I was the one most often in trouble. There were four girls left at home, but the others were less inclined toward outward expression. Still, I’m convinced that it wasn’t my verbal tendencies alone that got me punished. There were other factors.
I was simply too good a target.
With my easily tapped outpourings of pain, I was a faucet for the thirsty. My soggy outbursts, the chains of “I hate yous,” the howling. It was all so easy. In short, I offered the most bang for the punishment buck.
Or maybe it was dumb luck. Like the time my mother came home raging about something or other, and started yelling at the three of us seated in the living room. We sat tight, hoping it would pass.
It didn’t.
She pointed and screamed.
Why hadn’t we cleaned?
Why didn’t we turn off the damned TV?
Couldn’t we do anything worthwhile without her telling us to?
She yelled herself into a fit, and then lunged. We darted into the kitchen, went round and round the enamel-topped table while she followed on our heels, calling at us to stop. The more she couldn’t catch us, the more she wanted to. The faster we ran, the harder she chased. We screamed. She lumbered. And even as I ran, I thought of Sambo’s tigers turning to butter and wanted to laugh and share my thoughts with Stephanie so she could laugh too, but I couldn’t, because Steph was turning to butter too, the tiger right at her heels.
“You kids—stop running,” my mother shouted. “Stop your goddamned running!”
We screamed and cried, said we were afraid to stop, and ran even faster. It seemed like no end was in sight, and she must have felt the same way, because the next thing out of her mouth was that she only wanted one of us.
“The other two can go free,” she said, “if just one of you stops.”
“Which one?” I asked as my feet slapped the broken linoleum floor.
“I don’t care,” came her response. And the insanity of her answer stopped us.
We quit our running and faced off, us girls breathing hard in a line on one side of the table, her red-faced on the other. And what was it that kept me standing in the same position, cheeks wet from laugh-crying, heart-thumping even as the other two backed up, and slipped quietly into the other room? What was it that allowed my arm to be taken while the others scurried away? And afterward, once she’d hurt me somehow—once the crying was done, and my skin had returned from pink and was available to her again—what was it that led her in a tender moment to confide that she thought of me as special, more like her than the others, and then follow her confession with a bemoaning of the fact that she was too poor to send me off to boarding school a few states away? Why was it me, looking at a smattering of bleach stains on rust-colored carpet, who was most vulnerable, who found her declarations of love as stifling as hands wrapped round my neck?