None of us can really know how important we are to each other. I think chapter 45 illustrates how deeply we impact one another. Joe Walker wasn’t trying to do anything spectacular but he did, just being himself. I had lived my life up to that point feeling as though I was so intrinsically flawed and so utterly unworthy that his attention and recognition was like medicine to the dying. He acknowledged me. I became a person in his presence, a living valued person that deserved love and attention. It was a new feeling for me at the time. There was a hole in me. I was being absorbed into an abyss. I was losing my identity and reasons for holding on.

Joe was kind. He could have been dismissive but instead he recognized me. He could have chosen to ignore my attempts to reach out instead he reached back and let me feel the touch of human connection. He chose to listen when he could have talked. I still don’t know why he made those choices, why he didn’t do the easiest thing: to ignore. His choices made the difference in my life. I don’t know if I would have made it without him. He gave me his sincerity and I felt my soul mending itself.

The small things we do often have the most power. The moments when we are not trying to be heroic are the moments when the hero within is free to act. I have been inspired by Joe’s simple acts of kindness to live my life by the guiding light of kindness to others. His seemingly insignificant choices have shaped my values and perhaps even determined my own choices to stay alive. None of us know when our actions are changing the lives of those around us. When I choose to be kind to a fellow driver on the road,  each time I smile at a child or help someone open a door I cannot know how those actions will impact others. I only know that they aren’t small things. I am kind because I know for myself how powerful the small acts can be. I am kind because I get what I give. When I give kindness then I know for certain how it feels to have kindness in my own heart. I get it when I give it. Thanks Joe for teaching me.

His name is Joseph Walker.

Mother would kill me if she found out I’ve been calling him on the telephone. I haven’t told anyone but Emily, who promised on her life and the lives of all good men that she wouldn’t tell. I know I shouldn’t trust Emily but she loves to hear about all the bad things I do. She even encourages me to do it. She asks me at least once a day, “Did ya call Joe?” I call him constantly. Sometimes two or three times a week. Now that school has started I have a lot more opportunities. Mother Kay is in the schoolroom all day and Mother is in the playroom tending the babies and it’s just Emily and me. We take turns cooking and housecleaning. Mother keeps the laundry going until Lillian and Claire get out of school and they fold it in the evenings.

Joe is different from anyone I have ever met. I haven’t met that many people but I am convinced there aren’t many out there like him. Father talks about how dangerous the world is, full of kidnappers and murderers and thieves and policemen who would leap at the chance to throw Father in jail. I don’t think the world is full of dangers and ugliness. I don’t believe Father. I think he’s trying to scare me away from the world, scare me into being good. I know it’s wrong of me to be talking on the phone with someone out in the world but I don’t care. It’s worth it.

I first read Joe’s column when I saw that the former TV editor had been replaced by this young, handsome, dark-haired man with a lovable name like Joe. When I read his words it was as if I could hear his voice. There was a powerful feeling between the lines. I sat with the newspaper in my lap for a full five minutes, looking into this man’s eyes. It was there. I have no words for it. It was something so tangible that it hooked me to him; it emblazoned his face into my mind and I wondered if I was telepathic or something. I knew in that instant I was going to send him a letter and tell him, somehow, the impact his picture and his words had on me. I went straight to my room and drafted a letter using a televisionshow as a way to introduce myself. I told him that my mom thought I was nutty and strange and didn’t even come close to understanding me. I told him his smile was so powerful it could turn lemons into lemonade. I felt welcome and useful and appreciated all from gazing at his face. I poured on the flattery and my awkward charm without restraint. I wanted him to remember me if nothing else. I kept the letter in my drawer for a few months while I accumulated enough nerve to send it. When I mailed it I taped a quarter to the right hand corner of the envelope and left a note to the mail carrier to please attach a stamp. I watched from my bedroom window as the mailman placed a stamp on the envelope I had stolen out of Father’s desk and put the letter safely in his bag.

Joseph Walker noticed me and three weeks later he printed my letter in the mailbag section of his column. He added a thoughtful postscript that read, “By the way, Susanna, I don’t care what your mom says, I don’t think you’re nutty…for a fourteen-year-old.”

He spoke to me; he wrote my name. I touched the print as if it were his very own handwriting. I stared at those words and read them over and over and over. I laughed and cried and promised I would never throw that paper away. I felt as if my name had been inscribed on the pages of history, on the tablets of time. I had been documented. I was real.

He’s the first friend I have ever had. I’ve long since quit asking useless questions about television shows I only read about in his column. I tell him about my life, my worries, and my fears. I don’t tell him about the religion or home school or anything that will take him out of my life. The best part is he just listens. He tells me he understands my frustrations and he asks me all kinds of questions about me, like he cares. The first thing he says when I say hello to him is “Hi, Susanna! It’s good to hear your voice!” It takes all the words out of my mouth and sometimes I cry when he says it and I have to get my bearings straight in a hurry. I don’t want him to know it means so much to me. I want to be normal so I just say, “I’m great, how’re you?” After one of our talks I have more energy. I clean faster. I whistle while I work. Mother thinks I’m starting to grow up and be responsible. I’m glad she thinks that. She thinks that all Mother Kay’s lectures and reprimands are finally having the desired effect. Heh heh.

It is truly difficult to describe what life at home was like during my growing up years. In Chapter 31 I try to give the reader a glimpse of the workload that I carried at very young age. I have been assigned to do laundry for upwards of forty people. I was not only responsible for everyone’s personal clothes but towels, sheets, tablecloths, rags and even cloth diapers for the kids that hadn’t been potty trained. I had dresses to hang and shirts with buttons and collars that tended to curl and wrinkle in the dryer. It was a boring job, repetitive and mindless and yet it had to be done. Some days I had twenty loads of laundry to put through and my legs would ache from standing on a concrete floor all day in front of the folding table arranging the piles of clothes hoping they didn’t get mixed up with each other. Everyone’s clothes had to be labeled on the tag because there were so many kids that wore the same size or similar clothes so each item had to be examined for the person it belonged to and then placed in their pile. What began as a job quickly turned into a punishment as week in and week out I was put on the same job detail for not doing a good enough job the week before. This was my life every single day with the exception of Sundays. I spent the entire day in the basement from morning until sometimes late at night finishing a batch of clothes. It was dark and lonely and for a 13 year old girl it felt like a prison. I dreamed up all sorts of stories to help pass the time away but the feeling of shame and wrongdoing that I associated with laundry stayed with me for many many years. It has only been recently in the last five or six years that laundry is no longer stigmatized by those terrible years in the basement.

I’ve been doing wash duty for nine months. Six days a week without a break. I have to do the wash good for one week before Mother Kay will let me change jobs. She says I don’t care about anything but myself.

I care. I do. I care about the way Mother looks at me when she sees I am far behind or catches me reading a book. The disappointment in her face and the silence that she carries as she walks back up the basement stairs leaves me feeling sick to my stomach.

Do I care about the wash? She is right, I don’t care about that. I don’t care if I make Mother Kay mad. I wouldn’t care if she disappeared into thin air like a plane that mysteriously vanishes in the Bermuda Triangle. In fact, I wish she would vanish and never return.

Sometimes when I get mad I tell Mother I hope everyone’s clothes get permanently wrinkled, the dryer will make a tear in a favorite blouse, or one of the kids would leave a bright red crayon in their pocket and it would melt all over the dark batch. She gets really upset when I talk that way, and leaves the room.

I admit to getting desperate and throwing the towels in the dryer before they were washed. The smell of warm dirty towels filled the basement with a mildewy scent. I poured a capful of fabric softener, undiluted, into the dryer with the towels. The smell got worse. The yellow towels came out of the dryer looking awful and smelling worse than before. I folded them and put them in the bathrooms anyway. Mother Kay found them and I could hear her yelling my name long before I found her standing at the top of the stairs with her hand on her hip. When I got near her she pulled me all the way upstairs by my braid and shook my face into the dirty towels. It didn’t turn out very well.

Glenn tried to help me one day by telling me how I could do the wash better. “Do it this way,” he said. He doesn’t understand. After he left, I cried a little and then did twenty chin-ups on the copper pipes in the ceiling.

I crammed an entire batch of permanent press clothes up the dryer vent. Mother found the clothes the next morning, a shirt dangling out of the dryer vent outside, over the coal bin. I guess I pushed them up too far up. She was not happy and I had very wrinkly clothes and had to rewash them and do the batch all over. Other times I hide baskets of clean clothes in people’s closets. I throw piles of clothes behind the dryer and washers. I slide baskets of rags under the beds. On really bad days I just throw clothes right in the outside garbage can.

I don’t want to do it anymore. I can’t seem to bring myself to do the work when there isn’t a single reward. Mother says that a job well done should be reward enough. I don’t feel any reward when I do my job right. It only feels like Mother Kay won. She made me do things the right way with her beating and slapping. I can’t let her do that. I can’t let her take that away from me. I want to win.

Sometimes I lose people’s clothes. I suppose that is to be expected because I don’t try very hard not to lose them. The problem is I lose important clothes, like Mother Helen’s pantyhose. She checks the night before to see if they are in her drawer and then hunts me down and makes me find them. Sometimes I lose Mother Kay’s pantyhose too. She hollers down to the basement and when I come up the stairs she grabs me by the hair and drags me through the house making me look for them. Sometimes I know where they are; most times I have no idea. It might be because I throw the clean clothes back in the hamper. Or I pretend to forget to get the clothes in Father’s bathroom when I sort the laundry. Sometimes I just get so lost in my daydreams while folding that I forget where I put things.

Danny helps me sometimes. He folds clothes and races up the stairs to put them away for me. But he has to work in the garden at Aunt Liesel’s in the afternoon so he leaves me after lunch, riding down the street on his ten-speed bike. I cry unashamed until he pedals out of sight.

Yesterday when Ruby, Emily, Danny, and Tom went sledding on the hill at the park, I had to stay home and finish the wash. Tom and Danny bought a new inner tube with their own money. We’ve been getting an allowance. I’m not sure why Mother Kay is giving us money. I’ve never had money before so this is really new to me. I get about two dollars a week. I could get more but it would be risky. Mother Kay pays us. She takes us up in Father’s room one at a time and asks us what we think we deserve to have for our labor. The most we can get is five dollars but she makes it clear that we will never deserve that much. She says that’s a mother’s salary. I usually say I deserve two dollars. It keeps me right about where she thinks I ought to be and makes our weekly visits less dreadful. She tries to get me to talk too. She asks me things like “How are things going?” and “Is there anything you want to tell me?” I always play like I’m doing great and I couldn’t think of anything if I tried. She asked me one day why I wasn’t friends with her. I was muted by the question. Finally I just told her I didn’t know. Claire, on the other hand, pokes her head in the doorway and says, “Fifty cents.” Then Mother Kay wants to know why she thinks she only deserves fifty cents and then Claire says, “Okay, one dollar.” She keeps upping it until Mother Kay lets her go.

Ruby makes it a little harder. She asks for five dollars all the time and then ends up in Father’s room getting in trouble for an hour. She always comes out saying, “I deserve five dollars. I work harder than the mothers.” Mother Kay does not like Ruby.

Now that we’re getting money Mother Kay told us we have to buy our own clothes and everything we need. My eight dollars a month doesn’t go very far but I like to choose how I will spend my money. I’m saving to buy a Sports Illustrated subscription. Sometimes I pretend that a witch turns me into a football. Mother will come downstairs to check on me and I’ll be rolling around the floor. She won’t be able to find me and I will get thrown out or left on the grass at the park and found by a wonderful man that plays football at which point I will turn back into a girl and he will fall in love with me and we’ll live happily ever after. Sometimes I pretend while I am throwing the ball to Jacob that there is an agent sitting on the park bench. He doesn’t care that I am a girl. He’ll take me away to play for the Cincinnati Bengals or the Seattle Seahawks. I’ll be the star player and amaze the world with my unbelievable strength. Of course I’ll get hurt a few times and be carried off the field by my loyal teammates and a doting doctor that falls in love with me.

When dreams of playing professional football feels a little out of reach I imagine that I am the team laundress for the Miami Dolphins and I get to wash Dan Marino’s underwear and socks. He’ll be obsessed with me and watch me from a distance. I’ll be so beautiful he can’t take his eyes off me. He’ll fall in love with me and we’ll play football on the weekends. It all works out in the end.

The end. There’s no agent, no doting doctor, and no Dan Marino, only a basement full of clothes that I wash over and over and over. Besides the four invisible walls that seem to be closing in on me there’s only the dangling bare bulb over my head observing me.

I wrote this piece the night Rex, our sweet Australian Shepherd was hit and killed by a car. We had purchased him as a pup and had raised him through his chewing up everything and his barking and jumping up on people. We shared our lives with him for eight years. In that time, he had become a beloved family pet; notwithstanding his few flaws he warmed the hearts of anyone who met him. He loved everyone and had the sweetest personality one could imagine. He loved to lick any exposed skin on any person that came near him. He gave his unconditional love to the vet, the exterminator, the next door neighbors and anyone else that crossed his path. He was my teacher, my playmate and my friend.

January 1, 2011

Rex died tonight. I have so many emotions that rise and fall like ocean tides. What is it exactly that makes that lump in my throat or the tears spring eagerly to my eyes? I don’t feel  regret or sorrow in the typical sense. I think of the joy one small mute creature can bring to someone’s life and I can’t help but cry in awe at the power of love. Without joy there could be no tears. I will miss his face peering through the gate when I would leave or his sleeping form in the morning sun and upon hearing my approach his head would raise, ears alert. He would see me and he could not help himself from bounding up from his place to lick any exposed skin and waggle his tail-less back side. What is it about death that makes the small things all giant sized? But I am so grateful I have those things to miss! I will forever see his patient eyes gazing at me from his spot by the sliding door, his phantom presence somehow still there relaxing his paws on the stoop. I will miss the way he followed me to the shop and waited by the door, rain or shine for my return. I love him! That is what makes me cry, love, not death or loss or anything else, just love.

It would have been eight years in April when Rex came into our lives, a cuddly furry puppy. It was a dream come true for me to finally have a dog and to give my kids the experience of a dog, a beloved family pet. I would love to reach out right now and caress the downy soft fur on his head, to feel him once more. I didn’t know today would be the last day I would touch him, to have his eyes penetrate mine with such innocence and acceptance. He taught  me so much. Many days I marveled at his total non-resistance to life, his ability to care for himself and his unabashed delight in life itself. He was un-self-conscious and free. He loved without effort or expectation, unaware that he was loving. I will miss his eagerness or that crazy dog smile he would get on his face during summer days when he was doing his favorite activity-tending kids. He parked himself under the trampoline when the kids were outside. He kept his post, contentedly resting his head on his front paws and grinning. He was the reason we went for walks or to the park because his joy and pleasure during these activities gave us so much joy and pleasure.

That is not to say he didn’t have his quirks and annoying behavior. He was petrified of storms and barked ridiculously at thunder and lightning. He loved to chase anything that moved. A few months ago he cornered a huge raccoon on our flower boxes. He killed a few cats in his day. He chased the garbage truck, which was like a hundred times his size, like they were perfectly matched for a fight. Some nights he kept me awake barking at who knows what. More than once I paid a hundred dollars to get him released from animal control. He was the luckiest dog, escaping perils of life like a Houdini in a water tank. He harassed the horses until they kicked him, he got into fights with cats, dogs and raccoons that often left his muzzle bleeding and him limping proudly. He loved to jump on little kids and lick their faces, his teeth always coming precariously close to tiny noses and chubby cheeks. We lovingly called him “a big dork.” He had a goofiness about him that was downright endearing. He was such a fast runner, he was like watching a ball of fur whiz past. He was scared of heights and had no idea he could have easily scaled the fences that bordered his territory. I will miss the way he could always comfort me when I was feeling down with just his presence. He loved to ride in the car and could be persuaded away from nearly anything by the sound of the car door opening. He loved to greet the kids as they came home from school, wagging his backside after their long day away from him. Wherever we went people loved him and commented on his beauty. He charmed anyone who knew him  and won the hearts of those who knew him best.

How do you know when a life journey is over? I felt a change in him or was it in me? The last few days before he died he seemed to catch my attention or my thoughts and I found my conversation often being about him. Just today, Rhoda wanted to paint his picture and that prompted the album to come out and memories and laughter of his puppy-hood were discussed for hours. Several times yesterday I found myself nestling my hands in his face and telling him I loved him. How did I know? So many times I walked by without a word but not today. I caressed his head and told him what a good boy he was and he looked at me with those wise eyes and soaked it all in. He seemed calmer and quieter the last two days of his life. Just today as I put away the Christmas tree I remembered the ornament that Rhoda had made of Rex using a photograph and a rubber band. I thought how special he has been to her and to all of us. He was always there. When Audrie was feeling lonely or rejected she would go outside and walk with Rex around the yard and somehow he made her feel better. How many times did I see Millie out in the yard with Rex in her lap? Or Rhoda just sitting there holding his head in her arms. Seeing my kids love Rex was more rewarding than my own pleasure in him. Seeing them cry at the news of his death breaks my heart. I know it is a good experience that will enrich their lives but as their mother, it still hurts. The yard is full of the evidence of his life. His favorite squeaky toy is laying in the snow, the medicine  ball he pushed around the yard with his nose and unsuccessfully tried to chew up is out there too, somehow more silent than before. His food and water show signs of his muzzle pushing around the food and now there are only the remains of his last meal like crumbs of memory that can never be the real thing.

Now his body is in the barn, wrapped in a blanket, the blood still caked around his mouth and matted in his fur. I am sure his death was quick and painless but my shock at finding his body heaped unnaturally in the road, his vacant eyes staring at me with nothing but emptiness will haunt me. I felt numb at first and I needed to get his body off of the road. I laid the blanket I kept in the car over his body and made a kind of sling. A kind man in a truck stopped by  to help me bundle his sixty pounds of weight into the suburban. I didn’t want to see the damage to his body I was only glad it was I that had found him; that his body had not been pushed off the road like inconvenient garbage. Tomorrow Aaron will dig a hole in the frozen earth and create a final resting place for him. We will say good bye to the time we shared and marvel at the mystery of life. “It feels like he is still here,” Rhoda said to me tonight. “That’s because he is,” I told her. “Life doesn’t die.”

Here I sit by the fire tonight, crying, wiping my nose and thinking about love. It is only my love, our love that brings tears to my eyes. The sadness is the joy. Rex died today. I feel somehow that there is more inside of me not less and that there is more of him with me not less; that there is no loss just life realized, love more truly known. Death did not destroy life, it magnified it and polished it to make it shine all the brighter.

I love you Rexy!

In chapter 17 I describe the experience of losing one of my older sisters to marriage. In my family the older sisters played the role of “mother.” There were too many little kids and not enough adults to go around and the Big Girls, as we called them, were the maternal influence in our lives. The secrecy surrounding marriage made the loss of my sister all the more difficult. It felt as if she was entering an abyss from which there was no return. On the occasion that we did see her after she was married she had changed so dramatically that it was like she had been replaced by another person. This kind of loss is normal and accepted in polygamous families especially in the more conservative groups where placement or arranged marriages are common. In this chapter, my sister is wed to my father’s third wife’s father. It was like my sister was marrying my grandfather. Okay, maybe not quite that weird, but pretty close. But that was not the upsetting part, because older men marrying younger women just wasn’t that uncommon. The painful part of the arrangement was losing my sister. She had been so kind and loving to all of us. She was a beloved maternal figure and suddenly she was gone replaced by a younger less mature sister. I was also confused by the crying and the sense of dis-empowerment that seemed to come with marriage.

This was a pivotal experience for me. I was quite young, around nine years old and I decided I was not going to let someone else decide who I was going to marry. I didn’t actually think about it conceptually, I simply knew, in my bones and flesh that I would have a different and better experience. I think this is when I became aware that the men had too much power and had used that power to subjugate women and girls; that boys and girls had to be separated into opposing camps. I began to question religion and even God on the matter because according to the patriarchal Biblical teachings, being female seemed to be equal to slavery. I witnessed the helplessness of women to control their own lives. I was taught to see myself as inferior to boys and men. It was a doctrine that was completely contrary to my deepest nature and thus began years of turmoil. The sort of turmoil that churned and agitated until I could reconcile this conflict. It was part of what helped me discover my own voice and personal empowerment.

Charlotte’s getting married today. Mother won’t tell me who she is marrying; she says it’s a secret. She said the same thing when Maria and Ella got married too. When a girl is ready to get married, Father goes to one of the brethren and he prays to the Lord to find out who she belongs to. I don’t know if it works the same way with the boys because none of them are married yet.

Father and the mothers just drove out of the driveway with Charlotte. I stood at the top of the playroom stairs before she left to say good-bye. Everyone was crowded around her. She was wearing a borrowed pink dress with a high lace collar and a ruffle at mid-calf. I wonder why she doesn’t get to wear a white dress like Maria. Maria wore an ultra shiny white satin dress and was smiling from ear to ear. Charlotte is crying. I can’t tell if it’s because she’s so happy or if she’s sad she’s leaving. Last week I found her crying in the kitchen over a pan of pudding. I rarely see any of the Big Girls crying. I hugged her and kept asking her what was wrong. She just said, “It’s nothing. I’m okay.” Then she forced herself to smile so I would believe her.

I don’t want Charlotte to go. I felt bad when Maria and Ella got married but Charlotte’s different. Charlotte is the best Big Girl. She made everything fun and made me feel like I belonged to something. She taught me to sing and showed me the difference between singing and singing with feeling. She loved art and was encouraging all of us to stretch our imaginations. She used to take us on tours of our own house. We would line up behind her and she would guide us through the house as if it was an ancient manor owned by a famous duke. She made us forget that we lived there and brought attention to details we never noticed before. She was the storyteller.

She put on a play for the parents once. It was in the basement. Ruby was the fairy, Emily was the queen, I was the princess, and Tom was the handsome knight that saves the day. Danny was the king and Glenn was the evil wizard. She hung a red blanket from the ceiling and put a lamp behind it for a silhouette of the evil wizard stirring his dangerous potion in a big pot and laughing ominously. She had a tape recorder playing appropriate music for each scene. When we needed to change our set she had Amanda do commercials memorized from TV in front of the curtain while we changed our clothes and moved things around. The first year we had home school, each of the Big Girls taught a class. Charlotte taught us history and geography. Well, sort of. She would sit on top of the teacher’s desk and read Johnny Tremain out loud. If she heard someone coming down the stairs she would jump off the desk, hide her book, and pretend she was correcting papers. Sometimes she would turn on music and have us draw pictures of what the music made us feel like. She took us to the library to find books on famous explorers and then she would read the books and improvise them with dialogue and a little acting. She made Sir Frances Drake and Ferdinand Magellan into real-life characters with real-life problems. She showed us humanity in Hernando Cortez and Francisco Pizarro. She made history real.

I begged Emily to tell me if she knew who Charlotte was going to marry. She said she did but she wasn’t going to tell me. I know Mother will tell me in the morning after Charlotte is married but I need to know tonight. Mother says Charlotte is a daydreamer and marriage will give her a dose of reality. She isn’t a very good cook and Mother says she’s too slow and disorganized at housework in spite of the fact that she does it well. I don’t care if Charlotte is good at those things because she’s a writer, a poet, a musician, and an artist. She knows how to do things no one else does. She and Camille spend hours on the typewriter writing their own poetry or songs. Mark and Bryan write the music and Mark plays the guitar. Then the four of them sing the songs they’ve created. Sometimes Charlotte plays the piano for them too. Now, the band is broke up.

I ask Ruby if she will tell me who Charlotte is marrying. She says she is marrying Mother Kay’s father. I don’t believe her. I don’t want to believe her.

I probably won’t see Charlotte anymore, at least not as my sister. She will be a wife to Mother Kay’s father. Mother Kay says that when someone gets married it’s the same as dying. You will belong to your husband and not to your father anymore. I don’t want to belong to anybody. She said that some men make their wives change their first names when they get married and the husband sends all her stuff back to her parents, even down to the pins in her hair. I guess they don’t want them remembering anything from their family. Mother Kay said Father didn’t do that to her but there are a lot of men who do and there is nothing the woman can do but obey her husband. She says it’s in the Bible: “A woman’s desires shall be to her husband and he shall rule over her.” She says a woman is saved in childbirth, and that the husband is responsible for the woman. She talks about it a lot, women being subject to men. She says the woman is the glory of the man. The man is not of the woman but the woman is of the man, so a woman should submit herself to her husband. She says a woman cannot get into the celestial kingdom without the man and a woman can’t hold the priesthood. I don’t want to hold the priesthood and when I get married I won’t obey my husband; I don’t care what the Bible says. The Bible is wrong.

It has been said that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat animals. In this chapter I wanted to illustrate two important things: The willingness to abuse animals and the justification for such actions is a clear indication that the person will find justification for the abuse of children. I had a special love for animals as a child and it was baffling to see another human being behave with such clear disregard for them. It also helped me realize that her abuse of me was not personal. She simply did not have the ability to empathize or show compassion to other people or animals.

The second thing I hoped to make clear is the unpredictability of an abuser. In this chapter, Mother Kay is sharing and talking to me almost like a friend and yet at any moment she could and often did become volatile and controlling. I had to always be on my guard and most especially at times when she was remembering her own past, often haunted by her own memories. It was at precisely these moments, that I was able to see her humanity and what kind of person she might have been under different circumstances. Her ability to transform from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde was a powerful life lesson for me to witness. I often saw her own hidden pain and I was able to connect her abuse of me and others to the conflict within herself. I had the opportunity to see her vulnerabilities and cultivate my own empathy and compassion.

Mother Kay hates cats, which is a problem for her because we live in an inner-city cat zone. There are more strays in the area than kids who walk to and from school every day. I, on the other hand, love them, which is a problem for me because I am the kid and Mother Kay is the mother. No cats allowed. I close my eyes and will every cat in the area, with my animal telepathy, to my house. Strangely enough, cats of all sizes and colors find their way to me.

There was one cat, a large shiny black cat that liked to hang out under our porch. I was the only one who knew she was there. I would feed her bits of cornbread that I had sneaked away from the table. I risked stealing cans of tuna fish from the pantry for her.

It was one of the first warm Saturdays of spring and the curtains in the dining room were pulled down and washed and the windows were wide open. An unusual brightness filled the room. Mother Kay walked over to the window and sniffed the air, closing her eyes to the sunshine. I stood a few feet behind her, oddly interested in her behavior. She leaned her hands heavily on the sill and stood there without moving. It was about then that my cat sashayed out from under the porch. There was a deafening scream, the kind of surreal sound you hear in horror movies and not in real life. I had never heard Mother Kay scream like that before. She nearly fainted from fright. The cat, equally terrified, scrambled back under the porch, no doubt trembling, with her soft coat standing on alert at the back of her neck.

Once Mother Kay had regained enough color in her face, she made her way, shakily, to the kitchen. She grabbed the teakettle, which was heating up and close to boiling for her morning raspberry leaf tea. Potholder in one hand and kettle in the other she headed straight toward the window. I heard the water hitting the pavement and another screech, this one from the cat. Mother Kay filled the kettle back up with water and stood over it until it boiled again.

“That’s the last we’ll see of that cat,” Mother Kay said, more to herself than to me.

“What happened?” I asked.

“What do ya mean what happened? I poured boiling water on the damn thing. I got it square in the face; it took off like crazy.” Mother Kay stood at the counter, straining the leaves from her blue plastic mug in a small cloth. She pressed the little sack of boiled leaves until they released their dark juices. She tossed it casually in the sink. The mug steamed as she held it in both hands and sat on the step stool under the kitchen telephone. I realized I was alone with her in the kitchen.

I couldn’t stop thinking of my cat, confused and wandering around the unfriendly city, with third degree burns on her body. I wondered if the hot water had made her blind. I looked at Mother Kay, sitting serenely on her stool, her

loosened bathrobe hanging over her bare feet.

“Why did you do that?” I finally asked. She looked up from her tea, realizing I was still standing there in front of the dishwasher.

“I don’t like cats. I’m scared of them.” She looked deep into the mug, and I could tell she was remembering. “My mother is scared of cats and her mother too. Especially black ones.” There was a pause and she took another sip. I fidgeted with the end of my braid that rested over my shoulder. “I was attacked by one you know,” she said without looking up. “It was when I was working at the rest home.”

“I was in the basement; there weren’t lights, only one of those really small windows that sits above your head. It was startin’ to get dark outside. Let me tell ya, that basement was really creepy. There were mice and rats as big as a barn down there and they were mean too. Susan was chased by one and it nearly bit her foot.”

“None of us liked goin’ down the basement. I went most of the time because the other girls were too afraid. They knew I was afraid of cats. Marge and Ada weren’t so much. Of course, they didn’t like ’em either but they weren’t afraid. It was those rats that scared the other girls. I was the oldest and more responsible, so I went down there most of the time.” She sighed and took a long sip of her tea, and just when I thought maybe that was it, she continued.

“I’d finished gathering supplies for the next day and was ready to go back upstairs when I saw a black shadow move over the window.” She paused letting the image form in my mind. “I didn’t have time to think when it jumped right on my head. It was scratchin’ and bitin’. It was terrible. I fell on the floor screamin’. Marge and Ada came runnin’ down and it took both of them to get the cat off of me. It was a huge black tomcat. It coulda killed me if the girls hadn’t come down and scared it away. Same thing happened to Mother, attacked by a black cat. Grandma too.” She finished her tea and set the mug on the highchair that sat next to her. “We are all first daughters, ya know. My mother is Grandma’s oldest daughter and I’m my mother’s oldest daughter and Grandma is her mother’s oldest daughter.” She sat there thinking and I wondered if I had been there too long for my own good. “That cat was possessed by an evil spirit.” She sat quietly for a few minutes, not once looking up at me. Finally as if broken from a trance she looked straight into my eyes and said, “Don’t you have work to do or somethin’?” The old Mother Kay appeared out of her eyes and I left her sitting on the stool in the kitchen.

There is a faint meowing behind the metal garbage cans on the North Side. It’s a skinny, orange-striped cat. Large chunks of fur are missing, exposing her pink skin. She has scratches on her face. I sit down next to the garbage cans and hold her in my lap. She doesn’t try to get away. I pull out a piece of cornbread from my apron pocket and feed it to her.

Writing about child abuse proved to be a huge challenge for me while working on my book. No words can do justice or adequately express the experience. Believe me, I tried. I wrestled with this chapter for days before I finally came to the conclusion that I did not need to convince the reader of anything. It wasn’t possible anyway so that freed me up to just tell the story the way it happened; without the drama. Being abused was so normal and predictable that it had become almost blase and even ordinary.

In chapter nine I wanted to show the impact of starvation as punishment. For several years I and my fellow school mates lived on too little food, especially when one considers how much a growing child can eat. This experience deeply impacted my life. Watching my brother become smaller at a time when he should be growing larger left me questioning the purpose of life at an age when I might have been embracing it. My brother’s image became a distraction allowing me to avoid my own image, my own hunger and my own body. At the tender age of eleven I felt jaded and cynical about the value of life.

In this same chapter I wanted to juxtapose the shame and suffering with camaraderie and friendship. Spending so much time together and witnessing the bruises and the stripes of each beating, seeing the shame in the other person’s face created a deep connection between us. The four siblings that were locked in the schoolroom with me and deprived of food; that were beaten and shamed were like my war brothers. Bound together by shock, pain and loss we were forced into an intimacy that was both humiliating and comforting.

In the closing lines, I expose that even the bonds of friendship and intimacy gained through shared suffering are tenuous and subject to betrayal; that survival is a lonely business.