Gather All the Monsters

TW: Sexual assault. I'm republishing this piece from last week, edited.

Me, 1980

“Oh, you’re naked.”

I’m lying on the sofa in the basement of my friend’s Connecticut home. Outside, the heat is criminal, but down here, in the not quite dark, it’s cool and smelling of dirt bikes and old books. I wake from a nap to see my friend’s child standing in a pool of tulle. She is triumphant. Stomping in step. Pristine pink and wide eyes.

The princess costume was too hot! too much! and could she lie next to me and nap too? I sit up and my urge is to cover her up, but she’s five and hot and doesn’t understand her nudity in the way adults do. Instead, I ask if she’s cold now that she’s free of the purple satin and pink tulle. Without all her sparkle? Yes, she affirms but she’s done with playing princess, and so I pull the blanket off me and swathe her in it. Snug as a bug, I say, and she asks what that means and I tell her it’s something that adults sometimes say.

But she’s not a bug! I agree, of course, of course you’re not an insect. How dare I? She’s satisfied when I call her a burrito. We fall asleep like that until my friend wakes us for a late lunch. Her daughter leaps into her arms and the blanket tumbles on top of the tulle. Over lunch, I tell my friend about the nakedness, the burrito, and she laughs because this is how kids are. I smile and sip my wine.

Is this? How children are?

Is this what childhood could be? Safe in their body? Where a child can be trussed up and glittery and toss their finery aside because of the heat. Where a child can curl up in a trusted adult’s arms, fearless. Never knowing of a world where some adults will pillage the kingdom and savor the spoils because that’s what adults do—ruin.

I cut into my steak and tear up a little because of that safety, that beauty, and how some are lucky to have what every child deserves, and my friend asks if I’m okay while her daughter cartwheels in the grass and her son son swings a bat and misses. I say I’m happy. So happy.

But part of me is envious, sad in a way I can’t describe.

---

I am five and all bone. My mother scrapes my teeth with the tines of a fork, begging me to not make him mad. Begging me to eat. I remember shaking my head no, holding my body close. Gathering as much of me as I could. Later, I’m in the bathtub and my mother turns the hot spigot when he calls. I scream from the pain of the water, the heat, and my mother begs me again. Stay quiet. Don’t cry. She wraps my red legs in towels and years later she’ll explain the strange oval shaped scars as burn marks from that day. The day I wouldn’t eat.

Our bodies tell our stories. Our skin is a canvas scrawled with chapter and verse. My mother points to my scars and tells me they’re the story of him. I wonder why he should have a piece of me? Why should my body bear the burden of him? What I want to tell her is the story of him is not a patch of scabbed skin on my leg. It’s hidden in places you cannot see.

Years later, I’ll ask a doctor about those scars. They aren’t from hot water in a tub, he says. The scars aren’t burn marks at all. What are they then, I ask, and he doesn’t know. But he can make a referral to a specialist and I shake my head because some things are not worth knowing. Some stories are best left in the dark.

---

It’s 1980 and I’m watching my mother’s head smashed into wood furniture. The engravings mark her face. Blood pours from her nose and mouth. She’s been bad, but she’ll be good. She’ll be so good. I recede behind the beaded curtains of their bedroom, away from the couch that is my bed, where I sleep. And I curl up in a ball under the bed as it shakes and throttles and my mother’s screams are of another kind.

During the day, when she’s working, I don’t tell her how he calls to me. How the house is dark save for a teardrop of light in his room. He pats his bare leg and tells me about all the sweets he has for a sweet girl. I don’t tell my mother the things I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget. The hand on my thigh. My pants discarded on a ball on the floor. The rattle of the beaded curtain. Focus on the blue beads shimmering in the light. Focus on that one thing and only that thing. Focus on how the beads collide into one another and the music they make. Focus on the beads and not the man behind the beads. Turn away, sweet girl, from the light.

When I tell my mother what he’s done, she finally gathers the strength to leave. They sit across from one another in a barren apartment. For reasons I will never understand, she’s allowed to leave with much of his wooden furniture. I’m in the hallway, outside of the door, waiting for her when he says, I’ll kill you. Then, I’ll fuck your daughter. My mother nods and rises and walks out. Tells me we have to go.

Later, she’ll light a Kent 100 when three men pull him out of the taxi cab he drives. She’ll smoke a cigarette while the men beat and pummel him in the street. She’ll flick the ashes when he bleeds. She’ll take a long, easy drag when everyone gathers and says nothing, does nothing, because he got what was coming to him. I remember the blood on his shirt, how a man yanks him up by the collar and points to my mother, to me, and punches him again and again. I watch this and feel nothing when his bones break. I am six.

My mother rubs the butt of her cigarette on the stoop. Show’s over. It’s time to go.

Years later, after my first book is published, the man’s daughter will message me on Facebook. She is one of his three daughters. I remember the trio of them and how they pointed and laughed at me when the man took us to his ex-wife’s home in Pennsylvania. The daughter is an adult now and begs me to forgive Father as she has done. Because she’s found Christ, to which I respond that man is not my father and I didn’t realize Christ was lost.

And why are so many women begging on behalf of this man?

I want to feel something for this woman who’s also a victim, but I can’t find it because how dare she write me and ask that I forgive? How dare she ask me to forgive the larceny, the cruel thievery? Part of me grows to hate her for shielding men who are forever protected from their trespasses. Part of me wants to write her and detail his beating on the street and how I thought, at age six, it wasn’t enough.

That monster’s still alive? I write before I block her. I’m angry. Wishing I would’ve stepped into the street where his body lay and tasted his blood.

---

There she goes, a black star streaking across the night sky. I hold my sick cat in my arms as the veterinarian who’s made the trip to my home stands with a needle and an assistant nearby. Sophie is four pounds and fragile and after the needle goes in I lie with her until she’s all the way home. I clip patches of her fur and sob into the still-warm space of her belly.

I’ve always said I was never meant to be a mother.

And here’s this sweet girl slowly dying from a disease no doctor could diagnose, a disease where I ignored all the signs, for months, because I was too focused on a job that had been slowly killing me. But I’m still alive and the cat’s dead. My body becomes an earthquake on subway platforms and I play David Bowie’s “Heroes” too many times to count. I drink vodka in the morning because I can’t face the fact that I could’ve caught this earlier, done something. And my home feels naked and uninviting once the litter box and all the kitty toys are gone.

One night, I’m in a taxi barreling to the Upper East Side and I call my friend and ask if we were happy. We were happy once, right? I’m not imagining this. She pauses, and I can hear her children in the background yelling about baseball uniforms and he took my toy and tell him to give it back! Yes, she says. We were happy.

Tell me what it was like because I’ve lost the feel of it. I can’t identify its form or shape.

I sit with friends in bars rubbing a bird’s wings between my fingers. Am I supposed to eat this with ranch sauce and celery sticks? I rush to the bathroom and sob because if I had paid attention, if I had been a decent mother, I would’ve noticed my cat was dying.

Instead, I tell everyone I’m going home but I don’t because there’s a bar on the corner of the subway stop and I think, why not. And when a man slides in the seat next to me I also think, why not. And when he walks me home and I’m staggering and can barely see, part of me thinks, why not. Part of me knows what will happen but I allow because I tell myself I deserve this.

You deserve to suffer.

But it’s not the poetry I imagine. It’s the wanting him to leave when he doesn’t. It’s me trying to close my door and he won’t allow it to shut. It’s me saying go home, go away, no. It’s me feeling pain before I black out and it’s me waking feeling sick and sore in all the wrong places and is that a condom wrapper?

In the morning I stand in the shower for an hour. My hands shake when I text my friend that I need help. She’s a mother, a good one, and she picks me up and I spend the day with her as she runs her errands and she asks me about love. I loved my cat, this is true, but had I loved anyone? Truly and completely? I say no because love and loss have always been flip-sides of the same coin.

I sit on the floor in a Target and I want to tell my friend that a stranger took things from me. Instead, I tell her I’m sad about holding a dying cat in my arms. I tell her how I opened the bag of ashes and breathed in bone because I wanted to feel something. She lifts me off the ground and carries me to the car.

I’m six and my mother’s boyfriend is wrenched out of a car and he’s left bloodied in the middle of the street. I wanted to feel something beyond the desire to feel his bones break. With my hands.

And she drives me to an animal shelter and guides me from cage to cage until a chubby tabby juts his paw out of a cage and I claim him as Felix. I take him home because I want to do better this time around. I want to be a woman who doesn’t ignore a cat whittling down to fur and bone. I want to be a woman who doesn’t carry death in her arms on a Monday.

I imagine this is what my mother must have felt when she gave birth to her second daughter the year I excised her from my life. I can’t blame her, really—we all want our second chances and do-over children. This time, we’ll protect them from harm. This time, we’ll hold them close for as long as we can.

---

It’s Christmas and my friend shakes me awake. The room is black save for blonde hair that curtains my face. Her son is vomiting blood in the bathroom and could I look after her daughter while they go to the hospital? She’s calm in a way I imagine parents to be calm. Of course, I say.

Come morning, I make pancakes for her daughter. She’s grown from the girl who stood in a puddle of tulle. She’s wiser now, eight, and asks where everyone’s gone off to. Don’t lie, she tells me, and I say I wouldn’t know how to. I’m a rotten liar. I tell her that her brother’s in the hospital and she asks if he’ll be okay and I say yes, of course, but she’s skeptical, this one.

He’ll be fine, I say in the way adults do when they’re desperate to keep children innocent for as long as they can. And she looks up at me with those trusting eyes, believing me as children are wont to do.

We spend the morning building forts and playing elaborate games involving glitter, lanyard, and paper mâché. Finally, we curl up on the couch and watch Strawberry Shortcake cartoons. I curl her hair between my fingers, text my friend and ask about her son because I’m nervous. They’re taking longer than I thought they would. He’s okay, he’s fine, we’ll be home soon. Did she drive you crazy? My friend texts. Just enough, I message back. No, I’m kidding. She’s fine.

We’re two adults making assurances. Setting the world to rights. Even when our shivering persists.

When they come home, my friend draws me close and thanks me for taking care of her child. I watch her daughter scurry around the Christmas tree because now she has an audience. She’s a performer, this one, I laugh and her parents agree.

There she goes—telling us stories about her dolls and showing us her presents again, one by one, because, in her world, everything is beautiful and nobody ever hurts. And I want this for her, what I’ve never had, so I lean in closer and say, tell me everything.