Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood Read online

  Daniel Joseph Gregory the Second—complete with a Roman numeral to sound like royalty—weighed in at a whopping ten pounds and was so healthy he had to be cut right out of Mom. Little Danny Joe looked just like a Butterball turkey and, unlike me, he came with a full head of hair and a healthy scream.

  Danny was unexpected—a surprise or a mistake, depending on whether you talked to Mom or Dad—but nonetheless a miracle baby since the last two had died before they ever made it out of the hospital.

  Dad sings out, “Joe, Joe, broke his toe, riding on a buff-a-lo,” beaming over his boy whose name is in the song he loves.

  Now that Danny's here, people we don't even know stop by our house to see the baby. Twice-removed relatives send us invitations to family reunions we never knew existed. Even Grandma Madge is talking to Mom about making a pilgrimage from Phoenix to see little Joe, as Dad's started calling him.

  Mom coos over his bassinet and says “God love it” whenever Danny does anything from crap a diaper to bounce up and down in his baby bungee jumper, gumming a smile at nothing.

  I mimic Mom's words, her voice, her happiness.

  “God love it, looook, isn't he just adorable?”

  I answer our phone in the same Betty Homemaker voice, picked up from commercials and honed with inflections to match my mother.

  “Hello, this is the Gregory residence, how may I help you?”

  “Uh, Sandy?”

  “Ohhh”(feign surprise). “No, this is Julie, her seven-year-old daughter. If you'll hold just a moment I'll get her for you. May I ask who's calling?”

  Mom picks up the line and I hide behind the kitchen partition.

  “That's my little helper, God love her.”

  God did love me and so did my mom. “God love it” may have gone to Danny, but “God love her” went straight to me.

  WITH A NEWBORN BABY came all sorts of dangers that threatened my brother's trek from infancy to toddler-hood; frantic ER trips when Mom would find him blue in his crib, an emergency run to the fire department over a possibly poisonous spider bite. But Danny was the cutest and healthiest thing that had ever come out of the Gregory family, and his knack for slipping away from illness and injury was abundant. Dad had the Agent Orange, Mom had the toxemia, Madge was a battleac, Lee was off, Chester was brain dead, and I was sickly. But here Danny was: a grinning mound of angelic jiggling baby flesh that knew no bounds of appetite, action, or glee. He was contagious. After Danny, we all felt better, especially me. My migraines just miraculously dried up. I no longer had to stick pills under my tongue, and I even quit peeing the bed. Now that I wasn't sick and staying home from school all the time, I started getting straight A's and reciting Shel Silverstein poems for show-'n'-tell. I was in the top third-grade reading level—reading along with some fourth graders even— and I owed it all to Danny.

  Danny became the telescope we looked through from inside our own cloudy bubble, and what we caught was a glimpse of another galaxy, one full of light, laughter, and hope.

  ONE DAY AT SCHOOL, I was running on the playground when the whistle blew, and I tripped over somebody's sneaker trying to get into line. I felt my wrist snap as I hit the pavement. I knew it was broken. I didn't cry; I just held it tight to my chest and tugged on the shirt of the recess teacher. She told me I'd have to take it to my teacher. My teacher told me I'd have to take it to the school nurse. And the school nurse called my mother and said she'd have to take it to my doctor.

  All afternoon I sit in one of the blue velvet swivel chairs in the good living room as Mom bustles around the house, doing dishes, whistling to the radio, changing Danny. The bone in my arm sticks out a bit through my skin. It throbs now and hot tears flow down my face to match the heat pulsing in my wrist. I want to see Dr. Phillips. I want him to fix it. But Mom says it's probably just a sprain.

  “It's just too soon to tell, honey. Let's wait'n' see if the swelling goes down. Mommy's busy here. I got to get supper started before your dad gets home. I'll decide if I should run you in.”

  It is almost five when Mom calls Township to ask if she should have this little thing seen or hold off another day.

  Dr. Phillips shows Mom the X ray, my wrist cracked in three places.

  “Hmm, well, I'll be,” she says.

  It's a good thing she brought me in when she did, he says. Any longer and my wrist wouldn't have set right. Anything like this happens again, don't wait, Sandy, bring her straight in.

  When he walks out to get the casting material, Mom whips her face around, “Don't you look at me like that, it could have been just a sprain.”

  When I fall again in fourth grade, I know my other wrist is broken even before I hit the sidewalk. But Mom says I'm just going to have to wait for my father to get home, it's time he carried his weight around here and took me in to the doctor's for once.

  WHERE DAD HAD BEEN when I broke my arm was down in the country, looking for a new place for us to live. He didn't like the eyes of prying neighbors watching us from behind closed curtains, or the church pastors who drove past our house real slow, trying to guilt us into church every Sunday. Dad wanted to get us away from all the crazies out there and especially from the black people who stood around street corners and gas station parking lots. He was sure they were just waiting for the right chance to kidnap one of us and sell us into a child porno ring.

  As long as we were home or on a direct route to the medical center, we did all right. But driving into downtown Columbus for Dad's VA appointments, Mom and Dad would turn jittery and wide-eyed.

  “Oh, my God, Dan, look at that one over on the corner. Make the light, make it.”

  Dad flashes his face back to me in the rearview mirror. “Julie, get your door locked. Roll up your window.” He sneaks a look over to the black man, who's waiting to cross the street, a comb stuck upright in his great shock of hair. “Fast, get it up, Julie! Sandy, lock your door. Get your purse under the seat.”

  “Oh, shit, Dan, the light's turning. Don't stop, Dan, don't stop!”

  Mom is frantically trying to stuff a purse the size of a bowling ball under the seat and I am furiously cranking the backseat windows up while Dad pops the locks down, then repops them up and down, harder, just to make sure.

  The man flows over the curb and down into the crosswalk, his loose undone gait bringing him close to our car, like a real-life safari lion. And there we are, sticking out into the intersection, holding our breath while the man looks at us like we're crazy.

  As he passes, Dad guns it and we squeal away.

  “Jesus, that was close,” Mom says.

  Dad's massive forehead fills the rearview mirror, shiny sweat on his brow. “If one of them ever comes up to you kids, I don't care where you are or who you're with, you start screaming at the top of your lungs. You got me?”

  “Yeess, Daad.”

  IT WAS EASTER SUNDAY when I sat for the second time in the blue swivel chair clutching a snapped wrist. When Dad walked through the door later that night, he shouted, “I've found it, the perfect secluded place. Kids, honey, we're getting out of this goddamned suburb and away from the crazies. We're going to the country!”

  WE ARE ALL LOADED UP in the long, iV wide family wagon. Me, three-year-old Danny, porky little arms waving from where he is bound into his car seat, Dad driving and Mom gazing out the passenger window at the fields whizzing by.

  The air is hot, even at fifty-five miles per hour. It's like a blanket of oven heat, blasting through the car windows. No more cars to play headlight pididdle with, just open spaces, winding roads, and isolated woods that stand empty by the road, with the occasional cemetery marked only by little white stubby graves popping out of the earth, worn smooth like half-dissolved peppermint Life Savers.

  A bee gets blown in the window and lands on my sun-warmed cast, which I take as a compliment. I let him crawl around the plaster and he walks up to where the living skin that sees the sun meets the flakey skin that stays in the dark and dips down into the space my sh
runken arm has made at the top of my cast. His feelers rove over my moist arm until I've got a tickle deep in my cast I know I can't reach. I bang on the plaster and spook him out of it. The last thing I need is a sting halfway down my cast.

  We pull onto a narrow gravel track off the main paved road. It's single lane and goes down, down, deep into a tunnel of lush green treetops that interlace in a fin-gery canopy overhead. The car bump-bumps over the washboard rivets etched by years of wheels that have sped up the steep hill like it was their own 4X4 trail. At the bottom, the road pans out into a wider stretch that straightens and exits the woods into thick fields where the weeds grow as high as the car window. We pass a murky shaded swamp, a dilapidated log cabin, and finally—around one more bend—arrive at the grass-covered spot about half the size of a baseball field that will be the site of our new home.

  It is desolate. My stomach sinks. The ill-timed siren of a locust goes off in the distance. Wow, it sure is far out. There aren't any neighbor kids. School must be miles and miles away.

  “We're here.” Mom pops her gum, punctuating the silence. “I'm going to call it ‘Hideaway Farm.’”

  I'm wondering why Mom said this would be such a great place for me, but as soon as little Danny is lifted from his car seat, he drops his pants and squats to pee right there out in the open. We laugh. Then he races all around, like a puppy off his leash, no black people to abduct him, no cars to run him over, and a whole sea of emerald grass to lope through. If Danny's happy, so are we. He's the barometer by which we gauge what's okay for our family and what isn't.

  Mom walks over to the only standing building, which sits on the edge of a hill by the road. It's our very own log cabin straight off the pancake syrup bottle, except the white stuff is caked sloppily between the railroad ties like someone didn't care how it looked. From here, you can almost see the other log cabin we passed across the field. Mom tells me ours is the old original homestead, and that when Mr. Burns built here back in the twenties, he brought along the fortune he'd made robbing banks and sunk it deep into these hills. He named the road after himself and when he died, people came from miles around to dig for his treasure but it never was found.

  I make my way out behind the cabin to where the hill drops sharply down. As far as I can see are rusty refrigerators, old stoves, jagged edges of washers, toothy sheets of tin, and heaps of tires, wavy heat rising from the black rubber piled right out there in the blazing sun.

  WHEN WE COME DOWN THE ROAD the next time, there is a trailer sitting on the other side of the old cabin and looking out over the hill below. I'm not supposed to hate our new place, but it's nothing like our white two-story with the baby-blue carpet. I try to get excited about my mother's plans for building on a deck here, then one off the back, an extra bedroom, a whole new addition, but why does she keep calling it a house when it's really a tin box that doesn't even have real windows, just little squares of plastic that you have to crank open with a handle? It's a double-wide, she says, the same dimensions as a real house, there's no difference, absolutely none. She calls the place a “farm” too, but it really isn't a farm because we don't have any animals. Even I know a trailer isn't a house and a dump isn't a farm, but this is our Hideaway and we're here just in time for the summer.

  THE MINUTE WE MOVED IN, Dad wanted to start building a GTO, his vision of the ultimate oldies cruising machine. He picked up local Traditi' Times papers and Pontiac newsletters and started stockpiling junk parts around the trailer; slightly bent bumpers, old exhaust manifolds, random door panels, and rust-crusted windshield wiper motors. The parts stayed half wrapped in the newspaper they were shipped in (the better ones stashed on his closet shelf, the big ones slid under the trailer), until he could build himself a garage off the side of the log cabin. But Mom had different plans for him. She wanted Dad's free time devoted to building onto the house. She wanted him in a backhoe, digging us out a pond over the hill. She wanted that deck off the back and a bigger dining room for holiday dinners and parties with relatives and friends, her eyes literally glowing with plans for the future. And Dad was always in the awkward position of trying to prove to her that he was the man of the house.

  The whole time we were growing up Mom told us a story behind Dad's back whenever they were fighting and she wanted us to side with her. We still don't know if there was any truth to it, but as kids, we hung on every word and swallowed this dark family secret, and the shame that went with it. Supposedly, back in the seventies when I was just a baby, Dad took on a lover. But that wasn't even the worst of it. According to the story Mom spit out through clenched teeth, Dad's lover was a guy.

  “The faggot. Your father, nothing but a good-for-nothing, lazy-assed faggot.”

  So Dad's manhood became an overstatement he needed to make—as much to reassure himself, as for the sake of self-protection. An overstatement that spawned piles of greasy-cornered Ohio Swinger magazines of spread-eagle locals stacked up under his workbench, and that prompted him to comment on every overt physical attribute of any female who walked by. Otherwise, all Mom needed to do was drop a few choice words.

  And what Mom wanted for herself was to have a bunch of horses and her kids in 4-H, reciting the youth group's pledge, hand over heart:

  I pledge

  My head to clearer thinking,

  My heart to greater loyalty,

  My hands to larger service,

  and My health to better living,

  For my club, my community, my country, and

  my world.

  She wanted to stick us in horse shows, she wanted us wearing ten-gallon hats and silver conchs sewn down our thrift store polyester trousers, winning ribbons like she always wanted as a kid. And as soon as I got my cast off, there we were in August, at the United Methodist Fun-raiser horse show, sweltering in the back of the horse trailer, peeling off our show ring outfits and soaking in our resentments for getting dressed up like her personal cowboy dolls.

  And all Danny and I really wanted to do was lounge through the summer and play in the aboveground pool we bought secondhand out of the paper. But Mom had to have barbwire strung up and hay baled and half-starved horses from the livestock auctions, that would have gone to slaughter if she hadn't stepped in to outbid the meat buyers by a few measly dollars.

  We worked like slaves trying to get it all done. The pool sat empty but for a few bright green tree frogs under the slimy liner and a rippling surface full of stranded June bugs. The heavy-gauge barbwire fought us tooth and nail and clung to the spool like barnacles on a rib cage. Mom and I ran it for miles, up hills and through briar patches, stapled it into leaning trees and wrestled it around ancient rotting fence posts, stretching it taut until my hands bled. And as soon as we got one thing done, there was always something else pressing to do before we could be happy or relax. By the time Danny was four he could teeter a sheet of drywall on his head while I fed the tall end to Dad to hammer onto the studs. Even little Danny, who used to smile incessantly, started walking around worried that Mom would catch him playing and get the flyswatter.

  There weren't enough hours in the day to do extraneous chores like brushing our teeth, or—once we started school—homework. Sometimes Mom'd scrape her fingernail up and down on one of our front teeth and get a rind of yellowy paste under her nail. “I see you got some sweaters building up on your snags,” she'd say. “You better get in there and brush.”

  In the mornings, we scraped our sweaters off over bowls of sugary cereal, heaped high with tablespoons of more white sugar until there was a thick crusty layer on top. At night, we'd fall asleep exhausted and sweaty, like sticky glazed donuts. Come the next day, we'd start all over again.

  And if Mom didn't stay on top of Dad, he'd drop what he was doing the minute the coast was clear and plop down in his chair.

  When Dad settles in, he dominates the television and therefore any room that borders the living room. If you coast along on the couch with his daily ride of TV, you'll find yourself making several dozen
trips to the kitchen for a diet pop, jelly toast, or any other snack he hankers for. Since we moved down here, Dad's belly has started to get huge, even though he drinks a six-pack of Tab every day. If the batteries run down on the remote, he'll make you perch under the console and click through the channels as his living remote. Once cemented in his chair, Dad'll hawk into his hand and fling it against the wall or the carpet. But if he knows you're anywhere near, you'll have to fetch him toilet paper and haul it off, clamping the dry edge of the damp wonton pouch daintily between two fingers. If you can, it's best to slip into your room when no one's looking.

  And in my room, there are stacks of books—from Christmas, from the library, swiped from waiting rooms. I read them over and over, climbing into bed on perfectly sunny days whenever I can sneak away to hide between the pages of my favorite escape.

  OVER THE YEARS, OUR LITTLE TRAILER would grow into a labyrinth, with bedrooms and baths and living rooms, and even separate quarters for the veterans and foster kids Mom brought to the farm, all tacked on to one another and sprouting out from every side. We were surrounded by a moat of thick, lush, woods; a protective screen that kept us in a hidden world, our isolated bubble at the bottom of that hollow; our own private ecosystem brewing in a self-imposed petri dish.

  But at the top of the road, we rose to the occasion: Town. Everybody looked presentable before we left the house. That meant color-coordinated outfits for me, Garanimals for Danny, and clean underwear on us both. That meant Danny's sun-blond hair was combed to the side and sprayed stiff and mine was curl-ironed for body and then feathered flawlessly with the thick Goody comb Mom made me carry in my purse for touch-ups. We clicked into our seat belts and straightened our spines. We rolled out from under the cover of a thousand trees and the radio came alive, the gray crackling of a station without a signal suddenly turning to song. We might have to pause at the top of our dirt road for another car to pass by on the paved one, but when they did, we casually peered into their car windows and we looked just like them! And then we merged. Into the road, on toward civilization, past real houses with neighbors who knew each other, past suburbs like the one where we used to live and into crowded Kmarts and busy waiting rooms with people from all walks of life.