The House on My Street

When I was growing up, there was a house in my neighborhood that all the school kids walked past on their way home.

This house was pretty typical; it was a 2 story ranch with a concrete walkway to the drive and very little landscaping. There may have been some trees in the yard but my memory fails me. The house had 4 windows up and 3 down which had shutters on them, it had a pretty yellow door. The house itself was a nice white and yellow combination; it looked very fresh and friendly.

In the door of this house, every day, there was a little child. This child was about 3 or 4. Every day they would lean on the door, their little palms leaving sweaty prints where they had been, and the tears would run down from big brown eyes, over pudgy little cheeks to dangle from the jaw for a moment and then drip silently downward through space.

We would see this child every single day on the way home but none of us ever stopped to see if they were OK. We were just kids; it wasn’t our job, besides no one knew why they cried. Maybe they were a bad kid! None of us wanted to be associated with a bad kid. That was Taboo.

They looked so sad and helpless though, trapped behind that big door, but still, it was not our place.

Fast forward a few years –

There is a skinny little girl, in about third grade. She has few friends and many enemies. They all pick on her because she comes to school dressed in whatever, sometimes the nightgown she slept in and jeans, sometimes suits her mother crochets for her which are entirely unsuitable for school. Her hair has never been combed and her sense of humor leans towards the bawdy. She is both far too old and far too young for her age, her eyes show a deep pain that you do not expect in one so young. Sometimes she comes in to school and she has bruises on her, once she even had a welt from a leather strap across her face and tiny chest. She does well in school, when she is there, but the other children’s cruelty makes it hard for her to come many days. They call her fat, though the doctors say she is too thin, they call her ugly, though the men her father knows and the ones in the bar her takes her to tell her she is beautiful. No one really wants to be around her because she is so strange and has those old eyes, besides, she doesn’t play like the other children and they know they could get hurt if they make her angry. No one really ever knows what will make her angry after all.

She had a best friend once, but that ended. She treated that friend as she was used to being treated. She still remembers the day that she calls the beginning of the end, and what she did to cause it, and she feels shame so powerful it is a physical ache. She wants to curl up in a ball every time she thinks of it. She’s so sorry, but she does not know how to say it to her friend.

The little girl thrives under praise from the teachers, but it comes so infrequently. If she performs well, the other children call her teachers pet, never knowing just how deeply it hurts her to crave positive attention so badly and be ridiculed for it.

Things at home are as bad as they ever were. Mom tells her she will get a beating a day whether she needs it or not. Usually she doesn’t, but she gets one anyway because her older brothers have made her mom so mad. If it wasn’t for Mom telling her how bad men were, and how awful her father was in detail, daily, she would not have any friendship at all. She doesn’t realize she is far too young to bear the burden of her Mothers bad marriage.

She learns to hate, and is indoctrinated daily in the modes and methods of anger. In fact, there are only 2 acceptable expressions of emotion in her home; anger and violence. Most often, it seems to the girl, that violence is directed at her. She doesn’t know why, that is just the way it is, so quit crying before I give you something to cry about! She knows she is a baby, and useless and worthless and unlovable, she knows she is fat and ugly. She learns to hang her head, stay at the back of the line, never try out, never achieve and she learns to punish herself for those transgressions that no one else saw. When she said something someone else didn’t understand, she would tell herself “You’re stupid, you’re an idiot! Why would anyone want to talk to you?” She would punch herself in the stomach or snap her thigh with a comb until she felt better.

She prided herself, inside, on doing the best she could do, and when she failed she would quit trying and remind herself she was stupid, inept, or unfit in whatever way caused that failure.

She learned never to smile.

She recalls vividly, all these years later a particular incident that still feels like a white hot poker in her heart. Mom was tired of these “Goddamned lazy brats!” so she set up a chore board. All the kids names were there, and all the chores and you got a pretty gold star if you did your chore! Oh she was excited! She had never gotten a gold star from school before like the other kids and she was so jealous because no one ever though she was worth that gold star, but here it was! Here was her chance to finally have a gold star! She could Be Somebody! Besides, if she did the chores right, Mom might think she was a good girl. Really, all she wanted was to be a good girl. In the first week, she left the house with Mom to go to the store. Mom didn’t want to leave her home because the boys were beating her too much. When they got back, the boys had cleaned the kitchen up very nicely. She was jealous that they did something good and she wasn’t allowed to, but that wasn’t the worst of it. When she walked into the kitchen with Mom, the boys said “Look what she did while you were gone! She cleaned the kitchen!” The little girl had no idea why they would do this, why they would make fun of her in this way and look at her so very meanly. She began to cry, which only made the boys worse.<sp

an> She didn’t know why she was crying, except they were mad at her and that would mean more hitting. The memory fades out at that point, which surprises the woman she has become because the memory is so very vivid. She knew at that moment that she could never, ever trust her brothers to be fair or her Mother to protect her.

She learned not to trust.

More later……

This entry did not quite end up being what I intended, but I hope you enjoyed it.