JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ
THE EARLIEST MEMORY I HAVE of my father is running away from him. I am about three years old, and the world is tilted at an angle as I peer into my parents’ bedroom and see him half dressed, stumbling around.
Then I am over my mother’s shoulder and she is running. She is pulling my older sister next to us by the hand. I catch glimpses of my sister’s scared face each time we pass an orange streetlight.
I don’t remember what happens next. I don’t remember the next day. But I remember it as the first of similar memories to come.
I spent my whole childhood and adolescence scared of my father. Scared of his voice and the scrape of his cowboy boots on the kitchen floor when he’d come home from work. His presence, the threat of him and what he could do, what I’d seen him do, filled me with anxiety and fear. Every moment of every day was uncertain, every movement I made had to be careful. It was impossible to know what would anger him.
One morning as I sat down for breakfast, he immediately told me to get up and go down to the basement. Because I never dared question him or defy him, I went downstairs. My father loomed behind me.
I knew I’d done something wrong, but I didn’t know what it was or what I should do as we stood in the empty basement and he stared at me with strange, consuming anger. Finally, he told me I’d sat in the wrong chair. I had no idea what he meant. He looked over at an electrical cord on his workbench, and I felt my stomach drop. My mother yelled my name from the top of the stairs and demanded I get up there immediately. I didn’t care if I might not make it past him, I didn’t care if he might beat me or kill me for trying. I ran.
Nothing more was said about that morning. He didn’t hit me ever, not that day or any day after. But my legs felt weak, like I’d escaped some terrible danger, some irreversible something.
Another time, I was nine when my dad offered to drive me to school. He told my mom not to make my lunch, that we’d stop at the deli on the way and he’d get me a sandwich. He was in a good mood. We parked and I got out from the passenger side, slamming the heavy door hard behind me, right on my finger. The door was locked, but because I was afraid of him, afraid of getting in trouble for doing something stupid and ruining the moment, I didn’t say anything. I jerked my hand harshly from the door and followed my dad into the deli, hiding my hand behind me.
After a while, I felt dizzy. I tried to pay attention to what the guy at the counter was asking me, but I couldn’t make sense of it. My dad finally looked down at me. What’s wrong with you? I slowly lifted my hand, showed him my bloody, mangled finger.
He looked stricken. Worried. He rushed me home, put cartoons on the television, unwrapped my sandwich. He kept checking on me and looked grieved each time he looked my way. For days, I stared at my mangled finger and thought only of my father’s kindness. It’s a wonder I didn’t hurt myself regularly just to get the nice version of him.
This was what my dad was like. I never knew which version of him I would get. Even when he didn’t drink, he was unpredictable. His face could hold anger one moment and tenderness the next. I didn’t know what to make of him. I only knew I was afraid of him. That he was bad. And good. And he was my dad. And this was our life.
I don’t know what motivated my father to move us to Florida when I was ten, or why things seemed to slowly change after that. Maybe because none of my father’s friends were in Florida. And there were no more weekend parties, so there wasn’t as much liquor in the house. Maybe because this house had bright white walls inside and was filled with blinding sunshine that didn’t so easily hide secrets. My father was obsessed with having the light come in. Or maybe because my dad got an interstate trucking job and spent most of his time on the road, hauling produce up and down the East Coast, which gave us a little room to breathe. I don’t know. It just happened.
I remember being scared when we got to Florida, of starting somewhere new, but my classmates were scared of me because I was from New York and they thought that meant I was tough. I knew fear and how it could work, so I played into their assumptions, told them lies about how many kids I’d beaten up on the playground back home. And told anyone who would listen all kinds of fantastic things about New York. Anything but the truth.
Eventually, my teacher tired of my stories and asked me one day, “What do you not miss about New York?”
I thought about it for a second.
“My house,” I told her. “I don’t miss my house at all.”
“Your house?” She looked at me funny. “How can you not miss your house?”
I shrugged and ate my fruit snacks. I wasn’t saying any more.
My house in New York had brown carpeting that hid every stain, and wood paneling. It was dark inside, and it held our secrets. It held violence. It held too much liquor. It held the smell of hangovers and the view of my father’s car parked across our front lawn for all the neighbors to see, the door left wide open overnight. My house held my father and his anger.
I spent summer vacations after we moved visiting and hanging out with cousins in New York. And later, when my sister got married, I spent them with her in New Jersey. The way I traveled was to catch a ride with my father in his eighteen-wheeler. I liked these trips, despite the awkwardness between my father and me. He wasn’t exactly the person he used to be, but this somehow made it harder to know who he really was. We’d stop at Waffle Houses and eat silently across from each other. I never knew what to say to him. Sometimes what I wanted was to just ask him why. Why had he been the way he had been? But I didn’t have the courage then to be so direct with him, to bring up anything from the past, so we’d get back on the road. And I’d stare out the window and watch the cars below pass me by as I wondered about the people inside. I’d watch them cut my father off and hear him curse up a storm as tiny tree air fresheners spun around wildly. I’d listen to the gruff voices on the CB radio and try to figure out what they were saying. I’d fixate on the blurry white dashes on the road.
When we did talk, he’d ask about school, or soccer, or general things. Sometimes, we’d find ourselves mentioning something about New York, but he never brought up the things I remembered. Never admitted my memories were real. I wondered if he was pretending they didn’t happen, or if he really didn’t remember they had. In the twilight, when he couldn’t really see my face, I’d look over and study his profile as he stared at the road ahead and I’d wonder who my father was. Sometimes when we ran out of words, he’d pop in a tape to cover up any silence, and we’d listen to rancheras—songs about people done wrong.
It wasn’t until my later teen years that I realized the extent of abuse my father had suffered as a kid, that some of the stories he’d told in a joking manner were partial confessions of a far worse reality. He began filling in the truths of those stories on those trips as I got older. He talked more about his life in Santa Rosa, and I learned of the things he had endured, that his mother had endured as a child as well. He never called it abuse, but that’s what it was. He’d get pensive and say it was just the way things were back then. I wish I had told him no, not everyone was treated the way he was. I wish I had told him he should have been loved more, better. That he didn’t deserve any of what he experienced. I didn’t say those things to him then because maybe I didn’t really know them yet. And I still had not found my voice for those kinds of conversations. All I could do was swallow my sadness as I pictured my father as a scared child.
Those road trips with my father stayed with me through the years as our family changed. I used to close my eyes at night and picture him on the road. I wondered what filled his mind all those hours he spent driving, if he ever thought about those years in our old house or our life in New York or me and my sister scared. If he ever understood or knew the extent of our fear. I wondered what he would think if he knew that for years I dreamed of loose lions and bears in our house. Last Christmas, the time of year that long ago always began well enough but always ended violently, with yelling and screaming, crying, or a fist through a wall, my father looked at my sister and me and choked out an apology. For the fear and the memories he had created and for the ones he wished he had created instead.
I could not find the words. I did not want, could not stand, for him to hurt. He’d transformed so much over the years, I felt like the man before me was not the same one who had existed then. He’s become a gentle man. One who worries about people forgotten and disposed, who sees the humanity in people others are afraid to approach. My sister and I looked at each other, fumbled with our responses, and fell back to the way we’d always handled things with my father. We covered up our feelings, pretended it was no big deal. Forget it, we told him. We never think of it. He looked at us like there was more he needed to say, like he needed us to say more, too, but we couldn’t hear any more, couldn’t say any more. Forget it, we insisted.
I went home that night and cried. I went to sleep remembering my road trips with my father and the smell of diesel. And I wondered if the highway he’s driven all these years is littered with his demons.
I don’t know why or how things worked out the way they did with my dad. But because of him, I have an unshakable belief that things can get better. It’s the truest thing I can tell you. In the darkest, scariest moments of my life, I could not have known things would be okay. I could not have believed my father could one day be a man unafraid to cry, who wouldn’t touch hard liquor, who I wouldn’t be afraid of. But he is.
I’ve lost hope in people and the world many times. Hope is something I think you lose and find many times in life. And I know things could have gone a very different way with my father. But they went this way. And it’s why I know hope exists. Because there was nothing I wanted more when I was younger than to not be that scared little kid in that dark house anymore. There was nothing I wanted more than for the person I feared so much to be someone different. There was nothing I wanted more than to know what to do with all the feelings and secrets I kept bottled up for all those years.
So here I am, writing to you, telling you to trust and hope and believe.