Shunned

[First chapter of a nearly complete memoir, The Shape of a Good Ancestor, about healing from family scapegoating abuse, in part, by excavating ancestral history.]

Scapegoating is a rock goblin. It is hundreds of rock goblins that thunder down like boulders in a landslide and flatten us. We live misshapen lives, our spirits crushed and our attachments broken. Restoring our full selves—reclaiming our capacity for joy, love, trust, and belongingness—is possible. The cost is high…but we can find the ancestors we need and ourselves become good ancestors, our suffering having carved out a deeper space for the compassion that builds family even if it is one of choice rather than one of birth. – from my journal

            I am fifteen years old, seated at the pine dining table my mother bought recently as part of her kitchen makeover. “Country French” is the theme. Blue gingham wallpaper, white lace curtains, and delft tiles behind the stove. The centerpiece is a chunky table with a molasses gloss. Easily scratched, and sticky in the heat. I hate all of it, because it is a lie. Our life is not “Country French.” We live in a grimy working-class suburb of Boston. Walking to school each day, I taste the discontent of airborne silt from too much pavement and too few flowers. Coming home each afternoon, I cross a yard with the decorative white trellis my father built and hung with pink tea roses, and the fruit trees he planted to attract birds. Hedges and painted wood are his domain. The kitchen, my mother’s, is simmering with resentment. When dinner is over and the table cleared, my mother orders all of us, my father and three younger sisters, to “stay put.” The early dusk of late fall admits an uneasy gloom. Something is wrong.

            Something is always wrong.

            A plain sedan pulls into the driveway. From the window, I see the tall black-clad Nosferatu, thick bible in hand. Our pastor, whom my mother waves in. He glides around the table and stands behind me laying thin white hands on my shoulders. I am repulsed by this man for many reasons, his seeming bloodlessness high on the list as is his stringy combover and flaky scalp. But more than that, I hate him because he is part of the lie. The thick-thighed deacon who sits beside him on the dais every Sunday, the pastor’s right-hand man, is a child-fucker. Whether the pastor is also a sexual predator, I don’t know, but I am certain he is a predator of souls. Each Sunday I sit in the front row of the sanctuary prayerfully listening, standing, singing, sitting, and pretending. Because if our pastor can be seduced by my mother’s lie of Country French and she, by his lie of spiritual succor, I am screwed. The adults who are supposed to embody love and goodness are neither, and they have all the power. When the bloodless hands squeeze my shoulders, I feel an ache that I can’t quite locate. A cross between queasiness, fear, and the urgent need to shit.

            I know the pastor is here because of me. Weeks ago, I overheard my mother in the church vestibule after Sunday sermon. She grasped the pastor’s arm and plaintively observed that “With one hand God gave so much to her” (me) “and with the other, he took so much away.” I filed those words in the basement of memory, the archives of betrayal trauma that I will not dare unbox until adulthood. My own mother, confiding in a man of God that the source of our family’s strife and unhappiness is me, her troubled and troubling eldest daughter. Proclaiming it unapologetically, lugubriously, and with utter conviction, in a public place.

            If I heard her, isn’t it possible that others did too?

            Of course it is. Forty-five years later, I will learn the extent of her pious, long-suffering smear campaign against me, the child conceived before she was married thus ruining her artistic aspirations and trapping her in a loveless marriage. The daughter whom she professed to love “with all my heart” but who reciprocated with ingratitude and contempt. While cleaning her condominium, I will find wads of scribbled pages stuffed in unlikely places—the broken dishwasher, the crevices between couch cushions, the backs of dresser drawers—lamenting the miserable, wretched, disobedient daughter who has ruined her life.

            Was it drugs? Teen pregnancy? Theft? Quit school?

            No, no, no, and no. I am an exceptionally bright kid who loves books, drawing, and climbing trees. A bunny girl, I call my younger self, not because I was cute but because I have a limbic acuity to danger…and an equally acute flight response.

            My mother’s unhappiness is much simpler, much more basic.

            I exist. Take up space. Talk back. A smart, shy, artistically talented daughter with her own mind and thoughts and desires, all of them a canker in her mother’s heart.

            The pastor instructs my parents and sisters to join hands. My two middle sisters snigger and whisper that I’m “in big trouble,” clearly relieved that they aren’t. My youngest sister, in two long bow-tied braids, sits nearby, the knuckles of her interlaced fingers white as bone. My father is still in his dusty work clothes, his eyes glazed over and his arms crossed like let’s get this over with. My mother is tearful and earnest, her lower lip quivering as she holds hands with the paster, who begins to pray:

            “Dear Lord Jesus, we are here with this good family humbly asking for your mercy and love…This mother, this father, and their four daughters, especially Melanie. We know that you died on Calvary to save us from evil and deliver us to eternal life. We ask, Lord Jesus, that you would enter Melanie’s heart and purify it…cast out the Satan within, forgive her her sins, and let her be born anew in the spirit.”

            And there it was. My poor mother suffered because her eldest daughter was host to a red devil with horns. It sounds like a Lifetime movie. Laughable.

            I wish it were.

            Fifty years later, my thoughts float to my sisters who witnessed the bloodsucking specter of our pastor praying to drive the invisible demons out of me in a ritual that would forever stain my mother’s showroom kitchen. Why did my father so easily acquiesce to such madness? And why did no one connect this unapologetic soul murder with what would later become my relentless obsession with suicide?

            I try to re-imagine the scene. My mother telling the pastor that I am possessed and his briskly smacking her face, shouting, “Get a grip, lady! There’s nothing wrong with your daughter. You need to see a shrink.” What might have happened had my mother sought therapy to talk about her own unhappiness? About the violent household in which she grew up, with a Sicilian immigrant father who once struck her so hard for wearing lipstick that she lost consciousness? A mother who was the primary victim of his abuse? The succession of trusted adults, including family members, who had sexually molested her? The college education she relinquished in favor of an overdue marriage to conceal her pregnancy? And eventually, her casual use of valium and the encroaching obesity that betrayed her indulgence of food for comfort?

            She might have had a more fulfilling life than poring over wallpaper books, decorating magazines, and fabric swatches and shopping for Country French knick-knacks. She was smart and reasonably talented. At the very least, she might have escaped being a 300-pound housewife. But she was incapable of the rigorous self-honesty that life would eventually demand of me. Staying alive tasked me with both her work and my own. Unsurprisingly, a nearly suffocating load.

            When the pastor finished his quasi-exorcism, my father made a bee-line for the television and my sisters escaped to their rooms. I was less fortunate. The sticky molasses-brown lie held me fast. The pastor placed his bloodless palm on my forehead and whispered more mumbo-jumbo while my mother beamed amiably. Her Country French kitchen was clean, the Country French table was gleaming, and Satan had been given an eviction notice. She may have tried to hug me, and if she did, I resisted. Four inches shorter than me, she often wrapped her arms around my neck and hung like a millstone, most often after the threat of punishment or punishment itself, inflicted by proxy through my father.  “Let me tell you what your daughter did today,” she would say as she plated ravioli or casserole. Dinnertime was a waiting game. How long will it take for Dad to throw a dish across the room or chase me into a corner to slap my face? Once he had chased me around the same table that serves as the tableau for the pastor’s prayer session. My father shoved the table so hard to trap me that dishes fell and shattered on the floor. My mother was always on hand afterwards for one of her fetid hugs and sometimes with a jar of Vaseline for welts. She was a pitiful monster who delegated her dirty work to others.

            I hated her.

            Forty-five years later, my mother is dead and I am standing in my father’s kitchen, across the table from the sister whose brown braids have been transformed into a bleach-blond coif. Elsie works for her husband in his profitable company as the head of human resources, drives a Beemer, and lives in a million-dollar home. Her children have every opportunity and appear annually in the artfully posed photograph that she—the self-dubbed “memory maker”—sends out for the Christmas holiday party to which I alone am never invited. I am twice divorced and once widowed, a college instructor of writing, estranged from my only son who lives on another continent, and the object of such disgust that my she refers to me not by name but as “the sister seven years older than me.” She has blocked me on texts to the family, which I know because they—the few who have not blocked me—reply to messages I cannot see. Before she cut me off, she regularly ridiculed my clothing, my furniture, my writing, and my opinions. When I needed brain surgery, she asked me to call it something else because “you are upsetting everyone.” And like my mother, she indulges in screaming jags, the last one in the hospital as our mother, with whom I had made my peace, lay dying. “You don’t love our parents,” my sister shouted. “I want nothing to do with you. I don’t want my children around you. I need to protect them.” After our mother’s death, my sister—caretaker of our father, host of annual holidays—took an emotional buzz saw to the family tree and cut me out, and not one person protested.

            At the age of sixty-two, I get it, and the way I get it is by floating back to that horrid, molasses-dark kitchen on a cold night and gazing across the table at the little girl the bone-white knuckles.

            Melanie makes our parents fight, thinks the little girl. If Melanie would just do what they say, they would stop screaming and slamming doors. Melanie is “a bad seed,” our scantily clad mother has sobbed from a damp bed, producing the empty bottle of pills that she swallowed because she wants to die. Everyone was crying, but Melanie laughed.

             “You’re lying, just like last time,” she said to their mother. “You threw them down the toilet.”

            The sister with the long brown braids wants to ball up her white-knuckled fists and bash her older sister’s face into a bloody pulp. But she can’t, so instead, at night when no one is looking, she balls up her fists and beats the cat.

            Our mother was a screaming, nonsensical clown who wanted us pleading and groveling for her not to end her life. If I even cracked a half-smile during one of her tirades, she escalated, and all of my sisters despised not her but me for the ensuing chaos, which might include her breaking dishes or pressing the pointed end of a knife into her ample bosom and screaming, “Push it in. I know you want to!”

            I can’t count the number of days like this; each one of them seemed so long. Days the color of despair, burnt orange, though I don’t know why that comes to mind. So many days lost to a lunatic mother that none of us can retrieve and the effects of which I, in particular, cannot undo. Because those days were the crucible in which my role as the family scapegoat was hardened.

            How can that little kid with the long brown braids not have hated me?

            And how can that sister, now grown into a picture-perfect adulthood of privilege—a fairytale compared to the costly trainwreck of my own life—also not hate me? I am the antithesis of “memory making.” Childhood memories are supposed to be happy…and I remind her that ours are a succession of nightmares. 

            At eighty-seven, my frail, shrinking father suffers from hearing loss, gout, congestive heart failure, and loneliness. That is why, after our mother died, I moved to an apartment two miles away. I visit regularly to cook or clean or simply bird-watch with him, standing on his deck with binoculars trained on the squirrel-proof feeder I gave him. There is an easy quiet at our shared dinners, and I don’t mind. We are both introverts. If I wait long enough, he might offer something about my mother. He dreamed she was calling him, he told me once, and it was so real, he got out of bed to look for her. Or he asks how to cook something she used to make for him, like teriyaki chicken wings or linguini with clams. Or shares that he simply thinks of her and all the good times they had, and it “brings me down, real low.” He might shake his head and after a moment, I might say, “That makes sense.” We might look at the encyclopedia of heavy equipment I bought him and name the various excavators and diggers, to keep his mind sharp, or watch MSNBC. After we do the dishes, I kiss him goodnight and he waves from the front door until my car is out of sight.

            He loves me, and I love him. He hurt me terribly, but I need my father. He is the sole member of the family who still speaks to me. Dementia has muted his ire over past transgressions, and our time together is easy and warm…until Elsie calls. He takes the kitchen telephone into the living room and if I follow to ask a question or make any human noise—laughter, excitement at a bluebird in the feeder—he flails violently and presses his finger to his lips. The message is unmistakable: Pretend not to be here. The volume on the phone is adjusted for his hearing loss, so I listen as she asks what he did that day, what he’s having for dinner, and if he remembered to take his pills. And I listen when he tells her he hasn’t done anything special even though I may have taken him for an ice cream cone or to the drive-through carwash (which he loves) or the farm nearby with the new calves, or to his favorite seafood restaurant for smelts. I listen as he, having eaten the hot meal I prepared, tells her he hasn’t decided on dinner and accepts her delivery of a cold salami sub. If I call out, “We just had linguini with clam sauce,” he glowers at me and covers the receiver with his hand. I am required to acquiesce to my own erasure even as I am the first daughter he calls when he cuts himself, can’t remember how to use the coffee maker, or needs me to climb a ladder and change a lightbulb or shovel a path to the birdfeeders. My sister of the long brown braids now has power of attorney, managing his bills, overseeing his medical care, and liaising with the caregiver who comes for two hours each day. When my sister visits, I am ordered to stay away, even if it’s Father’s Day, his birthday, or my own. It’s as if the pope has descended from on high and I might offend in some way.

            On this perfect summer day, I have spontaneously bicycled to my father’s house to surprise him and see her white Beemer at the curb. I feel so happy, so energized by my brand-new bicycle that I ignore the stay-away order and dash up the front stairs to let myself in.

             “I forgot my water bottle,” I announce as I enter, “so I thought I’d stop by for a drink.”

            My father and sister are sitting at the kitchen table, their faces, twin pale ovals, though my father’s blue eyes are fluid in the light, as if he is startled, and my sister’s is expressionless. I realize that he anticipates a quarrel, because that’s her story of me. Except that, like the Country French curtains and delft dishes that traveled from our family home in the suburbs to this North Shore condominium, it is a decades-old lie.

            I hug my father and chat about this and that. My sister has crossed her arms defensively; her face is as brittle as glass.

             “I don’t know why you are angry at me,” I say, “but I love you. I’d be happy to talk about whatever you think I’ve done to hurt you.”

            She stares at me with cold blue-green eyes. I wonder if she possesses the self-awareness that she clearly is raging inside.

            “I love you, Elsie,” I say more softly.

            She replies with silence and a hard stare.

            I repeat that I love her, and leave.

            The next day, my telephone rings at the crack of dawn. It is my father, and I eagerly pick up. Foolishly I believe he will have perceived the family lie. A bad person doesn’t confess to love or offer to work through problems. He’ll know I am good.

            I swipe right and without saying hello, he begins to shout.

            I walk around my apartment with the phone in my outstretched hand to get some distance from the word-bullets. Next door, my neighbor is walking his little boy to the car for the ride to daycare. The toddler is outfitted with a backpack almost as big as he is and chattering away as his father lovingly secures him in a car seat. It helps, this floating out the window. Not in the dissociative way I did as a teenager, when I would land in a tree and gaze back at the lonely girl in the window, but instead pretending that I belong to that family with a gentle and attentive father.

            I watch the neighbor drive away.

            “Dad,” I interrupt, “why are you shouting at me?”

            Because I upset my sister, he says.

            “Elsie?”

            “Yes!”

            How?

            Because I said I love her.

            “Do you know how crazy that sounds?” I ask.

            “You know you only said that to rile her up,” he yells. “You have nothing to say to her, and she has nothing to say to you.”

            “How do you know what I have to say to anyone?”

            “I know you,” he shouts in a gotcha-tone. “You’re a trouble maker.”

            If I could have predicted the moment the door inside would have slammed shut, it wouldn’t have been the moment I naively thought would be a game-changer. I say “I love you” all the time. To my son, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, and my students. “I love you” announces my willingness to do the repair work rather than cut them off, and as such, is the clearest expression of who I am. In one short telephone exchange, my father has laid bare the immutable family fiction: that even when expressing love, I am fundamentally bad.

            My mother is long dead, but her most important bequest has survived.

            I was sixteen when my father hit me for the last time. He was chasing me up the stairs, wooden dust brush in hand, intending to stripe my legs and backside. I had quarreled with my mother over her insistence that I take off my pants so she could wash them. They weren’t dirty, just long and a bit scuffed at the hem. As usual, she had set my father on me. But halfway to the second floor, I heard the loud clanging of a steel-spiked dungeon door that rattled the earth as it dropped shut. Whatever it had trapped on the other side was not getting past.

            I whirled around to face my father.

            “Go ahead,” I shouted. “Hit me. I’m going to hit you back. Then I’m calling the police.”

            His expression was startled, uncomprehending.

            “I’m sick of you hurting me!” I screamed.

            Then I ran up the stairs two at a time and into the bathroom where I locked the door before sliding down beside the toilet to throw up.

            He never again hit me. He threatened, but no further blows landed…until I realized that words could deliver an equally painful bruise. The day he declared that “I love you” was a provocation, I heard the dungeon door drop a second time. The resounding clang announced, It’s time to give up.

            I knew I wasn’t the one trapped behind its metal bars. That was my father, confined to a rigid and inescapable fiction about the eldest daughter who perhaps best loved him—the one who didn’t demand he exile anyone. His cellmates were my sisters, heir to my mother’s lifelong animus. And they did not want to be set free.

            That day I stopped calling him, writing to him, or imagining an apology and a heartfelt embrace. Instead I stepped into the wilderness of familial banishment, a land that knows no light.