Chapter Six If Wishes Were Horses
Six
If Wishes Were Horses
When I was eleven, I got my period. For years, as adults had forced me to do things no child should know about, I’d been praised sometimes for acting “grown up.” But no one had bothered to tell me what happened when a girl actually grew up.
I had no idea what was coming. I remember being outside at one of my parents’ boozy bonfire parties, running around with some other kids, when I looked down at my jeans and saw a creeping red stain.
Was I bleeding to death? I wondered. Pale and terrified, I sought out Mom, who glared at me as she appraised my bloody pants.
Then, without putting down her beer, she headed into the house, scrounged around in the cupboard under the bathroom sink, and handed me a sanitary pad.
“Figure it out,” she said, turning on her heel and leaving me alone.
Locking the door behind her, I sat down on the toilet and cried.
Around this time, Sheila’s mom called my mom, and what she said set off an explosion in our house.
My memory is that Mom got the impression that Forrest had impregnated Sheila.
(He hadn’t, as it turned out. Sheila has recently told me that after a Florida court emancipated her, she moved to North Carolina with a boyfriend and got pregnant with him.
She married that boyfriend when she was eighteen, and they had a daughter.
But my mom didn’t know that.) My parents fought for hours that night as Skydy and I huddled together, covering our ears.
For a while, Dad moved out—but not before I was exiled to the home of one of my dad’s sisters.
Aunt Carol lived in California, three thousand miles west. Maybe my mother was trying to protect me when she sent me into this other galaxy, but it didn’t feel that way to me.
In my mind, my mother had once again chosen my father over me.
“Alone, listless / Breakfast table in an otherwise empty room,” Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam would sing into my earphones. When he’d belt out the chorus, in which a young girl demands again and again, “Don’t call me daughter,” I’d chime in at the top of my lungs.
When I arrived in Salinas, a dusty farming town just inland from Monterey, I was a skinny wreck, and I couldn’t have been less interested in starting at a new school.
I wasn’t a racist like my father, who’d told us that black people were born with tails that doctors cut off when they were young.
I knew that was bullshit, and that I was no better than anyone else, no matter their skin color.
But it was still hard to be one of only three white kids, and the only white girl, in a school that was ruled by Latino gangs.
I may have been seething inside, but on the outside, I wasn’t very scary looking, with my emaciated frame and my sunken blue eyes.
When a classmate told me I had two choices—“You can either be beat into a gang, or fucked into a gang”—I had an idea.
That afternoon, I convinced Aunt Carol to take me to get a haircut by threatening her with the truth: “If you don’t take me, I’ll call Mom and tell her you’re spending all the money she sends you on things that are not for me.
” The minute I got into the salon chair, though, I told the beautician to shave my head.
The poor woman was reluctant—my hair was almost to my waist—but I insisted.
When I emerged with my buzzcut, my aunt was horrified.
But my plan worked. The next day at school, I looked so crazy that even the gangs steered clear.
Though not raised religious, Aunt Carol had become a devout Mormon, and I had no use for her proselytizing.
With all that had happened, how could I believe that the Spirit of the Lord was trying to inspire me?
I doubted my aunt knew what her brother had been doing to me.
If she had known, she wouldn’t have kept pleading with me to use the Book of Mormon to bear my testimony.
Still, her faith sounded like mumbo jumbo to me, and it wasn’t long before I’d had enough of her.
Remembering how Mom had run away to San Francisco as a teenager, I hatched a plan.
If San Fran was good enough for Mom, I figured, maybe it’d be good enough for me.
The night before Easter, I crawled out a window and hitchhiked more than a hundred miles north.
Almost instantly, I regretted it. Not knowing how cold San Francisco could be, I hadn’t brought any warm clothes.
A few days later, the cops nabbed me for panhandling.
Aunt Carol called my father and said she was done with me.
That was that: my dad flew out and took me home to Florida.
When we got back to Rackley Road, the first thing I did was run to Alice’s empty stall.
“Where is she?” I demanded. My parents said that when they’d shipped me off to California, they’d sold Alice.
I cried for weeks, begging them to tell me where she was.
Could I at least visit her? But neither Mom nor Dad would tell me Alice’s whereabouts, saying only that she’d been sent to “a good home.”
“Well, that makes one of us,” I thought to myself.
—
At this point, for reasons I will never know, the sexual abuse stopped.
Forrest was gone, and Dad was steering clear of me.
I was relieved, of course, but I can’t say that life became entirely easy, either.
What was left of my relationship with my parents was a river of anger that flowed in both directions.
All this came to a head when Mom, Dad, Skydy, and I drove our camper van cross-country to a reunion of my dad’s family near Sacramento.
For the whole trip west, I stayed in the way back of the van, huddled under a blanket, headphones over my ears.
At this point I’d discovered Enya, whose New Age, ethereal style felt foreign in a good way.
“I walk the maze of moments / But everywhere I turn to / Begins a new beginning / But never finds a finish,” Enya sang in her lilting Irish accent.
I knew how she felt and sang along when she told me, “Sail away. Sail away. Sail away. Sail away.”
When we arrived at the campsite where the family reunion was being held, I couldn’t help but cheer up a bit.
The massive redwoods were different from Florida’s trees, and as we sat around the campfire each evening, I liked staring up at the stars.
Then one night toward the end of the four-day gathering, there was a dance that was open to all campers, not just our family group.
I went, grateful to be around kids my own age, but also to be in a place where no one knew a thing about me.
For a few hours, I pretended I was a carefree camper from a wonderful, loving home, and after the DJ played the night’s final song, a shy boy whom I’d danced with once or twice offered to walk me back to our campsite.
Gratefully, I accepted. My mom always said that my sense of direction was so poor that I could get lost in a circle, and on this night, I knew I needed help finding my way.
But minutes later, as the boy and I walked down the middle of a moonlit asphalt road, Dad’s van suddenly appeared and screeched to a halt.
“What the fuck are you doing?” my father screamed from the driver’s seat, and I could tell from the high keen of his voice that he was drunk.
My gracious escort looked as if he might swallow his tongue.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he stammered. “I didn’t do anything.
I’m just walking Jenna home.” But my dad wasn’t listening.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Dad ordered, stepping toward the boy.
Then he turned on me. “You’re a fucking slut,” he said, as he threw me into the van.
Back at our campsite, Dad kept up with his yelling, calling me a dirty whore, an ungrateful piece of shit, and worse.
I’d heard it all before, but that night I snapped.
“What, you think you’re the only one who’s allowed to touch me?
” I asked, my voice loud. My mom was inside the camper, out of earshot.
But if I was going to finally call Dad out, I wanted to make sure at least my uncles and aunts could hear.
“This guy has been fucking me for years, since I was a little kid,” I yelled in their direction, “and no one’s done shit about it.
” I wish I could say that they all stood up then to form a protective barrier around me.
But they didn’t move. So after a startled silence, Dad grabbed me by my neck with one hand and punched me in the face with the other.
Then he shoved me into the borrowed camper where we’d all been sleeping and continued beating me until my lips were split open and one of my eyes was swollen shut.
Skydy tried to come in to help me, but he was too little to do much.
Finally, I got Dad off me by kicking him in the groin, and the beating stopped. He’d worn himself out raging at me.
The next morning, I woke up thinking that since I’d finally revealed my father’s abuse out loud, something would have to change.
Maybe, at the very least, someone would acknowledge what I’d been through.
Instead, before we left to drive back to Florida, the entire extended family acted as if nothing had happened.
“You want some bacon and eggs?” Aunt Peggy (not actually my aunt, but a family friend; we’d been told to call her that) asked me when I emerged, black and blue, from wherever I’d passed out.
She offered me some Percocet. Then my family piled in our van, and I sought out my blanket in the back.
I didn’t speak to my father again until we got to Loxahatchee.
—