On the surface, it was an idyllic life start. But like passengers on the Titanic, I learned that the surface view can be a bitch of a liar.
The year I turned six I stole a book titled Make It Yourself from Mom’s book-club mailing. I expected my pocketknife to be the only tool needed to make the sweaters and turquoise afghan on the cover, so I was disappointed to learn about knitting needles and crochet hooks. I found a ball of white cotton string Dad used to mark vegetable rows in the garden. Then I eventually created makeshift knitting needles out of long, skinny paintbrushes and hid in the basement with them, terrified that I’d be caught while I followed the step-by-step pictures. I’d never seen a six-year-old knitting. I’d never seen anyone knitting. But in cartoons it was for wise old women in rocking chairs. Like staying up late to watch horror movies or drinking beer, knitting was not for children.
John caught me knitting and told Mom, who immediately bought me a set of emerald-green knitting needles and gave me a ball of orange yarn that had been her mother’s. A skinny child with knitting needles turns invisible in the shadowed corners of a room, so I spent a lot of time listening and thinking that fall of my first-grade year.
My grandma Laura, Mom’s mama, had just died, and our family dynamics had shifted. Mom was sad in an aching sort of way that I could see even when her back was to me. Her head was lower, curtaining her brown eyes with her long dark hair, and her shoulders slumped; but it was more than that, more than just the heaviness of grief pushing down. As she canned tomatoes that autumn over the old gas stove, every lift of her arm, every step from the stove to the sink was lighter, as though she were growing transparent and would soon float away to wherever her mama had gone.
From the dining-room table I kept watch through my clicking emerald needles, careful not to drop a stitch. The way the string looped, tied, and held everything together was soothing. I believed that if I could tie enough knots it would hold us all together.
First grade had put me in the same school as my brother, and that changed everything. It taught me to hide, to stay quiet, and it taught me to hate. Not the gentle you’re-not-my-friend hate of finicky first graders, but the real, vehement thing, ugly, dark, and lasting. The fullness of hate took me by surprise, since my mom was a fanatically religious woman who drove me to church three times a week and carried her Bible into the grocery store and on walks down deserted country roads. “You have to forgive no matter what,” she told me, “or you’ll burn in hell.”
Burning in hell sounded a lot less pleasant than snuggling up in front of our fireplace, but I couldn’t fully subscribe to the idea that my hate was wrong. Mom said even if the truck that had hit my brother and almost killed him that year would have actually taken him from us, she would have forgiven the man who was driving. God commanded that. I tried to be as light and good as she was and believe that suffering was all for a bigger purpose, for some plan, but I wanted a more immediate answer.
As luck would have it, Dad was an atheist. This was really convenient whenever I wanted to subscribe to an alternative view, but less than pleasant for the enormous weight of tension and disagreement between my polar-opposite parents. My childhood self most resembled a tightrope walker dodging projectiles. Every spoken word was up for debate, every activity; even my thoughts had to be weighed and weeded to a middle ground that I hoped might be acceptable to both. The atmosphere turned me into a listener, a thinker, and a careful negotiator.
But most of all, I became a dreamer, creating magical realms of Wisconsin winter igloos or summer forts that gave me an escape. And if I wasn’t able to sneak away to one of my hideouts, I availed myself of books. I read about aliens, elves, and unicorns; I spent several years believing I could develop telepathy followed by several more pretending I lived in Middle Earth. In the realms of my books, people understood one another at the end. Everyone compromised. Every problem was wrapped up nice and neat.
The endless conflict and my adopted role as negotiator had little to do with my discovery of hatred, though. I found that on the school bus and in the halls of Lemonweir Elementary School. Antibullying wasn’t a thing then. In fact, even teachers and bus drivers were bullies, and no one ever called them out for it. Maybe they had the idea that it was a way to toughen the weak, but I doubt it was anything so noble. Humans have traditionally picked on the weak to make themselves feel powerful, and there is nothing noble about that. In my mind, there is nothing forgivable about it either.
My brother was weak. He was small and his head was misshapen from a premature birth and a host of problems that went undiagnosed in those days. Getting hit by a truck while we played in a flooded, closed street had set him back even further, with a limp and less confidence. The poor kid never had a chance.
As we stepped on the bus every morning he was tripped, smacked in the head, spit at, and slammed against seats and windows. It was a ten-mile ride into school on gravel country roads. Ten miles turns out to be just the distance needed to destroy a small boy for good and take a decent chunk of his little sister along with him. The bus driver vacillated between ignoring the bullies and essentially joining them by punishing my puny brother for the disturbances. At one point she had a seat belt installed at the front of the bus to keep him safely seated; unfortunately it also served to hold him still for the poundings. There was no escape.
School was more of the same. I watched my brother’s face crack against the porcelain water fountain when he leaned in for a drink. I saw the torture on the playground and his fear of going into the bathroom, where anyone might be waiting. His glasses were continually broken by fists, feet, and flying books. He was sent to the office for punishment. He was a tiny, quiet problem.
And when we got home, the punishment continued, because his glasses were broken, because the school called again, because he might get kicked off the bus, or because he stole twenty dollars from my mom’s purse to try buying a friend for just one day of peace.
Mom was powerless, not allowed to own a car because it would take her to more religious activities. I was the smallest, skinniest kid in my class, too shy to speak, too weak to fight, a failure at the telekinetic powers I needed to attack the bullies.
The most important lessons I learned in school were how to be powerless, how to take a punch, and how to hate in silence. I learned that being a tattletale makes the bullies hit harder, and no one, not even your family, can save you.
–5–
Rise