Dirty Secret (10 page)

And there's one more story.

Helen is thirteen years old. Her family has just moved from one suburb of Boston to another. All of the other kids in the high school have known each other forever. She can't penetrate any of the cliques and has no friends. She's so shy that she can't say a word in any of her classes, can't say a word to any of the other students at lunch, can barely say thank you when she pays for her carton of milk to go with the peanut butter sandwich she's brought. Around this time, she starts breaking out in acne. Helen begs her mother to make her an appointment to see a dermatologist at one of the hospitals in Boston, and Esther complies.

The night before Helen's first appointment, there's a fight—Myron is slapping and shaking Esther in the kitchen. Helen runs in, yells at Myron, “Leave her alone!” and wedges her body between them. Myron's face reddens, his pale puffy lips tighten.
His fists come down on Helen's shoulders, her arms; he slaps her face. She screams but he doesn't stop, he keeps pelting her with his fists, with his open palms, until he's exhausted. Then he slams out of the house, off to the bar.

Esther, who has been trembling in the corner, walks out of the kitchen without a word to Helen. She goes into her bedroom and closes the door. Helen wants to knock on the door, wants to crawl into bed and under the covers with her mother, wants her mother to thank her for standing up for her, to run her hand over Helen's hair and tell her everything will be all right. But Helen knows better than to try. She doesn't knock. She will never knock.

The next day at the dermatologist appointment, Helen sits in a chair across from the doctor, who is behind a big oak desk. Helen's entire body hurts. Miraculously, there are no visible bruises, though she can barely lift her arms. The doctor, a young man with dark hair, green eyes, and almost translucent skin, begins to ask Helen the standard questions: “How long have you had this condition? Did either of your parents have acne?” And suddenly tears are streaming down Helen's face. She tries to wipe them away, tries to shift in her chair so the doctor won't see that she's crying, but now her whole body is shaking with sobs.

The guttural sounds are so animal that she doesn't recognize at first that they're coming from her. When she does, she's embarrassed; she feels her face flushing red, but she still can't stop.

“Miss Levine?” the doctor says, his face stern and concerned. “Are you okay?”

Helen shakes her head. She's not okay. Her father beats her. Her mother hates her. Her younger sister and brother pretend that everything in the house is okay and nothing ever happens to them. Things in that house happen only to Helen, whom no one will talk to.

No, she's not okay.

The doctor leans forward, hands Helen a tissue; without thinking she folds it into a blindfold and covers her eyes with it. She doesn't want to be here anymore, doesn't want to be anywhere. She wants to be a little kid who becomes invisible when she covers her eyes. She wants to be invisible so her body won't hurt anymore. So her father can't hurt her anymore.

The doctor comes around from his desk. He kneels next to Helen. She feels the weight of his hand on the chair next to her thigh, can tell he's resting his palm there. She can't stop crying. Will she ever stop? She's not sure.

“I'd like to help you, Miss Levine,” he says. “Can you tell me what's wrong?”

Helen wants to tell him what's wrong, but she doesn't know. Not exactly. Is it that her father beats her or is it that her mother hates her? She only knows that she can't stop crying. She can't talk because she can't stop crying. She's gulping for air now. She lifts the Kleenex and opens her eyes, thinking that'll help her breathe. He's still right there; for a second she wants to laugh because this handsome young doctor is kneeling next to her as if proposing marriage. This handsome young doctor could take her away. She wants to get away, wonders if she'll ever get away, then knows she'll never get away. Never.

She cries harder.

The doctor's hand—still next to her leg, not in a sexual way but in a desperate gesture of closeness—is puffy and red. He's a dermatologist, though. Shouldn't his hands be soft and silky? Why isn't anyone what he's supposed to be? A father is not a father, a mother is not a mother, a doctor is not a doctor.

Helen can trust no one.

The doctor rises. He goes back behind his desk. He picks up the phone. “I need a psychiatrist,” he says. “Now.”

After that, Helen has two appointments: Once a month she sees the dermatologist and once a week she sees a psychiatrist. Somehow she even convinces Myron to accompany her to one of her psychiatrist appointments.

“He stays out late and walks home singing so the whole block can hear him, and then he comes inside the house like a hurricane,” Helen says to Dr. McClure, her withered psychiatrist, the instant she and Myron sit down on the couch in his office. “Like a drunken hurricane.” She's still in disbelief that Myron actually showed up and she's giddy with anticipation. Now she'll get the hell out of his house. She's going to tell the truth. It's nothing she hasn't already told Dr. McClure, but now she gets to say it in front of her father. Now she gets to see her father humiliated in the presence of a professional. A professional who will help her get out of her parents' house once and for all. “He's always drunk,” she says. “Always.”

The psychiatrist writes something in his notebook and looks at Myron, who remains silent.

“And he beats me.” Helen doesn't turn her head, wants to look only at Dr. McClure. She didn't expect it to be so hard to say the words. She forces herself onward. “He hits my mother and he hits me.”

“Only when she deserves it,” Myron says, chewing on the tip of his unlit cigar, his fat fingers twirling it around.

Helen ignores him. He's an idiot, she knows. An idiot she'll soon be free from.

Dr. McClure asks questions: Are they a religious family (no), do they eat regular meals (yes), ever take vacations (no), have any pets (no), how are Helen's grades (good).

He writes down everything.

At the end of the appointment, Myron stands to leave and the doctor asks Helen to wait for a minute. Helen feels like
jumping up and down. Her chest feels light and she wonders if this is what it's like to be happy, to be really happy.

“Miss Levine,” the doctor says. They've had ten sessions already and he never uses her first name. “The foster care situations we have here in Boston are much worse than what you have at home. It's my recommendation that you stay there.”

“Are you serious? Stay there?” Helen can't believe it.

“The conditions in the foster homes and group homes are very dire.”

“But my parents, my house . . . it's dire there, too.”

“I understand. But a foster home would be worse. I'm sorry.”

And that's it. Nothing changes. Helen continues the appointments—they give her something to do, give her an excuse to go into Boston once a week.

The rest of the week she comes home after school and climbs directly into bed, burying herself under the blankets. She listens as her sister gets home and sits at the kitchen table with their mother, having coffee and talking about their days.

Whenever I ask my mother why the abuse was directed only at her, why her mother hardly spoke to her yet had coffee with her sister, the only answer she has is that her siblings “kept their blinders on and pretended everything was all right.”

I met Esther and Myron just once. I was seven and my brother was five, and my mother had decided to try to make peace with her parents after years of estrangement. They hadn't seen each other since right before she and my dad got married. So we all drove to her parents' house outside Boston for a visit. When they opened their front door and stepped forward, I couldn't believe how tiny they were. Neither of them was taller than four foot ten. And they were round, like little silos, and gray—probably from all the cigar smoke Myron was constantly spewing. Esther wore a housecoat that was so faded I couldn't tell what color it
had been originally. Myron wore workman pants and a button-down flannel shirt, even though it was summer.

They lived on the first floor of the three-family triplex they owned. It was dark inside. Dank. The wood floors were scratched and bare. It was a small space but there was room to move; it was certainly not a hoarded home. All of the furniture—the dressers in the bedrooms, the wooden stand in the hallway for mail and the telephone, the kitchen table—looked dumpy and half-broken. Stained and torn cloth doilies covered most surfaces. Cigar smoke had permeated every layer of the place. Even now the smell of cigars reminds me of Myron.

On one of our first days in Massachusetts, our parents took my brother and me to Revere, a seaside town with a famous beach. We walked along the boardwalk, inhaled the salty smell of the ocean—new to my brother and me—and ate hot dogs and fried clam strips and slices of pizza. We went down to the sand and dipped our toes in the water. My brother and I saw seagulls, white and honking, for the first time. The water was cold, much colder than the lakes we were used to in Minneapolis, but still we spread out our towels on the beach, kicked off our shoes, and shed the clothes we'd worn over our suits. My mom waited on one of the towels while my brother, my dad, and I went in. My dad pretended to be a shark, coming at us with his arms outstretched and we screamed and ran farther into the salty water, waiting as long as possible to take a gulp of air and dive under.

Another day my mom and dad decided to go into Boston for a few hours. They asked Esther and Myron to watch us. My brother and I did something—fought with each other? Ran around in a game of tag? Sassed back to Myron when he told us to shut up?—I honestly have no idea what we did, but during the few hours that our parents were gone, as Esther cried and
trembled, Myron took off his leather belt and whipped my five-year-old brother with it.

As soon as our parents came back, my brother and I told them what Myron had done; Myron stood there with his fat arms crossed over his fat belly and denied it—even though my brother had welts on his back. My dad regrets to this day that he didn't pummel Myron right there. My mother was upset because her hopes for reconciliation with her parents were ruined, but she wasn't surprised. Years later, when I ask her why she left us there when she knew how horrible Myron was, she says, “I don't know what I was thinking, I really don't.”

Five years after that visit, Myron became sick with prostate cancer. My mom didn't call or see him before he died, though she made a fragile peace with her mother just before she passed away six months after Myron.

Her parents even managed to screw over my mother from the grave: My grandfather had been a plumber, my grandmother a housewife, yet somehow they amassed more than three quarters of a million dollars—and their fully paid-off triplex was worth more than a million. According to my mom, the house was to be divided evenly between my mother's two siblings. Then, from the savings, my mother's sister got $500,000, her brother got $250,000 . . . and my mother got $20,000.

My mother has told me alternately that the injustice happened because she already had a house and her parents thought she didn't need one, that her father always hated her, and that her siblings convinced their parents to leave her out of the will. Who knows what's true?

My mother tried to get her siblings at least to give her something—the $20,000 covered the rest of her nursing school, which was helpful, but she was struggling at the time. According to my mom, they refused.

There's no demonstrable link between hoarding and early material deprivation. But there is a link between hoarding and
emotional
deprivation. Many hoarders report being physically or sexually abused as children. My mother was deprived of love, affection, often even the acknowledgment of her existence, to say nothing of the beatings she endured. Her cold and chaotic childhood home was the perfect breeding ground for the mental illness that would end up affecting us all.

MY MOTHER IS WHAT'S KNOWN AS A CLEAN hoarder—I wanted to laugh, then cry, the first time I read that term because her house is anything but clean—as opposed to a squalor hoarder. The house of a clean hoarder doesn't usually contain pools of putrid water from long-ago leaks, piles of feces from animals or humans (yes, sometimes hoarders simply toss dirty diapers, usually adult-sized, on the floor or into bathtubs), rotting food left out in the open, or decomposing corpses of rodents or passed-on pets buried beneath layers of garbage. The squalor hoarder is too ashamed to allow a plumber inside when something breaks, so the sink or the toilet or the shower goes unfixed. There's often no running water at all. Sometimes there's no heat. So compared to some other children of hoarders, and the messes they have to clean up, I'm lucky.

I'm also grateful that my mother isn't an animal hoarder, with dozens or even hundreds of dogs or cats or rabbits or chinchillas in tiny cages or sometimes running loose in a house, where the poor, often starving creatures create permanent stenches, destroy floors and walls, and leave enormous amounts of feces and carcasses in their wake. It's not uncommon for animal hoarders to serve jail time, sometimes more than once. They truly believe they're helping the animals, or even saving them. Many factors contribute to this blatant split from reality. Just to name one, animal hoarders have at least equal rates of childhood neglect and abuse as do object hoarders. Numerous studies have shown that early childhood trauma can cause dissociation, attachment disorder, and even impaired facial emotion recognition—thus, the hoarder may literally not see or understand the suffering happening among their animal charges.

In spite of my mother's horrid refrigerator, she's not a food hoarder. Food hoarders can't throw out any food item, regardless of how moldy or how many years past its expiration date it may be. The dangers of rotting food are multiple: the fumes, flies, maggots, cockroaches, and other infestations, for starters. Then, of course, there's also the fact that eating something spoiled can lead to serious health problems or even death. Many times food hoarders have extra refrigerators filled with items they just can't toss—expired yogurt, chicken broth, cheese, eggs. Just like my mother believing her house looks “marvelous,” food hoarders are blind to the decay inside their refrigerators and on their shelves. One theory about hoarding is that it's a normal instinct run amok, and this makes sense, especially in the case of food hoarders. Even animals collect and store food; in fact, the word “hamster” comes from the German word
hamstern,
which means to hoard.