Twenty-Four The Child
Twenty-Four
The Child
I have no idea how many months passed with me in a daze. I didn’t care if I lived or died. I thought of my baby all the time. I begged him to tell me what he’d done with him, but he just laughed at me.
I made up my mind then and there that he would never hurt me again. I was no longer going to allow him to rule my world. I was old enough to begin to see that I didn’t need him to survive anymore. I could take care of myself.
The way I saw it, the biggest drawback to my situation was the fact that I couldn’t read.
Couldn’t write. Didn’t understand math. I was illiterate.
But he refused to teach me to read. No way was he going to teach me to write and to do math.
I wasn’t entirely sure he could do either of those things very well himself.
So I bided my time. There were always times when he disappeared for a few hours.
I had no idea what he was doing since he refused to include me anymore.
Since he had stopped rutting into me very often, I figured he might be out finding other girls to stick his nasty thing into.
The idea made me jealous a little. I belonged to him.
He was my family. Then I thought of the baby, and I knew all that I had believed was a lie.
He was not my family. I did not belong to him. I belonged to me. The baby was the only real family I would ever have, and he was gone.
The next time he went out for a while, I sneaked to a neighbor’s house.
She wasn’t the old lady who helped get the baby out of me, she had moved away.
This one was a younger woman. She worked a street corner.
I had seen her a couple of times back when we used to pretend I was one of those girls to fool old men and get their money.
But I didn’t care what she was as long as she could read and write, that was all that mattered.
When I asked her to teach me to read, she laughed. She thought I was kidding. “You can’t read? What the hell? You stupid or something?”
Angry tears burned my eyes, but I refused to cry. “No one ever taught me,” I snarled. “I’ve never been to school.”
The look on her face told me she suddenly felt bad about what she said.
When she agreed to teach me, I made her promise never to tell him.
We had to do it in secret. She seemed to like that part most of all.
We agreed she would call me “girl” since I didn’t know my name. I didn’t want her to call me “it.”
Learning was slow at first, and I started to think maybe I was stupid.
But then the words began to click in my brain.
The letters and the sounds they made when put together fused in my memory.
Pretty soon I could read. I have never been so happy about anything in my life except for those few minutes when I held my baby.
Writing was harder, but I got it. My handwriting was really pathetic, but I could do it.
When I had a good handle on the reading and the writing, she started with the basic math concepts: addition and subtraction.
Then she made me memorize the multiplication table.
She said her mother had made her do that when she was a kid.
Once I knew the multiplication table by heart, she taught me about division.
One day she looked at me and said she’d never realized how much she’d taken for granted her whole life.
She’d learned all this stuff as a little kid.
Everyone she knew had learned it. To run into someone so young like me who hadn’t had the opportunity, who couldn’t read or write or do math in this day and time, was just weird, she said.
It was weird. I was weird.
I realized for the first time since I was seven years old that he was not my father or mother or family or friend.
He became my whole world because I was his prisoner for all those years.
I hadn’t understood that profound fact because I never had a real family.
I had no idea what one was supposed to be like.
Think about when someone asks you to describe what chocolate tastes like or what closing your eyes and spinning around and around feels like, telling them should be easy, right?
But if you’ve never tasted chocolate or never spun around, it’s not so easy.
At that moment I realized that I might never know what it felt like to have a real family, but I was going to make sure I was smart and strong and that I could take care of myself. No one—especially not him—would ever hurt or control me again.
That was the day I stopped being his “it.”