A Veritable Household Pet, page 8
I was halfway to the sidewalk when I heard Ma. “You get back here this instant!” She was whispering, but it was also like a yell.
When I didn’t move, she ran over to me and grabbed my shoulder. “You get back inside. Now!”
She pulled me into the house, then slammed the door behind us and locked it. When we got back to my room, she took a sheet and tied my wrists to the bed. She only untied me later because we were going to have company, she said.
The next day, a man came to our house and changed my doorknob. My old one was shiny and clear, like a crystal. The new one was a too-bright brassy color, and there was a hole in the middle, on the outside. When he was done, he handed Ma a key and told her that should do it. He didn’t even look at me. Ma paid him and he left.
Ma closed the door, then I heard a clicking sound.
[Scribe’s note: In Mother’s words, Darla had made an ‘escape attempt’ and could have ‘seriously hurt herself.’ We were all so lucky that Mother ‘had been there’ and that she had ‘found Darla in time.’ She didn’t say it, but I knew Mother was terrified a neighbor had seen the daughter she’d supposedly sent away months ago. After Mrs. Knowles had spread the word about Father’s suicide (thank goodness Darla was unconscious among the bushes and therefore went largely unnoticed), Mother was far more afraid of becoming the topic of neighborhood gossip yet again than of anything harmful happening to Darla. If she’d had more foresight, she probably would have let Darla leave. If Mother was lucky, Darla would walk off into the sunset and never darken her doorstep again.
I’d seen Mother’s homemade restraints the day before when I came home from school, and I was shocked. It seemed barbaric, but then again, the entire process was barbaric. I didn’t protest too much when Mother told me shortly thereafter that Darla’s room was to be locked at all times, and that when she wasn’t home, it was my responsibility to listen for Darla and escort her to the bathroom as needed. Except for toileting, Darla was not to leave her room. At least she wouldn’t be restrained anymore.
I was Darla’s cook, her laundress, her groomer, her teacher, and now, Mother expected me to be her jailer, too.
As with the reading lessons, though, I didn’t listen. When Mother was gone, I left Darla’s door wide open.]
1972
Ellie came home from school one day and sat on the end of my bed. I’d just finished walking around the house, and I was sweaty and tired. Instead of reading to me, Ellie started talking, and I was so caught up in what she said that I forgot to close my mouth. Ellie didn’t miss a beat—she just closed my mouth for me and used my nightgown to wipe the drool from my chin. She was telling me all about her life at school, but instead of talking about all the good parts, like the nice teachers and the fun playground and what she was learning, she told me about the bad parts. About the way mean girls sneered at her and made fun of her clothes, or about how the teachers yelled at her for falling asleep in class, or about how the boys pulled her ponytail and told her Pa killed himself because he was so disappointed to have a daughter like her. It was horrible. For once, I was glad to be safe at home, where nobody could say such nasty things to me. When Ellie stopped, she started to cry. I put my hand on her shoulder and tried to tell her that everything would be alright, but the words didn’t come out quite the way I wanted. Ellie just cried harder, which made me nervous, because I hadn’t seen Ellie cry in ages, not even when Pa died.
[Scribe’s note: There was no single incident that broke my emotional dam. Maybe it was all of the feelings Go Ask Alice had kindled in me, combined with the wretched treatment I got from the vile miscreants at school. I’ve come to realize that children can be impossibly cruel—after all, who would berate a little girl who’d just lost her father? Who would make such a girl feel smaller than she already did? Even though I still longed for the same kind of love Anonymous was always going on about, I knew I would never want children of my own. They were just as apt to rip your heart out and eat it as they were to give you purpose and meaning. The only purpose and meaning Darla and I had given our parents was a reason to work and a reason to die. I didn’t like those outcomes.
I was tired of holding everything inside. I wanted to get it out, even if Darla didn’t comprehend what I was telling her. That would be better, actually.
It wasn’t until much, much later that I realized just how much Darla did understand. But by then, it was too late.]
Ellie reminded me a lot of Anonymous, how the kids at school were so mean to her, in so many different ways. I tried to remember a time kids had been mean to me, but I couldn’t. I wanted to believe there were good people out there, people who would be kind to me and Ellie. I was starting to understand that I was different, but not in the same way I’d been before. I still felt hollow, but it was starting to become a hollow ache, like hunger pains. I wasn’t sure what I hungered for, but I knew it wasn’t the life I was currently living. I wanted to tell Ellie all of this, but the words crowded on my tongue and pushed each other out in ways that didn’t make sense. Ellie was never mean to me about it, though. She smiled at me and never locked my door like Ma did. Ellie made me feel like a real person, not a dirty secret.
I started thinking about Anonymous’s diary, and how it was her only friend for awhile, the one thing she could talk to openly and honestly. One day, when Ellie was sitting on the edge of my bed, telling me about Pauline Akroyd’s new puppy, I managed to ask her something.
“Can I write?” I asked, and Ellie’s eyes opened wide.
“Well,” she said, “I think so?”
I wasn’t asking it the right way. I’d been able to write before the surgery. I tried again. “Can you help me?”
Ellie looked startled again, then she smiled. “Sure,” she said, and she hopped up from the bed and ran out of the room. A few minutes later she came back, carrying a pink notebook and a sharpened pencil. She handed them to me, then sat back down on my bed. I fluffed my pillows and scooched into a sitting position, then opened up the notebook.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t think of this before,” Ellie said. “Of course I should have tried to get you writing right away.”
I wanted to tell her it wasn’t her fault, nothing was, but the words wouldn’t come, so I stayed quiet, wrapping my fingers around the warm wood of the pencil. It had been so long since I’d held one.
“Well?” Ellie said. “What do you want to write about?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but that wasn’t true. I knew what I wanted to write, but I didn’t know how to tell Ellie about it. My speech was getting better, but it still wasn’t good enough.
Ellie shrugged. “Just start going, then. It doesn’t have to be anything important.”
I brought the tip of the pencil to the paper and pressed down. The pointy tip broke instantly, and Ellie flinched at the snapping sound.
“Let me get you a pen instead,” she said, and flitted out of the room again. She came back with a black pen and fitted it into my hand, sliding the pencil out. “Try this.”
I pressed the pen into the paper, and a black dot appeared.
“Try to write your name,” Ellie suggested.
“Okay,” I said, pressing down into the paper again.
My brain was telling my hand to write, to move, to do something—but nothing was happening. I was concentrating so hard I started sweating. My fingers would not budge, not even to scrawl a single line. At last, I tried to use my left hand to drag my right one around the page, but I only ended up with a crooked spiral that meant nothing.
Before I knew what was happening, the pen was stabbing through the notebook, going through pages and pages of paper.
“It’s okay,” Ellie said, pulling the pen from my hand. “We’ll try again another time.”
“Okay,” I said, letting the anger spill away.
[Scribe’s note: Darla’s violent outburst didn’t surprise me, but it did make me wary. Please understand, I wanted desperately for Darla to be able to write again. Writing would have opened up her world considerably—she would have been able to communicate better, not just with me, but with others. She would be able to carry on a correspondence, to learn, to make some sort of mark in the world—to make others, outside of Mother and me, aware of her existence. More selfishly, I wanted her to be able to write so that she could one day live a productive life on her own. I was young, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew very well what could happen when Mother died if Darla wasn’t better, or if Mother decided she didn’t want to care for Darla anymore, even though she was doing less than the bare minimum at that time. She was my sister, of course, but I yearned for a life free of the shackles that bound me to her, to Mother, to that lonely, dismal house. Without literacy, without proper exercise and improvement, I knew Darla would be shackled to me for life.
Call me selfish if you want, but don’t tell me you wouldn’t feel the same.]
We tried again the next day, and the next, and the next after that. I didn’t get so angry the more we practiced. We tried so many times I lost count. One afternoon, I managed to make something that looked like a ‘D,’ and Ellie got so excited she squealed like a piglet. I didn’t tell her that the D was a happy accident, not something I was able to do on purpose. Ellie realized that on her own when, the next day, I couldn’t do it again. I threw the pen at the wall, leaving a black mark.
[Scribe’s note: I pushed Darla hard, even begging for mother to get her a tutor, someone with more skills than I had, someone trained in successful teaching methods. Mother looked at me, eyes narrowed, cigarette clamped between her yellow teeth, and laughed. “Yeah, right,” she said. “I’m not going to waste money on a moron.”
That’s what Darla had become to her. Not her daughter, not her baby, not even her ward—just a moron. Mother was no better than Father. I was so angry I had to remove myself from her presence immediately, lest I do something I’d regret.
I had to remind myself countless times that Mother’s miserable life was penance for the evil she’d brought on her daughter. She was living in her own personal hell—but that still didn’t give her the right to drag us into it with her.]
I still had these thoughts that I wanted to get out, and I felt this dull anger, like a drum beating far away, every time I failed at writing. I tried to tell Ellie what I was thinking, but the words never wanted to come out right, or even if I managed to say something, I’d forget what I was talking about halfway through. Ellie was kind to me, though. She didn’t laugh or yell like Ma probably would have. Ellie thought I didn’t know much about how Ma felt about me, but I did. I’m glad it didn’t hurt like it should have, like it would have if I hadn’t had that surgery. [Scribe’s note: I hurt enough for the both of us, I’m sure.]
I kept trying to do a little bit more every day—a little bit more walking around the house, a little bit more reading, a little bit more writing, although that never really worked. Every day was the same as the one before it, and the one after it. I wondered maybe if I would go crazy, but then I remembered I’d already been cured of that, so how could it happen again? [Scribe’s note: I never believed Darla was crazy in the first place, so I was increasingly concerned about her rather sedentary life. I knew, were I in her position, I would have let insanity take me easily, just to escape any awareness of that hellhole.]
Time passed.
Ellie started to change.
1973
I felt like Ellie was leaving me behind. She still came to my room almost every day, but she didn’t feel there in the same way she had before.
[Scribe’s note: I tried to hide my descent and my inappropriate behavior from Darla as much as possible, but I was no actress.
Those years were the hardest of my early life. Sure, harder years were to come, but puberty beat me like an unwanted stepchild, leaving me gasping for relief that never came.
I hated the psychiatrist for the path he’d put Darla on, the one that led straight to her lobotomy. Even through my hate, though, I wondered. I wondered about those little orange-brown pills, the same color as the shag carpet in our living room. On the nights when I couldn’t sleep, which were often, or the days I came home crying from school, which were also very often, the half-empty bottle of Thorazine in the medicine cabinet called to me. I wasn’t stupid; I’d absorbed enough of Go Ask Alice to understand that drugs were tiny ministers of destruction, but I was also angry. I was angry that a girl like Anonymous could relinquish all of her responsibilities, escape her home, her family, her school, her entire goddamn life, and have an experience of pure freedom, even if it killed her in the end. Slowly, as my grades dropped and my classmates’ cruel barbs dug deeper, my anger started to outweigh my caution. Why say no to drugs when oblivion could be so close at hand? Why do we cling to ourselves at all? Even at that young age, I could see that there were people who hung looser in their skins than others—Father, for one. Darla, on the other hand, used to cling to her corporeality far too tightly, manifesting that desperation into the extremely physical fear of vomiting. The lobotomy had subsequently made her far too loose, to the point where she was rattling around in her own skin like a marble in a tin can. I often wondered what would fill up that empty space. After all, nature hates a vacuum.
My brain had remained intact, but I felt my own vacuum widening within me, every time a girl at school jabbed my shoulder with her pointy nail and told me I was a loser, every time Mother sneered at me when our paths happened to cross in the hallway, every time Darla failed to draw a straight line.
The Thorazine kept calling to me, telling me it could help me fill that void, on my own terms, before something else could take hold of me.
One day, I listened.]
I was in my room, staring at a library book I’d read over and over already, when Ellie came into my room. She was walking funny, like she couldn’t quite keep up with her own feet. When she got to my bed, she fell onto the covers like she was exhausted, and when she pushed herself up, there was spit on my blanket. I’d never seen her like that before, and I was a bit scared. I knew she was changing, but this shift was too fast. I’d seen her only that morning, and she’d seemed like her usual self. Now, when I looked at her, I saw a little too much of me.
[Scribe’s note: I took the Thorazine the moment I got back from a particularly terrible school day. Gina Fletcher had told everyone Father had killed himself because he was so ashamed of having a cow for a daughter, and everywhere I went, an ensemble of ‘moos’ trailed behind me like a bovine Greek chorus. I was feeling weak, defeated, useless. So I opened the medicine cabinet, shook one of the rust-colored pills into my palm, and swallowed it dry. At the time, I was looking for escape. For what I think was an entire day, I got it, but that escape didn’t last long.
I quickly learned that the pill was nothing more than a prison.]
“Are you okay?” I managed to ask Ellie. She looked at me like she’d never seen me before, and then she started talking about my hair. She told me it wasn’t actually hair, but a nest of brown recluse spiders, and if I didn’t spray my head with hairspray and light it on fire, then I was going to die. A dark feeling started growing in my stomach, and I thought I might be sick.
“Ellie?” I said, hoping she’d say she was just kidding, anything normal. She didn’t respond, and I could see her face turning red. Sweat started sliding down her face, more than seemed possible. The room wasn’t hot. I was even a little bit cold.
She started breathing real funny, like she’d just run around the block and couldn’t catch her breath.
“Ellie?” I tried again, and even though she was looking at me, I could tell she wasn’t seeing me. Her body started to tighten, like all of her muscles were squeezing at once, and she fell off my bed onto the floor.
I knew this wasn’t right, I knew it, but what was I supposed to do? I didn’t know how to work the telephone, Ma wasn’t home, and I wasn’t supposed to leave the house.
On the floor, Ellie started to shake, and she kept asking where Papa was, and why wasn’t he here helping her.
The terror I felt in that moment was the strongest feeling I’d had since the surgery. Somehow, I managed to run to the front door, unlock it, and go outside. I must have been screaming, because our neighbor, Mrs. Knowles, came out of her house running, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Heavens, what’s the matter?” she asked me, and all I could do was grab her hand and pull her into my room. She went with me, but she kept asking what was happening, and I couldn’t answer her. I could only show her.
When we got into my room, Ellie was still shaking on the floor, and her face was redder than Ma’s lipstick.
“Dear Jesus in Heaven!” Mrs. Knowles said, and then she told me to grab a towel full of ice and, for heaven’s sake, call an ambulance.
I just sat on the bed and stared until Mrs. Knowles stopped fretting and took a good look at me. It looked like she wanted to say something, but just then, Ellie started screaming, and Mrs. Knowles ran into the kitchen on her own.
Ma still wasn’t home when the ambulance came, and Mrs. Knowles didn’t want to leave me by myself, so Ellie had to ride to the hospital alone.
I didn’t see her or Ma for a few days after that. I probably would have started eating my sheets if Mrs. Knowles hadn’t brought some food over for me.
“What’s your name, dear?” she asked me, and it had been so long since I’d heard that question, that I almost didn’t know how to answer.
