The Beat of My Own Drum (5 page)

Then I heard about traffic school, where you learned to walk younger children across the street. It came with a free uniform and even a hat, so I jumped at the chance and ended up being promoted to sergeant. I had to stand to attention and press a button before ferrying the little kids across. It was a job that required a lot of responsibility, and I was so proud to be in charge.

The golden days of my childhood changed for me when we moved to what I think of as
that
house, a duplex on Thirteenth Avenue and East Twenty-third Street. Up until we relocated there, the world seemed safe and harmonious. My life and everything in it was pitched just right. Something went badly out of tune for our family the day we shifted our raggle-taggle belongings into that duplex, though, and the effects of it resonate through my life to this day.

To begin with, we suddenly found ourselves visited frequently by the police—something that hadn’t happened much before. First they came to answer noise complaints from our neighbors about the music. We’d had complaints before, but the new and aggressive hammering on our front door was an unwelcome addition to our percussion.

If men in uniforms weren’t yelling at us to turn the music down, they’d be banging on a door upstairs, where one of my aunts and my uncle would yell and fight all the time. Once, in the middle of the night, I was startled awake by the sounds of furniture flying in the apartment above ours. Scared, I ran into the front room, where I found my parents looking equally worried.

They ordered me back to bed, but while I was still there my aunt began banging on the door, begging to be allowed in. She then stumbled into our home, covered in blood. Moms and Pops ran to help her, and I almost passed out at the sight of her blood all over Moms’s blouse.

After a while, I came to dread the flashing blue lights on the walls and the noise of the sirens, which only added to the cacophony already in my head.

Soon after we moved to
that
house, I went for a walk down the street and came upon a German shepherd tied up with a rope. Assuming he was friendly like all the other dogs I’d ever known, I went to pet him. He shot me a strange look and then suddenly lunged at me. I turned to run but I wasn’t fast enough, and the rope was longer than I realized. He sank his teeth into my backside and began shaking me like a rag doll. I screamed and fought him off for what seemed like forever before finally breaking loose.

When I burst into our duplex with blood pouring down my legs, Moms rushed me to the emergency room. The wounds were deep, and I had to have a tetanus shot. It took me a long time to feel comfortable around dogs again.

In a matter of weeks, my kid brother Peter Michael went missing. He was only two years old. Everyone gathered on the street as our neighbors stood watching. Moms and Pops were close to hysterics. For a while the situation seemed hopeless. The police came to take statements, but their presence only made me feel more insecure.

Seeing my mother’s tears, I convinced myself that my brother had been kidnapped after accepting candy from a stranger, something we’d repeatedly been warned against. Thankfully, Peter Michael (or Peto, as he was known until the day he announced that he wanted us to call him by his full name) was returned home safely after several hours. Someone had apparently spotted him alone
outside and assumed he was lost, so she took him home. Despite the happy ending, my world felt increasingly unsafe, and I continued to harbor a terror of one of us being snatched.

That
house seemed forever to be associated with blood in my mind. We were in
that
house when my mother suffered a miscarriage. I don’t remember much about it except that she came home late one night and looked wired to me. I asked her what was wrong because I saw blood on her. She said she cut herself and was fine and she told me to go back to bed, but I know she was very sad. Later on Juan hurt himself when the two of us were racing around the backyard. We were weaving in and out of tall weeds when he tripped and landed on a piece of glass, which embedded itself in his knee. I carried him inside as blood dripped down his leg. We spent hours at the emergency room that night.

Juan still has the scar and sometimes points to it affectionately—a symbol of his big sister’s heroics.

We were back in the ER a few days later when I had another of my nosebleeds, which had become increasingly frequent since we moved there. One day the bleeding just wouldn’t stop, despite Moms’s usual remedies like pinching my nose or placing a cold towel on the back of my neck. I drank a glass of water and watched in horror as it turned red. The doctors couldn’t stop the bleeding either, and I ended up vomiting up what I couldn’t help but swallow, which scared me even more. It seemed like hours before anyone was able to make it stop.

The memory of that incident remains—panic, Moms’s helplessness, and my own terror that I’d bleed to death.

I learned of President Kennedy’s assassination in
that
house too. Moms and I were sitting on her bed in front of the TV while she folded laundry. Walter Cronkite interrupted whatever we were watching with a report that the president had been shot. Moms gasped and then let out a scream, holding her head in her hands
and rocking herself to and fro. I looked up at her and then back at Walter Cronkite and didn’t understand. Was it for real? Hearing Moms’s cries, I realized that it had to be.

Three days later, I was in front of the TV again when the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald was inadvertently broadcast. There was a shot and screaming and lots of men shouting as I sat open-mouthed and mesmerized. The assassination prompted the news station to air footage of JFK just before he was shot. There was our president on the screen, smiling and alive. I couldn’t make sense of it.
Why was he smiling? Wasn’t he dead?
It was too much for my five-year-old mind to take in.

It was in
that
house where I witnessed my parents have an argument for the first time, too; the only time I ever saw my father lose his temper. That really frightened me, as he never got angry or yelled or hit us—Moms had all the southern fire that one family needed. I have no idea what it was about—money, probably—but I’ve never forgotten it.

As if there wasn’t enough going on within our four walls, the next thing to happen was that people warned us that our new next-door neighbors were Gypsies. We lived in a mostly black neighborhood, and the newcomers were exotic looking, like Indians, and they didn’t send their children to school. At such a young age I didn’t know about the Gypsy stereotype, but I detected that it was something not to be envied.

Their arrival all seemed part of the dark power
that
house held over us.

My fears were allayed when one of the dreaded Gypsies turned out to be a friendly nine-year-old boy. It was the 1960s, and everybody’s children played openly in the streets or in their yards, moving carefree from one house to another as games or faces changed.

“Go outside and play,” Moms or Pops would say, and none of us
would be expected home until Moms whistled loudly, which would be our cue to come inside for supper.

One day when I was wearing a dress (so we must have just come back from somewhere special), I ran outside to play in front of the house as usual. Our Gypsy neighbor spotted me and urged me to crawl with him into the gloomy two-foot space underneath his house.

“I have something to show you,” he told me with a smile.

Being a natural tomboy, I was all for an adventure and followed him eagerly, completely forgetting about my dress.

Once we got into the cramped, spidery space, though, I wasn’t so keen. Then he did something strange and pulled out a tube of glue, unscrewing the top. He squeezed some of the goo into a brown paper bag, which he held up to me in the half light, and said, “Sniff this.”

I shook my head. The bag was stinky, the space was dark and dirty, and I told him I wanted to leave.

“Look, it’s fine,” he said, and shoved his nose into the narrow opening of the bag to inhale. When he lifted his face, he was grinning.

He placed the bag in my hand. “Try it,” he urged. “It’ll make you feel good.”

He made it seem like fun, so I eventually gave in. No sooner had I taken a sniff, though, than I felt unwell. Dropping the bag, I lay back to stop my head spinning. I thought I might be sick.

While I lay there helplessly, the boy reached under my dress and began to touch me. What was he doing? No one ever touched me
there
.

I felt ill.

I didn’t feel right in the head.

I knew this wasn’t normal, and I told him, “Stop! Please!”

“Don’t worry, this’ll be fun, too,” he soothed.

I squirmed, but he was much older and stronger than me, plus my head was still spinning. As he pinned me down with his leg, I was powerless against him. I remained cognizant enough to know that I didn’t like it, and I asked him to stop. But he just carried on groping me.

I felt weird and disoriented. I wanted to get away from him, and I eventually pushed his hands away and wriggled free. “I have to go home,” I told him as firmly as a five-year-old can. “My mom’ll come looking for me.”

Before he let me go, he gripped my arm and told me harshly, “Don’t tell anyone what we’ve done. It’s our little secret, okay?” Although he was smiling, he was holding me too tightly, and his words were laden with threat.

I crawled out of there and ran home as fast as my little feet would carry me. I was very confused. What
we’ve
done? I didn’t do anything, did I? I felt suddenly ashamed that I’d let him touch me. Was I to blame?

Moms saw me come in and frowned. “How did you get your dress so dirty?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I was playing outside.”

That was the start of my lying.

“Sheila, you know not to play outside in your good clothes!”

It didn’t occur to me to tell my mother what had happened, and in any event I just wanted to forget it. I may have been only five years old, but I made sure to keep well away from the Gypsy boy after that.

I wish he’d been the only one who made me keep secrets, though. I had two older cousins in their teens who, on separate occasions, seemed to find me an easy target. If either of them was babysitting at night, they’d wake me up long after my brothers and I had gone to bed. I’d open my eyes, groggy with tiredness, and wonder what was happening.

“Let’s watch some TV,” they might say. “There’s no one to stop us watching what we like.” As soon as we settled down in front of the television, my molestation would begin.

It never took long for me to shake my sleep off and become instantly, terrifyingly alert. What had I done to deserve all this sudden attention? Why did they all want to touch me—
there
? It always felt wrong to me, but it had happened before and I was helpless every time.

Those cousins made me feel as if I had a notice on my forehead that said,
IT’S OPEN SEASON. COME MESS WITH ME!
I don’t know if they were secretly talking to each other or whether, at five, I was just coming to the age when I was getting noticed, but it seemed that everywhere I turned, somebody wanted a feel.

I dreaded seeing them after that; I was always so uncomfortable at family gatherings. I tried to make sure I was never left alone with them, but if they were innocently picked as our babysitters for the night, I’d think to myself, Oh, no, here it comes.

I never said anything to Moms or Pops because I knew family was everything to them. “Family is what we are, and family look out for each other,” was the code. “Never stir things up or get anybody into trouble. All we have is family, family, family.”

The fear of stirring things up tormented me, along with the relentless questions that spun round and round in my mind, despite my best efforts to make them stop.

Why me?

Why is it always a secret?

Why is it always in the dark?

And then came the darkest night of all. The night the Bad Thing happened. It was a night that changed my world forever.

I was still only five years old.

5
. Snare

A length of hide or gut stretched across a drumhead

Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

I
was fast asleep. Moms and Pops were out at a gig, and my brothers and I had gone to bed in the room we shared, just like always. Juan was three years old and Peter Michael was still a baby. They were in bunk beds while I had a single bed all to myself.

A teenager who was a distant relative was babysitting us for the first time in that duplex. When my parents had asked if he’d mind keeping an eye on us for a few hours that night, he smiled and said he’d be happy to.

In what felt like the middle of the night, I awoke to find myself being taken into the next room. It was the dining room that Moms and Pops had made into their bedroom by placing a mattress on the floor. I looked up into my babysitter’s face, but he wouldn’t return my gaze.

Why is he bringing me here?
I thought sleepily, not suspecting a
thing. I hoped I hadn’t wet the bed again—something I’d done a few times lately.

He sat me on the mattress in the half light that shone in from the hallway, and then he told me we were going to have a good time.

I rubbed my eyes with my fists and yawned.

“I’ve got something special to show you,” he said. Then he unbuttoned his pants and took out something I’d never seen before.

The boy with the glue under the house and the cousins who crept into my room had only ever touched me, never themselves.

As my whole body stiffened with tension, the babysitter unscrewed a jar of my mother’s Vaseline, covered his hand in it, and then spread the sticky goop over
my
right hand. I’ve never been able to smell Vaseline again without my stomach turning.

I turned my head away when he placed my hand on his penis and clamped his fingers around mine. We sat there together like that for a bit, but I had my eyes closed, and all I wanted was for it to stop. He made a moaning sound, and I was frightened by it and by the effect of my hand.