“Yeah, well, you need to iron my clothes!” Stepmother said, and Girl started to cry.
“Don’t you cry over this! Crying won’t get you out of your responsibilities!”
“I’m crying because I said I love you and you didn’t say it back.”
Stepmother punched her in the arm. Girl saw her fist ball up, and she instinctively moved a little bit to avoid her blow. There had been rules before. Spanking only on the bottom. Now there were no rules. Stepmother had never punched anyone before, not even Brother. But when she hit her, Girl had won. She now had proof of how out of control Stepmother was, a story Girl could hold up to match Brother’s. All the years of terror, and all Girl had was this one poorly thrown punch. Stepmother had meant to hurt her more, but Girl had turned at the last minute, or she had aimed badly. Girl knew she hadn’t hit her hard enough to bruise, and that scared her more. If Stepmother knew it didn’t really hurt, she might hit her again. Stepmother never stopped hitting Brother until he cried. Girl made damn sure she cried right away.
Brother jumped to her defense. “Don’t you hit my sister!” he yelled, and Girl exploded with love for him. Brother had promised that if Stepmother ever hit Girl again, he would stand up for her, but Girl hadn’t thought he was brave enough. She knew how hard it was to enter a fight against Stepmother.
“You stay out of this!” Stepmother yelled at him, and Brother backed down. Still, he had tried. The angry woman’s attention switched back to Girl for more yelling about wrinkles and laundry and what an ungrateful child Girl was who did precious little around here. Girl begged Mother to help. “I told Stepmother I loved her and she wouldn’t say it back. I don’t care about the laundry,” Girl said. “I just don’t know why she doesn’t love me anymore.” Finally, Mother got involved, yelling for Stepmother to calm down.
“Honey, she’s not crying over the laundry! She’s crying because you didn’t say I love you back!” It took Mother almost twenty minutes to get the hate to leave Stepmother’s eyes. Girl was so glad that this time Mother didn’t leave when the fight started. For once she stayed and interfered, and she was the only one who could ever get Stepmother to see reason. Eventually Stepmother calmed down. Mother got her to admit that putting clothes in a laundry basket was what Girl had been told to do. The fight sizzled out and everyone cried and said they were sorry and said they loved each other very much. Mother never mentioned the punch, as if it never happened. Stepmother opened a can of generic beer—white with only a black barcode and black letters that spelled BEER—and passed it around the table to Brother and Girl. “Nerd beer,” Girl called it. She took a sip when it was her turn, even though it was warm and bitter. It seemed necessary to Stepmother.
Stepmother rarely hit Girl, that’s what was so weird about it. She didn’t even yell at her that often. It was always Brother that was her target. He was Girl’s very own flesh, more so than anyone else in the world. He was the only one who shared all of her childhood—the Alaska part as well as the New York part. He was the only one who knew what school was like for children who didn’t make friends easily and wore the wrong clothes and liked the wrong TV shows and had the wrong kind of parents. Stepmother would hit Brother and Girl would watch silently in the corner, wishing she could take it for him, wishing he would just do enough to get by and not provoke her. The crack of Stepmother’s hand across Brother’s body opened a wound inside her own chest, a chasm filled with hate. Good girls don’t get mad, though, so Girl learned instead to turn her rage inward toward herself, she learned to call the rage fear, and after a while, she no longer knew the difference.
notes from the fourth wall
this is the explanation you hear when your parent is diagnosed with a mental illness
A vacuum, where everything you did was not good enough to keep the family stable, where you were constantly off-balance, waiting for the other shoe to drop, trying to be who your parents wanted, crossing your fingers, please don’t let her notice me. Nothing made sense and you were supposed to pretend everything was okay. The void was filled with your sweaty fear and stubborn rage. But you did not speak of it.
Your parents’ sexuality complicated things. Everyone treated you as a fascinating specimen under a microscope, asking probing questions about being raised by lesbians. You knew gayness was something that must be hidden and lied about and you had been given no other words for what was wrong in your family, so lesbian was the only word left to explain why you never felt safe in your house. Especially when your stepmother’s particular brand of lesbianism was of the man-hating variety, when the rage spewed over the dinner table was often directed at men in general, your brother in particular. It was an easy out, but you knew it wasn’t quite right. Red wool socks are both colorful and scratchy, but the red and the scratch are independent of each other. Other red things are not scratchy; other scratchy things are not red. But as a child you did go through a lesbian-hating phase, though it only lasted a few months, because you only had one word for the two conditions that defined your stepmother. You knew there was something more to what was wrong at home than just same-sex union, but it gave you a target for your impotent rage.
If you write this the wrong way, how will people look at Babs Walker? Your mother’s friend, the one
