Sister of Silence (4 page)

After breakfast, I went to the bathroom and stood staring at my reflection. The girl that peered back at me was no longer the same person. I began to tremble as I stood there, and I heard his voice as he placed my hand against his hard skin, remembering.

“You’re so pretty. If only you weren’t so pretty, you wouldn’t do this to me
…Look, you did this to me.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block out the memory, wondering how I could have thought I loved him.
Oh why, why did it have to happen? Now I’ll never be clean for another man, for the man I would’ve married.

In that second, I knew what I had to do: I had to marry him, because I was damaged and not fit to be another man’s wife. I had already been used.

“You have had sexual ‘intercourse’. Now no one will ever want you . . .”
The voice from the previous night returned to taunt me.

The day passed slowly, but it did pass, as did each day after it. I learned to keep a smile on my face, freezing all emotions inside so no one could see them. I began living a lie, because the truth wasn’t something I could face. The truth, I somehow sensed, would destroy me.

The first rape made the subsequent ones no easier; I began avoiding the mirror in the bathroom at home or, if I
had to, I would stare at the reflection, daring that girl to tell me how bad I was. Something inside me had snapped, which I didn’t discern until years later. I began hanging out with the girls who had bad reputations, many of whom had boyfriends who were six, seven or even ten years older than they were. I also began smoking with them every morning before school, a short-lived practice that stopped after one pack of cigarettes, when I found I detested the aftertaste they left in my mouth. Other bad habits, like my self-loathing, were harder to break.

So after the rape, almost overnight, I
became something I never had been: a rebellious adolescent who provoked the adults around me. It didn’t last long, but its impact was so intense that the memories remain clearly and painfully imprinted on my mind to this day.

My new crowd, as well as some of the “good girls” who remained loyal friends, decided we were going to break the rules by wearing shorts on the last day of school. I packed a pair in my gym bag and changed into them from jeans once I got to the girls’ restroom. I soon realized most of them had backed out, so in the end only one other girl and I took a stand against the school’s dress code.

Attending school in a rural area where rule breaking wasn’t tolerated, and where students were expected to show more than the usual amount of respect for teachers, was never a problem for me before that day. And on top of that, my mother had been, in a way, part of the educational establishment. She wasn’t a teacher, but when money was in short supply, she’d worked part-time throughout the years as a substitute cook and janitor. Nonetheless,
even her sporadic role as an employee in the school system meant more was expected from her children. Until then that’s all I’d ever given—and then some—in both my academic studies and my attitude toward my teachers and classmates.

But not so that day. The rebel within me fought to break loose, to fight back, and to make a statement about people in positions of authority. The first teacher I passed did a
double-take when he saw me, and ordered me straight to the office. Once there, the principal, Mr. Woodrow, wasted no time in ordering me to the locker room to change my clothes. He wanted to know why I would do something so unlike me, but I just glared past him out the window, refusing to speak. When I got up to leave, he tried to say something else, but I brushed right past him.

As I left the office, Mr. Woodrow called out after me, “Do you hear me, Miss Berry?” I continued walking. I felt an arm reach out from behind and grab me, and I wheeled on him like a wild animal. Screaming. Kicking. Saying words I’d never thought, much less spoken.

“Mr. Hess, come here!” Mr. Woodrow yelled to a nearby teacher, and they both tried to restrain me.

“Let me go! Let me go!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “You bastard! How dare you touch me? I hate you, you son
-of-a-bitch!”

The entire scene occurred within moments, but it felt like a lifetime, and I vaguely became aware that teachers were peering from their classrooms to see where all the commotion was coming from. Together, Mr. Woodrow and Mr. Hess finally managed to subdue me, and I found myself sitting in a chair in Mr. Woodrow’s office, four strong arms making sure I couldn’t move. They needn’t have bothered, for all the fight had gone out of me and I sat there, unseeing, refusing to give way to the tears behind my eyes.

An hour later I sat in the car with my mother, and felt her disbelieving stare on me.

“Daleen
what’s wrong with you? I hope you realize how much reproach this brings on God and your family. I would never have expected something like this from you.”

I said nothing, for there was nothing to say. Not when I didn’t even understand what had happened. Nor would I three months later when summer ended, school resumed, and the rebel within would escape once again.

I like to think I survived a nightmare that lasted thirteen years because I was surrounded by love and tenderness as a young child, sheltered by parents with reasonable expectations and moderate discipline. Their love stayed with me when I began to question the world and my own place in it, giving me a warm cocoon to curl up in. At the same time, with alcohol being such a strong force in our lives, that cocoon was bound to crack and wither away, just as the fragile remnants of a shell provide no protection once a newly hatched moth is free to roam on its own.

I loved hearing my parents tell the story about how we came to be a family. In 1961 my college dropout father was fifteen years her senior when he met the “California girl” who would become my mother. She wasn’t tall, standing almost eye level with my father, but at fourteen, Eileen Freeman had a full figure. Her large, deep-set blue eyes matched Dad’s, and she had pulled up her thick, brown hair into a chignon, making her look about eighteen. But her most distinguishing feature was probably a dark, oblong mole. No bigger than the
end of her pinky finger, it lay just below her right eye, giving her an exotic look. Dad was smitten from the moment he met her. Mom said he refused to marry her until she was “grown up,” but after he got drunk one night and said he would, she held him to his promise. That’s why, when she was sixteen, they ran away to get married in Reno, Nevada, where she wasn’t considered underage.

One year later and just few months before the youngest man ever to be elected president was assassinated, I was born in a hospital maternity ward without the benefit of air-conditioning, in what my mother has since said was the hottest August in the history of San Jose.

“I should know,” she said laughing, “I lived through it. After you were born, the first thing I did was ask for a glass of water.”

I never forgot what Mom told me about that day. A first-time father, Dad had been granted medical leave six weeks earlier from his job in Alaska, where he worked as an electronics engineer on the military’s Distant Early Warning line. “I guess she’s the youngest mother in here,” Dad told the nurse on duty.

“Not by a long shot,” the nurse replied. “There’s a girl just fourteen down the hall having her second one.”

Dad, who had always been a stickler for proper grammar and perfect spelling, had to complete the paperwork for my birth certificate. Nonetheless, Dale Berry’s assiduous spelling failed him the night he became a parent. Mom told me the story over and over again, how he tried to write down my gender, crossing it out and respelling it, “D-o-t-t-e-r,” before asking her how to spell the word.

Three days after I was born, my parents took me home to Sunnyvale. I still remember the story they told me, how when I was just two, I ran around in circles on the lawn, my blond hair bobbed short. My arms reached up toward the airplanes that flew above our heads, which they said I thought I could catch and hold in my hands.

My father, who had his private pilot’s license and had dreamed of being an airline pilot, “thought you were just adorable,” Mom said.

Dad couldn’t live without the smell of jet fuel, and his feet were never planted on solid ground. The family joke later became that he must be part Gypsy, because he moved us from place to place every year or two. We would no sooner get settled in than Dad would be off, like a butterfly floating from one flower to the next in a big, open meadow. Thanks to a stint in Uncle Sam’s Navy, by the time he married Mom, the only continent Dad hadn’t seen was Australia.

Not long after I was born, we migrated from California to Wyoming, where the snowfalls were so deep that we would open our front door on winter mornings to find it piled higher than I was tall. Dad would take me to work with him, sitting me inside the circle of his arms, within the protective gating of the little snow cat he used to reach his work site.

In Wyoming, my father bought a grey Stetson cowboy hat that he took great pride in wearing, because, as my mother said, “That’s what all the men in Wyoming wore then.” His beloved hat later became a play toy for his two young daughters, in what was for me a testimony of the paternal feelings he showed when I was a little girl. But as the years passed, he was there less and less for all of us, as both his job and his booze took him away.

Wyoming was where I first remember seeing my father play his guitar. He would come home at night, sit down on the vanilla-colored Naugahyde couch
that was next to the square metal warming stove in our living room, grab his guitar, and begin playing chords and picking the strings. Before long, he would start singing some country song from his own childhood.

One cold winter night, I sat, mesmerized, at his feet. He looked into my eyes and then, strumming his guitar, he sang the loveliest songs. After listening to his small repertoire, which included any number of tear-jerker tunes, I asked for more.

“Play me another one, Daddy,” I begged.

“What would you like to hear?” he asked.

“Clementine,” I said.

He grinned and twisted the white knobs at the end of the guitar, strumming a few times as he did so. “Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, Clementine
…” he began.

When he finished, I begged him to play “Red River Valley,” and “You Are My Sunshine.” By the time he sang all three songs, I had crawled up into a corner of the couch, and was growing sleepy.

Dad placed the guitar into its case and then turned to me, trying to sidestep the beer bottles that had taken my place on the floor at his feet.

“I think it’s somebody’s bedtime,” he said, leaning down and hugging me. As he began to tickle me all over, I laughed and wriggled out of his grasp
to go over to my mother’s chair, where she smiled at our antics as she sat crocheting.

Wyoming was a place of chuck wagons and horse riding trails, of men in cowboy hats and the wide-open spaces referred to by songwriters of long ago. It was the place where I saw my first Native American, resplendent in a full headdress.

We had just come out of J.C. Penney’s, when I looked up and saw the largest man I had ever seen. Terrified, I grabbed my mother’s leg.

“Mommy, will he scalp me?” I asked.

“Shhh,” Mom’s face was red as she tried to quiet me.

Either he didn’t hear me or he pretended not to, and my embarrassed parents hurried to our car. “No, he won’t hurt you,” she assured me.

“Sometimes, it’s better not to say certain things, for fear of hurting another person’s feelings, or even making them angry,” Daddy said.

After making sure my seatbelt was fastened, he closed the door and climbed into the driver’s seat. As we pulled away from the curb, I watched the solemn-looking man standing there, unmoving. From where I sat, I could hear my father’s quiet chuckle.

My sister Carla was born in Kemmerer, Wyoming, not long after we moved there, and I was happy to have my own live baby doll. I would hop onto the couch and beg my mother to let me hold her. Then I would try to sing her some of my father’s songs. She was a beautiful baby, and Mom would style her strawberry blonde hair so it formed a pretty little curl on top of her head, or Dad would pose us together on the couch, taking pictures with his old Rolleiflex camera. Later, he would come out of our little bathroom holding long strips of dark plastic that he would show us. All I could see were tiny black spots on the plastic, and I thought it was funny when Dad pointed to the spots and said they were really Carla and me.

The life I never should have lived began with an ill-fated American presidency, when I sat in the front seat of my mother’s little black MG as we made the 2,500-mile journey from Kemmerer, Wyoming to Albright, West Virginia, not long after President Richard Nixon took office. Dad transferred there after bidding on an open position within Western Union, where he then worked. I was five, Carla was two, and Dad’s drinking was growing worse. Mom’s loyalty remained undeterred and she seemed destined to fulfill the words of that ever-popular Tammy Wynette tune, “Stand by Your Man.”

The long trek was the first of many things that would remind me of my Appalachian heritage, since it was made because of the strong family ties so common in that part of the country. The trip was also a sign of things to come, both in my mother’s life and mine
—that need for a woman to have more independence and freedom than was common at the time, made necessary by the men who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be there themselves.

By then Dad was rarely home, content to spend his evenings at the local beer joints, while leaving us to fend for ourselves. My embarrassment began early, even as I struggled to do my part to keep up my parents’ picture of a happy family.

By West Virginia standards at least, we were considered middle class. With our own assorted vehicles, and the company vehicle my father drove, our neighbors seemed to think so. But the truth was, the income Dad earned meant little to his family waiting at home, since his penchant for alcohol stole away most of his paycheck. It was money we seldom saw, unless you counted the empty beer bottles lined up on the kitchen counter.

I still remember the fight caused by Dad’s drinking, one night when I should’ve been sleeping, but instead found myself held captive to my parents’ raised voices. I was in first grade
, Carla was three. Mom had been taking night classes to get her long-delayed high school diploma. In the California of 1962, you see, pregnant girls didn’t attend classes with everyone else. When Mom got “in the family way” three months after her teen marriage, a tutor was sent to her home. She dropped out of school entirely after I was born to take care of me.

One evening after she left for class, Daddy asked us if we wanted to go for a ride. “Yes!” we squealed. Going anywhere with him was a rare treat.

Climbing into a big Oldsmobile the color of a freshly filled swimming pool, we wound down the long dirt driveway, following the road running beside the mighty Cheat River. Our car had driven that exact route so many times, it could have found its own way to the beer joint where Daddy took us. The old coal-dust-covered clapboard building sat next to the river, just a few doors down from the church where Carla and I once went to Sunday school. From time to time Daddy would take us here, or to other beer joints he frequented. Like the rest, it was loud and noisy and so hazy my eyes burned from the cigarette-smoke clouds that filled the place.

Daddy bought Carla and me each a soda, and his buddies gathered around and took turns pinching our cheeks. Two close friends of Daddy’s stopped playing pool and came over to us. Luke and Levi were brothers in their late teens who, when outfitted with cigarettes and beer cans, looked much older.

“How’s Little Dale today?” Levi asked with a wink, using the nickname he’d given me.

Luke grinned at us, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “You gals have such pretty hair, and you’re so well-behaved.”

Daddy only smiled while Luke patted our corn-silk-colored heads and gave us each a quarter. Then he prompted, “What do you say?”

“Thank you,” we said in unison, with matching grins.

I looked behind them to the shelves filled with bottles and watched a bartender, whose face had a worn and wrinkled look, hand Daddy a dark brown bottle that released a misty trail as its top was popped off. Daddy perched on a red vinyl-covered barstool next to a wiry old man whose eyes grew squinty when he released a puff of white smoke from his mouth. His face reminded me of a shriveled walnut shell.

Daddy turned to me. “Hey Neelad, I have an idea. How about we play a game of pool?”

I hung back shyly. “I don’t know how.” I watched Levi and Luke, who had returned to the pool table behind us.

Daddy motioned to the pool cue that hung on the wall. “Well, I’ll teach you. Come on, you’ll really like it.”

I climbed off the tall barstool and went over to stand next to Daddy. He held a small blue cube. “Here, you take it,” he said, pressing it into my hand. “There, now rub it right here.” He held the smaller end of the wooden stick toward me, and I rubbed the chalky stuff on the white tip. “That’s good,” he said, and then took the cube from me. I looked down and wrinkled my nose at my blue fingers.

“That’ll come off,” he laughed. “Don’t worry about it.” He placed the cue in my hands and then went behind me, showing me how to hold onto it.

“Hey, you’re using the wrong hand,” Levi yelled.

Daddy laughed. “She’s a southpaw. A pretty good one, too.” He put his hand over my own, and showed me how to run the stick along the edge of the table. Taking my right hand, he helped me form a hole between my thumb and forefinger, showing me how the stick could slide through, and move back and forth.

“Now, what you want to do is shoot one of these balls down into a pocket—that’s the little holes in the corners and sides of the pool table.” As he spoke, he picked up a stick and took aim. Just as I heard a sharp
crack
, the ball shot forward and into one of the holes. “Just like that,” he said. “Now you try it.”

Aware of an audience, I could barely hold the long stick still enough to do anything with it. But after a few tries, and with Daddy holding the heavier end, I managed to shoot one of the balls. It didn’t go into a pocket, but it did scurry all over the table, even knocking against other balls.