Gretel In Darkness

 

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Gretel In Darkness

This is the world we wanted. All who would have seen us dead
Are dead. I hear the witch's cry
Break in the moonlight through a sheet of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas...
Now, far from woman's arms
And memory of women, in our father's hut
We sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
From this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
Summer afternoons you look at me as though you meant
To leave, as though it never happened. But I killed for you.
I see armed firs, the spires of that gleaming kiln come back, come back-

Nights I turn to you to hold me but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
Hiss in the stillness, Hansel we are there
Still, and it is real, real,
That black forest, and the fire in earnest.
-Louise Gluck

Intro To Dysfunction

 I suppose I will begin at the beginning. I was born to two alcoholic parents. My father came from a very poor family. His mother gave birth to him when she was sixteen years old. She was married to his father who was about forty years old (Pedophilia much?), but apparently, they split soon after his birth. My paternal grandmother was a hoochie coochie dancer in a traveling Irish circus. (A hoochie coochie dancer is like an old-fashioned stripper.) The circus was owned by her father, and she met my paternal grandfather in the course of their travels. The family had immigrated from County Cork, Ireland. I’m not sure what year that happened, though. Probably sometime in the early 1900s. I know virtually nothing about my paternal grandfather. I know his name and that he died soon after he split with my father's mother. 

My mother’s parents came from very poor families as well. I have a vivid memory of being in my maternal grandmother’s pantry and being astonished at how much food she had stored in there. Her pantry was the size of a small bedroom. I can remember her telling me that she lived through the Great Depression and how often she went hungry during that time. So, when she could afford it, she stocked up on years of canned food. I don’t know much about my mother’s parents except their families came to the United States so long ago that I regularly get invitations to the groups The Daughters of the American Revolution and The Daughters of the Confederacy, both of which I decline every year. I know that my paternal grandmother’s family is Irish and that my maternal grandfather’s family is Scottish. I know that my maternal grandmother was abused in every kind of way by her parents. She was another in the generational cycle of familial violence and incest. I don’t know much about my maternal grandfather’s background. I know he was a WWII vet. I know that he and another man were stranded on a deserted island in the Pacific for months after some kind of accident in the water or above the water. My mother told me that he nearly died and lost a good amount of his teeth as well.

Alcoholism and drug use runs rampant in both sides of my family. Both sets of my grandparents were hard drinkers. My mother’s parents added a side of physical violence to that lovely addiction. My mother told me so many stories about them beating on each other. 

Her father was a salesman for a company which sold granite and other kinds of stones for large construction projects. So, he was on the road for most of the time during which he would be mostly drunk. He would come home, and it would be sweet for a while, but after a couple of weeks it would start to go downhill. My grandmother would accuse him of cheating, and he would accuse her of cheating and then they would beat on each other. 

My mother related one story to me that happened when she was about nine or ten years old in which they were both completely drunk and had gone a few rounds with each other, Then, my grandmother got a knife and cut one of my grandfather’s fingers off. It was then that my mother had to drive them to the hospital. She said that was one of the scariest nights of her life.

My mother had two sisters. She was the eldest. When she and her first sister were children, she told me that they were so afraid of their parents that they would sleep nightly underneath their bed so that they would not get beaten or molested by one or both of them. Apparently, the youngest sister was an “accident” and happened many years after their childhood and after my grandfather had made his fortune (He became very wealthy.) so she didn’t get as much or the same kind of abuse as the first two sisters did.

The majority of the abuse that happened to me was inflicted by my mother and her parents. My father was abusive, for sure, but he was completely different. I’m not making excuses for him, but I believe that his physical and mental abuse of me was mostly because he did not know how to deal with me being the product of systematic and traumatic abuse inflicted on me by my mother and family. The abuse from my mother and maternal grandparents was by far worse, began in toddlerhood and lasted for most of my young life.

The First Four Years-Gaps In Time

 As a very young child, as my mother tells it, I was afraid of old men. The men who were around the same age as her father. I was very picky about who could touch me as a young child. Only my mother and father could pick me up or handle me in any way without me screaming bloody murder. However, my fear of older men went beyond this, apparently. My mother said that whenever her father (my grandfather) would hold me I would scream and get completely hysterical with hyperventilating and sometimes passing out. She said that they all thought it was just a phase I was going through or that I was incredibly shy. Now that I am an adult, I realize that this is not normal behavior for a baby. I am a parent now and if my daughter had acted that way when someone held her, you can bet that I would have investigated why very thoroughly.

I have huge gaps in my memory of my childhood. There are pictures in my mind or flashes of things that happened, but no continuous memory. The very first memory I have is of being a toddler and climbing out of my crib, walking down the hallway of our house to the living room and crawling up on the sofa to snuggle with my dad who was eating ice cream while watching Johnny Carson. When I told my dad of that memory, he didn’t believe me at first, saying that he didn’t believe children that young could have detailed memories. However, when I began to describe the layout of our house to him in detail, his eyes got wider and wider. He was shocked that I could remember all of that when I was still in diapers. The memories I do have are very detailed and accurate. I notice little things around me like if there are chachkis and where they are placed in a house or what the weather was like on a particular day. I can remember dreams I had when I was a child in great detail. I think I had a photographic memory. When I started elementary school, all of the things I learned I snapped pictures of in my mind. I have this memory of being around ten years old, sitting at my mother’s dining table studying for a test the next day. I had a page of notes, front and back, in my own handwriting that I was reading and re-reading. The next day, during the test, I was able to recall the notes I took in the form of pictures in my mind which were organized into paragraphs or sections of the paper. My mind still works this way to some extent.

My parents divorced when I was four years old. I was completely devastated. My mother said I cried every night for six months. I was very attached to my father. Not long after I was born, my mother had to undergo heart surgery for the second time. She was born with a congenital heart defect and had had surgery to correct it when she was a child, but evidently, that surgery was not done correctly. So, after I was born, she was recovering from that surgery for a long time. During this time, she could not hold me, and she definitely did not breast feed me. (When I mentioned to her years later that I had decided to breast feed my own daughter, she screwed up her face in disgust and made an “ewww” sort of sound.) My father had to take up all of the duties caring for me. He was the only one who held me, fed me, changed me, played with me, took me to daycare, etc… My mother did not have anything to do with me for practically the first year of my life. So, it’s no wonder that I was so attached to my father. My father told me that when they talked about who would get custody of me during the divorce proceedings, it was agreed that I would be better off with him. However, my mother told him that she was going to fight for custody of me because she “needed the money” that she would get from his child support payments. My father’s exact response to me regarding this was,

 “It’s terrible to use a child like that. For money.” 

I think this statement sums up perfectly the major differences in who they were as people and their parenting styles.

My mother remarried almost immediately after her divorce was final. She had been having an affair with a child psychologist at the hospital where she worked. When he moved into our apartment after they married, I was still crying every night over the loss of my father. His continuous presence just made things that much more difficult. Every night, I would lay in bed crying and heartbroken and every night, one or the other of them would come into my bedroom, drag me out of bed and beat me until I stopped crying. This happened nightly for around six months. I had bunk beds at the time, and I can remember moving to sleep on the top bunk thinking, in my childish way, that if I were on the top bunk that they couldn’t reach me to pull me out of bed for the nightly abuse. As children often do though, I misjudged. After I moved to the top bunk, they would just yank me off of it and I would crash to the floor. A startling and rude awakening. 

When the time came that I finally stopped crying every night for my father, I began to hear at night strange noises coming from my mother’s bedroom. Since my bedroom was adjacent to hers, I discovered that if I put my ear to the door that connected her room to mine, I could hear everything that was going on. This is just what I did. For the first few times I listened, I couldn’t understand what was going on. During the day, though, my mother began to appear with various bruises on her face or body and she seemed always to have a purplish red ring around her neck which she tried to cover up with makeup.

Sleepy and Mother

~Sleepy~

Scarves floating like ghosts
Twirling and twirling
tickling my knees
Silken pink slippers
playing gypsy dancer
Gossamer wings
to fly and flit
petals waiting on the wind
floating softly
fairy boats on the water
Dappled sunlight
playing warm on white stones
mermaid sunning
blue-green wetscales
and Ophelia's petal-hair
Siren songs
sing sweetly
of Secret Gardens
follow blackbird
to the iron-keyed door
where swings are twining vines
swallowed in sweet scent
of pollen bees buzzing slowly
Leprechauns have houses of gold
where the rainbow ends~
-------------------------------------

~Mother~
I wondered why that spot inside of me was so vulnerable.
That secret place I had tucked away in a far corner of my heart.
Growing dusty in the attic of my mind.
That traveler's trunk of insecurity,
locked securely and strapped tightly.
Yet I walked into your the room of your mind,
into the dim interior of your idiosyncrasies,
and you opened that rusty trunk as if it had never been locked.
I know... I know...
I told myself over and over,
that I am not those things you think,
not those things you say.
I bled everyday as the lies I swallowed became razors in my throat.
Working their purpose
destroying me from the inside out,
bleeding away all of my self-esteem
all of my security,
all of what is me.
I was sick unto death and my hatred of you grew and grew
until it became its own entity.
Living and breathing,
the stench of the cesspool of vileness it exhaled
morbidly intoxicating,
replicating,
doting on its horrid spawn,
cultivating more and more
of me.
And building upon itself seared my vision
white hot with insurmountable rage
and lashing out wildly in the end,
uncontrollable,
I imagined that you were dead.
That I had cut you to pieces
and left you in a quivering, bloody heap.
And then I vomited up all of the sickness
and all of the lies
you fostered
that I believed
and I felt relieved.~

Irish

 

 I found out at the end that they called her Irish. I never knew why because no one knew if she was even from there. I thought she may have been about sixty years old, but she may have been older or younger. Regardless of whether she had lived a hard life in her youth, it was plain that she lived a hard life now and it showed on her face and the way she carried herself. Irish was not hunched over by any means, as if she had that bone-wasting disease that so many women of her age have. She stood straight and rested most of her weight on one leg and kicked the other one out in front of her as if to tell the world that she had claimed whatever spot she happened to be standing on.  She was not very tall and slight of build, but she was wiry and strong for her size and had short and coarse curly gray hair which she had brushed back from her forehead. She wore mismatched items that seemed as though she might have gotten them dumpster diving. She wore a black leather patch over one eye which had a strap that went across her head and cut through her thick hair. Her brown leather jacket was a duster and fell to her ankles. You could tell it had been worn a lot before she got it. It was marred all over with cuts and creases and completely covered in a layer of dirt. She wore a belt that was made for gun ammo, but it never seemed to have any in it. She never wore skirts or dresses. Always trousers and those were mostly cargo pants. You know, the kind with all the pockets. God only knows what she kept in them. Her shirts were always thin and full of random small holes. If there was a design or a picture on them, they were always so faded that you could only see what might have been there when it was new. To complete her ensemble, Irish always wore a pair of black army boots that were never tied all the way up. Somehow, the laces always seemed to drag, but she never tripped. That was a miracle, I thought. Overall, Irish gave off the air of someone who had come up the hard way and still had to grapple for everything she had and what she did have she would not give up without a fight. She was not a woman whom most would approach easily. This was how she looked when Sam, our local detective, brought her to stand on my front porch. 

She had kidnapped my daughter and a number of other townsfolk's children. My daughter was 9 years old when she disappeared. A blur of giggles and long hair, she was. Sweet, stubborn, insanely smart and empathetic and the love of my life. The day she was taken was the day I died inside. So, when Sam knocked on my door that chilly fall morning, I opened it hoping that he had news of the whereabouts of my daughter. I pushed open the screen door and looked to my right and there she was. On my porch. In handcuffs. Smirking with that damned leg kicked out standing there in front of me like she owned my house. 

"Sam," I said tentatively, "Why is Irish on my porch in handcuffs?"

He cleared his throat nervously.

"She has something she wants to tell you, Fae." 

I turned toward her and right then her smirk broke into a wide grin revealing teeth that looked like they had been blackened with a marker. 

"I took yer daughter," she drawled nonchalantly. 

I looked at Sam questioning, "Is this true?"

"I'm afraid so, Fae," he said lowering his head. 

I came fully out on to the porch at that moment and let the screen door slam. I was numb or livid or desperately sad. I couldn't tell which. I stood still for a couple of minutes, which, to me, felt like millennia. I was trying to process what had just taken place. Out of all the emotions I was feeling at that moment, anger became the foremost. No, it was not just anger. It was homicidal anger. I turned my body toward Irish and lunged at her screaming. A sound that couldn't have come from me tore itself up and out of my body through my throat. I sounded like a wild animal. When I landed on her, I smelled whiskey, cigarettes, and unwash. It permeated everything about her. As if by my touching her, I loosed some weird spores that made up her being. I felt surrounded by her essence and I hated her for so confidently telling me that she had taken my daughter, whom I loved more than anything in the universe. I punched and clawed at Irish until Sam managed to pry me off of her.

"She's not dead, Fae!", Sam yelled as he pulled me off Irish, "That's what I come here to tell you!"  

I disengaged from Irish and looked alternately at Sam and at her. I noticed that when Irish got to her feet, she wasn't so nonchalant. Her face looked like it had been through a meat grinder. Two black eyes, a broken nose and, I noticed a few of those black teeth littered my porch. Now, it was my turn to smirk. 

"That's right, she ain't dead and neither are them others," Irish hissed through her missing teeth. 

Sam let out a breath as if he had been holding it since he had arrived, "Irish told us where all them kids are, Fae. They're out by the old airplane graveyard." 

I started awake. The last thing I saw in my dream was my daughter running toward me down a hill of airplane trash with her beautiful hair trailing behind her. I lay in bed for some time trying to convince myself that this was not real. I got up and padded down the hall to my daughter's bedroom and peeked inside. There she was. Her angelic face relaxed and her hair all around her looking like a burnished bronze halo. It was all a dream. Just a bad dream.