Coming Clean: A Memoir (5 page)

The fighting that had been sparked by the CPS man’s visit years earlier had become the norm any time my parents were both home. Every fight was the same. My mother said she was tired of living in filth. She told my father that I would grow up
to hate him. When he stormed off, as he usually did, without saying a word, I would pick up the fight. I would yell at her in return. If he wouldn’t protect himself, I would protect him.
It wasn’t that bad,
I told her.
I liked the way we lived,
I lied.
Daddy can’t help it
was the only part of my argument that I knew was actually true. I knew that; I couldn’t see why she didn’t.

My parents were completely different outside the house. When we weren’t home, we were normal. My parents sang along with the car radio and told me stories about their adventures pre-Kim, and my mother made a habit of tickling my father each time the car was stopped at a red light, relenting only when it turned green. My parents were always laughing as long as we weren’t home.

I knew that if we could escape the papers we could be happy.

George Burns finally got around to me on February 14, 1989. It was a Wednesday, and I had woken up naturally, without tickling or blinking lights. My father was nowhere to be seen, and my first thought when I realized I had slept until 10 a.m. was that I would miss the Valentine’s Day party my second grade class was throwing.

I rushed out of my room, ready to protest the loss of candy his tardiness had cost me, when I heard my mom. She should have been at work, but she was yelling at someone on the phone in her bedroom.

She looked up at me in her doorway just as she was slamming the phone down.

“Kimmy, what are we going to do with your father?” she said, motioning for me to sit on the bed next to her. She asked me that a lot, and I knew it didn’t need answering.

“Your father was in an accident,” she told me. “Part of the bus he was driving last night came loose and hit him on the head. He’s hurt, but he’ll live. He’s driving home now.”

I followed my mom to the kitchen and leaned against the refrigerator as she made me breakfast—toast with a hole in the shape of a heart, for Valentine’s Day, with an egg cooked sunny-side up in the middle. As she cooked, she filled me in on the details of the accident. While driving, the Plexiglas visor in the front of his bus had swung loose, hitting him in the head once, then swung back to hit him again. When he started feeling dizzy and nauseous, he told his passengers that he was going express to the bus yard and drove himself to the nearest hospital. The doctors told him that he probably had a concussion. Since there was nothing but rest that could heal him, he decided to drive the two hours back to Long Island and rest at home.

I was more upset about not being on the receiving end of Valentine’s Day cards and candy than I was about my father. I couldn’t imagine that getting hit on the head by a visor would cause much damage.

I was wrong. When Daddy came home, he was different. What started as a day of sleeping in turned into weeks and then a month. There didn’t seem to be enough rest in the world to make him better. My mother told me he was having migraines. He didn’t want to watch TV or go to the pond anymore; he just wanted to be left alone. His moods were unreliable, and I never really knew which Daddy I was going to come home to. Sometimes he would get mad for no reason at all and punch his fist through a wall, and seconds later he would throw me over his shoulder and spin me around like he used to before the accident.
More often, though, he seemed completely indifferent to everything and anyone.

Instead of working he would go to doctors’ appointments. We were told that he had Post Traumatic Brain Injury Syndrome—which my mom said meant that the doctors had no idea why he hadn’t fully recovered from the concussion. I had the feeling he wasn’t really sick anymore, but that he’d finally wandered off like I had always been afraid of; his body just hadn’t gone anywhere.

I didn’t think much of it when my mother announced at the end of April that we would be moving to the Bronx, just the two of us, to take care of my grandmother. Grandma had developed gangrene in her foot, which my mother informed me meant that her foot was rotting, and we needed to clean it regularly so that she wouldn’t have to get it cut off.

I learned years later from my aunt Lee that my mother’s story was only partly true. My grandmother did have gangrene in her foot, but her ailment coincided with yet another visit from CPS. This time there was no mistake—they were not called about the unfair treatment of dolls in our household. A neighbor had reported the conditions of our house. The mess was worse than it had ever been—our beds, toilet, and tub had become the only visible surfaces left—and my father didn’t want to do anything but sleep. Faced with the fact that she couldn’t clean the house alone, my mother had decided to leave my father for good. She fled to my grandmother’s apartment and enrolled me in a new school district so that I wouldn’t be taken away from her.

T
HE SMELL OF OLD APARTMENT
buildings and their aged wood and dusty railings marked a welcome change to my surroundings. I loved everything about the Bronx and couldn’t understand why my parents would ever trade in the hustle and bustle of city life for Long Island.

The walls of my grandparents’ apartment were lined with old family photographs: baby pictures of my grandfather that I thought were funny because he was wearing a dress, and old photos of people who had died long before I was born, taken in countries I had never given much thought to. My favorite pictures were my grandparents’ wedding photos. My grandmother had been the great beauty of our family: alabaster skin, thick black hair that had always been worn in a bob just above her shoulders, and a round face that made her look like a real-life version of Snow White. My grandfather was tall and skinny, his olive skin tone and dark hair making him look more Italian than Jewish. He looked nothing like the blind, round-bellied, pale man that I had known.

My grandfather had died a few months earlier. When he was alive, he would sing me Louis Armstrong songs while teaching
me to cook. He told me, “If a starfish cuts off a finger it will grow back, but you are not a starfish, and you have to be very careful with knives because your fingers won’t grow back.”

Taking care of Grandma’s foot should have been his job.

There weren’t many pictures of my mom on the wall of pictures, which I always felt slightly cheated by. This seemed to only support my mother’s argument that her parents never particularly cared much for her, a fact that I had adamantly decided not to accept. Whenever the opportunity arose I attempted to pester my mom into liking Grandma, and Grandma into saying nice things about my mom. It seemed beyond my understanding that a mother and a daughter could not love one another. Parents love their kids, kids love their parents—that seemed like a universal truth. But according to my mom, it didn’t always work that way.

My mother was left alone for most of her childhood: She remembers being handed a box of cereal and told to watch TV and not bother anyone, or being kicked out of the house to go play in the street when she was barely out of diapers. When she broke her collarbone on the way to school when she was five, she listened to the school nurse berate my grandmother for not deeming it important to come pick her daughter up and take her to a doctor. Grandma told the nurse my mom could walk home after school and she would deal with the problem then.

But the biggest area of neglect in my mother’s upbringing was her back. During a routine doctor visit when she was seven years old, the family doctor informed my grandparents that their daughter had already started to show strong curvatures in her
spine. In order to lead a normal life, they were told, my mother would need to be fitted for a back brace immediately to help contain her scoliosis while her tiny body grew.

They refused. My mother grew up, but not much. Her S-shaped spine, if stretched out, would have her measure at five feet, eight inches, the same height as her nearly identical younger sister. Instead she is four foot nine.

As a result of her curved spine, my grandfather would tell her during her teenage years that “No decent man will ever want you.” She set out to prove him right, dating one bad boy after another, even marrying one at eighteen just to get of the house. Her ill-fated first marriage was annulled within a year—more proof for her family that she was a screw-up.

My grandparents’ apartment wasn’t tidy by any stretch of the imagination, but it was less messy than our house, and therefore clean by default. I slept in the room my mom had shared with my aunt until she left home, and my mom slept on the couch in the living room. There was a third bedroom in the apartment, but it was full to the brim with things no one used. It didn’t strike me as odd that my grandparents had a junk room. There were plenty of rooms in our house we didn’t use.

Despite the cool climate between her and my mother, I liked Grandma. She read the newspaper to me every day. One day she read me the story of a girl my age who had fallen down an elevator shaft not far from where Grandma lived and had died. I made her read the story to me over and over again.

“Do you enjoy this?” My grandmother asked me.

“No.” I did though. I was fascinated by the idea that someone my age could die, but I didn’t want to tell her that. I liked
our daily newspaper reading, and I didn’t want her to stop. I was used to hearing the news on the radio and loved having it told to me like a story, curled up against her on her bed.

At lunchtime she would make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on cinnamon raisin bread. PB&J was a favorite food of hers, but neither of her children had liked it, so my grandmother had waited until she was well into her sixties to have someone in the family to share it with. Unlike my mom, Grandma always wore lipstick—bright reds or pinks that smelled waxy and accentuated the contrast between her dark hair and pale skin. She called me “my darling” and made me a cradle for my Glow Worm in an arts and crafts class.

I decided to give my grandmother the benefit of the doubt and chalk my mom’s feelings up to a big misunderstanding.

“Do you love my mom?” I asked my grandmother one day after school.

“Yes. Why would you ask that?” Grandma didn’t seem so much shocked by my question as she was suspicious that I was accusing her of something.

“I don’t think Mommy knows. Maybe you should tell her,” I suggested. “Maybe you could hug her.”

“I’ll talk to her about it,” she said, proceeding to change the subject by averting her attention back to the episode of
Father Dowling Mysteries
we were watching.

I was pretty sure I’d just mended all fences between the two maternal figures in my life. I patted myself on the back as Grandma and I watched our favorite mystery-solving priest together.

The talk they had later consisted of more yelling than talking.

“That child is the only thing you’ve ever done right!” I heard her yell from her bedroom.

My mother said something about Grandma being an ungrateful old witch, and then—

“I should have just let you rot,” she said as she slammed Grandma’s bedroom door and came to find me in the living room.

“Kim, there are some things you don’t repeat!”

“It wasn’t a lie.”

“No, it wasn’t a lie. But we don’t have to talk about everything that’s true.”

“I’m sorry.” I apologized because I’d obviously done something wrong, but I was angry. I was getting increasingly confused about what was okay to discuss in my life.

My mom was exasperated. “It’s okay. She was right. You are the only thing I’ve ever done right.”

The kids were different in Grandma’s neighborhood. They seemed to be a little bit older than their seven or eight years. I was one of only two white kids in my class, a stark difference from my almost exclusively white classmates on Long Island. It never occurred to me that I didn’t fit in, and I felt the salutation of “new white girl” was as apt a description as any. There were no carpools or play dates to dodge—kids walked home after school and played with whomever they could find loitering the hallways of their building. During lunch they traded war stories in the cafeteria, stories about mothers leaving them with their grandparents and not coming back or cousins who had been killed. I didn’t talk about my dad because I had promised not to,
and I doubted many of my classmates would understand what it was like to have too much, but for the first time my secret felt like a good thing. I fit in with these kids and their unfair lives.

The climate between my mother and my grandmother neither improved nor worsened after my botched effort to make us one big happy family. Their relationship was what it had always been: an obligation neither was particularly grateful for. I finally understood what my mother had been trying to explain: She didn’t feel about Grandma the way I felt about her, and Grandma didn’t love my mom the way my mom loved me.

My mother continued to clean and bandage Grandma’s gangrene until my father called one night at the end of June. I was already in bed, but my mom woke me up, brushing the hair from my face. She was much gentler in her wake-ups than Dad was, but also less effective.

“Kim, honey, I need you to get up,” she whispered.

I sat up in bed. The room was still dark, but the light from the hallway illuminated enough of the room for me to see her sitting on my bed.

“Daddy just called.”

I was still groggy and it took me a while to realize what my mother was trying to tell me. “There was a fire,” she said.

I hadn’t prayed in months.
I hadn’t asked God to burn down our house since we had moved in with Grandma. A part of me hoped we might stay with Grandma and that my father could visit a few days a week so we could live here indefinitely.

“Daddy’s okay,” she said. My father was asleep in the bedroom when it happened, and had to climb out a window to escape. My dogs had died, and our cats, and all of the birds in the Bird Room. Misty was going to have kittens—I was sad about
that, but mostly I was mad at myself… God had gotten it all wrong. He wasn’t supposed to kill my pets. I should have been more specific.