Soon I was staying into the evening and having dinner with their family when my mother had to work late. I don’t think it was a babysitting situation—just a way for the twins to have some company and probably something their mother did out of the goodness of her heart.
I remember sitting on the floor of their living room, watching television and coloring. It felt nice inside their house—cozy and warm. One evening, their mother read to us from a book called Smokey Joe as the three of us kids lay all cuddled together on the couch. I don’t remember what the story was about, exactly, I just remember how good it felt to be cuddled up and have someone read to me.
The next evening, instead of coloring, I created a book of my own. It had both words and pictures and I especially liked drawing Smokey Joe, a beautiful brown and white pinto horse.
The twins’ parents had been leaving their kids alone to play on the back patio and in their yard for quite some time. They were good kids and they minded the rules laid out for them, so their parents had no reason to fear they would venture out of their yard; and because it was a safe neighborhood, they had no reason to believe anyone would come into their fence-en-closed yard and harm their children in any way. They also didn’t believe that the cute little girl from down the street, the one who played so nicely with their children, the one with the sophisticated mother, could possibly present any threat to their children.
But they were wrong. That cute little girl was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Remember, I was only part child. The other half of me was an adult with an adult’s experiences. My mind was distorted with memories and knowledge I couldn’t control. And I had a compulsion to return to the scene of the crime, but this time to be the one in power—the one in charge.
I don’t even know how I introduced the game. What did I say—“Hey, I have an idea: let’s take off all our clothes while we play restaurant”? I don’t know if the twins hesitated, either. All I remember is the look on their mother’s face when she came home early one evening to find us all naked.
At first, she looked completely shocked and horrified. But when the twins told her what had happened, how I had been the instigator, she looked at me with a disappointed look on her face. I’ll never forget that look as long as I live. Here this woman had taken me into her home and made me feel welcome and even loved, and I had repaid her in this way.
That night, when my mother came to pick me up, the scenario that was to be repeated many more times in the future played out. The twins’ mother told my mother that her daughter—the bad seed—was no longer welcome in their home and no longer able to play with her kids.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Engel but we are a good Catholic family, and as much as we have grown to love Beverly she has become a bad influence on our children,” she said with a serious look on her face.
“What did she do?” my mother demanded, glaring at me suspiciously.
“She, well . . . she told my children to take all their clothes off.”
My mother didn’t miss a beat. She grabbed my arm and literally dragged me out of the house, muttering, “I’m terribly sorry. We won’t bother you again. Thank you so much for being so kind. It’s too bad you got paid for your kindness in this way.”
Momma was so angry with me that I don’t even remember what she said or did to me. I blanked out like I did when Steve did those ugly things to me. I just couldn’t take one more time of being yelled at, one more time being told what a disappointment I was to my mother, so my mind tuned out.
I avoided walking past the twins’ house after that. I didn’t want to have to see the look on their mother’s face ever again.
As much as I missed playing with the twins, I soon made friends with the little girl next door. Her name was Linda. She seemed to have the perfect house and the perfect family. Her mother stayed home all day being a housewife while her father went to work as a plumber.
Both the outside and inside of their pretty green house were immaculate. So was Linda. Her clothes were always crisply clean and ironed and there never seemed to be a hair out of place on her ponytailed head.
The only thing that seemed slightly out of place was the fact that her mother looked different from anyone I’d ever seen. My mother said she looked somewhat “Oriental,” although she couldn’t tell if she was Japanese, Chinese, or Filipino. Linda’s eyes didn’t look as Asian as her mother’s, but if you looked closely you could see the similarity.
In the beginning, Linda came over to my house to play. We jumped up and down on the bed until we broke it. We oohed and aahed our way through my mother’s jewelry boxes, looking at all the rhinestone pin and earring sets, necklaces, and rings. We played a game where we each had to pick out our favorite piece of jewelry. It could sometimes take us hours.
We also played in my backyard with the Hills’ dog, Tiny. I knew better than to get Linda to take her clothes off. But there was what was called a “stationary tub” mounted to the back wall of our little house, used for washing clothes. Although I don’t
