he'd make me do all the dishes over again. He'd explain how he had studied hard so he knew where to hit me and not leave a single mark. He'd brag about it. He wanted me to appreciate the quality of his work. Like any good teacher, he wanted to pa.s.s it down.

XI.

During the summer when my mother and aunt were cleaning and wanted me out of the house, I would go out to the side of the house with a fly swatter and command the flies not to land on my wall. There were hundreds of flies, and though I told them not to, they continued to land. I don't think I said it out loud. I think I said it-screamed it, really-in my mind. Sometimes I believed that the things in the world heard your thoughts, the way G.o.d heard your prayers. When I was very young, not even out of my crib, I'd ask the shades to blow a certain way to prove they had heard me.

The flies were disobeying me. Whenever one landed, I would go after it with the fly swatter. I was furious that they would do what I had commanded them not to. I knew they understood, or would understand finally. I killed tens, hundreds-didn't they see?-but they wouldn't stop.

I knew I was murderous, and yet, was it murder to kill flies? My aunt and mother never stopped me.

XII.

Before my grandmother died, when I was ten, she had three dogs. Each had a short life. Patsy was the ”good” dog, who died of a chicken bone in her stomach, and Smokey was the ”bad” dog who growled at people and would jump over the second-story banister on the porch and walk around on the outside of the rail. When my grandmother and grandfather were downstairs in the undertaking parlor, they would leave me alone with Smokey. I was about seven, and I had learned the voice the nuns used to say cruel things to the children who were slow. Sometimes the nuns. .h.i.t those children over the knuckles with a ruler, but mostly they just humiliated them, made them sit in the back and never called on them to do errands. I tried to teach Smokey to stay behind the gate to the pantry. I would open the gate and tell him to stay, and when he went out in the kitchen, I'd hit him with his leash. I believe I hit him hard, maybe as hard as my father hit me. I wanted to feel that power.

I did this two, three, or four times, and though it seems impossible that my grandparents didn't know, no one stopped me. One time I came over, and my grandmother said Smokey had escaped, jumped over the second-story banister to the street, and didn't die but ran away. He was never seen again. Was he that desperate to get away? I felt sad and responsible. I felt glad.

XIII.

I was nine when we moved to a bigger apartment on the first floor. Now my father had only one flight to carry me up by my hair. He didn't mind going public-the stairs were right in the lobby-but he refused to allow me to scream in terror when he grabbed me. Not because he was afraid people would see. My screaming made him furious because I knew he was only going to carry me up the stairs and scream at me, only beat me on the thighs and calves (where it wouldn't show), and only until I made every look of pain, confusion, and fury disappear from my face. He knew I knew that. So what was all that broadcasting, as if something really bad was going to happen, as if he was going to kill me?

XIV.

Life is something you have to get used to: what is normal in a house, the bottom line, what is taken for granted. I always had good food. Our house was clean. My mother was tired and sad most of the time. My mother spent most of her day cleaning.

We had a kitchen with a little dining s.p.a.ce, a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and two halls, one that led to the bathroom and the bedroom and one that led to the front door. There was a linen closet in the hall between the bedroom and the bathroom. My books and toys all went into a drawer that I had to straighten every Sat.u.r.day. There was a closet in the bedroom for my mother's clothes, a closet in the front hall for my father's, and a closet off the living room that held my mother's bed.

It was a huge metal apparatus that somehow swept out on a hinge. I can't imagine how my mother and I, as small as we were, brought it out and put it back every night and every morning, for my father was hardly ever there. We just grabbed on, exerted a little force, and pulled it straight toward us. It seemed to glide by itself, swinging outward around the corner; then it would stand up, rocking, balancing, until we pulled it down.

XV.

My father and I shared the small bedroom, and my mother slept on the pullout in the living room so that she wouldn't wake us when she got dressed in the morning to go to her new job. We slept in twin beds she had bought us, pushed up close together.

I had special things given to me, special things she paid for: the expensive toys I got for Christmas that took a whole year to pay for and the clothes I wore from Himelhoch's while my mother wore an old plaid coat for eleven years. Now I was a big girl moving from a little cot in the kitchen to my own bed in a bedroom. My father and I always got the best.

XVI.

My mother shopped after work every Thursday, so my father would come home and fix dinner for me. He'd stop at Fadell's Market and get a big steak with a bone in it. He'd bring it home and unwrap the brown paper, slowly, savoring one corner at a time, like someone doing a striptease or opening a trove of stolen diamonds. He'd brag about how much money he had spent. He'd broil it right up next to the flame, spattering grease, fire, and smoke, only a couple of minutes on each side, cooked still b.l.o.o.d.y, nearly raw, the way we liked it, he said-different from my mother. He'd say he liked it just knocked over the head with a hammer and dragged over a hot skillet. His eyebrows would go wild, and he'd rub his hands together like a fly.

XVII.

Once my father took me to the movies. We walked downtown to the Fox Theater on one unusually warm Thursday evening during my Christmas vacation to see Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary's. My father frequently promised things he didn't deliver, like the time he promised to come home and pray the family rosary every night for a week when I carried the huge statue of the Virgin home in a box as big as a violin case. He never came home once. When I turned the Virgin back in at school, I had to lie to the nun. After that, I rarely asked for anything. But going to the movies was his idea.

I was never happier than when I was with my father and he was in a good mood. He liked to tease me and make me laugh. He was so handsome that I felt proud when people noticed us. I thought they were thinking that my father really enjoyed me, that I was a very special girl. I acted like a special girl, happy and pretty, until I almost believed it. I had dressed up, and we stopped for a Coney Island and caramel corn, which were his favorites.

XVIII.

By this time, my father didn't come home most nights. Sometimes he and my mother wouldn't speak to each other for months. Sometimes they wouldn't even speak to me when we were in the house together, as if we had to be quiet, like in a church, and respect their hatred for each other.

My father thought I hated him like my mother did or else he didn't think I was worth talking to, for he'd often go months without speaking even when we were in the house alone.

I tried to make him change. I'd make up special names like ”D-dats.” ”Hi, D-dats,” I'd meet him at the door when he came home at night. I knew he liked to feel young and hip. I'd make my voice happy. I actually was happy when I was with him-I had to be! He could see inside me. He could tell my moods. My unhappiness blamed him.

Maybe all that silence and beating was because he thought n.o.body loved him, not my mother and not his mother. He told me how his mother had knocked him down when he was a grown man. He told me how my mother always picked up his ashtrays to wash them as soon as he put his cigarette out. I tried to make him feel loved. Sometimes we played ”Step on a crack you break your mother's back” when we were coming home from his mother's house, the two of us in cahoots.

XIX.

Once, when I was ten or eleven, he came home for lunch, and I asked him if I could dance for him. I had seen Rita Hayworth dance the Dance of the Seven Veils. I had stayed home sick and practiced. I liked to dance on the bed so I could see myself in my mother's dressing table mirror.

I wore old see-through curtains and my mother's jewelry on my head like a crown. I must have had something underneath for I knew some things mustn't show. I thought maybe if he saw I was almost a woman and could do what beautiful women do, he might find a reason to love me.

At the end, I spun around and around until most of the drapes, towels, and my mother's nightgown fell to the floor. I don't remember what remained to cover me.

XX.

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