I was dumbfounded. She didn’t believe me. But of course she didn’t believe me. And now Ruby would think I was a liar too. Just trying to make trouble. Just trying to hurt her. I wanted to die. To just end it right there and then.
I don’t remember if I tried to plead my case with my mother, if I tried to get her to believe me. It felt hopeless, so I don’t think I said anything more. I felt completely defeated.
My mother and I never spoke about it again. But several weeks later she told me that Steve had been sent back to the mental hospital. I never found out why—if it had anything to do with me, but I assumed it did.
I also assumed that Ruby despised me. Not only had I betrayed her, I was also responsible for taking her husband away from her and leaving her all alone again.
I never saw Ruby again, even though she lived only a few blocks away and the Little Brown Jug was a frequent stop for us girls many years later when we were out cruising. I always stayed in the car while Florence and the other girls bought Cokes and cups of ice to make our drinks.
Years later, I found out that my mother had kept in touch with Ruby when she let me know she had moved away to live with her son. Apparently she had bought a horse ranch.
I never forgave my mother for not believing me about Steve. I’d wanted to confess to her, like I had at church, and be rid of some of the horrible shame I was carrying around, even if only for a short time. I wanted her to comfort me and tell me she was sorry this had happened to me. I wanted her to protect me from Steve. But the reality was that these things were never going to happen. My mother saw me as a “bad seed”—as if I had been born bad from the beginning. And eventually I started seeing myself the same way.
Around this same time I’d seen the movie The Bad Seed, and that’s where I got the idea in my mind that this was what I was. In the movie, the mother always defended her daughter’s actions, even though it was clear she was really a bad kid. Time after time, the girl did something wrong, and time after time the mother defended her or turned a blind eye to her negative behavior. Eventually, by the end of the movie, the mother was forced to concede that she had a very troubled girl on her hands who was capable of most anything.
I remember crying during that movie because I wished my mother would defend me like that, or at least give me the benefit of the doubt. Instead, she always assumed I was wrong or that whatever had happened was my fault. And she never gave me a chance to explain myself.
chapter 16
As dirty as I felt, inside and out, I had a hard time getting myself to take a bath. Even though I liked the feeling of sitting in the warm water, Steve had ruined the experience for me. I couldn’t take a bath without thinking of how he’d used giving me a bath as an excuse to look at and touch my naked body. Being in the tub made me feel exposed.
Momma didn’t have enough money to buy curtains or drapes, so most of the windows in our little house only had shades. This left a space between the shade and the window ledge so big I could easily see outside. Momma still had the habit of walking around the house naked when it was hot, and she never seemed to worry whether anyone could see in. But I did.
The window that bothered me the most was the bathroom window. Not only did it not have curtains, it didn’t even have a shade. When I was lying in the tub, I was looking directly at the window, and I always felt like someone was looking at me from outside.
When I did get up enough nerve to take a bath, I got in quickly and immediately placed a washcloth over my developing breasts. I figured that if someone was looking, they wouldn’t be able to see the part of my body under the water. I just had to make sure I got in and out of the bathtub really fast and that I got a towel around me as soon as I could when I got out.
I couldn’t reach the top of the window so I asked Momma if she could put up a towel to cover the small window, but she just laughed at me. “Don’t worry,” she said, “no one’s going to want to look at a nine-year-old girl in the bathtub.”
I ended up feeling silly for worrying about it.
Even so, several times I thought I heard someone outside the bathroom window. Each time, I told Momma about it. Each time, she just rolled her eyes and told me I was imagining things.
Momma was always laughing at my modesty. I hated it when she walked in on me when I was on the toilet or in the bath and I told her so. But she didn’t listen and continued to come in whenever she wanted. She thought I was silly for always covering up my body when she walked in while I was getting dressed and she made fun of me for always wearing pajamas around the house, even when it was hot. In other areas of her life, Momma was hardly what you might describe as a free spirit, but she certainly was when it came to her body. She always left the bathroom door open when she went to the bathroom and would often talk to me while she was on the toilet.
About eight months after we moved into our new house, we were awakened one night to
