wave of modulation

ownership

In 1978, my stepfather tracked us to the single wide broken down trailer in the backwoods of Oregon we'd been living in, brought us back and moved us into a townhouse in Redondo Beach. The house was so large and clean and modern. My brother and sister and I had our own rooms with our own televisions. My stepfather was hardly ever home; he worked round the clock. He knew my mother was slipping deeper and deeper into insanity but still, he left us alone in the new house. Looking back, I see the bribe. One of my only fond memories of living in this house was my discovery of disco. Every week, I watched Dance Fever alone in my room. I loved the colorful spinning lights. I loved making up my own dance routines and repeating them over and over. I once snuck into my parent's room to admire their floor to ceiling windows and to see the marble in the bathrooms up close. That's when I noticed the mirror. I touched one of the petals in the floral pattern that curved along its edges. I was surprised to feel the petal was smooth inside, scooped out. I put my fingertips inside the depressions. They fit perfectly. In May, I turned eleven. And a great boil grew on my cheek. I still have a small scar where it was. The thing is, I don’t remember the boil. I remember my mother looking at me, saying “Satan, I will remove thine evil from thee.” That was one I hadn’t heard before, and I hoped it didn’t mean she wanted to exorcise me again. I found out quickly that she had seen the boil growing under my skin. It was an omen of some kind. She pulled me into her room, across the expansive floor of the master bedroom, to the open bathroom. There were steps up to the bathroom, kind of like an altar in church, and two sinks, with a wide marble countertop. I thought it was a beautiful place. My stepfather happened to be in the house at that moment, and my mother quickly got his help. He said they would need to lance my boil. I had no idea what they meant. She lifted me up in the center of the counter, between the two sinks, and pressed my back against the mirror. My stepfather forced my head to one side and told me to “Hold still! This is for your own good!” And then she began cutting. Digging. I know I cried. After it was over, my mother showed me a very small jagged greenish stone, on the tip of her bloodied finger. “See! See?” I felt all the blood rush to my ears, and I couldn’t hear anymore. I don’t remember anything else about that day. - - - - In June, the month after I turned eleven, during one of his infrequent visits home, my stepfather sat with my brother and me in the living room and watched Spanish tv. He reached toward me when I put my bare feet on the couch. I instinctively put my feet on the floor, as quickly as I could. But he wasn’t going to punish me. My stepfather had seen that I had hundreds of tiny seed warts embedded in both of the balls of my feet. They itched, sure, but I hadn’t noticed the little bubbles under my skin. He said I must have got them from the park or the public pool. The next day, he drove me to the doctor, who treated them by applying acid to each wart. This tickled at first, but then it itched. A lot. And then it burned, and burned. And burned. When we got home, my stepfather carried me into the house and laid me on my bed. And he left. I willed myself to sleep. In the morning, there was a bloody crater every place there had been a wart. I couldn’t walk for a few days or do my dance routines. After they healed a little they felt smooth like the hollow petals in my mother's mirror. My fingertips fit in them perfectly. My brother said the biggest ones looked like constellations. In July, some of the warts returned. I decided to cut them off myself. I took sterilized a razor blade from my mother’s medicine cabinet, one she used for her ‘cutting’. I sterilized it well by boiling it in a pot of water and then soaking it in rubbing alcohol. And then I cut the warts out of the pads of my feet. - - - - In August, my mother cut up everything she owned in small pieces, including a 15 x 20 foot patchwork rug. Which, alone, would have taken her a week, if she’d been eating or sleeping. Which she wasn't. She spent several days destroying all her things: cutting every piece of clothing, hammering every perfume bottle, tearing every picture, burning every book, severing every necklace, sawing every piece of furniture, every possession, every scrap of anything she had ever cared about. At the end of it all, she called me into her room and demanded that I help her remove the massive mirror in her bathroom, the beautiful one, etched with a delicate floral pattern. She made me help her rip it down. We wrestled with it. We pulled, we groaned. I tried my best. But it didn’t move. We were sweaty and breathless as we both knelt over opposite sinks. I stared into the mirror, now covered with our finger prints, our oily hand, arm and face prints like ghosts hovering on the surface. Our eyes met. My mother reached for the hammer and smashed the mirror to shards. I fell backward onto the carpet and scrambled across the room toward a pile of sheets and ripped up clothes. I covered my head and shoulders and held still until it was over. After a few minutes, I could hear her whisper-shouting scriptures again, repeating, repeating. Finally, she grew quieter and quieter. Finally, I uncovered myself and stood up, tiptoed to the bathroom. The mirror was shooting rays of light across me like a disco ball as I moved, reflecting the light from sundown outside. I looked at her, crouched on the counter. The glue had done its job, suspended the mirror in place, all those thousands of tiny pieces. She was reflected there in the mirror, in pieces, a mosaic of my mother. Then I looked at her face, her flesh twisted and weeping. As she moved, dots of golden light danced across her face. I wondered if they made a pattern like the constellations. In her hushed fury, she was digging at the pieces, she was trying to remove her face from view. Her fingertips were already blood red. By then, she didn’t even know I was standing there. - - - - Whatever compelled her to destruction, to tearing and picking, the cutting, the nervous habits, I'll never know. Nature or nurture. I think it's both. We come from the same source. She made me from her body, and watching her changed me. I’ve never been able to stop biting my fingernails. But I forgive myself. I want to forgive her.

yellow

I remember wiping the yellow tablecloth after dinner. It was my turn to do dishes, and I was embarrassed about stumbling on the table leg. My uncle reached over and pulled me onto his lap, and hugged me tight. He and my aunt had recently decided they were going to "keep" my brother and sister and I. They had recently asked us to call them "Mom" and "Dad". And I had. I wanted to forget everything that had come before; my dad, my mom, my step dad. I believed having new parents would help me forget. My uncle hugged me tight around my waist, and though I felt too big and awkward for his lap, I felt a little bit happy, too. I felt an involuntary smile creep across my face but it disappeared as soon as my aunt came in. She glared at both of us, hard. "Sherri, go clean the kitchen! I'll finish clearing the table." I looked back and saw my aunt reprimanding my uncle, almost in a whisper, her floppy jowls and double chin quivering with anger as she spoke. He was spreading his napkin over his lap. I felt confused, and somehow bad. - - - - There was a stretch of years, from eleven to fifteen, when I was almost too shy to speak, too unsure to fight for myself. Yes, I had always been a girl of few words up to that point. But, for a wide variety of reasons, the power and sureness I had felt in myself at five years old had slowly diminished and was completely gone by the time I grew breasts. I had been a five year old who retaliated against doctors for taking control of my body against my wishes. I wanted to negotiate where and when I would get a shot. I wanted to pose for a picture on my own terms. Smile when I felt like it. I understood that I couldn't always have my way, but if I was ignored or lied to, I got revenge. Later, I was a child who believed I could make myself disappear simply by holding very still. I believed that I could kill myself by holding my breath. I was committed enough to make myself pass out that way on several occasions. So, at ten years old, my first suicide attempts were fruitless. I gradually lost my natural self protectiveness. Or rather, my self preservation changed. It went underground, beneath my skin. In my heart I wanted to trust people, to believe in them. But I was skeptical, and timid. Accidentally I developed a method to test how trustworthy someone was: when I found myself in a situation where I felt powerless or unsafe or afraid, I would hold very still. I would be passive. Accidentally, I learned how to detect that critical moment. The moment when someone realized my vulnerability and felt their power. I learned about whether I could trust people by what they did in that moment. - - - - It was dark. I knocked on my cousin's closed bedroom door. My uncle answered. I told him I just needed to get my pajamas.  This was their special time, the time every night when he sat with his youngest daughter and talked about her day and tucked her into bed. My aunt and uncle had asked me to respect this time they had together, that it might be tough at first for their girls to get used to sharing their home and their parents with us. He opened the door a little and I quickly walked to the dresser and slipped out. It was nearly spring, nearly warm, but not quite. In the privacy of the bathroom, I took off my new bra and, not knowing how to fold the darned thing, rolled it into a ball on top of my clothes on the bathroom counter. While I brushed my teeth, I saw something shiny inside the part with the hooks and eyes. The satin label read "32C" and "Angel Soft". I didn't really know what the numbers meant, but "Ha!, I thought, "Not Angel Soft!" I had never had a bra before. In fact, I didn't even know I needed one. But that was one of the first things my aunt brought me after we had arrived at their house. As she handed it to me wrapped tightly in a plastic bag, she whispered that it wasn't "proper for a young lady to go without a bra." My cousins, C and L, were very curious about my bra. The one who was nine had whined that she was jealous of my bra and wanted one, too, but her mom shushed her and told her that she didn't need a bra yet. The cousin who was fourteen had gigantic breasts; she was very heavy. Just like her mom. I didn't like wearing the bra. It felt strange. I was twelve and didn't want to have breasts and my period already. I didn't know any other kid who had theirs. I felt happy and relieved to pull on my new favorite pajamas: the stretchy-soft baby yellow terry cloth ones from the Salvation Army. They were already snagged and pilly when I got them, but I didn't mind because they were so soft, somehow. I got dressed in the bathroom, zipping them up from my foot, right up to my neck. I was twelve but had hit puberty two years before, and these were little kid pajamas. But remembering now, maybe that was what I liked about them, the feeling of safety, of going back in time. Going back to a time that maybe never belonged to me, but I wrapped myself in the feeling anyway. I knocked on the bedroom door. My uncle opened the door. As I crawled into bed, he kissed my cousin on the forehead and walked out into the hall. Ever since my grandmother had left us with these relatives, my cousin and I had shared her room, and a double bed. I didn't mind sharing; I'd never had my own anything anyway. I thought about school the next day, seventh grade english, The Red Pony by Steinbeck. Art class. Papier mache. My locker combination. We lay there in her quiet suburban room, falling asleep side by side. I woke up to her hand creeping across my stomach. But for some reason, I didn't know why, I held my breath. And I held still. She reached for the zipper on my pajamas and slowly dragged it open from my neck, unzipping it down to my belly. Even though my cousin was three years younger than me, I felt afraid, unsure, wondering. I was embarrassed. Her little hand reached inside my pajamas and barely cupped my right breast. She rested her hand lightly, and left it there for a long time. Finally I couldn't hold my breath anymore. I breathed as slowly as I could, as motionlessly as I could, hoping she wouldn't realize I was awake. Hoping she would take her hand away soon. Eventually, she did take her hand away. And she carefully zipped my pajamas up. I waited a long while, counting by twenties up to a thousand and then back down. This was my way of getting through scary moments. Then I rolled over, away from her. I tried to think about school the next day but couldn't. I tried to empty my mind. We lay silent, side by side in the shadows. Watching the patterns of tree branches moving in the wind outside, the street lights glowing yellow across the wall. - - - - One cold sunny morning a few weeks later, as we got dressed for the day, I could feel her watching my back while I was putting on my bra. I flushed. My nine year old cousin said, "I knew you were awake." I knew she was referring to that night. I froze. I didn't speak. "My dad says you can tell if a person is asleep or faking it. If they're asleep, you can hear them breathing. If they're faking it, they hold their breath."