The Invitation -- Chapter 4
From The Undercurrent -- What Lies Beneath
The Invitation
What would Mama want me to do?
There’s a stranger coming to my home. I have a long-standing agreement with my Mama not to speak to strangers. So, it goes without saying, next time Marian approaches me with “I don’t intend to replace your mother,” I have nothing to say. What is there to say? Of course, she won’t replace Mama.
My future stepmother has scored, plain and simple. She has won the prize. A new home, in-laws with money, and there will be no ex-wife to tangle with, or get in her way. They will marry in June, two months away. In the meantime, it is nauseating to watch.
Luckily, my Grandparents provide a reprieve from all this nonsense so the three of us girls can get our bearings and brace ourselves for what is to come. Daddy’s parents are snowbirds, have been for years. They leave for Mesa, Arizona every October, coming back early April, pulling their Airstream behind them. This year, Grandpa asked Daddy and Marian to come help with the drive back. In return, Grandpa will buy Daddy a new car. Imagine that. The wife you tried to divorce, takes her life, you get to marry your secretary, and get a brand-new car. Easy. Clean. Instantly transforming.
The love birds left for Arizona the first of April, gone for my twelfth birthday. Grandma Davis is with us. She’s keeping an open mind about Marian. After all, she’d been the new stepmother once herself, coming into a family of teenagers.
One night, a movie filmed in Seattle airs on television, The Slender Thread. A story about a depressed, troubled woman, and the crisis clinic worker she encounters on the hotline, the night she contemplates suicide. Carrie Ann, Grandma, and I, make it all the way to the end, not without tears. It is revealing and cleansing. I doubt Mama placed such a call.
Daddy and Marian pick their June wedding date, her Birthday. I’m told I can have a new dress for the wedding. Not one charged to a credit card from Nordstrom like my sisters have done for years. Instead, I’m told to sew myself a dress. Daddy will pay for the fabric.
Thank goodness for Miss Warren’s sewing class. She knew both of my sisters. Mama, too, as it turns out. Miss Warren oozed sexual innuendo--perfect red hair, stunning makeup with personally applied eyebrows, always matching lipstick and nails that change color often, and spiked heels in every color imaginable to match the tight knit dresses she whipped up in one evening. I fumble my way through the dress for the wedding, with the help of Brian’s mother, a perfected seamstress.
It’s a church wedding. As if God is going to bless them. The same God that watched over Mama, letting her slip away. After the honeymoon at my Grandparents’ cabin on Whidbey Island, they come home and sleep in the same bed Mama tried to die in. They retire early. The shower runs, the bed rhythmically pounds against my bedroom wall, and eventually stops.
The moment Marian moves in, there’s tension. My sisters didn’t hide their dislike for this woman, rarely holding back how they feel about Marian’s desire to bring her ways into our home. I witness bold confrontations. My sisters have courage well beyond what Mama would want us to do. They know something I don’t. I’m sure of it.
I can’t tell you what they fought about. Only that they did, heatedly. The hardest part to watch is Daddy appears to stay out of it, letting his wife run the show. At least that’s what I see. Eventually, two of his daughters are no longer welcome and leave home. The why, is their story to tell.
My sisters left me with Dad and Marian. It isn’t easy. And it doesn’t get any easier as Rachel and Brian’s wedding approaches. No surprise, my stepmother isn’t invited. Dad takes a stand. If she’s not going, neither is he. My Grandparents in solidarity refuse their invitation. That not only means Rachel will walk down the aisle alone, it means the family has been torn, perhaps beyond repair.
My father begins to drink more, slurs his speech, sometimes sways when standing still. He interrogates me whenever I spend time with my sisters, often when he’s lit, questions that make me feel guilty for being with people I love. He belittles me, shames me, even locks me out when he and Marian go away for the weekend. Instead, I’m sent to a friend’s home, told not to come back to the house, nor dare let my sisters inside. Oh, I went back. You know I did. Slipping around to the lower side, where the rec room and my room are located. Sure enough, there are bars placed in the slider windows, and a security patrol drives by the house while I’m there.
The turning point is a few months later, the summer before high school. While standing at the sink doing dishes, my Grandparents corner me against the dishwasher. Then Grandpa reaches for his wallet pulling out a twenty-dollar bill, shoving it my way. “Here. Take this. We want you to be nice to Marian.”
Really? You’re kidding me. You want to buy my loyalty? No such luck. I wipe my hands on the kitchen towel, throwing it on the counter.
“I don’t want or need your money,” I reply.
They step back in shock as I leave the room in disgust. I’d never been outspoken before, especially to my Grandparents, besides the horrific tantrums thrown as a child, when I didn’t get my way.
I make it clear to my sisters, things aren’t good. I’m tired of being cornered, questioned, blamed, and shamed, for wanting to be with my family.
Defiance begins to feel natural and comfortable. I no longer feel nor act like me at all. What’s the point? I find solace in weekend parties and boys. Why, I develop talents I didn’t even know I had, like syphoning off bourbon from the liquor cabinet, and making out in a darkened room full of people.
Eventually, I’ve had enough of this charade.
“Maybe you would be happier living somewhere else.” So said the stranger who’d been living in my home for two years, standing in my bedroom, her hand still clutching the doorknob. It’s quite the invitation to receive. One I’d been waiting for it seems, for a very long time.
I sit unmoved on my bed, staring at this woman before me, who systematically eradicated from my home everyone I love. That includes the man upstairs. I wait for his footsteps behind her, yet I know they won’t come. Was it for the house? Money? Sex?
I maintain silence as my dialogue. It is the weapon, the armor, others have effectively used.
Once my step-mother turns to leave, I hope I’ll never see her again. Her footsteps move away from my room, down the hall and around the corner, shoeing my little dog back up the stairs, as the messenger climbs them. Only then do I get up and shut the door. As I turn and look around my room, I realize what I will have to give up to have what I want, what I need, to feel safe.
My desk is piled high on one end with homework. On the other end, a blue enameled tin coffee pot with variegated red tissue paper flowers, a gift from my uncle. On the wall, a large rectangular piece of plywood covered with a collage of magazine pictures, each with special significance, perfectly chosen, shellacked for preservation. A gift from friends for my birthday last April, a surprise party six months ago. Below it, my Mama’s old black trunk with a clay pot I made in school resting upon it, small candles, and little books of wisdom for living. There are poems about lilacs, unrequited love, loss of innocence, and getting up early in the morning to steal perfect moments, before the rest of the world touches them.
Inside the trunk are what few treasures of Mama’s I have left. I knew each one inside without looking. Some, I’d yet to fully understand their importance. They all touched me deeply anyway. Her wedding veil shaped like a beaded crown tiara, a crisply starched nurse’s uniform, high school yearbooks, letters and newspaper clippings sent from Northern State Hospital to Mama from her mother, when she was my age. I tell myself, if Mama could be on her own at fourteen, so could I. And I tell myself come hell or high water, I won’t let any man ever have so much power over me that he robs me of my will to live. Never, ever.
On the high boy chest of drawers is a photo from Rachel’s wedding last year, with me and Carrie Ann as bridesmaids, dressed in long seafoam aqua, Mama’s favorite color. Beside the picture, a translucent crystal egg, an antlered deer etched upon it, a gift for being in the wedding. Mama’s watch that was given to me rested near. I walk over and put it on, fastening the black leather band, marveling at the small size of both our wrists. The face of the time piece, a gold and black kaleidoscope, changing every second. My fingers stroke the smooth face remembering. She wears it in the photo resting against the wall, Mama in her flannel nightgown, cooking breakfast at the old wood stove at my Grandparents’ cabin, our last summer together. Surely these things will not take up space in an overnight bag.
Across the room at the end of the bed, brick and board bookshelves with a colorful poster of an Aries ram on the wall above. Mixed in with the soundtrack of Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Funny Girl, and West Side Story, are my albums--Joni, Jimi, Grand Funk, Chicago, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, James, Carole, Bob, Carly, Wishbone Ash, the Stones, Yes, and Zeppelin. And my stereo, of course. There are books on the shelves and clothes in my closet. How I would get them again and where I will put them, I haven’t a clue. It doesn’t matter. Getting out is the goal. Getting out without being seen.
There’s always been a tentative exit plan. I only need to follow it and improvise the rest. In my heart, I wasn’t running. I’m simply walking. Walking away as far as I could.
I can’t tell you what I said that provoked this, or was said to me that I resent, or even if we argued. My father internalized everything, never laid a hand on me in discipline or anger. I’m a sophomore in high school from a broken home. It could’ve been about anything. Yet, I know I’m of sound mind and body, making this decision. And I knew this day would come. Hoped this day would come. That it would be my turn.
I can’t tell you what I said, yet I can tell you what I feel. It isn’t love for the man upstairs, sitting in his big blue leather chair, a bourbon on the rocks beside him. It is self-love. I wanted to be with my people who still respected Mama, and how we were raised. Those who love and care about me. I didn’t call my family, or even a friend, boy or girl, to give them head’s up that night. If I’d tried, I’m sure someone upstairs would pick up the phone for a listen. I wanted to be spontaneous, that element of surprise. That all important, be careful what you wish for, Dad.
I no longer feel like this house is my home. It is as if who I am on the inside, doesn’t fit with what exists on the outside. And I’m tired of pretending. Surrounded by secrets, I can feel them everywhere. Now I have mine. I will pretend one last time, all night, that everything is fine, until morning when they leave for work. I’ll be hidden and out of their reach by the time they get home.
What I did that night, when possibility was delivered to my door, I cannot recall in detail, nor the feelings that surged up within me, calling me to action despite my fear and in spite of my hope. Yet saying it aloud proves I am ready to look again and find out. This time, not as a victim nor a survivor. This time simply an observer. What did I see? A young teenager, waiting for the opportunity to save herself. Would she be brave enough to leave? I see a girl, a young woman, who doesn’t have all the answers yet, all the information kept from her, to protect her, from what? Herself? Blame and hate for her father, whom she’d been left to live with? And feeling oh so betrayed that she’d agreed to this.
There she is living in a house that no longer felt safe, her family destroyed before her very eyes. Abandoned by the person who gave her life, so she abandons a way of life that is no longer comfortable, no longer fits. It will take great courage to walk out that door. She must trust and rely on her instincts. The voice inside her head that’s been begging her to leave, will clip at her heels whispering, “keep moving.”
Maybe you would be happier living somewhere else. It is a key that will open doors for years to come. Sometimes clenched in fist hidden from view. Sometimes I’ll misplace it, only to find it right where I’ve left it. It is a key that will save my life. A key that will open doors and teach me about me. And it is a key, one day every one of my children would use, because history always manages to repeat itself.
These are the moments I worked so hard to forget. These are the moments that were pregnant with potential and possibility, expectant answers and the birth place of half-truths and lies of omission. The influence of a single thought woven throughout my whole life. If you’re not happy, move on. I pulled that loosened thread and watched its path unravel. That slender, delicate thread.
In the morning, I call my sisters telling them my bag is packed, I am ready to leave. I call my father at work. I tell him his wife has suggested I go live elsewhere. I’m taking her up on those words. I’m leaving. I do not wait for my father’s response. As I put down the phone, I can hear him say, stay put, I’ll be right home. I didn’t wait. I kiss my dog and walk out the front door where Brian’s mother is waiting for me in her car. I’m scared and brave at the same time, numb and my stomach hurts. I begin throwing up in the back seat and continue for hours.
Later, Brian comes to get me. At their apartment, I’m put straight to bed with high fever. While I lay dying inside, my sisters and Brian begin to research how to proceed. Before my father makes any moves, I need to get well and make mine. They notify him of my whereabouts. When they call, his good friend, the life insurance salesman is over at the house. No time wasted. Maybe his blood pressure is rising again.
Two days later, I wake from deep slumber, finally keep food down, gaining strength. It is the day of a meeting in Rachel and Brian’s living room. Grandma Davis is there, Carrie Ann, too, and a caseworker from The Department of Social and Health Services. We sit in a circle as the caseworker leads us through the family intervention of truth telling. As she takes notes, my family is instructed to tell me what they knew about events that had taken place without my knowing, the truth that had been withheld, the facts that had been omitted, and any lies that had been told.
The secrecy unfolded, point by point, corner by corner, all the way back to 1963. After the death of my Grandfather, Mama was influenced to commit herself to the psychiatric ward of a hospital. She would live there for nearly nine months, fed psychotics and barbiturates, the very pills that would eventually kill her. They told of following my father to places where he’d meet up with Marian, of grocery store trips that lasted four hours, of pulling up beside the two necking in a neighborhood park. This had been going on for years. Mama had not known. That is, not until after the company Christmas party in 1968, when the wife of my father’s boss called Mama out of respect, to let her know what was going on. I was reminded of things I barely knew, and told things that I did not know. I was told the truth for a change. As my caseworker noted, so I could make the best decision for me. It’s certainly time.
The next day I call my father. After telling him I’m alright, I give him instructions. “Meet me at the County Juvenile Detention Center. I’ll be there in an hour.”
“What? It’s snowing outside. I can’t get up those hills...” His voice drifts off as I hang up the phone, and follow my family out the door.
“I’d like to turn myself in as a runaway.” The words rolled off my tongue with ease.
I didn’t throw up. I didn’t stutter. I stated my claim, armed with the typed family history dating back to 1963, all in chronological order.
I’m escorted into an interview room while the others wait outside on a long bench. When asked what happened, I provide the pages of facts. They ask me about Mama’s death, my home, family, and school. Once I tell them I’m a straight “A” student, things move rather quickly.
One by one, they interview my family, even Dad and Marian, who finally arrive in a huff. Marian tries to hug me, yet I push away. At my shunning, she turns to Rachel with a glare. “How could you?”
What I really want to ask is, ‘How could YOU, Marian.’ Instead, I stay silent. I had an agreement with Mama not talk to strangers. That’s what my Mama would want me to do.
After everyone is interviewed, they call me back in for a second round. They ask me what I want to do. Yet all I can tell them is, what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to go home, ever again. It was not safe. I was not safe. I couldn’t be me there anymore. I didn’t belong there anymore. I didn’t belong anywhere anymore.
My life had been compromised--again.
Emotional and psychological abuse and neglect, the court stated, at my emancipation. That’s the kind that leaves invisible scars and like a magnet, attracts more of the same.