4. Cold Cuts

Revenge is a dish best served cold.  At least that’s what people say.   

On hot summer days I like to stock the fridge with lots of cold cuts and summer salads.  A bit of sharp cheddar, Swiss, gouda, pepper jack or Colby cheese, add some salami or maybe some corned beef, thinly sliced ham or turkey then put it together on slices of rye bread or a Kaiser Roll. Then add some black olives, sliced avocados, cold asparagus spears, deviled eggs or pickles. As a side dish cucumbers in sour cream, macaroni salad, pasta salad or cole slaw are delicious. 

When it’s almost too hot to eat and certainly too hot to cook, a few ready to eat treats in the fridge will make the summer a splash. 

But I have no appetite for revenge.  

I have been on the receiving end too often to ignore its dangers, the unintended consequences, the collateral damage or friendly fire.

Some people live on the revenge scenario.  My estranged daughter says it’s like rocket fuel. When everything else is gone she says she can live on the dream of vengeance. It is a destructive cycle.  The need for vengeance creates villains where none existed.  It makes her a solitary soldier in her own private war.  Revenge can not nourish you and it turns my stomach sour.  Watching someone else suffer does nothing to diminish my pain.  It fact it does quite the opposite. It opens the old wounds and spreads the misery around like a hospital staff infection.  It will not bring back dead children.  It will not un-break a heart.  It will not mend a family.   

My method has been to ignore the tragedy, to close my eyes at the scary parts like it’s a movie and I can go home safe and sound after.  For a long time I believed that if I could pretend it never happened then I wouldn’t have scars. I took my children away from the pollution, the pedophiles and the poverty.  I took them to the mountains with clean water and fresh air and open doors.  I left it all behind I thought. I thought I could keep them safe but I failed.  My insistence on remaining naive blinded me to the danger and kept me a victim and it made my children targets. 

My subconscious could not forget the pain and it gave me external scars to remind me of the psychic ones.  I cut myself open until, as my mother used to say, “The meanness came out”.   So began my love affair with the exacto knife.  I have been cutting at myself ever since. When people noticed the supply of razors I changed to a small cuticle cutter.  With precision I could inflict just enough punishment.   When the physical cuts didn’t work, I cut myself off from my own life. 

It began here.  I was standing at the bathroom sink washing out my panties.  They were the new panties I got for my eighth birthday, one pair for each day of the week.   My teacher told me about washing out my underpants in the sink because I came to school in the same panties I had peed in the day before.  I peed in my panties a lot because it burned and sometime I couldn’t stop.  It felt like I was peeing razor blades.  One day as I sat in class, I just started to pee and it splattered on the hardwood floor and all the kids stared at me.  The next day the teacher asked if my mother had given me a bath.  I told her she hadn’t.  My big brother did the baths, the meals and the bedtime stories.  But he was sent away to stay with our Dad down south.  Mama’s new boyfriend thought he needed to go away.   That’s why I had no bath.  No one told me I needed one.  But the teacher told me about baths.  Then she told me that I should change my panties everyday and wash them out in the sink if I had no clean ones. 

 That’s what I was doing, standing at the sink with my legs apart so he could get his fingers inside me.   I didn’t like it, I hated it.  He had a hangnail, at least I think it was a hangnail, and it scratched me up inside.  But I wasn’t allowed to cry.  I had to stand there, legs apart and let him hurt me.  Mama said I had to mind him.  Mama said, “Be sweet” and I was. 

 He was the bartender from the bar below our apartment and my mother’s new boyfriend.  That’s the first home I remember, the apartment over the bar on Jefferson Avenue across the street from Belle Isle.  The neon sign for the bar – a little pink martini glass, tilted back and forth all night long.  It became our night light.  At night when Mama was working the late shift at the restaurant, we’d watch the glass dance back and forth and fall asleep.  We never knew the name of the bar; we just called it the “Martini Bar.”

 Sometimes when Mama was sleeping between shifts, we’d escape to Belle Isle.  Eddie the ring leader would navigate the busy street dragging his little sisters behind him and find his way to the fountain.  For three hillbilly kids on a hot summer day, it was heaven.  We’d splash in the water, stick out feet in and cure boredom and heat all at once.  Eddie was a great one for going on adventures and his little sisters loved to tag along.  He called us the Three Musketeers.  It wasn’t till much later I found out that he wasn’t calling us candy bars.

 My big brother didn’t like the city much.  He didn’t like shoes or being inside all day long.  He missed the wildness and the freedom of the mountains.  He got teased a lot about his accent and came home with lots of bloody noses.  Then they sent both of us to something called the Open Air school. There were other hillbilly kids there.  Still, Eddie managed to get bloody noses.  We had to ride a special bus down past the Vernors factory and the WonderBread bakery.  I rode for free because I was so small.  It was a great adventure for us.  As we rode my big brother would entertain me with great stories of heroic deeds.  He treated me more like a little brother, teaching me how to be brave, how to hide my fear and how to hold my ground in a fight.  I liked being my brother’s co-conspirator.

 Sometimes, when we were all very good, we were allowed to go inside the Martini Bar.  On those special occasions, we’d be dressed in our best clothes.  My hair, which insisted on being Cherokee and refused to curl in those Shirley Temple banana curls that looked so nice on Kitty, would be pulled back in a braid on both sides of my head and held firmly in place with barrettes.  I’d wear my patent leather shoes, white socks with lacy tops, the dress I got for my birthday and even white gloves.  The dim light of the bar was welcome after the harshness of the daylight. It was air conditioned and so it was always cool and dark, always clean and elegant.  There were red leather booths lining one wall and the sleek chrome Wurlitzer on the other.  I remember the first time I witnessed the magic of that machine.  As it slide one record off the rack and flipped it over and placed it on the turntable.  I was transfixed.  I sat, mouth open like a Detroit hillbilly, watching as the magic arm picked out just the right record and placed it on the turntable.

 But it’s the music that I remember best.  During the daytime I heard Country music on the radio, Patsy Cline and Hank Williams.  My mother often sang along with the radio. She had a good voice.  When my half -a- sister, Rayleen  was home in the summertime, all we heard was Elvis and the Everley Brothers.  The Wurlitzer in the Martini Bar played different music.  It was as sleek and sophisticated as the fancy machine that played it.  I heard instruments and rhythms that I’d never heard before.  These were new sounds to my young ears and I loved it.  I loved the horns and the piano; I loved the rich full voices and the cool rhythms of Dinah Washington and Nat King Cole.  In the Wurlitzer at the Martini Bar, blonde southern belle Peggy Lee’s “Fever” slid into place next to the Platters “At Twilight Time” and no one made a move to segregate them.

We felt sophisticated too as we sat at the bar eating potato chips one at a time, with white gloved fingers.  Then we would drink our cokes through these strange little red straws.  The next day, in the alley behind the bar, we’d collect those little red straws and make things with them.  We had no toys so we invented them.  Once we got a skip rope for a present and we played with it till it was threadbare.  We had no teachers so we explored the alley like Lewis and Clark. 

I remember when we first met the bartender; he was minding us while Mama worked.  He taught us to play the hide the hot dog game.  He laid down on the couch and covered up with a blanket.  One at a time he took all three of us under the blanket and had us hide his hot dog. 

Later he seemed to only want to play with me.  Maybe that’s why he kept me home from school so much.  He said I had a sore throat and he had medicine to fix me.  Sometimes he had to put the medicine in down there too.  That’s what he was doing when I was standing at the sink washing my panties.  Putting the medicine in with his scratchy fingers. 

Mama walked in and screamed.  Suddenly things were flying. She was beating on him and screaming.  I was confused.  I had done everything he told me to do just like she said.  Now she was screaming at me, “Don’t you know right from wrong!  Don’t you know right from wrong?”  I had no answer so I curled up in the corner and hid.  I don’t know how long the hysteria went on.  I just crawled inside to hide.   I never wanted to be ignorant again.  I decided then and there that I would learn the difference between right and wrong and I looked for places that you could learn such things. 

There were only two books in our house, the big Family Bible Mama owned and the “True Confessions” magazines my half-a-sister brought when she came to visit.  I realized quickly that right and wrong would not be found in the stories of the “True Confession” magazine.  I decided it must have been the Bible. 

Once when Mama was sleeping, the Jehovah’s Witness people came to the door.  They asked what religion we were.  We woke Mama up to ask her because we’d never been to church.  She started swatting at us and rolled over saying, “You’re a bunch a heathens, that’s what you are, all three of you!”  When we went back to the door and told the lady with the Watchtower magazines what our Mama had said, she turned white as a sheet and ran away.  For a long time, I thought heathen was our religion. 

I found out different from my school friend Linda.  She was a strong believer in the Baptist faith.  She told me all about baptism and how it cleaned away all your sins.  I knew that was for me, a sin bath. It worked for the dirty panties and maybe it would work for my dirty soul.  Maybe it would give me some magic knowledge to know right from wrong.   Linda went to one of those storefront Baptist churches where you could hear the singing a block away.  I went there one night and I got myself baptized.  For awhile, I was sure that my sins were washed away. 

Then one day Mama took me up in the attic where all of bartender’s clothes were in a pile.  He had lots of nice clothes, fancy suits and shirts, dozens of ties and handkerchiefs, all in a pile on the attic floor.  He ran out after that night in the bathroom.  He left so quick he didn’t even take his shoes.  Now what was left of him was in this huge pile of clothes in the attic.  Mama said, “I want to show you something.”  She sat me down and took out a razor, one of those straight razors that men use for shaving.  She started tearing the suits and the shirts and the pants to shreds.  With each slice she said, “This will teach you!  This will teach you!”  I sat too terrified to speak but silently I screamed “Teach me What Mama?  Teach me what?  Is this right from wrong?” 

 I figured the baptism hadn’t worked.  Mama reminded me that the evil was still inside of me.  So I began to try to cut it out of me and as she had shown me, I used a razor. 

A few weeks later school was out for the year.  My sister and I were taken to a small farm north of Detroit.  It was a nice elderly couple that we were told to call Grandma and Grandpa.  They were no kin to us.  But we had to call them that or the child protective people would come get us.  They lived in a trailer that had a little shed built off the side that was in the middle of a huge cornfield.  The people were nice enough but I felt abandoned by my mother, left alone to figure out my sins.  My sister and I played in the corn and I wondered if it was the same corn that my grandmother had on her farm. 

One day towards the end of summer my mother came and got me.  Not my sister or my brother but just me.  I felt so special.  I felt that maybe she had forgiven me.  Maybe she would teach me what the razor meant or what right and wrong meant. 

She took me to an apartment and handed me a rag and a broom.  She told me to start with the dishes and the kitchen floor.  I was confused but I went to work.  I am a tidy housekeeper and I am good at cleaning.  We worked for a few hours until the apartment was spic and span.  Then a man that I didn’t know came in.  He was my mother’s new boyfriend and later he would become my step-father.  My mother was all giddy as she introduced me to him and told me “Now you be sweet to him.” 

At nine years old, the cycles of my life were set.  I knew that I had to clean to earn my mother's love.  I thought that "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" must be the gospel truth.  I became an immaculate housekeeper, even obsessive. 

It was only later that I would abhor the idea of being sweet and cling to my sour disposition as a weapon. And much later, maybe too late, I realized that love can’t be earned.