Don't Call Me Mother (23 page)

It’s an evening in June when they come to the house to say goodbye. I can’t imagine my life without them. I take in the love in Mr. B.’s eyes, the graceful movements of his fingers as he talks. My childhood is truly ending now. He has found a full-size cello for Gram to buy for me. “The size of the cello will challenge her, but we know Linda Joy loves a challenge.” Mr. B. winks at me and Eva laughs, saying, “That girl will make it, she’s a trooper.”

He shakes our hands, then says with a grin, “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” My heart contracts in agony, but I smile and wave at them as they disappear up the street in their blue Dodge. This is a terrible, familiar feeling. The cicadas are humming in the silver evening and a bright moon has risen in the east. The summer air is sweet and warm. I hold in my tears as so many images of Mr. Brauninger flit through my mind—that first day when I was nine years old, tapping his toes as he danced, rosin flying everywhere, the light in his eyes as he kneeled down and asked my name. My memories are like pages of a calendar, tearing off and flying away—Saturday morning Youth Orchestra where I labored joyfully with my friends over Haydn, Bach, and Beethoven.

The mourning doves say who, who, who, as the wind sweeps and swirls away my childhood. Without a word to Gram, I go to my room and take out a Nancy Drew book, losing myself in a world of adventure with a smart girl who always figures things out.

Wasteland

One weekend during the summer of my fifteenth year, Aunt Helen drives me to her house. Gram hardly leaves the house any more, so every week Aunt Helen and I take care of the chores, like laundry and shopping; sometimes I go to church with them on Sunday. I’m always welcomed with homemade food and warm hugs. Uncle Maj takes me out to the garden to cut roses, cupping the flowers in his hands. Today it is warm, the fragrance of roses wafting through the house. I inhale the scent deep into my body, glad to be away from Gram’s smoke and caustic ramblings.

After lunch Aunt Helen tells me to sit down, she wants to talk to me. My heart beats a little faster—this phrase usually means I’m in trouble, but Aunt Helen smiles. “Darlin’, I just want to talk to you about your father. It’s not right what your grandmother is doing, making you write those terrible letters, going on and on about him.”

Despite everything, my loyalty to Gram makes me take her side. “She says he doesn’t take care of me the way he should. She’s right; he doesn’t send enough money.”

“He does all right, and besides, he deserves respect. He sends money; some fathers send nothing at all. The real problem is Frances. She’s not fair to him. He’s a darned good man.”

“How do you know about him?”

“Land sakes, child, I’ve known him for years. He’s hot headed, but they’re two peas in a pod. He deserves to have his daughter’s respect. It’s a sin, I tell you, a sin not to respect your father.”

I’m shocked to hear her talk against my grandmother. Long ago I gave up defending my father. Until this conversation with Aunt Helen, I had never considered the possibility that Gram’s web of hate is woven with lies and her own agenda.

Aunt Helen continues. “He isn’t the man your grandmother says he is. If I were you, I’d write my own letters. I’d give him a chance to know me through my own words.”

I’m knotted up inside with worry. I begin to cry, partly out of fear, partly from relief. At least I know that someone cares about what is happening. I pace around the living room. “Gram will know. I can’t get away with anything. She opens my mail, she reads my mind…”

“She won’t find out,” Aunt Helen tries to reassure me. “You’ll write your letters at our house, and he’ll send his replies here for you to read. They’ll be waiting for you when you come over. She’ll dictate the other letters as usual, and he’ll answer those at your house.”

“What if he gets mixed up?” I grab a Kleenex and blow my nose, trembling with the possibility of Gram finding out. Aunt Helen puts her arm around me.

“Great balls of sheet iron,” Maj says in his typical colorful speech. “The Duchess is our good friend, but it isn’t right that she’s come between you and your father. It’s criminal, I tell you!”

I’m excited by the plan but terrified. She’s always threatening to send me away to the juvenile authorities. If she finds out about this, she’ll have more reasons to beat me senseless with the yardstick. When she’s crossed, she’s a demon from hell.

Nevertheless, on that spring day, Aunt Helen, Uncle Maj, and I make our pact. That afternoon I write to my father, telling him in my own words what I think about school, the symphony, and my friends. It’s been years since I wrote him a letter that comes just from me. I seal it and give it to Aunt Helen to mail, feeling triumphant and a little bit freer from Gram’s shackles.

She seems to know everything I do or think, as if she’s inside me, breathing my air. It frightens me that her attitude toward my father has taken root inside me. Perhaps I am becoming like her, learning from her to be hateful. I embark on this journey to know and be known by my father as a way of saving myself.

Gram and I continue the hate letters, which seem to have become her sole source of enjoyment. She perks up on the couch, more awake and alive than at any other time. I write down her terrible words without guilt now, knowing that Daddy is getting my real letters, too. In those I tell him that he has to be very careful about keeping the letters straight, that Gram still opens my mail before I get home. He assures me that he understands; he will be careful.

The great glacier that has frozen over us for the last several years begins to thaw. Joyfully I come to Aunt Helen’s to find his letters written with affection and excitement. My father is very verbal and always writes several pages in his distinctive loopy handwriting, expressing himself freely. We’re finally getting acquainted. Things have been going along well for a few weeks when suddenly the world tilts on its side.

I come home one afternoon in July to find Gram standing at the front door, her hands on her hips, a letter in her hand. The look on her face would turn Moses to stone. Her hair frizzes in all directions and her eyes shoot a dangerous light, the kind of light you could fall into and die. She rattles the letter at me.

“How dare you! You betrayed me. You’ve been talking to your father behind my back! Don’t deny it, or I’ll slap you into the next life.”

I break into a sweat, frantic with worry about what she’ll do to me. I can see that Daddy blew it, writing about something that she didn’t dictate.

“Behind my back!” she rages. “You wrote to him behind my back! Who put you up to this?” She goes on and on, screaming, pacing, ranting. For a long time I don’t admit to her that Aunt Helen suggested it.

“Fine. I can see you don’t care about me any more, for all I’ve done for you. Call your mother and tell her to come get you. Call your father. You think he’s so damned great, let him take care of you. I can’t have you living under my roof.”

She has threatened to send me away for years now, whenever I express my own opinions or question hers. I fight back, fighting for my life, screaming at her about wanting to know my father, having a right to know my parents; it doesn’t mean I don’t love her just the same. After several hours, she pummels me into submission until I tell her the truth about Aunt Helen.

On the phone with Aunt Helen her voice crescendos to ever higher peaks. Gram has entered into some new realm of the rounds of hell. After she puts down the phone, her face in a sneer, announces that Aunt Helen told her that I’d asked her to help me write to my father. This is the lowest point of the day—Aunt Helen has covered up her own role in this. Now that Gram thinks I am lying, she closes in on me. I protect myself with my hands, but I can’t escape Gram’s mindless fury. I’m still in shock, stunned that Daddy slipped up and Aunt Helen lied, both of them leaving me to face this Medusa who’s trapped me in her lair. My face and arms sting as I slink into bed. I wish I could run away, but I know Gram would beat me even more when I got back.

Gram seals my prison, enforcing her complete control over me. She allows me to complete summer school, but the rest of the time I’m isolated in the dark smoky house with her, my only respites in music and reading. Gram can’t allow me to have a speck of autonomy. Accusing me, hating my father, and being angry at Aunt Helen seem to become her reasons for living, yet she constantly threatens to die, saying that with all this stress—which is my fault—she’ll die of a heart attack and haunt me for the rest of my life.

I don’t want her to die; time and time again I’ve told her so. After a few weeks of her wailing, I get wise to her and build a shield that protects me from feeling guilty any more. She just wants to scare me and make me do what she wants; she loves having total control over my body and soul. The more she burrows into me, the more I practice hiding from her, making sure she never knows what I’m thinking again, learning how to make my face a mask.

Summer passes in this way. Every day she threatens to send me away for talking back to her, either to a juvenile hall or to my parents. As much as I want to be away from her, I don’t want to leave the only home I’ve ever had, my friends, and my school. Chicago is a huge city, scary and impersonal. I worry about the future and what bad things might be in store.

She sits on the couch and goes on and on. “You want your damned parents so bad, you can have them. If they’d wanted you all these years, they could have had you. I did them a favor taking care of their brat when they had better things to do. Your father never wanted a child; he was forty years old before you were born. You were an accident. Go on and live with him if that’s what you want. Go to bed. I can’t stand the sight of you.”

I keep telling her it’s normal to want to know your own father, and that I love them both, but she doesn’t understand. In her eyes, it’s one or the other. I can love my mother, of course, but my father, he’s in a different category. I wonder if what she says about him not wanting me is true, remembering my time at Vera’s—I could tell then that I was inconvenient. Did my father want me? I don’t know what to believe.

One day, several weeks into this madness, Gram sits quietly on the couch, pondering and smoking. She’s suddenly so quiet I wonder what she’s up to. She says, “I suppose your father could come for a visit.”

Is it a trap? She’s just testing me; she’ll attack me if I agree. Over the next few days, she pursues the idea enough to call my father and arrange it. I still don’t trust her, but plans are made for him to pick me up and drive us to Oklahoma City so we can spend time away from Enid, meaning Gram.

As the day draws near, I start to get excited about seeing my father. The last time I saw him, I was twelve. I wonder what he’ll think of me, if he will recognize me. Since I last saw him, I’ve gotten my period, started wearing a bra, and grown several inches, though I’m still thin as a rail and wear glasses. Will my father like me? After all that has happened, will he think that I’m like Gram or Mother?

He comes to pick me up in a rented, cream-colored Cadillac. He and Gram are civil to each other, nodding and tight lipped. I feel proud that I was strong enough to win him, and convert Gram to my side. His deep voice curls around me like a warm blanket. I try not to show how happy I am, not wanting to make Gram jealous.

We drive to Oklahoma City on highway 81, the Chisholm Trail. The sky is azure blue, with clouds floating above the edge of the horizon. Daddy bubbles over with talk and laughter, his eyes bright with admiration as he looks at me.

“You sure have grown up, such a nice little figure, just like your mother. You have to be careful about boys. They’ve only got one thing on their minds.”

“I don’t worry about that,” I say.

“I just want you to know that if something were to happen, if you ever got in trouble, you could talk to me. Your Gram, she’s old-fashioned, but I’m your father. You know you can come to me.”

I say all the right things: thank you, I appreciate your concern. At the same time, I’m almost insulted, shocked that he could think such a thing about me. Clearly he does not know me very well at all. Good Baptist girls don’t go around getting pregnant. I’m not even sure of the details of the sex act.

Daddy goes on to tell me that boys are wily creatures. “I ought to know. I was a very horny young man myself. Still am, but… Hazel and I don’t have that kind of relationship any more. Hardly ever did.”