A Veritable Household Pet, page 10
So, it was no surprise that Mrs. Knowles hadn’t called a doctor for Darla, or the police, or even a social worker, although Mother certainly believed she’d told just about everyone else in our neighborhood. Not that I wanted yet another person meddling in our lives (I was a product of my generation, after all), but I can’t help thinking Darla’s life would have been better outside of that house. Maybe I’m naive—in fact, I’m sure I am—but at the time, I saw Mrs. Knowles’ inaction as a failure. Yes, Darla needed tutoring, but she needed medical attention even more. If medicine had made her this way, then medicine should be able to undo it.
As I said, I was naive. I know better now.]
Mrs. Knowles started coming over most mornings, while Ma was sleeping in her room. They never spoke to each other, as far as I could tell.
It started getting hot outside, and my days took on a new pattern. When I woke up, I walked into the kitchen and got a piece of bread from the breadbox, then put some jelly on it. Ellie would usually come into the kitchen, too, and sometimes whisper-shout at me for leaving the fridge door open again. I ate my bread and jelly at the table, and it was just fine. I wasn’t allowed to use the toaster, Ellie said it was too dangerous, and she said I was only allowed to have one piece of bread. She poured me a glass of milk when we had it, water when we didn’t. She sat at the table with me, drinking coffee that smelled like the cleaning wipes they used on me in the hospital. [Scribe’s note: What can I say? I like my coffee black. Plus, if there was any milk in the fridge, Darla needed it more than I did. That summer, I focused mostly on rereading the texts I’d been neglecting for the previous year, a sort of self-directed course correction that I so desperately needed.]
Most mornings, Ellie would open up her schoolbooks and study at the table with me. She’d get annoyed if I asked questions, so I tried really hard to stay quiet. Her textbooks were full of diagrams I couldn’t understand and words I didn’t know. I tried to sound them out in my head, but nothing worked. One time, I accidentally tried to sound out a word with my mouth, and I ended up spraying bread-and-jelly crumbs all over Ellie’s books. She didn’t yell at me, like I expected her to, but she did stare at me, looking like she was about to cry. That was worse.
After Ellie left for the library, I would do my best to comb my hair and get dressed so I could be presentable for Mrs. Knowles. I had trouble with the buttons on my blouses, and my hair was always flat on one side, but Mrs. Knowles didn’t seem to care. She’d come into the house without knocking and bring me from my room into the kitchen, where we’d sit at the table and she’d help me read, or try to do my numbers, or color a picture inside the lines with big fat crayons. I liked Mrs. Knowles, and I was grateful for her help, but I missed Ellie—especially when we sat at the kitchen table, Mrs. Knowles squatting in Ellie’s chair.
I was no good at numbers. Mrs. Knowles tried every day, and she never lost patience with me, even when I told her the numbers made no sense. Eventually, we stopped trying, and she helped me get better at the things I could do, like read and color.
Writing was another story. I managed to tell Mrs. Knowles that I wanted to write a diary, and she smiled at me. “I’m sure you’ve got quite the story to tell!” I didn’t really know what she meant by that, but I nodded anyway. The next day, she brought me a clean composition book and a box of sharpened pencils.
“Let’s get started,” she said.
Weeks, maybe months, went by. It got hotter, and then the weather got better again. Ellie started back to school. Every day except weekends, Mrs. Knowles sat with me in the kitchen, moving my hand, pointing at letters, helping me trace—doing everything she could think of to help me do what I wanted to do.
Even after those long months of work, I couldn’t really write anything readable. The few letters I could force my hand to make looked like a toddler’s, and even though I could read okay, spelling on my own was another matter.
Mrs. Knowles never gave up on me, though, even when I gave up on myself.
[Scribe’s note: I was devastated when Mrs. Knowles couldn’t help Darla with writing. I thought, for sure, with the focused attention and patience Mrs. Knowles could provide, Darla would surely make leaps and bounds, more progress than I could ever hope for. Darla did get better at reading and her fine motor skills improved, but writing was still beyond her. If Mrs. Knowles couldn’t help her, then, yet again, I resigned myself to the patent fact that Darla was simply beyond help.]
After lessons, Mrs. Knowles would fix me lunch. Sometimes it was leftovers from her dinner, usually tasty things like meatloaf or brisket and mashed potatoes. Once in a while she brought a slice of pie, but I could tell it troubled her to see me have a hard time eating the gooey stuff on my own. She’d wipe my mouth and tuck my napkin into my collar, and she’d tell me stories while I ate. Most of the stories were fairy tales, and as I chewed my chicken casserole or spooned peas into my mouth, I’d dream I was a part of a fairy tale, and that the life I was living now was just the moment before my prince took me away and we lived happily ever after.
Mrs. Knowles left after lunchtime, after cleaning the kitchen so there’d be no extra work for Ma. Ma would usually come out of her bedroom around that time, her hair tangled and her eyes dark. She wouldn’t usually talk to me, but if she did, it sounded more like she was talking to herself. She’d say things like “Uppity bitch,” or “She doesn’t think I can take care of my own children.” If Ma was in a talkative mood, I’d stay to listen, even though she didn’t seem to care or even know if I was there or not. If she was quiet, I’d go back to my room and take a nap.
Ellie started getting home from school later and later. Usually, there was no time to visit. She’d just come into the kitchen and start making dinner. Her cooking wasn’t nearly as tasty as Mrs. Knowles’s, and the one time I told her that, she threw a plate of watery macaroni on the floor. It broke into a million tiny sharp pieces, and Ellie spent the rest of the evening picking them up. We went to bed without food that night.
[Scribe’s note: With Mrs. Knowles teaching Darla, however slow or nonexistent their progress was, I rededicated myself to my schoolwork. After a summer of studying and languishing in the empty library, I was ready to hit the ground running in the new school year. Mother’s trajectory in life had plateaued at a very low point, and I knew I would never be able to rely on her to function as a safety net or a security blanket in any sense. After my scare with the Thorazine, I wanted nothing more than to understand what had happened to me. It fascinated and repelled me, but my fascination won out. If I was going to make something of myself, and have a bigger life than Mother’s, with even the smallest scrap of happiness given the shitty hand I’d been dealt, I knew I’d have to rely on my own intelligence and grit, both of which I had in spades.
I put my head down, tried to ignore the evil jokes my classmates continued to make at my expense, and studied as hard as I could. I stayed after school to work in the library, where it was quiet and nobody needed me. I could escape there in a way I never could at home.
When I did open our front door and enter our dreary house, Darla was usually waiting for me at the kitchen table like a loyal puppy dog. I felt more like a working mother than her sister; I went right into preparing dinner. Darla’s not wrong, I was no cook—I’m still not, as I’m sure you know. Food didn’t need to taste good, it just needed to keep us alive for another day. The day I broke the plate, I’d endured one of the worst days of bullying yet—Trudy Winthrop had stuck a ‘Spit on Me’ sign to my back, and I didn’t realize until the day was over and I was scratching my shoulder blade in the library and felt something crinkling. As a result, I had spent the entire school day dodging loogies, mostly unsuccessfully. I was at my wit’s end by the time I came home, and when Darla told me I was a shoddy cook, I’d had more than I could take, so I exploded. Who can really blame me? I didn’t hurt anybody, after all.]
When Mrs. Knowles wasn’t with me, I was trying to study on my own, like I watched Ellie do every day. After dinner, Ellie would take her books into her room, and sometimes, if I was quiet, she would let me sit on the floor next to her bed and try to read my own books. What Mrs. Knowles brought me from her home wasn’t nearly as exciting as Go Ask Alice, but I made do with things like Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and Bridge to Terabithia. Ellie snorted when she saw the Margaret book, and when I asked her why, she just shrugged her shoulders and went back to staring at her textbook. [Scribe’s note: The book was absolutely absurd—it was all right there in the title. Hadn’t Darla lived long enough to see that God was not there, had never been there? Darla asked me if I wanted to read it, and it took all my strength to keep from slapping it to the floor.
A few weeks later, when Darla started asking me nonstop about her ‘changing body,’ I wondered if I should have read the book, after all, just to get an idea of what Darla had been absorbing. Really, what did Mrs. Knowles expect, giving Darla a story like that? She didn’t need those questions in her head, not yet.
Even as I say that, I know I was wrong, but I can’t change the past, I can only recount it, as painful as that is.]
I learned a lot from the Margaret book, and it made more sense to me even than the Alice book. I could understand Margaret, and I wondered mostly about the ‘changing body.’ I looked at Ellie whenever I could, and she had certainly changed, anybody with eyes could see that, even someone like me. But even though I could see it, I couldn’t understand it. Why did it happen? What did it mean? Would it happen to me? That last question is what bothered me the most, but when I asked Mrs. Knowles about it, she told me it was really a conversation I should have with my mother. When I asked again the next day, and the day after that, Mrs. Knowles finally told me that, as a girl, I would go through changes in my body that would make me a woman. She wouldn’t be more specific than that, so I had to ask Ellie.
“What’s going to happen to my body?” I asked one afternoon while we were sitting in Ellie’s room.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Am I going to look like you?”
Ellie paused and looked at me. “Maybe,” she said after a moment.
“I don’t understand,” I said, my mouth slow. I still struggled with long words, having to sound them out as slowly as possible to keep them from turning to mush on my tongue.
“You’ll look like me in that you’ll grow breasts, and you’ll probably get taller, and your armpits will grow hair, and so will your legs and other places, too. And your hips will get wider.”
I was stunned. I’d been different for so long, it was hard to wrap my mind around the idea that my body would go through something normal, just like everybody else.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
Ellie’s eyes shifted around before she answered. “No.”
[Scribe’s note: What was I supposed to tell her? That menstrual cramps are the gift of a sadistic god? That she’d bleed like a stuck pig every month, and she’d need to either insert a glorified cotton ball inside of herself or wrap her undercarriage in a pad no better than a child’s diaper, and if she failed to perform properly, she’d be subject to ridicule simply for undergoing a natural bodily experience? That her legs would grow furrier than a field mouse? That she’d start to stink, even without sweating, and would need to apply deodorant and perfume and makeup and fix her hair and wear pantyhose and smile all the time just to be accepted as a woman in this world? No, I think I made the right decision, even though I had to deal with the bloody aftermath.]
Mrs. Knowles was working through a history lesson with me in the kitchen when I knocked over a cup of water on accident. She jumped up to clean the spill, then refilled my cup and brought it back to me. There was something about the way the water dripped onto the linoleum—I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.
So I did it again. This time, I knocked the cup over on purpose, just so I could see the way the water fell to the floor.
“Now, Darla, that’s not very kind of you,” she said, pinching her eyebrows and shaking her head.
I had the odd sensation that I should feel upset with myself, but I simply wasn’t. I could understand that what I had done wasn’t necessarily good, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around why it wasn’t good.
When Mrs. Knowles refilled my cup for the second time and sat down again to talk about the French Revolution, I pushed the cup with one finger so slowly that Mrs. Knowles didn’t notice what I was doing until water splashed onto her leg.
“Darla!” she yelled. I cocked my head at her—she’d never yelled at me before, not really. Her voice was sharp, but it didn’t cut me. It didn’t even leave a scratch.
Mrs. Knowles stood up again, staring at me with that pinch between her eyebrows. “This is not acceptable, Darla,” she said. The water spot on her leg made it look like she had wet herself, and I started to giggle.
Mrs. Knowles scowled, which only made me laugh harder. She picked up her books and left the house without saying goodbye, leaving me alone in the kitchen, giggling to myself.
She didn’t come back for a few days. The next time I saw her, she handled me differently, like I was at arms’ length. She used a softer voice, but it was firmer. She sat farther away from me at the table. She never brought me water in a cup anymore, and she always looked at me out of the corner of her eye, like she was waiting for me to do something else she could call ‘not good.’ I don’t think she thought she should explain to me why something was good or not. Nobody did.
[Scribe’s note: Maybe you’ll say I should have stepped in, or checked in with Mrs. Knowles once in a while, but I no longer had the capacity for Darla and her needs. I tried not to worry about her so profusely once she had Mrs. Knowles to look out for her. Instead, I buried my head into my studies as if my life depended on it—because, in a way, it did. Nobody was going to help me out of the hellhole our lives had become except for me, and if I wanted to do that, I would need money. I was still young, but I was far less naive than someone my age probably should have been. I knew money ran the world, and the best way to get money outside of stealing it from someone else was to educate your way to it. I absorbed myself in homework, in papers and textbooks and lectures, and ignored the evil little goblins who sat around me in school, wanting me to fail. Whether it was their perpetual taunting or my own subconscious desire to live twice as hard since Darla could barely live at all, I pushed myself to excel, no matter the cost.]
Mrs. Knowles warmed back up to me, at least I think she did. When the leaves started changing color again, she even began taking me on little walks around the neighborhood. With her arm around my waist, we strolled slowly along the sidewalk. The cool breeze was nice, and I’d forgotten what the air smelled like.
The walks stopped suddenly, and when I asked Mrs. Knowles to take me outside, she just shook her head. I probably did something ‘not good,’ but I couldn’t fathom what it was. Like everything in my life, I accepted the change and we went back to studying indoors.
[Scribe’s note: Darla did nothing wrong. Mother had been at work one evening when a neighbor sat in her section and idly commented on how lovely it was to see her ‘other daughter’ out and about, how he’d thought she’d been sent away. I’ve no idea how Mother reacted in the moment, but when she came home, she was so furious she began throwing things against the wall in her bedroom. Miraculously, Darla slept through the commotion. I crept to Mother’s closed door to try to eavesdrop, but all I heard was the occasional sob and the glug of alcohol slipping down Mother’s throat.
Mother must have confronted Mrs. Knowles while I was at school, and I can imagine it was ugly. Fortunately for Darla (and, frankly, for me), it wasn’t ugly enough to scare Mrs. Knowles away for good, but it did bring a definitive end to the walks. Darla remained the dirty little secret Mother wanted to hide at all costs.]
Winter came, then spring, and things continued as they had. If there was a Christmas celebration, I don’t remember it. [Scribe’s note: There was not. On Christmas morning, Mother holed up in her room with a bottle of peppermint schnapps and didn’t come out until the following day. I made Darla pancakes, which she drooled her way through, most of the meal ending up in her lap. We watched television together until Darla fell asleep, then I went back to my own room to study.]
Mrs. Knowles was very patient with me, even when I did more things she said were ‘not good,’ like rip up a few pages from her books, or throw a spoonful of macaroni salad at the refrigerator, or rummage through her purse looking for candy.
I tried to tell myself it wasn’t such a bad life.
1974
Ma was not doing okay, even I could see that. [Scribe’s note: This is a major understatement. Mother had been regressing slowly ever since Darla’s surgery, then more quickly after Father’s suicide. Perhaps, if Father had stuck around longer, he might have been pleased with Darla’s recovery (sluggish though it was) and could have halted Mother’s decline.
After Mrs. Knowles’s introduction into our home, however, Mother gave up even the tiniest pretense of being a loving parent. I suppose she figured Mrs. Knowles would be spreading lies about her anyway, so why even bother to put on an act. I had to steal money from her purse to buy groceries at the corner store on my way home from the library. I don’t know what Mother ate; I assume she consumed her fill at her workplace, and supplemented the rest of her caloric needs with alcohol. Our garbage bags clinked with glass when I took them out to the curb.
