23.Cracked Glass Gelatin

I saw this picture while waiting in the doctor’s office one day. It’s “Noche Buena (Christmas Eve) Broken Glass Gelatin”. The recipe says it’s a special treat you make with children on Christmas Eve. You prepare six different flavors of gelatin, cut them in pieces (crack the glass), combine with a cream mixture, pour into gelatin molds and let it set.  The glossy picture got my attention first but it was the process and the patterns that kept me reading.  It wasn’t like a marble cake with streaks of light and dark, or a jellyroll or a layer cake with different flavored fillings between stacks of cake.  It wasn’t a mosaic or a parquet with carefully cut pieces placed in intricate patterns. It was oddly shaped and jagged edged pieces held together in gelatin.  It was a Jigsaw Puzzle Jell-o.  I love puzzles and I’ve had a thing for Jig Saw puzzles ever since the Howie Mandel incident.

Once in the dark recesses of my past, I spent three days in a mental institution in Nevada.  At the end of the three days they booted me out saying, “Lady, you’re not crazy, your life is crazy.  We can’t fix that.”  Before I got the boot, I made an enemy of the fellow who was in charge of my “humor therapy”.   You’d think this therapy would be a perfect fit for me but it wasn’t.  Our humor therapist choose Howie Mandel as the Humor Guru. I love comedy, but even when I was sane I never thought Howie Mandel was funny.  I tried to be a good patient; I sat there watching the program and tried very hard to make laughing noises.  But my humor therapist, George, was not fooled and sat across the room glaring at me.  After class was over he threatened to report me for being uncooperative.  Since that meant I would loose cigarette privileges I tried to explain my failure to enjoy Howie.  I said that I preferred a different kind of humor and that my humor was rather dry.  He asked me to give examples of what exactly I considered funny.  Put on the spot like that I was unable to think of a single funny thing.  He stomped off and told me he was going to be watching me. He was true to his word and watched me like a hawk.  Soon it became a battle of wills between the two of us. If it looked like I was going to crack a smile he’d be in front of me saying, “Ok so what’s so funny?  You think THAT’S funny?”  He caught me watching reruns of “Northern Exposure” once and demanded that I explain what was funny about the Moose. (In view of recent Alaskan imports – I now declare that there is nothing funny about a moose.)

The last day of my stay, I was alone in the Day Room, a big empty green “institutional” room with twelve foot ceilings and a row of long narrow windows. It was raining hard outside and the rain was sliding down the windows like a veil of tears.  I just wanted to be alone for awhile and collect my thoughts. I wanted to ready myself for all the problems that waited for me outside the asylum.  I needed some mindless activity to keep my hands busy while my mind rested.  I found a stack of jigsaw puzzles on the bookshelf and started looking through them.  The first thing I noticed was that there were no pictures on the boxes.  Just titles scrawled in black magic marker “Tree in Autumn”, “Country Lane” and last but not least, “Dogs Playing Poker.” I opened the boxes and there were no further instructions. Then I started to laugh hysterically and began to sing the Jigsaw Puzzle song by the Rolling Stones. 

“Me, I'm waiting so patiently,

  Lying on the floor
  I’m just trying to do this jig-saw puzzle
  Before it rains anymore.”

George came running into the room.  I looked up at him and said in a loud clear voice, “Rolling Stones, the Rolling Stones are pretty damn funny!”

JigSaw Puzzel - Rolling Stones

That incident is typical of my attempts at mental health. It’s been like trying to put together a puzzle without the picture, aided by a humor therapist with no sense of humor. A decade later I tried again, this time with a woman who was more interested in “launching” my daughter than in treating me.  The Cuckoo Bird therapist launched her alright, without wings or even a parachute.  She had inserted herself and poisoned our relationship so badly that when my daughter crashed, she no longer trusted me to help her.  The damage was irreparable.

It has been that way all my life.  Each time I reached out for help, the therapists have done more harm than good.  I'd struggle through on my own and think I’d recovered.  I’d make plans, fall in love, marry and have children.  Then something would trigger a flash of memory and I was either running for my life or digging at the past again.  It’s like an itch that won’t stop or a wound that just won’t heal. Maybe you see a commercial for a movie where the girl is dragged out of bed by her feet.  You filch.  You realize that you know exactly how that feels.  You feel your head bounce against the floor.  Or you smell Aqua Velva and the nausea makes you vomit. You pull your daughter close to you and feed her your fears.  She grows in the shadow of your nightmares. Then you turn away and try to shut it out and you shut out her as well.  By looking away and trying to pretend it out of existence, you’ve kept yourself deliberately naïve to what’s right in front of you.  You keep yourself a victim and left your own daughter unprotected.

Then a few years ago I met Joshua.  Unlike my humor therapist, Joshua has a sense of humor.  Unlike my Cuckoo Bird Daughter Launcher, he was not interested in parenting my children or collecting my stories.  He was only interested in treating me.  He’s only thirty-something but he has a whole wall full of degrees, a ton of experience and incredible sensitivity.  He’s also the spitting image of Matt Damon.  (Yea, God does in fact love me!)

I started seeing Joshua for grief counseling after my mother died.  It had been a year filled with family deaths, starting with my big brother and ending with my mother. I had hoped for reconciliation and healing but their deaths ended that hope.  Instead there were new wounds from old enemies and fresh betrayals from the people I loved. I slid into a well of depression that I could not escape alone.  Only sheer desperation forced me to allow another “professional” into my life.

During the grief counseling, memories of childhood sexual abuse emerged.  They dripped out like a leaky faucet- neither on nor off but just enough to keep you awake at night.  Joshua was wonderful.  He had a way of asking just the right questions and then giving me the tools to unravel my mystery at my own pace. I made more progress in the few years working with Joshua than in the thirty years before I met him.  In fact the work was going so well that the day I saw the Jell-o Jigsaw, I had become a bit glib about the whole thing.

I had gone to the doctor for problems swallowing.  I was choking on scrambled eggs and even swallowing water was a problem.  “It’s a lifelong problem,” I said to the doctor, “and it would be foolish not to acknowledge the possible psychological link”. Then I glibly told her, “I was choked by my stepfather as he raped me and later my mother choked me for telling about it.  I went to live with foster parents and for my eighteenth birthday, my foster father choked me as he raped me.  With his hands around my throat he kept telling me not to wake his daughters. I’m in therapy now and I’m just beginning to unravel the memories. The increase in choking may be related to that."  I said all of that without a single, tear or any sign of emotion, just matter of fact. I just said it like I was asking for flu shot.  I felt so liberated that later I told a friend from church. Then I emailed a friend from high school. I wanted everyone to know my secrets! I thought the truth would set me free.

When Joshua came the next day, I was still high on my new found liberty. I told him about the doctor visit. Then he asked me for details, nothing major, just details of the sexual assault. I found myself arguing with myself right in front of him. You see, Kitty had always remembered the abuse but I didn’t.  When I began to remember anything, I only remembered what happened after Kitty told Mom.  I insisted over and over that nothing happened before that. Now sitting in front of Joshua, I was having the ancient argument with Kitty all by myself.

It seems that in spite of my glib proclamations, I still wanted to pretend it didn't happen.  I did not want to be that little girl.  I did not want those memories to be a part of me. I wanted to make excuses. I said, “He was only drunk.  He had a head injury.”  Then in the middle of one hell of a rationalization I stopped and turned to Joshua.  "I kept the bottom drawer of the dresser open so he couldn't get to me” I said.  “I hated Kitty because she got the room with the cubby and she could hide in there.  He couldn’t fit inside and he couldn’t reach her.  That’s why I kept the bottom drawer open, so he couldn’t reach me.  But he did reach me.  Hid did reach me. He grabbed my foot and pulled me off the bed and cracked my head on the open drawer! He hurt me."

Suddenly, I was frozen with fear. Every muscle in my body ached as I fought to keep the words from reaching my lips.  I was amazed by the how much pain I still carried and how long I had shoved those feelings deep inside. It stunned me to see how much power it still had over me.  I wanted to wrap my arms around myself to keep the pain inside, but I couldn’t move.  I could barely breathe.

At one point Joshua was trying to tenderly comfort me from the other side of the room.  I hate being touched lately.  I am afraid of physical contact and I found his tenderness frightening.  I backed away from him, “No! No kindness, no tenderness!  It’s a lie, it’s the way they trick you into letting down your guard.  It can’t be trusted.”

At that moment, it became clear to me that I choose men who are indifferent to me. I intentionally choose men who can not love me; men with no tenderness because tenderness has been used to hurt me.  Now I go even farther.  I have physically cut myself off from the world. A diagnosis of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity keeps me safe inside a bubble without human touch. I don't comb my hair because it will keep me safe.  I hide behind closed curtains because it will keep me safe.  Like the choking, only a fool wouldn’t see the correlation here.  I live in isolation because only then am I safe.  Joshua sat back in his chair.  He used his words to try to reach through the pain.  He asked again and again what would make me feel safe.  I could not answer. There’s no such thing as safe.

I ushered him out the door. He left reluctantly reminding me that I could call anytime.  I pushed him away thinking I had to do this by myself.  No one can help me.  No prince ever comes to the rescue.  If they do it’s just a foster father with cameras in your shower. Trust no one – trust no one they will betray you. 

I did tell once, I told my half-a-sister.  She grabbed me by the arm and shook me hard.  Then she told me that I’d kill my mother if I told her. She screamed in my face, “Do you WANT to kill your mother?”  I loved my mother.  So I kept quiet. A year later my mother confronted me in the bathroom.  She said that my baby sister Kitty complained that the step-father was ‘bothering’ her at night.  “Bothering’ like ‘molesting has as much in common with what grown men do to little girls as questioning does to torture.   Some guy bumps into you on the street – he’s molesting you. When the man who is father to you comes into your bed and takes your innocence, its rape.  It’s rape.  Don’t try and use nice words in front of the kids.  They know they are damaged.  They know something precious and irreplaceable has been taken from them.  They don’t feel molested.

I started my period.  He’d stopped ‘bothering’ me at night. I didn’t think he would bother Kitty. I didn’t mean to abandon her, I thought she was safe.  I still heard my half-a-sister’s warning.  I could not tell my mother about all the nights he had bothered me.  All I could say was “Kitty didn’t lie”.  I kept repeating that like a criminal repeats a fabricated alibi.  Whenever I was asked about that year, I try not to lie but I’ve never been able to tell the whole truth.  I do not remember that year.  Kitty didn’t lie.

When we finally left my step-father’s house it was not because I finally told my mother or because she finally believed Kitty.  It was because my step-father had found another waitress to charm.  This one had several young daughters who were ripe for the picking.  He would be the devoted husband and good daddy for a time. Then he would slowly pick at the mother’s mind.  Pulling her close then pushing her away, loving her, rejecting her.  All the while he would present himself to the daughters as the reliable one, the good father.  Then slowly the touching would start. At first it was a back rub that felt affectionate and nice. Then his hand would slide down your back and caress your butt. At first you didn’t know what it was.  You’d want to move, to pull away but he wasn’t hurting you.  He wouldn’t hurt you, he was the Good Daddy.  Mom was so erratic, you dare not offend him.  You dare not lose him too.  So you stand there unable to move, unable to breathe.  Before long, the hands slide up between the legs and he starts a gentle rhythmic rub.  You’re stuck; you don’t know what you’re feeling.  You don’t want those feelings but they’re there. Your body betrays you.  It flushes and rushes and you hate what he does but your body doesn’t know it’s repulsive.  You never outgrow this dichotomy. You never know true pleasure.

When I was not quite sixteen we moved to a new town leaving my step-father behind, leaving the night visits behind.  I wanted to be washed clean of his sin. It was a new school in a new town and lots of new friends.  Before long, I’d met a boy and fallen in love. I was full of teenage dreams.  I wanted to be like Gidget in the movie, in love with my Moondoggie.

Then one day I’d been out with friends and I came home to find my mother crazy on diet pills, my diary and fear. She greeted me at the door full of rage.  There was nothing in my diary but the sweet longings of a girl and her first love.  I ached for slow dances and hand holding and nothing more.  I wrote of class rings and prom dresses. Somehow in spite of everything my heart was still innocent and I was trying desperately to keep it that way.  But she is having none of it.  She ripped at me with slut and whoring and evil shame filled words.  She threw them like darts at a dartboard.  Sharpened words meant to pierce the skin.

In the corner is baby sister Kitty, the only person who could have revealed the secret location of my diary.  She was looking like a repentant suicide bomber. Kitty does not understand why I say I don’t remember. She is angry with me for leaving her to carry the memory alone.  She digs out my diary wanting to expose the truth. 

I am tired of the damn lie.  I scream that we didn’t lie.  Kitty and I did not lie!   Before I know it the words are out of my mouth.  She stops, turns her head slowly and stares at me.  I do not stop.  I shout at her for all the nights she left me alone to fight him off.  I shout at her for the knife under my pillow and the stitches in my head. She flies through the air and I land flat on my back.  She is on top, her hands around my throat screaming, “You stole my husband, you little slut, you stole my husband from me!”  At first I fight, then I let go.  Then I want her to choke the life from me.  I welcome the darkness.  I’ve killed my mother.

Sometime later I hear the sounds of the song “They’re coming to take me away” on my bedroom radio.  I see my mother in a straight jacket being led to a police car. The half-a-sister has come and taken Kitty.  I am alone and the house is empty.  I stumble in a fog the two mile walk to the High School Basketball Game. I slide onto the bench in the front row.  A friend leans over and asks, “Where’s your jacket?  What are those marks on your neck?”  I don’t remember much after that, not for many months.  Another black hole.

That was the end of my family and the death of my mother.  The woman I knew and loved never came home again.  Instead an almost robotic figure would pick me up at my foster parent’s house.  Sitting across the booth at a Bob’s Big Boy she would tell me she was sorry.  Our eyes never met.  Never again in her lifetime was I her daughter.  The rest of my family scattered too.  Whatever glue held us together was gone.  I had killed my mother.  I had killed my family.  I had made myself an orphan. It is all my fault. I don’t remember.  Kitty didn’t lie.

I spent the weekend, the long weekend alone remembering.  I can trust no one with the truth, maybe not even me.  I spent three days trying to pull the pieces together but this puzzle is as slippery as the jell-o in the recipe. Memories keep slipping through my fingers.  I remembered dresser drawer and then later the same day I forgot.  I shove my hand back into my jell-o memory to find the purple drawer and come up with a piece of a blue knife. That kept happening.  I’d remember and then the memory would slide through my fingers.  Some were seemingly benign memories; my first High School Dance the summer before 9^th grade, a new bicycle or a homework assignment. It made no sense that I would try to hide those memories.  I finally wrote “bottom drawer” on a purple post it note and stuck it to the mirror.  Later other slippery memories would get the post it note treatment.  I had a stack of post it’s in different colors.  I left a pad in each room along with a pen.  The blue notes were on my desk, the pink in the living room, purple were in the bedroom and green were kitchen notes.  On each one I scribbled notes like clues to that Holy Grail. 

I scooped up all the notes and stuck them to the bedroom mirror.  It looked interesting but held more questions than answers. The memories were disconnected with no sense of time.  Events floated unattached.  Then I lined up the post it notes according to date.  I had to check other sources to verify dates. I looked up yearbooks, checked wedding dates, Army enlistment dates and old letters.  Finally I had a timeline.  It was only then that things began to make sense.  There seemed to be a logical order to events.  I still could not remember without the notes but at least now I had the notes.

Months and months of tiny flashes, weekends full of jigsaw jell-o pass as I sorted through the broken bits of my life.   Then one day, out of nowhere, I said to Joshua on his weekly visit, “I can hear him grunt.”  The words escaped before I knew I’d said them.  I would have been ashamed but I was busy getting the sound out of my head.  Ugguhh.  Ugguhh.  Ugguhh.  I’m shaking my head, shaking my head; I want to shake him out of there.  Suddenly I stop.  “I can’t do this” I said and Joshua believed me.

A month later Joshua asked about doing “Body Work”. It was a kind of meditation where you connect with your body memories.  I was ready to try and I trusted Joshua to help me through.  First he did some guided meditation and then began asking about where I might feel pain or discomfort.  “My chest” I quickly answered, “there is always a weight on my chest.” It seems a harmless answer but as soon as the words were out of my mouth I felt the weight on him on top of my tiny body.  I was barely 70 pounds and the weight of him crushed me.  I heard the grunting noises again.  I saw images in the mirror over the dresser.  I saw the bottom drawer left open.  I saw a figure standing in the doorway.  Was that me?  It looked like me.  I sat up.  “I can’t.”  Joshua was talking but I couldn’t hear him. 

It wasn’t anger or fear but sadness that overwhelmed me.  I could hear the child in me saying, “If I don’t remember he can’t hurt me.  If I don’t remember I won’t kill my mother. He can’t hurt me; I won’t kill my mother, if I don’t remember.”  The pieces snapped together.

There it is.  There it is.

I did tell.  I told the half-a-sister the next day at the top of the basement stairs.  She was doing laundry. She saw my bloody sheets and asked if I’d started my period. As I shook my head back and fort, the words gushed like tears.  I told her how the blood got there.  I told her about the grunting. I told her he hurt me.  I could barely speak I was crying so hard.  Then she grabbed my arm hard and said, “"Don't you EVER tell! Do you want to KILL your Mother? Do you? Do you want her DEAD?" I sucked the words back in and I shut up good. I loved my mother. I didn’t want to kill her. So whenever I wanted to tell, I sucked the words back in.  Sometimes I choke on them. Sometimes I can’t breath.

That next night my mother dreamed of me dead in a white coffin.  She woke up screaming, “The blood, the blood!” I remember hoping that she would find out and that it wouldn’t kill her. But she didn’t notice.  She was busy working to pay off half-a-sisters wedding. She was working nights as a waitress.  She’d come home in the early morning hours and drag herself over to the sofa and fall asleep.  I tried waiting up for her, but I’d fall asleep. 

My big brother came home from Basic Training in the Army and I wanted to tell him.  But the words stuck in my throat. There was a dance at the tennis courts for all the high school.  It was my first high school dance. All my girlfriends and I were in a little huddle when my big brother walked in.  He was bad boy handsome and all my friends swooned.  He started walking across the tennis courts and I grinned when I realized he was headed straight for me.  When he walked up he didn’t even say hello he just leaned down and said, “Sis, your nylons are sagging around your ankles and what is THAT zit on your chin?”   I think he was embarrassed by me. 

I think my brother told our mother that since I was going to start high school, it was important that I make a good impression. He said I needed clothes and he even sent some money to help pay for my new school clothes. It makes sense now.  Because my step-father refused to buy clothes for my brother he went to Vietnam.  It really is that simple.  My brother didn’t have a winter coat and my step-father had stopped the charade of being the good father.  He had become a demanding miser who argued over every dime.  My brother broke into a dry cleaning store and stole a coat.  OK so it was a James Dean leather jacket, but it was a coat.  I remember the police showing up at the door and my big brother looking like a scalded cat.  My step-father was saying that the military would “Make a man out of him”.  Everyone seemed to agree except my brother who had other plans.  But whoosh my big brother was gone.

My Mom and I  went to the big Hudson’s store downtown and spent the whole day shopping for me.  I got three new wool skirts and a kilt.  I got new loafers and a sweater with my initials on it.  I loved shopping with my mother, she was better at picking out clothes for me than I was. When we finished we stopped at the mezzanine and had lunch.  Since we were very small my mother took us out to eat.  It was important to her that we learn how to behave in public, especially in restaurants.  I could have told her that day, but it was such a wonderful day.  I didn’t want to spoil it.

I was tender hearted my mother used to say.  She would take me aside and explain to me so I would understand.  She never thought my tender heart was a damaged heart.  Not until my half-a-sister called me “too sensitive” and everybody knows that too much of a thing – even a good thing – is bad.  I longed for the day when my mother would sit beside me and wrap her arms around me. But I didn’t want to kill my mother.  

After school started and I slept through my classes.  I would try to stay awake until my mother got home.  I’d go to school exhausted.  One day my English teacher, took me aside and asked about my essay titled “Living versus Existing”.  I said nothing.  In the emergency room when I got twelve stitches in my head the doctors asked why I slept in my clothes and if someone was hurting me.  I said nothing. Over the years when my little sister would demand that I remember, I said nothing.  Nothing nothing nothing. 

I felt like nothing in my life was real.   Every night he'd rape me.  Then every morning I'd make his breakfast; two eggs sunny side up, two pieces of crisp bacon, toast lightly browned and coffee and go to school.  I would struggle to stay awake during class then after school I would dread coming home.  I would get off the bus at St Patrick's and pray for divine intervention before going home.  Once I went into the confessional but I didn’t even tell the Priest.  I just asked if I could kill myself.  He said no.  I asked if I could kill someone who was hurting me.  He said no.  It was alright for me to be killed defending myself.  I started sleeping with a knife.

I tried to stay awake as long as I could but I fell asleep.  I woke with his hands around my throat making those grunting noises.  I stopped wearing pajamas and started sleeping in my clothes.  I still sleep in my clothes.  I pulled the drawers out of the dresser thinking he couldn’t get past them.  But he just grabbed my foot and pulled me off the bed. 

At the end of the first term my once solid A’s were now failing grades.  The friends from junior high school never came by.  I failed cheerleading tryouts and my English teacher reported me as suicidal and the school called my Mom.

The half-a-sister offered to take me to the doctor.  She said my mother shouldn’t worry about me  because "It was all that housework I was doing" The doctor told half-a-sister that I had an infection and bruising. But half-a-sister told my mother I'd broken my hymen riding a my brother's bike (crossbar). That year my Mom spent too much money buying me a new bike.

It gets complicated after that, I got my period, he left me alone and went after Kitty. I didn’t think he would, I thought it was just the evil in me. I failed to protect her but Kitty told. I still couldn't. My mother didn’t believe Kitty but it destroyed her anyway, she never recovered. Stepfather was the love of her life. She still has his name.

Once my Mom was dead, once I could no longer kill her by telling, I remembered. I remembered all of it. I remembered how much I loved her. I remembered her sitting on the bed next to me talking to me when I was upset. Who she was before my step-father's betrayal, before half-a-sister got her hooked on speed, before a nervous breakdown before months of shock treatments. It was like someone gave me an old photograph album full of pictures of my mother.  Things I put aside to help me keep my distance from her.  Pictures of her in the kitchen, working in the yard, trying to teach me to sew.  A lifetime of memories flooded into me.  Then I cried like hell for all the damn years lost.

Later I stood in front of the mirror.  I opened a photo album to a picture of my family.  It was taken on the front porch of our house in North Carolina. My mother wearing a flowered summer dress, her hair long a loose, my big brother out in front with that charming smile and my father still in uniform, cigarette in hand, holding me, a fat faced little girl in a blue bonnet on his knee.

Take the mirror image of that plump faced, bonneted, thumb sucking little toddler and shatter it with a sledge hammer. It fractured my memories, leaving a sunburst fracture with long ragged shards that dropped to the floor.  All that’s left is an empty frame and a pile of disconnected memories.  You try to walk away but the fragments clutter your path, one gets stuck in your heel and you walk with a limp.  You try to reconstruct your childhood.  You sort out the pieces, finding a corner piece here, a piece with two lumps, a straight side or a v shape.  Each piece is dangerous, sharp and slippery.  The glass shatters in your hands leaving your fingertips laced with slivers of glass. You have to force your shaky hands to grab hold and make the pieces tell the story.  

No wait, you have a shattered family portrait.  What my step-father did destroyed all of us.  His betrayal broke my mother in ways that only another woman can understand.  A child can’t understand.  It’s unbearable to know that the love of your life has cast you aside for your child.  It torments your soul.  My brother was confused by secret events he often misjudged.  My little sister was forever cast as the liar even by me and forced to carry the horrible secrets alone. Fifty years later, the children and grandchildren of this family still bear the scars of one man’s perversity.

For decades I just closed off memories in order to survive. Later, things kept creeping into my life at the worst possible moments.  When my mother died I found I had to open the door and solve the puzzle. My childhood memories slowly began to reveal a picture. I finally understand my sister’s determination to make me remember, my brother’s desperate wish that I would forget and I think I finally understand my Mother.  She was a woman who couldn't understand my sadness and tried what she could to help me.  She bought me a new bicycle to save my virginity and new school clothes to ease my sadness.  Having raised a daughter I understand how deep the wounding goes and how many generations will feel the pain.

It began with the Jigsaw Puzzle Jell-o at the doctor’s office and ended with the shattered glass puzzle. During this process I learned some hard facts and faced some truths. I also found my Mother. It was worth the journey.

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.

Introduction to the Anorexic’s Cookbook

I am a tidy cook. I clean as I go. I keep the sink full of hot soapy water and I wash the dishes and utensils as soon as I‘m finished using them. I also clean the pots and pans immediately and put them away. I never leave food out. It goes back in the refrigerator or cupboard as soon as I’m done using it. It’s a matter of economy as well as safety. Food safety is important to me. Before I’ve finished cooking, I wipe down the counters and take out the trash. By the time the food is served, the kitchen is spotless and you can’t even tell that anyone has been cooking. I leave no evidence behind. 

While I’m cooking I take tiny tastes of the food but I cook mostly by smell. I can smell if the spaghetti has enough oregano or if the turkey stuffing has enough sage. I know when the bread is done by the way it smells. I like kitchen-cooking smells. I’m actually a pretty good cook, if not an inventive or exotic one. I don’t eat my own cooking; in fact I rarely eat at all. Cooking leaves me without an appetite. I cook because I love to watch other people eat.

My daughter’s kitchen is a jungle. The cutting board is camouflaged by yesterday’s limp and lifeless vegetables. The stove is buried under spills from earlier meals. The sink has lost beneath a pile of uneaten food and dirty dishes. But then my daughter enters the room it comes alive again. Yesterday’s dishes are cleared away and in their place are fresh vegetables and bottles of exotic oils and spices. Soon pots are bubbling over on the stove and her kitchen is again full of scrumptious smells from exotic dishes. Her food is noisy. It has crunch and punch and a dash of something forbidden. No safe brown beef and green bean – her colors are tangerine and eggplant. Her dishes have names that I can’t pronounce let alone spell. It can be Hungarian Goulash, Greek Avgolemono Soup or Traditional Carnitas done Yucatan style. They are foreign and dangerous and mouth wateringly delicious. When she’s finished making the meal her kitchen looks like a whirling dervish has done the cooking.

I suppose you could say that I cook to ease hunger and my daughter feeds her appetite. But that oversimplifies the differences between the two of us. Sometimes I wonder where this child came from. How did this wild creature come from me? I am amazed by her and frightened too.

When she was small she was my child – timid and soft-spoken. Her words stuck in her throat and her voice, which yearned to sing, could only squeak. She hid behind me when strangers came along and was only really happy when she played in the garden. She seemed to have an innate affinity with the natural world. Butterflies would gather around her head like a crown, whenever she went out to play. She would pick the wild blackberries and carry them home in her shoe. She hated clothes and left a trail of clothing behind her as she danced naked in the garden.

Then someone hurt her down deep. Somewhere I can only guess about. Somewhere I could never quite reach. She never told me about it but in my mother’s heart I knew. But I stayed silent and looked away. Like too many mothers, I couldn’t bear her pain and I tried to pretended it out of existence. It lived there, behind her eyes, punishing both of us.

The change came gradually as she discovered the illusion of strength that comes with anger. She became dependent on the anger to ease her fear. In time, like an addict she found more and more reason to use the drug till it was all she could feel. I felt her slipping away.

She never forgave me for the thing we never spoke about and her anger focused hard on me. I think she believed that if she could hurt me enough she would stop hurting. I took the beatings. I played the martyr mother of the ungrateful child. As unfair as it was, it was easier than facing the truth. I could not bear to see her in pain and know I had failed her. I preferred to see her as a monster.

It hadn’t always been that way. I lost my first child and I was terrified that I would lose her as well. She came early, sending me to the hospital several times before she finally decided to come out. She was tiny but healthy and her first smile went to her father who was waiting with open arms. For the first three years of her life, she was her “daddy’s girl” and he spoiled her with affection.

I hovered over her, afraid to let her sleep; afraid she’d never wake up. Sometimes I’d poke her just to make sure she was really sleeping. I covered her with too many blankets and pondered the content of every dirty diaper. I couldn’t bear to hear her cry so I ran to comfort every ache. I taught her that she should never feel pain. I wanted to keep her safe from everything that could harm her and instead I crippled her. I made this world an inhospitable place for her. I should have let her cry. I should have told her that tears cleanse the eyes and the soul. That pain reminds us that we are human and teaches us compassion. But she was my first child, my living child, my daughter and I made mistakes.

Now, its decades too late to hold the ten year old and let her cry till the pain eases. Too much distance separates us and we are forever estranged. We are making a final attempt at Thanksgiving dinner. It is a battle over every detail. I want the traditional dinner with all the trimmings. She wants to break that mold. She wants to put her imprint on the holiday. She resents me and revolts against everything I love. She has defined herself by being “not like” me. I am the ugly” before” picture in her family album.

For months now, I have been working on a Christmas present for my daughter. It is a box that her father made for her when she was only five. It is a jewelry box meant to hold the treasures of a little girl. He made it from fine grain golden oak. He cut the corners with the miter box I gave him once. The top is gently rounded and the inside is lined with black velvet embroidered with butterflies. He worked on it for months. It was the last gift he made for her before the divorce: before he rejected her for a step-daughter. She lost it years ago. I found it recently when unpacking the Christmas decorations. It was a jewelry box for a small girl but she’s outgrown it now.

I’ve decided to make it into a recipe box. It’s just the right size. I’ve been working on this for months, designing the cards, finding the recipes. I want to fill it with the family recipes – the ones I’ve been collecting from across the country and across a lifetime. They are a kind of culinary scrapbook that I’m putting together. I have David (my friend Lynn’s first husband) Delicious Eggnog, Betty and Phil’s Hillbilly Lasagna, Aunt Jeanne’s whole wheat bread, the barbecue meat balls from the coworker in Texas, my mothers chestnut turkey stuffing and fried chicken, corn bread and peach cobbler acquired along the way from who knows where. I am very pleased with this gift. I am giving her my life’s treasure.

As I’m passing the bedroom on my way to empty the trash, I hear my daughter and my mother huddled in deep conversation. It seems they are telling each other about my gifts. My daughter is not happy that I have gone the “Homemade” route this year. She prefers the guilt ridden electronic presents. I hear her say “ Yea, great, the anorexic’s giving me a cookbook – just what I’ve always wanted” She leans over and pretends to whisper, “Never trust a skinny cook!” and walks towards the kitchen.

My mother grins in agreement. They are round women, the one before and the one after. I am the odd one, the one in the middle, the one who doesn’t fit in. I lean hard against the back door. I am stunned, not because my mother broke her promise and told my daughter of the present. It is the truth of my daughter’s words that stuns me.

I am a skinny cook. I am anorexic. I am all angles and elbows. No soft place to rest your head. I am like trying to hug a pile of wire coat hangers. My daughter is curvy like a woman. She is rounded at her corners without my sharp edges. She has soft shoulders to cry on and a lap large enough to give comfort. It is absurd for me to give my daughter cooking instructions.

I had worked for weeks on that recipe box. I refinished the box and replaced the velvet liner with more velvet butterflies. I was so shamed by her comments that when I gave her the box, I also gave her the too expensive, electronic guilt present. The electronics were received with polite appreciation, no surprise and no show of gratitude. It was as though it was the very least that I could do. The recipe box was immediately ridiculed. Later she took it out on the deck and smashed it with a hammer. Then she sent the fragments to me. She said, “You claim that you’re giving me something I need but it’s really something you need to give. I don’t need it.” Of course she was right. She’s convinced she can learn nothing from me.

I looked at the fragments of the recipe box. I saw more than a discarded present. I saw my life scattered before me. The torn page from an old cookbook cut out recipes from a newspaper, the pink phone message, the page from a yellow legal pad, the three by five cards and the fancy recipe cards I got for my wedding. These scraps of paper were more than recipes, they were Christmas cards, love letters, postcards from lifelong friends and bits of memory from here and there - the fragments of a life. In the wreckage I see other mothers, other daughters, other women who took me into their kitchen and taught me their secrets. I see good fathers who keep little girls safe and nourished their spirits. From these other mothers and good fathers, I learned the proper use of spice, how long to knead and how much is too much. From them I learned how to measure, sift and blend and how to let things ripen.

That’s what I wanted to give my daughter but again I have failed her. Her hammer is the true symbolism of my family’s traditions. It was meant to silence me. But I’ve been silent much too long already. If she can’t hear my words, then I’ll save them for when she’s ready. When she needs to hear them, they’ll be waiting.

These stories, these recipes, document my journey back through the lost memories of my childhood. The sexual abuse that happened when I was just a little girl not only changed my life but forever made me a target for predators. The wounds are deep and last a lifetime – it is a kind of death. I see now that my mother was a victim too. Her pain made her blind herself to mine. Like mother like daughter, I could not defend my little girl. With these stories, I hope to break the silence and shame the devils. Maybe someone will read my words and know they are not alone. Maybe some mother will read my words and rescue her daughter. Maybe some daughter will read my words and put down the razor. Maybe.

This is a book of the stories dedicated to all the women who were mothers to me. It is a book I give to other women’s daughters who share a kitchen with me. It is the kitchen wisdom that one woman hands down to another. It’s about food, or more precisely – about nourishment and appetites. It is a lifetime of memories and lessons. Celebrations and tragedy all punctuated with food. It’s a story started by a painfully skinny woman and ended by a round robust one. It is not enough for my daughter but it is all I have. It is an anorexic’s cookbook.

Pass it on.