Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood Read online

  Years go by with Sandy strapped to the board: white leather, showgirl's smile. Coal black hair separated down the middle into leather tunnels that lace up the side in Indian squaw fashion, accentuating the trace of Cherokee blood that gives her the high cheekbones and blushed full lips. She runs alongside as her gift horse tumbles into a full gallop, grips its long, flying mane, and then, clutching the horn, springs into the saddle with a panther's grace, pushing to balance her way up until she is standing tall while the spectators cheer. Still running at a breakneck speed, she plunges under the horse's belly and thrusts her arm out in performance-style splendor, ta-daaaaa. This is the Russian Death Drag. She has captured an audience and, for the first time in her existence, something other than a life, a body full of pain.

  IT IS DURING ONE OF OHIO'S BRUTAL WINTERS that Smokey comes down with his annual bad cold and Sandy has her psychic premonition. When Smokey wasn't out on summer tour traveling behind the Grand Ole Opry with his act, he was working double shifts down at the Swan dry cleaning factory, sucking in the rich chemical-laden steam. And he usually got sick every winter. But no matter how hard he hacked or how many specks of blood flew out with a spit, there was no way in hell Smokey was going to go to any quack doctor at Sandy's insistence. Ain't nothing ever wrong with Smokey that a swig of Pepto-Bismol couldn't fix. So when he woke up close to Christmas the color of dirty mop water, he had Sandy run into town to pick him up some. That burn in his chest was probably just indigestion, same as it ever was. All the while Sandy was driving, she wanted to keep on going, to never come back. She saw in her mind's eye walking in to find Smokey cold and stiff, his face frozen in pain, and she didn't want to come home to another man dead. She drove round and round curvy country roads, frantically thinking of someone to call. But she had nobody but Smokey. When she did pull in a few hours later, Smokey was standing in the gravel driveway, as pissed as a bear with a sore ass, chomping at the bit over his Christmas dinner being late. They climbed into bed that night around ten and not a half hour into sleep did Smokey bolt upright and let out a bloodcurdling scream, go into a death rattle, and fall back stiff onto the depression of the pillows.

  Sandy was left with horses and bills, a mortgage on the new ranch, and loads of tack: show bridles, saddles, blankets, and brushes. And, despite what sounds like a marriage arranged in hell, she loved Smokey. He treated her better than any man she'd ever known, if only by the baseline that he never beat her. Now, not only has she not got him but she's got no insurance, no money, no job, no family. She sells the horses and the knife-throwing wheel, the saddles and the tack, just to afford a casket for the man no one comes to see. Sandy stands alone at Smokey's funeral in a nameless parlor, wailing over his body until the undertaker ushers her out when the rental time is up. She is twenty-six.

  NOW. SOMEWHERE ACROSS TOWN is a smiling scrawny nineteen-year-old kid, freshly turned loose from the Vietnam War, having done a few questionable things to land himself in a VA hospital. He wears a permanent Westside look carved on his face from years of beatings by a father more interested in raising tomatoes in the backyard than his kids, a wary expectant look so that if somebody, anybody, looked back too closely or for too long, then he knew that they knew something he didn't want them to know and it was either fight or run. Usually fight. He took that look into Vietnam, where he got a lung full of Agent Orange and then watched through it as his best friend from high school exploded beside him in the brush. He held his friend's broken head in his hands and wrung bottled-up, exhausted sobs from his own. Four months later he walked free from the war, with a low white buzz between his ears, out into the sun from the VA psych ward with only a mild and questionable case of paranoid schizophrenia. This is my Dad, Dan Gregory the First. His actual time spent in Vietnam itself added up to only a few months.

  Sandy and Dan bumped into each other soon afterward in the parking lot of the gas station where he worked, and they rushed one another with a hunger so penetrating it came to cannibalize their very souls. Sandy pulled in for gas at the Lane and Sullivan service station and took a sharp turn in her life by asking the mechanic on duty to check her oil. My father got in her car and never got out. They held court for three months, then tied the knot. Tight. Dad wanted to get married Catholic, and the priest sat Sandy down and said, “Do you realize this man is crazy, my child? He's crazy.” She'd later say she had no idea he'd been in the psych ward at all and chalked up her nineteen years with him as a learning experience. Funny, there were just as many years with Dan as there were inches in the knives Smokey threw at her.

  NOW. IT IS ONE THING to see the VA papers that say your dad is crazy, to hear constantly regurgitated bits from your mom confirming that he's crazy, and how he got that way. It is a different thing entirely to walk away from this scene, to look back years later and wonder if perhaps the woman who is your mother is actually crazier than the man who is your father—only without the paperwork to back it up.

  MY FIRST MEMORIES of medical mayhem began when we moved to Arizona to be closer to Grandma Madge, Mom's mom. I was three then, with long wispy hair the shade of banana taffy, pulled to a shine. I enjoyed the rich life of a three-year-old: roller skates strapped over my shoes and a pillow belted to my butt, frying an egg on the sidewalk in midday Phoenix heat, learning cuss words in Spanish from the Mexican boy next door, and visiting Grandma, who lived just up the street.

  By then Grandma Madge was a born-again Christian and devout basement Sunday school teacher. She wore a fishing cap with a smiley face on it to match her own cheerful self, and would take me down to the lake on sweltering Phoenix afternoons to catch sunfish. On the way, we'd drive along the mountains, their tops shrouded by the pollution haze that hung over Phoenix and bled out into the desert. As we'd come up on Encino Mountain, the largest peak, Grandma would lurch the sedan over on the dusty roadside and, with a hand shielding her eyes like a visor, scan the mountaintop haze for signs of Jesus. Once she spotted him, she'd tug me over onto her lap so I could pop my little body out the driver-side window and share the revelation.

  “See him, Jewelly?” She'd thrust a wrinkled finger past my head. “He's right there.” She'd squeeze an eye half shut like she was peering through a rifle viewfinder. Sometimes Grandma Madge saw him kneeling in prayer, sometimes standing, holding the Bible. Sometimes she'd squeak out a few tears from the sheer beauty of his majesty. Then she'd start jabbing again with her finger. “Can't you see him, Jewelly? He's right there, right there!”

  Uh-uh, Grandma, I don't think I can. But Grandma Madge got so exasperated at my lack of vision that I began to guess at his wardrobe from fractured memories of Sunday school pictures.

  “Oh, Grandma, is that him in the brown dress? With the baby goat? Ohhh, now I think I see.”

  Grandma Madge shuddered in rapture as soon as I started talking about his lace-up sandals. But then she'd suddenly clamp down on my little arms and swing me around to direct fire of her rotten breath.

  “Did you really see Jesus up there?” she'd say. “You're not lying now, are you? ‘Cause liars go straaaiiiight to hell,” the “straight” reverberating from the very depths of what to me seemed like the black pit of hell right then and there. This is the only time Grandma Madge got mad at me, when I lied about seeing Jesus at the top of Encino Mountain, living up there in the industrial wastelands of outer Phoenix. So I started seeing him a little sooner and memorizing details from Sunday school that started to convince even me, until I could have sworn that the rock I laid my lies upon under Grandma Madge's pointing finger actually took on the shape of that bearded man in prayer.

  SO WE'D GET ON DOWN to the lake and lounge on the smooth rocks and catch fish with prickly parts wherever I'd touch. “Sun fish,” she called them, because they glistened in the light bouncing off the lake. There's a photo of me standing there knock-kneed with a scrunched-up smile that shone no less than the sun itself, holding a fishing pole high over my head with a spiky little fish flopping on the end of the line. We alwa
ys gave those little fish their freedom and that was my favorite part: handing them over to Grandma to peel the hook out of their mouths and then, squatting down at water's edge, watching them swim away. As for the ones that floated on top, I'd hope and pray to Jesus that they were as okay as Grandma said they were right after she crunched the hook out of the side of their face.

  Then the sun would sink a little, feathering lightly into the surface of the water, and Grandma and I would climb back in the car and go off and get in a car wreck.

  It was never anything too serious. A head-on here, a rear-ending there, always at slow speed and usually with old people like her. Kind of like bumper cars, only the real thing. Sometimes she'd say, “Here we go, Jewelly,” which meant to scoot over and clutch the door handle, squinching your eyes shut. Her targets were usually red things: signs and brake lights. When she'd smash into another driver, she'd hop out of the car and disappear, melting into the small pool of people who were starting to gather.

  I'd crawl out my open door (Grandma was always kind enough to stretch across the seat and open it for me from the inside before she got out) and wander around in the confusion. Usually some stranger would be shocked to find me at the scene of an accident, standing in the buzz of an intersection not knowing what part of the puzzle my piece fit. They'd scoop me up, fussing and full of questions, and carry me into a 7-Eleven or a bait-and-tackle shop or their own house, and eventually my mother would come to pick me up.

  Grandma was never taken to the hospital or injured in any real way; she got in these wrecks to talk to people. Standing in the middle of the street, she'd fish through her giant white textured leatherette purse— perched on the knee of her leg hoisted up to the wheel well—for her wallet, and show them the pictures of her four-year-old granddaughter who was with her— the four-year-old that no one seemed to notice was missing.

  Even though Grandma's happiness at the scene of an accident was effervescent, she eventually got hauled away. The officer stood before her like a stone effigy and lectured on the dangers of her constant and questionable benders, and Grandma Madge just smiled, God-blessed him, and climbed into the back of the police car on her own, fingering her white Bible like a Persian lap cat. So Grandma lost her license, and got forbidden to ever stick me in a car and drive off anywhere again, but she still came over to baby-sit me when Mom and Dad went out on dates.

  WHILE MOM GETS DRESSED, Dad sits me on his knee and bounces me up and down: “Joe, Joe broke his toe, riding on a buff-a-lo.” I toss my long hair and giggle. “Daaad! I'm not Joe, I'm Jewelly!”

  I adore my father. He takes me out to 7-Eleven and grabs a Clark Bar off the shelf. He rips it open and gives me half, then lets the empty wrapper fall from his hand as softly as a feather and we walk out the door, climb into our little peanut-mobile and roar off, giggling the whole way home.

  ON BABY-SITTING NIGHTS, Grandma and I play Chutes and Ladders or Candy Land. We take a Mr. Bubble bath and just before bed she digs around and pulls something out from the depths of her bottomless purse: clusters of sticky, fused-together Cracker Jacks that taste funny, or some strange warped candy melded to its wrapper. Turning down your grandmother's candy is a breach of etiquette even a four-year-old knows better than to commit, so I'd sit at the kitchen table and nibble on whatever strange concoction she put in front of me, feigning “mmmmm”s while she watched. And when I was through, she'd start in asking.

  “Honey, do you feel all right? You're looking a little peak-id.”

  I feel fine as I slide my hand down a shimmery wallpapered hall, heading to my room for jammies. Grandma Madge follows, muttering her thoughts out loud. “Oh, honey, I'm worried. You look so sick. C'mere, let Grandma feel your forehead.” She flips my blond bangs out of the way and lays her icy knuckles against my face.

  “Oh, God, Jewelly, you are burning up, just burning up. I better call the squad.” Grandma is serious, her face etched in worry and hovering inches from mine. Her fingers spread my eyelids apart, looking for signs that she can report to the hospital. Maybe I am feeling something in my tummy. Maybe I do have a fever. What does it feel like, Grandma? Am I sick, Grandma?

  “Oh, honey, you are so sick. But let's just wait till your mother comes home. Then we'll all go to the hospital. I'd take you now, but your daddy won't let me. I think you'll live until they get home. I hope so, honey.” She pats my head while she shakes her own.

  “Let us pray now.” And Grandma Madge puts her hand in mine and bows her head. I start bawling. I don't want to die. But Grandma's not sure if I'll make it. My stomach is twisted like a braid. I'm propped on cushions against my headboard, just like the ninety-year-old lady down the street, who faded into her pillows and died last year.

  Grandma asks me again about the sharp pains in my tummy and my hand slips under the covers to hold myself. I'm afraid to breathe in too much. I'm watching Grandma pace back and forth, back and forth between me and the phone: She picks it up, calls the squad, hangs up when they answer. She winds the curly phone cord around her finger, pulls it out, peeks out my curtains, feels my forehead, runs back to the phone, picks it up to listen for the dial tone, sets it down.

  And then soft headlights ease into the drive. The car creeps into the garage, the engine cuts. Mom and Dad slip quietly in the front door and Madge flicks on the foyer light switch, rushing them, blurting out that I've eaten something that looked funny and how a strange man had come to the house and given her the Cracker Jacks as a gift and she thought it was okay because he seemed like a nice black man and he didn't look like he would do anything poisonous or with razor blades like you hear about these days.

  Grandma Madge clasps her hands to her chest like a praying mantis, her voice a bird, pulled higher and higher by a string.

  It takes a few seconds for Mom and Dad, with steady blinking, to decipher her words. And as they sink in, Mom explodes, “My Gawd! How could you, Madge? What the hell is wrong with you? She's a little girl. How could you give her candy from a black man?”

  Dad surveys the two of them for a minute, scanning between their faces like a slow-motion tennis match. Then he drops his head to his chest, lets out a long whizzing hiss, and tromps past us to bed. He was twenty-five then.

  Mom is frantic, running through the house, grabbing things to take to the hospital in case they have to keep me, in case I don't make it, and barking out orders to Grandma Madge.

  And then suddenly, I'm scooped up from behind, bundled in a blanket, and raced to the car. We veer around corners and punch through lights on our way to the hospital. Occasionally Mom leans over and whispers, “Check on her,” and Grandma Madge flops a saggy arm back and gropes at the blanket to make sure it's rising and falling with each of my breaths.

  Clunking into park in the ER lot, as Grandma sits on the shadowy side of the car, gathering her enormous purse, Mom turns around to face me in the backseat. With the yellow lamplight casting a jack-o'-lantern glow on her long face, she reaches back and smooths out the folds in my pajamas, her eyes latching on to mine.

  “Now, honey, I need you to show the doctor how sick you were back at the house, okay? I don't want him sending you home if there's a razor blade stuck inside you.”

  AND IT WAS AFTER FIVE TRIPS to the ER that Dad finally said, “That Madge is a fucking battleac! We're going back to Ohio.” And so we loaded black velvet Jesus into the U-Haul and drove far away from the battleac pandemonium of Grandma Madge. And along the way, over the empty highways that in the 1970s still stretched between the desert and the sparse rolling hills of the Midwest, I'd sit on Mom's lap and rummage through her purse.

  “You looking for the suckers, honey? Here, let me get ‘em for you.”

  Mom pulls out a new book of matches and carefully bends back the cover to expose two fresh red rows of the minipops she's been giving me for as long as I can remember. My mouth waters when I see their shimmery crimson tips. The first one is always the best, and I pluck it out and get it fast on my tongue, waiting for the meta
llic zolt to rush my taste buds. Once the hardest layer dissolves, I flip the match against the side of my teeth and crunch the softer bits off the stick, spitting the white flimsy paper to the floor, swallowing the rest.

  One by one, I devour the pack, trying to finish it off for Mom. Mom pulls out a hairbrush and strokes my long blond hair; my crown bobs toward her with each pull of the brush. She smiles softly at me with a sucker in my mouth as Dad clenches the wheel, lost in thought, driving us as fast and as far away as he can from the crafty antics of a madwoman named Madge.

  So what I'VE NOTICED, Dr. Phillips, is that Julie is mostly sick on schooldays and has a soaring fever and really bad sore throats. I think it might be strep or tonsillitis.”

  OHIO IS HOME NOW, and after enough moves to shuffle me through five different kindergartens, we've finally settled into a swanky rural suburb, thanks to Dad landing a steady job with full benefits at the Rickenbacker Air Force Base.

  These are the salad years: white two-story house, baby blue carpeting, sunken den, bay windows with furry African violet leaves curled up on the sill, hot with diffused sunlight streaming in through freshly Windexed double-paned glass.

  And now that we've got full medical coverage, Mom's got to get me established with a pediatrician. Township Family Physicians lies about ten miles down the road from us. Since my first checkup, I've been back for sore throats, nausea, and headaches. Mom thinks I'm allergic to the new carpeting in our house, but Dr. Phillips puts me on an elimination diet to see if it's something I'm eating. He tells her to take chocolate, meat, eggs, dairy, and bread out of every meal I eat.

  After our appointment, Mom and I amble down the aisles of the supermarket, my fingers looped through the metal slots of the cart as I watch what she pulls off the shelves: Oreo cookies, pork chops, Grade A eggs, two-percent milk, and a couple loaves of Wonder. Bay's Grocery doesn't seem to have any of the foods Dr. Phillips wants me to eat.