The Unwelcomed Child (2 page)

My grandfather nodded after these answers, but he didn’t look happy about it, and I didn’t know what sperm was yet. It sounded like some sort of letter with our address on it. My grandfather added, “Don’t worry. Someday you’ll understand it all, and you won’t hate us.” He didn’t make it sound like a threat. He smiled when he said it.

Instinctively, even at a young age, I knew that if I were ever to see any softness, any kindness, it would come from my grandfather. At times, after I had been punished or slapped for something I had said or done, something I had no idea was wrong, he would wince as if it were he who had been punished. On occasion, he would tell my grandmother to ease up. “She’s got the point.”

She would glare back at him, and he would look away.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop wondering about the man and the woman who had created me. Why didn’t they ever want to see me? Why had they no interest in me? From reading, I knew that fathers more than mothers abandoned their children. There were many biblical lessons my grandmother taught me about such things, but I always wondered how my mother could give birth to me and then just leave and never return. No matter how many times I asked, sometimes being slapped for doing so too often or told to go to my room and read a passage from the Bible, I continued to inquire. Many times, I saw my grandfather on the verge of telling me, but he never did.

What my grandmother was willing to tell me was that no matter what my mother might tell me, she fled from me because she couldn’t abide the evil she had seen in her own child.

“She had looked into the face of evil many times, so she knew what it was,” my grandmother said.

Whenever she said something like this, I felt the tears come into my eyes. How could I be so evil? What had I done after I was born? What could I have done before I was born? It made no sense, and I think my grandfather especially realized that I knew it didn’t make sense for them to continue telling me this.

Finally, one night, when she thought I was old enough to understand the truth, she sat me down in the kitchen and told me everything, laying it all out like one of her biblical stories that had a bad ending to illustrate some sin.

She ended with “And it came to pass that you were born without the grace of God.”

That made it sound as if I was born without a soul, and when I asked her if that was true, she said, “We’ll see. We’ll see what you become.”

What a horrible childhood I had endured, and what a hard life I still had. To this day, I would like to blame my mother for everything, especially leaving me to live with them, but under the circumstances that were finally revealed to me, that was impossible. I never believed she fled from me because she saw evil in me. She never looked at me long enough. She never wanted to, but how could I blame her? If anything, the truth left me feeling just as sorry for her, if not sorrier.

How do you blame a young woman for being raped and forced to have the child who was created, a child no one wanted, and who my grandparents feared would bring the wrath of God down on their heads?

Until now, I never had a birthday celebration, and the presents I received on Christmas would not even bring a smile to the face of any other child. They were always only something I needed, such as new pairs of socks or underthings, a toothbrush, a hairbrush, even a few bars of soap, pure soap, never soap with any delicious scent.

Sometimes they gave me biblical storybooks, but I wasn’t permitted to read much else until I was deemed old enough by Grandmother Myra to begin my homeschooling. The requirements for that forced her to give me reading she would have otherwise forbidden, such as most of the novels and plays being read in public school, especially when I reached junior and then senior high school age. However, if she didn’t want the state education department on her back to have me brought to a public school, she had to obey and follow the prescribed curriculum. Of course, she did it begrudgingly, complaining about how loose the standards had become in public schools.

She had been a grade-school teacher in a parochial school for five years, but she was never very fond of formal classroom teaching, always criticizing the way parents were bringing up their children. I read between the lines whenever she talked about her short teaching career and imagined that she was unpopular not only with her students but also with their parents, because she wasn’t shy about giving them a piece of her mind. Perhaps she didn’t quit teaching. Maybe she was not so gently nudged to leave. After that, she went to work for an accounting firm, where she met my grandfather, who was one of their clients.

Because my grandmother homeschooled me, I never had a close friend or any real friends, or even acquaintances. I was never invited to someone else’s birthday party or to any party, for that matter. All I knew about the wonderful things other girls my age had and enjoyed is what I learned from reading books and plays and, when permitted, watching what my grandparents called decent television, usually never for more than two hours at a time.

I had no television or radio in my room. I’d never been to a movie. Even if I had some music CD, I had nothing on which to play it, and I was never given a computer or any of the modern-day devices I saw advertised, such as an iPod. They had none of this technology, either. My grandmother said that the Internet was Satan’s new playground. The little music I knew came in bits and pieces from the short television viewing I was permitted or when I was outside and heard a car go by with the windows open and music spilling out. I would cling to the sounds the way someone dying of thirst might follow the final drops of a glass of water.

Of course, Grandmother Myra and Grandfather Prescott had their hymns and made me sing along with them on Sundays, but they didn’t listen to or play anything else themselves. My grandmother claimed her favorite song was “Amazing Grace.” I often wondered if there had ever been anything remotely romantic about them. They never spoke of a honeymoon, and when their anniversary arrived, they usually had a very simple dinner and talked about how different things were now from the day they were married, how much more things cost, and how the village had changed but not for the better.

If I believed what they said, or at least what my grandmother said, most of the time, nothing had gotten better with time. Progress seemed to undermine the important and especially the moral things in our lives. One of her favorite expressions was “I wish I could turn back time.” Sometimes I thought she prayed for it. Her refrain at the end of grace was always “and spare us from the new horrors outside our door.”

The way she said that made me think that monsters were camped on our front lawn, especially when I was younger. I was so frightened that I repeated her refrain almost as loudly as she did. I accepted the power and the hope that prayer provided. What else did I have?

There we were on Sundays, the three of us, holding our Bibles in the living room in front of a large crucifix, singing. Grandfather Prescott would read a passage, and we would then do a silent prayer. We would have something special to eat for lunch that day and maybe a homemade pie with an infinitesimal amount of sugar. It was the only highlight of the week.

How dreary their lives were, I thought when I was old enough to understand it all and could look back with clearer eyes. I even found myself pitying them, as much as or more than I pitied myself. In many ways, they were just as caged up as I was, except that they had crawled in of their own volition and then willingly locked the door behind themselves.

Before my grandfather had retired, he at least had his successful mattress-manufacturing business in Lake Hurley. That gave him more contact with the world, with other people, and therefore, I thought, more pleasure. Any real socializing they had done came out of his business connections and associates. From what he told me, at the high point of his enterprise, he was employing fifty people, including salesmen who sold his product in three different upstate counties.

Despite how well he did, he and my grandmother never lived more than modest lives. They still drove the same car they had bought ten years ago. They never went on any vacation, nor did they buy anything anyone would call luxurious for their home. My grandmother didn’t buy new clothing for herself until something had been washed so much it was close to falling apart in her hands. Whenever my grandfather mentioned that he might buy a new pair of shoes or some clothing, she told him he didn’t need it or simply asked, “What for?” Usually, that was enough to stomp his urge to death the way she would stomp on an ant that had begun a foray in our kitchen.

After they were married, my grandmother had worked for the mattress company, overseeing all the finances. She had left teaching but was so good at math she had been hired as an assistant to the accountant my grandfather had been using. During one of the infrequent times he talked to me about their courting and marriage, he told me that the first time he met my grandmother, she made some very sensible financial suggestions to him.

“I knew I had a blessing in disguise when I met her,” he told me.

I wasn’t too young to think that he must have been blind. Was that really a reason to marry someone, her skill at seeing a wasteful expenditure? However, when I did get the opportunity to look at some old photographs, I was surprised to see how naturally pretty Grandmother Myra was. She was much thinner now, and her facial features were sharper, her skin spotted with age and her hair a dull gray with just a touch of her once dark brown shade in places. She kept it so tightly knotted behind her head it pulled her forehead and thin cheeks as firmly as a drum skin. She was about my grandfather’s height, with surprising strength in her long, thin arms.

My grandfather still had a very handsome face, with a strong, straight mouth, bright blue eyes, and a full head of still thick light brown hair. Grandmother Myra was always after him to go to the barber, but he avoided it for as long as he could, until she would threaten to cut it herself while he was sleeping. I had no doubt she would, and neither did he. She always cut my auburn hair to the length she thought proper. It was years before I even knew what a beauty parlor was, and only then because she ranted on and on about how wasteful an expenditure that was, especially “women having their toenails cut and painted.”

When I was twelve, my grandparents began to take me on occasional shopping trips. Many times, they made me stay in the car while they went into stores, and when they did bring me into a store to buy some clothes I needed, my grandmother hovered over me, forcing me to concentrate only on what I had to buy and not look around, never attract any boy’s attention, especially, and never, ever speak to anyone except the saleslady, and that was just to say, “Thank you.”

“You never talk to strangers,” she warned, and since I knew practically no one, everyone was a stranger. How would I ever have a conversation with anyone?

When we drove, my grandmother would periodically look back at me and say, “Don’t gape out the window. You look like a fool.”

Of course, that was exactly how I felt, like a fool. There were things out there that were so obvious to other girls and boys my age, but to me, they were like things discovered in outer space. I was fascinated by signs and posters, especially those advertising concerts and films, the style of the clothing girls my age were wearing, the jewelry I saw on them, and, of course, the makeup. I had yet to hold a tube of lipstick in my hand, much less use one. Grandmother Myra never used any makeup, so I couldn’t even try something she had.

When we walked through a mall and I was drawn to the covers of magazines to look at the beautiful women and girls, my grandmother would seize my head and force me to look straight, nearly tearing my neck. I moaned in pain.

“Don’t look at trash,” she would say. “It will spoil your eyes, missy.”

I didn’t have to ask if she was serious. There was never any question that evil was seen as a disease, something I could catch like a cold. My grandparents believed that because of what had happened to my mother and because I was the unwelcome result of it, I had a poorer immune system when it came to evil. I would catch it faster, and it would be far more serious for me. They also believed that was true for actual diseases and illnesses. Even though seemingly good people had terrible health problems, my grandmother believed there was something in their past or their parents’ past that caused it. It was one of her favorite biblical quotes: “You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children.”

Even though I was very healthy and didn’t have to see a doctor much at all, the possibility of something horrendous happening to me always loomed out there. She had me expecting to be struck down by some debilitating disease. However, when they took me to a dentist twice a year, he would always remark about how perfect my teeth were.

“She doesn’t eat horrible sweets or chew gum,” my grandmother would tell him.

That wasn’t a lie. Except for the pie on Sunday, the sweetest thing I was permitted was a tablespoon of honey in a cup of tea. I had no cookies, soda, candy, or cake and had never tasted ice cream. My grandmother told me that the longer she kept me from indulging in the lust for overly sweet foods, the better chance I had to be pure of blood.