The Unwelcomed Child (3 page)

When I was younger, I never understood what all the talk about my blood meant, but my grandparents made it sound as if there was something rotten or spoiled in my blood, and the whole purpose of how they were bringing me up was to purify it and destroy the strains of evil that flowed through my veins. In fact, whenever I cut myself, I studied the blood that came out, looking for something dark or ugly. When I asked her why it wasn’t there, she told me to stop being stupid.

Gradually, I realized that in their minds, evil was something inherited, or, at least, the tendency to commit it was. This wasn’t so different from what I understood to be original sin. Everyone, they told me, even they, had that stain on his or her soul, but I had more of it, and deeper, so I didn’t have just what everyone else had. I had something extra. It did no good in my earlier years to ask what it was or why. I was told that it was there, and that was that. It was my grandparents’ burden in life to work at driving it out of me. If I listened and was obedient, it could happen, and then I would be able to be free. That goal they had set for me kept me at least a little hopeful.

From the comments they dropped here and there like grass seed, I gathered that my mother was far from the perfect child in their eyes and that the man who had raped her was obviously pure evil, if not the devil himself. But if she were a better person, he wouldn’t have been so drawn to her. This was why I had inherited a tendency toward evil itself. Not only was I fathered by a rapist, but I also had a mother who was more evil than most girls her age. As long as I was with them, I had no choice but to accept their view of me. I could look at myself in a mirror for hours and not see any good in my eyes, which had tiny black dots swimming in the blue, according to Grandmother Myra, another sign of something dark inside me. I tried to look at myself as much as I could to see if there was something inside me I could see. I couldn’t, of course, and looking at yourself in mirrors for longer than a few seconds to check something on your face was forbidden anyway. It led to narcissism, she said, which was the main fault of Lucifer in heaven.

I had no mirror in my room, and when I asked for one, she said, “It’s enough to look at yourself in the bathroom to see if you’re clean. Why else would you look at yourself?”

Did I ever dare say or even think, to see if I was pretty?

Seeing what was available out there when I went on the shopping excursions inevitably made me ask for more and complain about how little I had. My grandmother’s reaction was to shake her head and tell my grandfather, “We have given her a taste of the apple. It can lead to no good.”

What apple? Where was the snake urging me to defy God? Was it living inside me? Why was wanting nicer clothes and pretty things going to lead me to no good? It was all so confusing, so frustrating. If I complained too much, the periods between shopping trips would grow longer. I had to learn to keep my thoughts all bundled up inside and never look at anything with any special desire or admiration. In many ways, I was my own jailer, slapping down my hands if they reached out for something new, shutting curtains if I looked at something exciting.

Sometimes I would study a fly caught in a spider’s web. I watched how desperately and futilely it struggled. I imagined the spider was sitting off to the side somewhere, enjoying the sight. Usually, I would destroy the web and set the fly free, because I was like that fly.

Someday,
I thought,
someone will tear apart the web I’m in, and I will be just like everyone else.
That thought gave me hope, but it was easy for a young girl like me to lose her optimism. There were many times when I thought about running away, of course. I dreamed of finding my mother and hearing her say, “Oh, I’m so sorry I was selfish and left you with them. Forgive me. Now we’ll be a real mother-daughter team, our own family, and I’ll buy you nice things and get you into a school where you can meet other girls and go to dances and have a boyfriend and not feel guilty about it.

“I’ll show you how to wear makeup, get you a decent hairstyle, and buy you fashionable clothes. I’ll drive the horrid memories you have of your terrible childhood out of your mind so that it will be impossible for you to recall anything. It will be as if I was able to get into your head and wash your brain.”

And then she would hug me, and we would go to a fun place to eat and laugh, and she would tell me things I longed to know, not just about her but also about the world out there, things like how to find a boyfriend and what to do when he began to hold and kiss you and touch you in places you were afraid to touch yourself. At least, I was afraid, thanks to my grandmother’s warnings, which would all have something to do with how I came into this world.

My mother wouldn’t tell me about the rape right away. I would understand how painful it was for her to remember it, and I would think that wasn’t so important now anyway. Eventually, though, I would, as I did often now, wonder about my biological father. Did he just come out of the night, a dark shadow raging with lust, and overwhelm her? Did she get to see his face or hear his voice? When she looked at me now, did she see him in me? Were my grandparents right after all? Was there something sinful embedded in me? Did I have to be extra careful? Would she tell me the truth?

But in my dream scenario, even that would be pleasant. “No, no,” she would say. “There is nothing significant of him in you. You’re all me. Don’t give it a second thought. I tell you what,” she would add, laughing, “think of yourself as an immaculate conception. That’s what my parents should have thought. If they trusted in their God so much, why didn’t they trust in you, in the wonder of you?”

How wonderful she would make me feel. I could go to sleep, snuggled up comfortably with her nearby. I would hear music, see movies, read magazines, and eat sweets and fun foods like pizza. The invisible chains that I had felt wrapped around me would be gone. It would be as if the whole world had opened up to me. I had gone through a door, fallen through a magic hole, like Alice, and entered the wonderland I envisioned in my lonely, dark moments shut away by not only doors and windows and walls but also my grandmother’s angry glare. It was like looking directly at the sun. I had to turn away and seek the cool darkness.

But all of that was over now that I was older and stronger.

They could take away my freedom for now, I thought, but they couldn’t take away my dreams.

Could they?

They seemed to be able to take away so much, even from themselves. This fantasy I had about my mother was nothing more than just that and never would be, I thought. What I realized from reading between the lines of what they told me about my birth and my mother’s horrible victimization was that she didn’t want to give birth to me. If she didn’t want me then, why would she want to see me now?

When she realized the rapist had impregnated her, she had come to her parents, expecting that they would arrange for an abortion, but they wouldn’t hear of it. I gathered that once my mother passed a certain point in her pregnancy, she was unable to end it, especially since she was practically kept the way I’d been, a virtual prisoner in her own home.

“It was too late already when she came home,” my grandmother told me. “It was just like her to ignore something wrong.”

So I understood that they had forced her to go through with it. Later, my mother would tell me she assumed they were going to give me away, get me out of everyone’s life, but they felt they had to do something else, too: they had to atone for the evil that my mother had invited into her life.

I learned bits and pieces of the story as I grew older and asked more questions. I hoped I would learn it all someday, but for now, that was all they would tell me.

It was only recently, in fact, that they even permitted me to see a picture of my mother. Right after I was born and my mother literally fled her home, they hid any pictures they had displayed of her. It took me years to learn that my mother’s name was Deborah Ann Edwards. My grandmother was always angry at her, it seemed, especially when my mother began to permit people to call her Debbie instead of Deborah. If someone called and asked for Debbie, she would say there was no one there by that name and hang up. I would later learn from my mother that when she had a friend over and my grandmother overheard the friend call her Debbie, she would ask the friend to leave. She even bawled out one of her teachers who casually referred to her as Debbie.

Grandmother Myra had given birth to my mother late in her marriage to Grandfather Prescott. She was thirty-eight years old. Again trying to read between the lines, I understood that they had tried earlier, but she couldn’t get pregnant and certainly wasn’t going to take any medication or do any procedure that might heighten her chances for pregnancy. From the way Grandfather Prescott described it once when my grandmother wasn’t nearby to hear him, it came as a total surprise to them when she had begun to develop the signs of pregnancy. Back then, before my mother had disappointed them, they believed an angel had come into the house and touched Grandmother Myra in her sleep.

They told me my mother was a beautiful, perfect-looking infant, so much so that the nurses in the maternity ward called her a cherub.

“I should have known she would turn out to be anything but,” my grandmother said bitterly. “Right from the start, she cried too much, demanded too much, almost sucked my breasts dry.”

The image of that widened my eyes. Rarely, if ever, did my grandmother refer to her own body as anything but a vessel for her soul. But the feminine journey all girls travel made it impossible for her to keep me innocent and asexual. She didn’t have to prepare me for my menarche because one of the science books I had to read included some basic human reproduction facts.

The day it happened, she made me stand in a hot shower, almost too hot to bear, and recite a prayer asking my guardian angel to keep me from succumbing to the temptations of the flesh. I babbled the words as quickly as I could, not understanding all of them. When it was over, she told me never to mention my monthlies to any man, even my grandfather. She told me to care for myself in silence and never complain about any cramps to anyone but her. Then she went into a long explanation of why women were punished with this biological event, tracing the blame back to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Whenever she spoke of these things, she was the most animated. It was as if everything to do with sex was an affront to our spiritual well-being, at minimum a test God threw down upon us to help him choose those of us who deserved to be in heaven and those who deserved to be embraced by Satan and suffer in hell. Years later, when I told my mother about all this, she shook her head and told me she used to imagine my grandparents making love.

“Dad had to poke it through a hole in a sheet she had wrapped around her.”

“Really?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” she said, and then we both laughed.

How did they get to be that way? I wondered. Like me, my grandmother was an only child. Of course, I wondered why she was so reluctant to talk about her parents, her father especially. Finally, I learned that he was a serious alcoholic who died one night in an alleyway. Her mother and she had a very hard life because of that. She blamed her mother’s early death on her father, claiming her tiny, fragile heart couldn’t take the burden any longer.

Like her parents, Grandfather Prescott’s parents were long gone. Never once did either of them take me to visit their parents’ grave sites, but I did believe Grandfather Prescott visited his parents’ graves on his own from time to time. They were in a cemetery close by.

Grandfather Prescott had a younger brother, Brett Edwards, a talented musician. He began playing the trumpet in junior high school and went on to win prizes. His parents wanted him to go to a business school, just as Grandfather Prescott had done, but he rebelled and ran away from home to join a band playing on cruise ships, the first being a remodeled steamship that went up and down the Mississippi from New Orleans. Grandmother Myra wasn’t fond of my grandfather talking about his younger brother. As far as they knew, he was still unmarried, although she said on more than one occasion that she wouldn’t guarantee that he wasn’t a father.

“Men like him spread their seed all over, indifferent to what misery they cause some poor young woman. You mark my words, missy.”

“We don’t know anything like that to be true,” Grandfather Prescott said. It was practically the only topic on which he held his ground. She usually retreated but not without a condemning grunt.

Nevertheless, I had the feeling my grandfather harbored love for his younger brother and a little envy, too. Maybe deep down inside, he longed for the freedom my great-uncle Brett enjoyed, especially now. When I looked at pictures of Brett, I saw a very handsome, much happier-looking man. I had never met him. My grandmother didn’t welcome him to their home anymore. I understood that he had been there last a year or so before I was born and never since. For me, he was almost a fictional character. Years later, my mother would describe the terrible crush she had on her uncle when she was younger and how much she looked forward to seeing him whenever he was able to visit.

Grandmother Myra disapproved of her liking him so much.

“He’s a philanderer,” she told my mother. “A womanizer, selfish, venal, and, like all those musicians, into drugs, I’m sure.”

My mother said they had terrible arguments about him. “It was one of the few times I can remember that my father came to my aid, but no matter, she was never hospitable to Uncle Brett. I’m sure that was why he saw us so infrequently. I know that was why he gave up visiting, even calling them.”

She said she had always kept up a correspondence with him, and later, he came to her aid. He often sent her postcards from places where he played, and occasionally, he sent her some small gift, a doll, a trinket, inexpensive jewelry, even a watch. My grandmother told me she had thrown out whatever my mother had left in the house when she ran off, so I never saw any of it.