When I enter the classroom I notice her immediately. She is obese and has difficulty fitting onto the school chair attached to the desk. She wears thick glasses, and the skin on her face is pale as if she hides from sun, hides from light. Stringy hair trails to her shoulders. Her clothes, not just because of her weight, are ill-fitting, the material worn and beaded. She looks unsure, awkward, ashamed, defeated. And this is why I notice her immediately: because I remember my own awkwardness and shame, as if we are twins. Even though when I starved myself I was skinny, there is no difference between us, for I, too, looked ill-fitted, always expecting to fail.
I put my books on the teacher’s desk—I, now the teacher, teaching freshman English part-time at a local college. I stand before the class feigning authority, worried that I am still ill-fitted, worried that the students will know how I spent my childhood, or will think I’m not a real teacher. Yes, I dress differently now, wearing clothes I hope look professional. Still, I’m scared and unsure.
On this first day I introduce myself, hand out a syllabus, and am more than a little surprised that every student actually reads it, only a syllabus, yes, but one I’ve written. I’m even more surprised that all the students copy down words I write, my words, that I write on the blackboard. But maybe it’s only because my clothes make me look professional.
When I call roll I learn the name of the obese girl. Kathy. I have this small dread she won’t make it.
I’ve never taught before, and I can’t begin to figure out prepositions, but I am willfully determined to succeed because I believe I’ve failed at everything I’ve previously done. So I’m up at four o’clock every morning to grade papers or prepare classes. By nine o’clock at night, after again grading papers or preparing, I fall asleep, exhausted. I work Saturdays and Sundays, every weekend, grading papers. I read essay after essay, all the essays, very carefully. Because the essays are so personal—more personal than I would have expected—I must, besides correcting grammar, write long notes in the margins and on the backs of pages.
I must respond to my students’ tentative, unsure words, words that tell me their stories. They write of alcoholic fathers, of physically violent mothers. Their childhood pets die. Relatives are killed in car wrecks. Best friends die in DUI accidents. As children they are dumped at grandparents’ houses as their parents divorce or disappear. One grandmother beats her granddaughter for failing to finish dinner. So I must comment not just about grammar and organization in the margins. I must also express encouragement, or outrage and sympathy. I tell them I’m sorry such terrible things have happened to them. Many don’t receive good grades—I grade carefully, fairly—but I must tell them I know, with a little more work, they can do better.
Kathy, whose handwriting is thin and scratchy, writes an essay about all the hours she sleeps. She’s scared she’ll fall asleep in class and the other students will laugh. As a child, she writes, she always slept in school, at home, in the car, outside on the grass, at friends’ houses, before she lost her friends, sleeping anywhere and everywhere. She says she can’t stay awake. Her mother used to beat her for sleeping.
And, yes, I understand this sleep. If your body is sleeping, what can it feel? If your mind’s not awake, what can it know? I imagine Kathy slumbering through endless summer heat. I imagine white sheets graying after hours and days of sleep. I remember the summer I slept in the West Indies. I remember being engulfed in clouds of sleep. I wonder where Kathy’s father is while she sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.
But even when my momma beat me, I couldn’t wake up, Kathy writes in her essay. I could never wake up.
In the margin of her paper I tell her I’m sad this has happened to her, sad her mother beat her, sad she couldn’t wake up.
My students and I don’t talk about these things. They write their essays; I respond, by writing and writing in the margins.
I assign the topic of child abuse for one of their essays. I am able to say they can write about physical, emotional, or sexual child abuse, say these words without flinching. “If you need information, you should be able to find magazine articles in the library,” I tell my students. I want them, I want everyone, to understand it.
Without explanation, Kathy doesn’t turn in the essay. Two days after the deadline I quietly ask her about it. She claims she’s hard at work on it and will turn it in Monday.
On Monday, no essay, no Kathy. Now, three weeks before the end of the quarter, this is the first class she’s missed. I know, I absolutely know why she missed it.
I check her schedule and meet her after one of her classes. She looks terrified, assuming I’m angry at her for not turning in the essay. I lead her to my office, saying, no, no, you misunderstand, I’m not angry. I close the door and turn on a lamp. “Kathy, please, sit down,” I urge her, nodding toward the chair.
She sinks into it and stares down at her scuffed white tennis shoes with split seams. Yes, I stared at my feet during every school confrontation, no matter how mild. Her fingernails are ragged and dirty. Lint flecks her sweatshirt, and behind the thick glasses her eyelids are rimmed with granulated lashes. The skin on her face, as she seems to sway between fear of this encounter and, perhaps, total dissociation, alternates between a dark flush and opaque white, as lifeless as a statue. I want to help her feel better. I want to help her feel at ease. With my linen blazer and freshly ironed blouse, with nylon stockings without runs and polished shoes, with clean fingernails and a showered body, with shampooed hair and jewelry and makeup, how can I ever tell her, how can I tell you, Kathy, no, no, no, this is not truly me—at least has not always been me. I am not exactly this person you see before you. I have not always been who you thinkyou see. I want to tell Kathy it might take years of work but she can create a stronger self, too.
But I fear my words will sound false to her. If I’d heard these words from a woman now dressed as I am, I would never have comprehended what that woman was saying.
“You know, when I was in college, I never really felt like other kids.” I nod toward the open window where girls sit on new spring grass and pretend to study for finals. As guys pause to talk with them, laughter echoes across the yard. “Even if I hung out with them, I think I was always waiting for someone to tell me to leave.”
She looks surprised. Surely this is not what she expected me to say. Slowly she shakes her head. “But you’re—” She doesn’t know how to finish her sentence. Tears rise slow from the corners of her eyes.
“What is it?” My voice is quiet, almost a whisper. “Can you tell me?”
“It’s the essay,” she says.
She tells me she hasn’t finished it. She tells me she never even started it. Well, she started reading magazine articles but she never began to write it. She lied to me the other day, she says, and she feels so bad. Besides, she still can’t write the essay. She’ll never be able to write it, even though she knows she’ll receive a zero and will probably flunk the course.
“Could you tell me why you can’t write it?” I ask her.
I must know the answer before it’s given. Her mouth looks as if the skin might crack. “I didn’t know—” Her words sound thin, tight. “Till I read this magazine article. On that child abuse. That that’s me.”
The tears are gone. Her words, as she stops speaking, seem gone, as if they landed at the bottom of the sea like tossed rocks. Even in the heft of her body she seems to be draining out of herself, disappearing. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “That should never have happened to you.”
I’m terrified I’ve made a terrible mistake by asking Kathy, asking any of the students, to write on this subject, that I’m asking Kathy, in particular, to know something before she’s ready. I try to tell her to forget about the essay—it’s only an essay. I look in the school directory for the name of the counselor and urge Kathy to make an appointment. This is more important than the essay, I say, nudging a scrap of paper with the counselor’s name into her hand. She takes it. Or her fingers manage to hold onto it as I stuff the paper in her fist. I worry that later, when she opens that fist, the paper will slip out unnoticed.
I must do more. I must tell her. As I speak, though, I know she’s fading, that maybe she’s already gone. I want to urge her back. “Kathy, I want you to know that was me, too, that child abuse. That happened to me, too.”
For a moment she seems stunned. Rigidly she seems to nod her head, although I’m not sure she heard what I’d said. She has heaved herself from the chair and is heading toward the door. I go after her into the hall. I point to her fist. I take the paper back and write my own home number on the other side. I tell her to call me. Call me anytime. Day or night. Or call the counselor. Call someone who can help her… will she call someone? She nods her head. But she is already gone.
Kathy. I believe one day you will be ready to be helped. And I want to believe you know I have never forgotten you and your secret, that I am with you always while you struggle.
I also must pass you, Kathy. Maybe because I know you will always expect to fail. Maybe because there are times we must receive high marks for simply surviving.
I discover, over the years of teaching, that I most enjoy teaching students who hate English, who hate to write. Most students believe, at least at the beginning of the quarter, they have nothing to say. Our language scares them. Words scare them. Their voices scare them. Grammar terrifies them. Education scares them. Many tell me they’re stupid. But when they say this I hear not their voices, but, rather, the imitated voice of an unknowing parent or unprofessional teacher who said this to them first. I tell them they’re not stupid. Maybe the parent or teacher didn’t know how to teach them, didn’t know how to listen, didn’t bother enough to care. I urge them to try again. Every quarter I want to see if maybe even one student might change his or her mind, if one student might discover a word, a whisper of a voice, if one student might realize he or she has something that must be said.
Marcia never had anyone to listen to her, never had anyone to care, has always hidden her wishes and her words as if they’re secrets. Marcia’s face is calm and serene, while her hair is a loose mass of caramel-colored curls, lovely and wild. In class today I’d mentioned I loved words. Now, after waiting for the other students to leave the room, she bends close to me and whispers, “I love words, too.” She seems to be holding her breath, her body tense, as if she thinks I’ll belittle her admission. I nod, serious, encouraging her. “But I’ve never told anyone before,” she continues. “Everyone I know would’ve laughed. I mean, I didn’t know it was okay to love words.”
“But it is okay,” I say. “I’m glad you love them.”
She nods and puts her books on the corner of my desk. “I’ve kind of been writing poems since I was little, but I’ve never told anyone or shown them to anyone. I mean, they’re not very good.”
“I’d like to see them,” I say. “If you’d like to show them to me.”
She beams and shrugs. “I’m going back to school to be a nurse, but I’ve always wanted to be an English teacher. I don’t mean I could teach college or anything—but maybe middle school. But I don’t know. I don’t think I’m probably smart enough.”
I tell her I think it’s great she’s found something she loves, that I think she’d be a wonderful English teacher, that she is smart enough. Over the quarter I help her with her writing, with her skills. I give her my phone number and she calls to ask me questions about her life, about her career, about her future. “Am I good enough?” she always wants to know. Yes, I say, you are always good enough, for anything. Finally she switches her major to English. She transfers to a four-year college. She begins to feel confident she can be an English teacher. It never would have occurred to me I could have helped anyone plan a future.
Kathy’s story and Marcia’s story are only two stories. Over the years there will be more students, other stories. Always, I listen. I must listen. I begin to think that listening and encouraging are more important than teaching punctuation or grammar. Or maybe just teaching students not to fear words, so then they can learn their own words, hear who they are, tell their own stories. At the end of quarters I receive letters and poems, small presents from my students, thanking me … mirroring the small offerings and scribbled notes, the tentative words I give Randy, thanking him, words that gradually are woven into my story—while Randy’s words, in turn, offer me safety, offer me life. So with Randy, with my students, I must thank them, for with them, all of them, I begin to see and hear the circular interconnectings of poems, words, people, scraps of paper, voices, all woven into a strong tapestry to cloak the earth in comfort. Individual threads knit together to form a strong fabric. And I know this can be the way the world is now.
I join a gym to use the weight-lifting equipment. I bench press, execute bicep curls, leg curls, sit-ups. Over the weeks and months I add more and more bars of weight to the stack. I learn the names of my muscles: triceps, quadriceps, deltoids, biceps. I stand before a mirror and notice small curves swelling beneath my skin. I touch my muscles. I flex. I am amazed by these muscles I have created. These muscles seem to be tangible evidence of existence, proving I now live inside my body. This is my body. And now only I decide what it wants—no, what I want.
Finally, my sister and I are orphans. We maneuver through our parents’ deaths and look at each other: We survived. When my sister received our parents’ ashes, she promised one day she’d carry them to Israel for burial. She will be the one to fulfill this final responsibility of a daughter. I cannot. There’s nothing more I can do for them. I think my sister knows this, and I’m grateful.
Kiki knows this because I finally revealed to her the secret of our father. Although I first told her shortly before I entered the hospital, it is only now, after our parents’ deaths, that I am truly able to hear the gentleness of her response. It has taken me these two years to trust myself enough to trust her, or trust that, together, we will survive the sound of the word “incest,” that this word, spoken aloud, can be tolerated and absorbed into our family history. She was very quiet when I told her, as well as patient, asking few questions, wanting perhaps to know as little as possible. Still, she did not rush off the phone or run away. Rather, her voice was small and scared, her silences tangible with worry. She carefully listened to what I said, even as my own voice faltered, struggling to pronounce the words of this new language. And although I didn’t ask directly, she claimed our father had never touched her.
Soon after this initial conversation my sister called my husband one evening while I was in the hospital to tell him she was worried about me and hoped I’d be able to recover. She also told my husband she loved him. “What she meant, what she was saying, I think, is that she loves me because I love you, for being with you and caring for you,” my husband later relayed to me. “She also told me how much she loves you.”
How much my sister loves me. At that time I had trouble hearing those words. Or I heard them, but struggled to understand the meaning. Because every year during our childhood, Kiki and I lost more and more words, until we no longer knew how to speak to each other except with the thinnest of phrases, except with the dissonance of emotional lies. Like motes of dust, our words lie carelessly scattered across a vast expanse of childhood. Now we begin, like earnest children, to learn to speak simple words, words of one or two syllables, words such as “sister,” “life,” “hear,” “speak,” “soul.” Words such as “love.” We must begin here, at the beginning, before we can learn to move on.
One evening, several years after our parents’ deaths, my sister calls. She says she saw a cute little girl on the street that morning. “She reminded me of you when you were little. You were such a cute kid,” she tells me.
As if I am hearing the sound of her voice for the first time and am stunned by its gentleness, I sink onto the chair next to the telephone. “Thank you,” I whisper.
Then it is her voice to go small, her voice to sound like a small girl, a sound I don’t remember hearing when she was little. “I feel so bad I couldn’t have protected you,” she says. “You know, from what he did to you.”
“Oh, Kiki, no, no. I mean, that’s so sweet. But you were just a kid, too. You couldn’t have stopped it. She was the only one who could’ve stopped it.” And now, now I must tell her, for now is the time, even though I have told her before, I must tell her again, believing this is the first time she will know what I mean. “I have always loved you, too, Kiki.”
Kiki. My sister’s real name is Carol. When I first began to speak I couldn’t pronounce the sound and formed the word “Kiki” instead. While I have always called her Kiki, I have never been able to hold onto Kiki. The two quick syllables of that nickname exploded beyond my reach and there I was, alone, unable to grasp her, unable to see a fading image, unable to hear a vanishing sound.
Now, I whisper the name “Carol.” The two long syllables linger in my mouth. The slow-slow sound “Car-ol” slows my sister. Now I believe, and must trust, that she can pause to hear the heavy weight of my voice say her name, pause long enough to see me, hear what I must say: Carol, you have always been my sister.
And now I believe, deep down, that even as a child Carol always loved and missed me, too. But because of our parents, she wasn’t able to show it. Now, in the soundlessness of their deaths, in the infinite stillness of their absence, I believe my sister and I will learn to hear each other better.
I volunteer at a shelter for battered women. I am in a house where windows and doors have double and triple locks to prevent angry men from entering. I’ve never seen any man enter, never seen any man in this house. It is a haven for women and children who need a safe place to heal, a place to hide.
The director of the shelter and I serve dinner to the women and children. We have set the table in the dining room: plates, silverware, napkins, glasses. I’d stopped at Kroger and bought a bouquet of flowers for a centerpiece. Staff, volunteers, guests of the shelter and their children—we all eat together, early, because of the children. A late-afternoon sun angles through slats on Venetian blinds. Outside, rush-hour traffic rumbles down the street. But inside we are quiet. The click of silverware. The low murmur of voices. No one outside knows we are here, inside. No plaque or sign marks this ordinary house. The address is not listed in the telephone directory. No angry man will ever find us.
I sit across from Jean. Bruises mar her cheekbone, a scab clots her lip. Valiantly, she wears eye makeup, blush, even lipstick, which is gently smoothed across the scab. With narrowed eyes she secretly glances at the director and at me as we cut our food into small pieces, as we place silverware on our plates while chewing, as we use napkins, then replace them in our laps. With tentative movements Jean seems to imitate us, do what we are doing, as if no one has ever taken the time to teach her how to eat.
I imagine my sister here with me. I imagine my mother. I imagine the three of us all here together, somber but safe. I imagine having lived here forever, the one permanent resident in this impermanent flow of women and children drifting through. Every night I would sleep in a room full of beds, beds crammed together, all the little girls safely tucked into their beds while they sleep.
After dinner I sort through bags of donated clothing. I fold women’s clothes into separate stacks of small, medium, large. I separate summer clothes from winter clothes. Shirts, blouses, sweaters from skirts and slacks. I separate children’s jeans from dresses. In my family, my mother always dutifully donated outgrown or outdated clothes to charitable organizations. I never considered where my clothes actually went or who might eventually wear them. Now I imagine a pile of my childhood clothes here in this house. A little girl retrieves my favorite lime-green dress and wears it.
I discover a pretty silk blouse with pearl-like buttons. I take it to Jean’s room, but she’s not there. Her suitcase is by the foot of the bed. I fold the blouse and leave it.
I find Jean in the lounge reading the want ads. She lost her job as cashier at a convenience store because her husband, who’d accused her of cheating on him, smashed the door of the store and beat her. Yesterday she had an interview at a fast-food restaurant, but her shoulders seem exhausted with defeat when she mentions the pay is close to minimum wage. She can’t support two children on minimum, so she knows she needs to learn some skills in order to get a better job. If she can’t, she’s scared she’ll go back to her husband, who will beat her. She’s more concerned he’ll start beating her children. She tells me she doesn’t see a future.
I sink down beside her on the couch, also scared about her future. But I tell her how brave she is to be here, to have protected herself as well as her children. I say I’m sure, in not too much time, she can learn some skills, maybe take courses at a technical school in order to get a better job to support her children.
The following week I bring her information about training centers. After dinner she sits beside me on the couch to read the brochures. On the floor by our feet Jean’s two children play a board game. Another boy, a preschooler named Joey, wanders into the room sucking his thumb and dragging a ragged blanket for security. Without a word he climbs onto my lap. He hunkers against me in a tight curl and closes his eyes.
I stroke his hair. I trail my fingers down his back. I think of my sister, of rubbing her back, the only time she allowed me close to her, the only time she sat still long enough for me to hear her breathing, hear her heart beating. In a moment Joey is sleeping. I wrap my arms around him and press my cheek against the top of his head. His hair smells of shampoo and of sun. I hug him tighter—as if this one hug can dispel all childhood nightmares. I want it to; I know it can’t. I want what I can’t have: to know, to be sure, he will always be protected.
But he is safe now. Jean and her children are safe now.
This house is quiet. We all seem to speak quietly here, even the children, for we have all heard too much noise outside. From the other rooms trails the slow murmur of women’s voices, brave women who have fled their homes and their husbands for the security of this shelter, for themselves and for their children. I listen to them, a comforting blend of voices, listen until I imagine I hear another voice, a murmur of my mother’s voice, finally safe with other women, her voice, a sound I long to hear, longing to hear her say one special word, and I must believe I hear her whisper it. It is to me she calls. I hear her say my name, that one soft syllable. She calls to me, telling me she wished she’d found her way here years earlier to claim even one night of safety for her and her daughters.
I will carry this soft sound of my mother’s voice home with me, carry all these women’s voices home with me, this, as well as the rustle of paper as Jean plans her future. I carry the sound of Joey’s sleeping breath home with me, a steady breath which lulls him until morning. These sounds will lull me until morning.
My husband has always wanted for us to buy a house. I have resisted because I feared responsibility, feared the idea of home, the only definition of home I had ever known. Finally, agreeing to seek other definitions, I relent. We are busy decorating and fixing up our new home, even though sometimes I feel like a kid playing house.
It is night. My husband is sleeping. I sit in this quiet house surrounded by my parents’ possessions. I sit on their navy and tan couch. Silk material my father bought in the Orient has been sewn into curtains. Their vases, candlesticks, books, lamps, and photograph albums decorate mantels, bookcases, coffee tables. My blankets are in their antique trunks.
But their possessions aren’t them. Their possessions are merely lovely things to admire. This is not their home. This is not their house.
It is night, a peaceful Christmas night. The lights on our Christmas tree, the scent of pine, warm the living room. Earlier my husband and I drove to the Christmas tree lot where I lingered, admiring every tree. I wanted to carry all the beautiful trees home with me, place a tree in every room, beside every window. Finally we settled on one, thick and sturdy.
So now we are that family to slide our tree into the back of our station wagon. Now my husband and I are that family to hang red, green, silver, gold metallic balls on our tree. We string blinking lights. Strand by strand we drape tinsel from each bough. My husband has a painted tin bird, a Christmas ornament saved from his childhood, that we clip onto the tree. While we want this childhood ornament, a precious heirloom, to connect us to children, to who we were as children, still, we secure the bird to our chosen tree, in our chosen house, to our lives, lives that we now choose to be gentle.
Christmas lights sparkle on the tin bird, reflect on winter windows, sparkling until the bird seems to be ruffling its feathers, fluttering. I imagine it circling the tree, then flying out through the window. I watch it soar over yards in the neighborhood, down the street and across town, far beyond. I imagine the bird winging back to my first Christmas tree that I secreted in my bedroom in New Jersey, back to that night of Christmas spirits that watched over children, protected us from night, this bird revealing to me how far it’s possible to fly—from that treasured tree back then, forward, to this tree now.
On this Christmas night I am with my cat Quizzle, who curls on the floor by the tree. Quizzle is still leery of designs in Oriental carpets, but I firmly believe one day she’ll trust that the designs don’t camouflage coiled serpents, fanged snakes. Besides, Quizzle is much more than her fears. She’s in touch with her “inner kitty” and loves to play. I strip edges off computer paper and unfurl them, heaping them into a mound on the floor. Quizzle races across the room and leaps onto them, as if they are autumn leaves. She rustles her way to the bottom and hides. I pretend to search for her. She purrs and purrs when discovered.
Now I stroke her luxurious gray fur, the color of a comforting shadow. I scratch her chin. Her purr comes quick and seems to twine with the warmth of Christmas lights, both trailing down the hall to the rest of the house. I listen. Her purr rises from her throat, rises into the house, rises into this Christmas night, this purr, purr, purring, a soft, steady sound of joy and connection which can be the living center of the house if I let it. And I will. I want to tell Randy. If Randy were here I would whisper, Randy, this is what you mean, isn’t it? This is what you mean. This peace is love; these connections are life. But I will wait for Tuesday to tell him. Every Tuesday we still learn together, more and more, about this kind of love, this kind of life.
I lift Quizzle and carry her down the hall to the bedroom. Quietly, I open the door. It is dark and warm, but safe.
Mack stirs and lifts his head. “What?” he says. “What’s wrong?”
With me, he always expects disaster.
“Nothing,” I whisper. “It’s me and Quizzle. We’re lonely. Nothing’s wrong.”
He reaches his steady arm out to us, both of us, and pulls us close, pulls us toward him, to keep us secure against night. Here, he will hold us all night.
Softly I whisper his name. Softly I say, “I’m sorry. You know?”
“All that matters,” he says, “is that everything’s going to be all right. We’re going to make it.”
Yes, I’m going to make it. We ’re going to make it. Mack and me and Quizzle.