Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (20 page)

Now I had what I believed could be answers to the why and the who, but as I considered the idea that bullying was a kind of legacy—something passed from person to person and down the generations, like a disease that was both contagious and hereditary—I started thinking about the central question of my childhood, a question that had remained unanswered into my adult life: Why me? Why was I bullied? What was it about me that singled me out?

If you do a little research into bullying, you’ll find it described in terms of animal behavior where, in most species that live in communities or aggregations, the forces of dominance and subordination determine a social order, an order that isn’t set but shifts as its members grow and change with age. There’s a pecking order among chickens that determines who gets to eat first. There’s a bunting order among cattle, set as they knock into each other to see who gets to the feed trough first. Packs of wolves and prides of lions have alpha males and alpha females who dominate the group and call all the shots. In all these groups, in herds of wild stallions and on beaches full of walruses or elephant seals, an aggressive male will occasionally challenge the alpha male and make him defend his position. It’s the stuff of nearly every nature show I’d ever seen on television, the footage of rams butting horns or grizzlies baring their teeth to each other.

I’d never, to my knowledge, overtly challenged any of the dominant boys in my classes, but I did present to them an opportunity to safely display their power and assert their dominance without any risk. Bullies often learn to be bullies at home, and have parents who display anger or are verbally aggressive toward each other or toward their kids. Bullies learn that behavior at home and take it to school, where they apply it to gain social status or power, but they don’t bully kids who look like they’re going to fight back, because they would risk losing power, not gaining or maintaining it. They don’t pick on kids who have large groups of friends who will back them up. They identify loners, and then they isolate the loners by labeling them as losers, as people no one would want to be friends with. You can hear it in conversations that can seem subtle and indirect, the cool bully girl at the mall who says to her sidekick in disbelief, “Eeeuuw—you’re friends with
her
?” In tone and inflection, the message is clear—nobody should be friends with
her
. And then the next time the three are together, the sidekick snubs
her
to show the cool girl whose side she’s on, and
her
is blindsided and doesn’t know what just happened. Bullies only pick on kids it’s safe to pick on, kids who don’t know what to do or how to react, and all they want is to avoid or escape the negative comments and hurtful judgments, so they try to be invisible. They try to
not do
whatever it is that’s inviting attacks, unaware that it’s exactly their passivity, their
not doing
anything, that makes them such easy targets. Bullies are motivated by fear, fear of losing status and of being weak or isolated or excluded, so they attack to protect something they’re afraid of losing. They choose victims who pose the least threat, the ugly girl or the developmentally challenged boy whose parents are trying to mainstream him.

And more often than not, they don’t see what they’re doing. They don’t see themselves. That might have been the biggest disconnect of all, because I was, as a kid, supremely self-conscious and aware of every move I made and every step I took, constantly scrutinizing my own behavior, to identify and avoid doing whatever it was that I was doing wrong and getting bullied for, while at the same time scanning the horizon for signs of trouble, all my sensors and bully detectors set at maximum. It was true that I wasn’t aware of how my passivity and avoidance behaviors were inviting the trouble I was trying to escape, but I was aware of what I did. I don’t know if there’s a measurable percentage that could ever be obtained, where you could get a thousand bullies in a room and give them all a test and say 35 percent of them knew they were being bullies and 65 percent did not, but I would bet money that the majority, probably the large majority, do not think they’re doing anything wrong. If they see bullying at home, or if they’re bullied by their parents, when they get to school and in turn bully a schoolmate, it’s just normal to them. They might also think it’s all relative, the star athlete who wins a championship for his high school, and maybe gets good grades too, so if he’s mean to some kid he considers a twerp, his achievements and finer attributes more than balance it all out. Bullies learn at home not just how to bully but how to hide it, from others and from themselves.

You would suppose that with our larger brains, our capacity for altruism, our ability to see things in ethical and moral terms, our sense of mortality and final judgment, our belief that we all have souls—our conviction that we are more highly evolved that chickens or cows or horses or bears or elephant seals—that we might have transcended the struggle for dominance by now, but that did not seem to be the case. Instead, I thought, we’d passed on the worst part of our natures, from one generation to the next.

It occurred to me, then, that if being a bully was something learned at home, perhaps being a victim was, too. I grew up angry at my father and my mother for not protecting me or teaching me how to protect myself. My father, when I was with him, either bullied me or allowed Robin to. He either looked the other way or wasn’t there.

It was my mother who I spent most of my time with—so why didn’t she teach me how to stand up for myself or protect myself?

The answer was simple. She couldn’t teach me how to do something she couldn’t do herself, any more than I could teach someone how to knit or fly an airplane. She could only teach me the lessons she’d learned.

She could not have meant to, but in a sense, my mother prepared me for a period, if not a life, of victimization simply because she was victimized at nearly every stage of her life. I’d seen how she sabotaged herself, making herself late for everything, her way of making herself a victim before anyone else could, similar to how the victims of bullies make self-deprecating jokes and, for example, call themselves fat before anybody else can. Part of being a victim is lacking basic problem-solving skills, not understanding what people wanted and never learning how to negotiate with them. Getting to work on time is important. Being late all the time is a problem. No one can argue it isn’t a problem, but it’s one anybody can solve. You get an alarm clock. You set it. But she couldn’t do it.

I’d seen how she exhibited obsessive compulsive behaviors, like cleaning the sink or the stove, as if she didn’t know what else to do to be a mother. As if a clean stove or a clean sink were the only things she knew she could do to be proud of herself for achieving something that was, in her mind, significant, and that was all she saw. The rest of the kitchen could be a mess, but the stove was clean, so she’d fulfilled an obligation. She was self-absorbed because it was her way of minding her own business and keeping her head down, the same way I was when I was eating lunch in the cafeteria, shielding myself from hurt by not making eye contact with anybody. She’d modeled the behavior, and I’d copied it.

I was far too young to remember anything about the time when she and my father were married. I do have faint memories of them interacting, albeit awkwardly. I must have been five. My dad dropped me off at my home in Cudahy early in the morning on his way to work. He came upstairs a few times and I witnessed something that didn’t make sense, because I was too small. My mother was lying on the couch, where she would often sleep. Mark sat down next to her and taunted and teased her, tickling her. Her words said stop, but her tone said she liked the attention. She even asked me to help her, a ridiculous thing to say, as if a five-year-old could physically stop his dad from grab-assing with his mom. I remember feeling a plethora of confusing emotions, from helpless to angry to confused. Was this normal? Was this what parents did? How was I to know any different? It was all just too much for me to process.

But to understand someone, of course, you need to look at where you’ve come from and what forces shaped them. When I did that, it became easier to understand how she could be both so timid and subordinate when she felt she was in a position of weakness, and so mean spirited and controlling when she felt the need to push me around. She was like a mouse who’d grown up in a household of cats.

She was raised in a house in Milwaukee where she lived with her brother, Sean, her mother, Alice Simon, and her father, Roland Simon, but her paternal grandparents lived downstairs in the same house. Her paternal grandmother could be a nasty old lady, a mean small-minded person who would call the police when the neighborhood kids cut through the yard, unaware that the neighborhood kids, to retaliate, would beat up my mother.

There was no love on display, ever, between her mother and father, who bickered and fought constantly and never hugged or kissed, not each other, and not her. She was constantly punished and told she was bad, a label she ultimately accepted, until she thought of herself as a bad person, a person of little value or worth. Cruelty and negative reinforcement were everywhere, every day, a constant. Praise was nonexistent. When Sandra got A’s on her report card, Alice wouldn’t look at it. When there was a mother-daughter function at school, Alice would not attend. She sometimes used what was once called a “switch” to administer corporal punishment for minor offenses, a believer in the old parenting adage, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” My mother shared with Michelle a story where she recalled a hot summer day when Alice bought a group of children ice cream cones, but she would not buy a cone for Sandra, who was told she was being punished and deprived of ice cream because she’d been bad. Even if being deprived of ice cream was a suitable punishment, why would Alice go the extra mile and buy all the other kids ice cream, just to make Sandra feel even worse than she already did? In high school, when my mother modeled a dress for her mother before a school dance, proudly twirling in the belief that she had successfully prettied herself up, Alice said, “You look ugly.”

It was, unfortunately, not the last time she’d hear that. When I was in third or fourth grade, I became aware that she was trying a dating service called Unique Encounters, which at the time, before the Internet, meant arranging telephone conversations with potential dates or partners. She would do alright until they asked her to send them a picture. One man in particular seemed particularly enthusiastic and kept begging her to send a picture so that he could see what she looked like. When she finally complied, he stopped taking her calls and he never called her back again.

Such are the stories she told me and Michelle. I assume they’re accurate, but I wonder how much she remembers, and I wonder what she might not be saying.

My grandfather, Roland, was of German descent, raised on Pierce Street in Milwaukee, the son of a man who worked for the city. I remember hearing that his father had been an amateur boxer. I don’t know what my grandfather did before he joined the army air corps out of high school during World War II and served in India.

When he came home from the war, he was sent by the military to Woods Hospital, a psychiatric facility, where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and treated with shock therapy. My mother and her mother would visit him there, and he would occasionally come home on weekends. He scored high on the intelligence tests they gave him, but he never fully recovered from the illness, which he claimed he’d come down with in the military. I wasn’t sure if it actually worked that way, where schizophrenia is a contagious disease you “come down with,” like the flu or chicken pox, but I knew he got disability checks from the government for the rest of his life.

My mother recalls her father as having a dual personality. She may have preferred the drunk one to the sober one, because the only time he ever told her he loved her was when he was drunk, though she didn’t believe it and felt it was the alcohol talking. If she and her father were close when she was younger, it deteriorated as she grew older. Once when they fought, Roland threatened to send her away to a home for girls run by nuns. Only a freshman in high school, she believed this to be a real place. She wrote her father a long letter and put it on his pillow. He never sent her to the home run by nuns, but he never removed the threat either.

Schizophrenic is a pretty big word for a kid to understand. As a child, I believed this was something he’d contracted during his service in India with the army air corps. I thought it was something he had and got over. It didn’t really dawn on me that his being in and out of mental hospitals during my mother’s youth meant he had an ongoing problem. I saw for myself, on the many occasions that I would visit their house, that when my grandfather was home, he drank to excess, and then he became surly and abusive.

The worst memory I have of such an episode was when I was very young, six or seven. My grandparents got into another one of their fights, but this time the hostilities erupted rather than dissipated as they carried their argument from the living room into the kitchen and then into the bathroom, where things got physical. I heard, above the screaming, the sound of my grandmother being pushed against the wall. She yelled at him to stop pushing her. That’s when I got scared. I snapped, walked into the kitchen, shaking, and screamed at them, “STOP IT!” before bursting into tears, and then I ran back into the living room and buried myself in the couch.

It worked. I’d shamed them into stopping. They sat down in the living room and actually started talking, and there was peace. I was still scared and confused by what had happened. I ran back and forth between the two of them, burying my head in their laps, one after the other, feeling sad for them, and for myself.

Because they lived only thirty minutes away, I became fairly close to Alice and Roland. I knew him as the man who built little ships and boats for me to play with out of wood scraps and found household items. I knew he was a veteran because he talked about the war, over and over again, and told me the same story about how he’d put out an engine fire on an airplane and rescued the pilot, over and over, a hundred times, until I realized one day that he talked about virtually nothing else, as if he’d spent a lifetime in the military and seen combat action, rather than the year and a half he spent working on airplanes before he was sent home. I didn’t know what schizophrenia meant, other than that it was described at one time, probably at the time my grandfather was diagnosed, as having a “split personality.” It means crazy, paranoid or deluded to the point of hallucinations, with unpredictable behaviors and erratic emotional responses, and an inability to function normally or think logically. People who are schizophrenic can’t hold jobs, suffer from depression or anxiety disorders, and often, like my grandfather, are prone to substance abuse. Alcoholism is, in a way, its own kind of splitting, because it divides the parent into two people, the sober one and the drunk one, and little kids can never tell which one is coming at them, the sober one they can trust or the drunk one they can’t.