On the way up

In the first months of exile from the house I still thought of as home, long before all our cats had died or disappeared, my stepfather told me on a random Saturday to go to the basement to get something for him. The stairway sat in the middle of the house, running from the living room down to where the hamsters and snake and fish divided the wide plain of the family room into different habitats.

Standing in the open doorway the top of the stairs, I stopped to make a comment. I don’t recall what I said. Not quite seven, I didn’t yet dream of talking back to an adult. More likely, I offered some unrelated thought reflecting my own daydreaming. The comment dissolved into the air around us.

It was the delay that set him off. Without warning, his hands clamped the sides of my shoulders, and I couldn’t move. As he spoke, he bent down close, his face almost touching mine. The pale field of his forehead overshadowed both eyes—one brown and the other blue. The latter, which I couldn’t bear to look at, was the live one. I focused instead on the bony triangle of skin between his eyebrows, then his dark mustache, which moved as he spoke.

“You say ‘yes, sir’ when you address me,” he said, and paused. “Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“What do you say?” he said, still inches from my face. He pressed me backward slightly. I had a sense of tilting into the open space behind me and wondered if he would really push me backward down the stairs. I decided he might.

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?” He gripped my shoulders, his hands quivering.

“Yes, sir.”

“And if I tell you to jump,” he said, now speaking almost into my mouth. “You jump right away. You need more information, you ask how high on the way up.”

“Yes, sir.”

He let go and stepped back, leaving his hands open and palms facing me, like a magician at the end of a trick, or as if demonstrating to an impartial observer—some god watching at a great distance—that he meant no harm.

I made my way downstairs.

***

After years of endless attention from my mother, I was probably spoiled. Yet I knew myself to be a child she loved, one she thought of as a gift. Until that moment at the top of the stairs, I hadn’t understood everyone might not share her opinion. I realized with shock that my stepfather liked me no better than he liked his own children.

I’d seen grownups angry a few times, occasionally at me. But before my stepfather, I hadn’t felt the quiver of violence in a body longing to set it free. And without ever thinking directly about it, I’d assumed my mother was in charge of me. I’d believed myself exempt from his opinions and discipline, and imagined him my equal in our new hierarchy. But what if that wasn’t true?

After that day, he moved slowly and deliberately around me, with a low way of talking that was more intimate and worse than yelling. As he felt less and less obligated to hide his feelings, he revealed a bottomless anger. He berated me daily: I had done this or that badly. I had a smart mouth. I was disrespectful. I was a pig. I was a bad child. It wasn’t so much the individual insults as their relentless accumulation.

Trying to figure out what had gone wrong or how to fix it was beyond my capabilities. I began to observe his hectoring critically from some floating perspective. I had a sense that the floor under me had vanished, that I’d been moved into a world with different physics.

.***

My brother and I tried to lie low and stay outside as much as possible. My mother, a freshly minted social worker, took everything to heart and realized something was amiss. One evening, she sat us all down together around the round table in the dining nook.

“Now we’ll play a game,” she said, setting a ball of blue yarn in front of us.

She told us to put an elbow on the table and aim the fingers of that hand up toward the ceiling. With the other hand, we should take the ball when she told us to, and wrap a loop of yarn once around the hand of the forearm we’d kept upright. She would say when to pass the ball to someone else. In between instructions, we could make conversation.

The four of us sat under the searchlight of the hanging lampshade, winding the yarn around our limbs and chatting. My brother and I loved talking with our mother, who was curious about everything and considered even our most frivolous ideas with great earnestness.

After an hour, maybe less, she made a sweeping gesture of satisfaction encompassing the yarn and the table.

“Just look at that,” she said.

I looked. I was relentlessly competitive. Was there some mathematical game at the heart of the evening that I had missed?

She tried again. “Look at the yarn. What do you see?”

I sat puzzled.

She motioned toward my stepfather, saying that he had almost no yarn around his wrist. Holding up her other hand, she noted that the three of us had loop after loop. She’d had us pass the yarn each time someone spoke. The ball was given to the person spoken to. Her instructions had lagged our conversation, so it wouldn’t be obvious what she was doing.

The results were clear. The three of us had talked among ourselves. She had addressed my stepfather, but my brother and I had hardly spoken to him at all.

“You shut him out of the conversation,” she said. “Do you see how unfair that is?”

My stepfather sat silently at the table, letting my mother talk. The evidence couldn’t be disputed, but I had no idea what to do with the knowledge. I felt vaguely ashamed, because I did avoid him, while the three of us were close. With a pang of guilt, I understood he might feel like an outsider in his own home—because of me.

Yet inside my body, something squirmed in protest. I couldn’t have named the feeling, but on a gut level, I recognized I’d been betrayed. My mother never took anyone’s part in a family conflict, not even her own. She, my brother, and I had been a team. Now she was taking sides, and it was against us.

 ***

Fifty years later, I can draw floor plans of earlier houses I lived in, even the one I left at the age of four. But trying to sketch my stepfather’s house at Hall Acres, some sections refuse to appear. Downstairs in the basement is the couch and television. Here is the kitchen and living area upstairs with a pass-through between them. Over there is the dining nook with its round table and hanging lamp. But I can’t move my mind’s eye down the hallway beyond it. My bedroom was surely down that corridor, but I can’t get there.

Like film run through an overheating projector, images speckle and darken or flare to white. I know my third-grade teacher’s name because I have a class photo with “Ms. Fields” spelled out in white letters on the fuzzy black signboard the photographer used to label each class. But I don’t remember ever meeting her or being in a room with her.

The photo shows me smiling, hair in barrettes, wearing a white blouse, dark pants, and red tights in the second row. One buckle of my Mary Janes peeks out between children sitting cross-legged in front of me on the floor. The person in the photo is recognizably me, but I have no memory of that school year at all.

You can read another story in this series about my childhood here.