That Takes Ovaries! (7 page)

First the men played, and won. During intermission the President congratulated them. On his way out, he made himself accessible to the crowd and shook hands with nearly everyone. I was amazed at how easy it was to greet him. I pushed my way through the stands to shake the President’s hand.

“Hi, Mr. President,” I said. “I teach women’s history here at GWU. I think it would be real meaningful, and an important statement to your daughter, if you’d stay and watch the women’s game.” Determination smoothed my bravery along, so I pointedly added, “Don’t leave now that the men’s team has won. Show your support of Title IX and women athletes.”

“Well, I’d like to stay,” Bill Clinton told me. “But I have a meeting at two o’clock.”

“Fine,” I replied, feeling sure of my convictions as well as my temporal calculations. “You can still watch the first twenty minutes of the women’s game.” To my delight, the President went back to his seat and cheered the women on.

I’d just given a direct order to the president of the United States, and he took it.

Later, he became the first president ever to telephone his congratulations to the winning
women’s
team of the NCAA basketball championships. I’d like to think I had a little something to do with that.

“Honey, wake up. Wake up, baby, okay?”

“Mommy? What’s wrong? What happened?”

“Wake up, honey. Put your kimono, we go. I get your brother. Hurry up.”

“What? Where are we going?”

“Be a good girl and listen Mommy, okay? Help Mommy, please, baby. Help Mommy.”

She sounded more frantic, more desperate than I’d ever heard her.
They must have fought again,
I thought. Now, in the middle of the night, we would “go” one more time. Instead of the usual harried grabbing of extra changes of clothes, this time she simply dressed my younger brother in his robe and slippers and asked me to do the same. I complied. There would be no reasoning with her until we got out of the house and away. I figured we were going to a phone booth, as usual, where we’d wait for a cab or friend to pick us up, and where I’d be able to reason with her.

We walked into the street. The sky was clear and full of stars, the night silent and chilled—rare for summer in Taiwan. Everything and everyone in the world seemed forever gone.

Mommy walked hurriedly with my brother in her arms, her high heels failing her in her struggle to move faster. She moaned. It was that noise that always scared me, the one that came from the darkest, most unknowable part of the soul. She cried and muttered endlessly—half in Chinese, half in broken English—about how much she hated him, about how she couldn’t take it, about how she wouldn’t stand it … about how she didn’t want to live any more. As she rushed past the phone booth, I jogged beside her, trying to keep my little six-year-old legs in pace with hers. My mind was in a fevered state:
Where are we going? What should I do? What should I say?

We approached the train tracks and I suddenly understood. She was prone to extremes. I knew the years of getting banged against walls, cut with knives, threatened with guns, kicked, punched, stepped on; years of broken bones, torn ligaments, and unborn children pummeled into miscarriage had led her to the desperation and anger I was now seeing. It was the blood, the bruises, the fear and misery, day after day, year after year, that finally brought us to those tracks.

As her tirade subsided, her voice began to grow clear. Her
despair gave way to an intent to persuade, and she became eerily convincing to me as she spoke. “Okay, baby, that’s it. Mommy no take his crap no more. That’s right, we come back in the next life and try again. We do better, okay? We leave him for good. I can’t take any more, baby. Mommy get you and you brother better father
next time,
okay baby?”

Next time:
Usually, for Buddhists like Mom, that means the next life; on this night, for her, it also meant freedom.

Everything stopped, time stood still. The first thought that finally formed in my mind was
I’m only six. I’m not ready to die.
Though the promise of the three of us leaving him forever and coming back to a new father, a good one, was better than I could imagine. But no, I just wasn’t ready, not yet.

As I listened to her frenzied reasonings, I became conscious that the ground was rumbling under us, that the once faint clack-clacking in the distance was growing urgent: The train was coming. I flew into a panic.

“Mommy, wait! No, no, it’s okay. We don’t have to die. We can just leave him. We’ll do it right now. We don’t have to die!” I looked up at her: “Mommy,
I don’t want to die.”

She nodded slowly, understanding, but only half persuaded. She handed my brother to me, “Okay, Mommy go alone.”

I started again, “Mommy, no!
It’s okay, it’s okay. You don’t have to die. Just leave him! You don’t want to die, I know you don’t. He’ll win if you die. Mommy,
don’t leave us with him by ourselves!”

I pleaded, with my brother clinging around my neck while I struggled to keep him from slipping off me. Tears and mucous streamed out of my eyes and nose. I tugged at her wrist to pull her away from the tracks she was inching toward.

“Mommy, don’t leave me, please! It’ll be okay. Please, please, Mommy. I love you.
I’ll take care of you! I promise! I promise!”

With that promise, she finally broke.

She moved away from the rail and lay flat on the ground, wailing. Her agony echoed out through the fields, toward the houses nearby, yet no one came to help. I stood there relieved,
panting, watching her sob in defeat. The train sped past, so close we could almost reach out to touch it.

That was the first time I saved my mother’s life.

We understood from that moment on we’d indefinitely bound ourselves to the evil we’d wanted so desperately to escape. She was trapped, doomed to suffer the beatings over and over for the sake of her children. And it was my job, ever after, to protect her—even at the cost of an innocent childhood. We knew we only had each other. There was no one else to help us.

Sometimes I could block a punch or throw a few, talk down a gun or even brandish one. Sometimes I put a stop to it; but more often than not, he would beat her until she was nothing but a bloodied, terrified mess, crying in a corner. Yet I never gave up my attempts to save her.

She finally divorced him before I reached my teen years, thereby exonerating us both from our promise to each other. Now that he’s dead, we both know to simply enjoy the freedom and quiet that was so elusive to us in those earlier days. If you listen closely, though, you can hear our secret history in the way I still call her my “Mommy” and she still calls me her “Baby.”

Fridays were our days. When she was still tending bar at the tavern she and Grandpa owned, my grandmother would take me home with her after closing. My daddy worked in the tavern, too, and I lived and slept with my parents in the apartment above. But not on weekends. That was when we’d sit in Grandma’s orange kitchen shucking corn, shelling peas, and telling stories. I looked forward to midnight on Fridays when the jukebox stopped and I’d wait on the steps with an old, gray bowling bag packed for a sleepover. Together, Grandma and I would hop into her burgundy Buick Regal to go to her home, little more than five minutes away.

One night a stranger interrupted this memorable routine before we even got to the house. This stranger had a siren and a badge.

When most people see me, especially now that I’m older, they say I look just like my grandmother. I think so, too. Some people have a hard time recognizing it though, probably because they expect us to have the same skin color and hair texture. Instead, I have the complexion and hair of my white mother. My grandmother thinks that’s why the police officer pulled her over, because maybe he thought she’d kidnapped this five-year-old white child.

This is where she begins her version of the story, which she says reflects the Tara I grew up to be: “So, they pulled me over, and the one officer starts talking to me, and he shines the flashlight on my face, and he’s asking me questions—and then he starts asking about Tara.”

What my grandmother doesn’t say when she’s telling this story is what she must have been feeling as that flashlight blinded her. Was it humiliation at being questioned so suspiciously for simply being Black? Maybe she felt fear, because who knows what crimes white cops committed against Black women in the 1970s, on dark, quiet streets so late at night? Whatever she was feeling, I sensed it.

“About this time,” Grandma continues, “Tara, who never was one for sitting still, jumps up in the seat and goes”—Grandma makes a sideways-looking face that imitates me about to snap—
“‘What’chu doin’ puttin’ that light in my granma’s face? You betta get that light out my granma’s face! What’chu think you doin’?!’”

“So, I guess he figured I didn’t steal you from nobody,” she said, the last time I heard her tell the story. She stifles her laughter when she gets to this part, just like she says she did then, when the undoubtedly bewildered and embarrassed officer wished her a good night and walked back to his squad car.

I don’t remember this incident, but I’ll take Grandma’s word that it happened. After all, she
is
right that it reflects the Tara I grew up to be:
I won’t take nothing from nobody.

A number of years ago, I was invited to attend a technical meeting at an extremely conservative corporation. When I say it was conservative, I am talking about the fact that the company had been in business for more than a hundred years, and I was the first female to attend one of these meetings.