Roxy’s Story (38 page)

I’m sure there were few, if any, six-year-old girls in our community forced to do
this kind of housecleaning and to wash and dry their own clothes, too. I also had
to iron, and I consequently burned myself a few times because the iron was heavy in
my small hands. The first time, I wasn’t given anything to ease the pain, no matter
how hard I cried.

“Pain,” my grandmother told me, “is the guardian of good. It keeps you from violating
a commandment, a rule, or a law. Suffering is the only really effective teacher. Cut
yourself playing with something you shouldn’t, and you won’t play with it again. That’s
why people are in constant agony in hell.”

Despite all of this religious fury blowing through our house, with tornado intensity
at times, my grandparents weren’t avid churchgoers. If anything, they saw the clergymen
they knew as hypocrites. They actually railed against organized religion, complaining
about corruption, both financial and moral, and never contributed to any religious
charity run by the church. They believed a well-kept religious home was church enough
if the people living within it followed the commandments and were pure at heart, whatever
that meant. Sometimes I imagined my grandmother
taking her heart out and scrubbing it in the sink with the harsh side of a sponge.

I can’t remember the actual moment when my light-blue infant eyes were able to focus
and my developing nervous system was able to interpret shapes and colors. No one could
remember that, but I’m confident that the first face I really saw clearly was the
face of the infant Jesus. For my first few years in that back room of the first floor,
the room that was hastily set up as my nursery and stayed my room, this framed print
of the infant Jesus was all that was on the wall I faced daily. I woke up with it
and fell asleep with it. It’s still there today among the other biblical prints and
plaques.

When I was old enough to do so, I was ordered to recite my prayers to the picture
of the baby Jesus before I went to sleep and the moment I awoke. My grandmother designed
the prayer so that the first line, which didn’t make sense to me since I had little
chance to sin while I was sleeping, was “Forgive me, Jesus, for I have sinned.”

When I was a little girl, I feared that my grandmother could see the moment my eyes
opened and would know if I didn’t recite the prayer. The punishment, when she either
saw me not pray or believed I didn’t, was no breakfast and some added task such as
scrubbing the kitchen floor with all the food and the aromas of eggs and bacon swirling
around me, making my stomach growl and bringing fresh tears to my eyes.

For almost anyone else, I’m sure these biblical scenes, depictions of saints and prophets,
and framed
needlework prayers and sayings would provide a sense of security, a holy wall keeping
out what Grandmother Myra called the “nasties out there.” She had me believing that
they came right up to our front door at night and would have come in to devour us
if we didn’t have the icons and blessings in clear view. Nevertheless, despite all
her warnings and assurances that the obedient are protected, from the day I could
conceive of escaping, I was beguiled by the thought of living out there, free from
any commandments except the ones I declared for myself.

It seemed to me that I was always sitting by a window, looking out like some lost
and lonely Cinderella waiting for her prince to come riding up on a magnificent white
stallion. He would beckon to me, and I would rush out to take his hand, and he would
gently pull me up to sit behind him. I could see us galloping off, leaving all of
this behind and forgotten like some terribly unpleasant dream.

That’s what my life in this prison-home quickly had become and remained: a nightmare.
To just go outside like any other child and explore the wonders of nature, the wildflowers,
the insects, and the different birds, even just to lie on the grass and watch the
clouds being sculpted by the wind, was like a short break granted to a convict in
his otherwise heavily regimented day in a cold and dismal place. Whenever I was permitted
outside, I would take deep breaths of fresh air, as if I had to store it in my lungs
for weeks until my next release.

If I tried to bring something back in with me,
something as innocent as a dead bee because I was intrigued with its shape and features,
I was in for a paddling, with the same paddle my grandfather’s father had used on
him, and then sent to my room without supper. I learned that the paddle had been retrieved
from some box in the attic shortly after I was able to walk.

Everything I did, no matter how small, was watched, studied, and judged. From what
I clearly understood, this scrutinizing of my every breath, every move, and every
sound began in the cradle, as if something a baby did, the way she looked at them,
the way she cried or even burped, could be interpreted as either something good or
something that smelled of evil.

Instead of common baby toys such as animals that made sounds or things that made music
or things I could take apart and put together, I was given crucifixes and crosses
to touch and study. One had the figure of Jesus with his crown of thorns attached.
I would trace the body of Jesus with my tiny fingers, intrigued, and even, when I
was older and had more control of my arms and hands, try to take it off the cross,
which frightened my grandmother. From what she would tell me later, that was one of
the first clear indications that I was polluted the way a lake or a pond could be
polluted, and it was her and my grandfather’s task to do what they could to cleanse
my soul. It was her way of explaining why everything harsh they did to me was necessary.

I was born in that house and in that back-room nursery on a dark, foggy night when
the air was full of
cold rain not yet ready to become drops. The weather on my birthday was very important
to my grandparents. The fact that it was their home that would welcome me into the
world terrified them enough as it was, but the ugly weather that night only reinforced
their fears. That’s what my mother would tell me when I finally met her and we talked.
While she was describing my birth and the howling of the wind, I kept thinking of
the witches in
Macbeth
saying, “Fair is foul and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

“The fog, the wet darkness, and the cold air that seemed to seep into the house through
every crack and cranny confirmed all their darkest thoughts that night, Elle,” she
said. “I’ll never forget the look on their faces when you came out looking normal,
with two legs and two arms. I think they, at least my mother, expected you to have
a tail and horns.”

My grandmother more or less had confirmed all that. Maybe she didn’t believe I really
would have horns and a tail, but in her mind, it was as if I did.

“There was no joy at the sound of your first cry,” my grandmother admitted to me when
she thought I was old enough to understand and appreciate her efforts to purify me.
She described how she and my grandfather had crossed themselves and held my hands:
“Your grandfather on one side and me on the other, reciting the Lord’s Prayer. You
squirmed as if hearing those words was painful.”

She made me clearly understand how much fear they had in their hearts at the sight
of me. But she
didn’t tell me all this and more in greater detail until nearly twelve years later,
when I began to wonder constantly about why I was so restricted and questioned the
heavy rules under which I lived. Every time I saw a young girl or boy go by our house
or saw children in books and on the little television I was permitted to watch, I
longed to understand why I wasn’t permitted to play with any, much less speak to any.

It was shocking to learn that I was born secretly and not given a name immediately.
Sometimes I think that if they could have, they would have kept me anonymous forever,
but they couldn’t go on denying my existence. Finally, they decided to name me Elle
because it could mean “God’s promise” and that there was some hope. Otherwise, I’m
sure they thought, why bother? I used to wonder if my grandmother was capable back
then of drowning me the way I’d seen her drown baby mice. I was told that before they
named me, they simply called me “the child” or referred to me as “it.” “It’s not eating.”
“It’s not sleeping.” “It’s crying too much.”

Right from the start, I was more like a creature than a human child in their eyes.
Of course, I often wondered what my mother and father could have been like for my
grandparents to harbor such thoughts. For years after I was old enough to begin to
think about my birth, I would ask about my parents and only get more frustrated with
the answers.

“Where is my father? Where is my mother? Why don’t I ever see them?”

“You will never see your father,” my grandmother
told me finally. “He dropped his sperm into your mother as casually as someone drops
a letter into a mailbox and didn’t wait to see it delivered. You might see your mother
someday, although I doubt it.”

My grandfather nodded after these answers, but he didn’t look happy about it, and
I didn’t know what sperm was yet. It sounded like some sort of letter with our address
on it. My grandfather added, “Don’t worry. Someday you’ll understand it all, and you
won’t hate us.” He didn’t make it sound like a threat. He smiled when he said it.

Instinctively, even at a young age, I knew that if I was ever to see any softness,
any kindness, it would come from my grandfather. At times, after I had been punished
or slapped for something I had said or done, something I had no idea was wrong, he
would wince as if it were he who had been punished. On occasion, he would tell my
grandmother to ease up. “She’s got the point.”

She would glare back at him, and he would look away.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop wondering about the man and the woman who had created
me. Why didn’t they ever want to see me? Why had they no interest in me? From reading,
I knew that fathers more than mothers abandoned their children. There were many biblical
lessons my grandmother taught me about such things, but I always wondered how my mother
could give birth to me and then just leave and never return. No matter how many times
I asked, sometimes being slapped for doing so too often or told to go to my
room and read a passage from the Bible, I continued to inquire. Many times, I saw
my grandfather on the verge of telling me, but he never did.

What my grandmother was willing to say was that no matter what my mother might tell
me, she fled from me because she couldn’t abide the evil she had seen in her own child.

“She had looked into the face of evil many times, so she knew what it was,” my grandmother
said.

Whenever she said something like this, I felt the tears come into my eyes. How could
I be so evil? What had I done after I was born? What could I have done before I was
born? It made no sense, and I think my grandfather especially realized that I knew
it didn’t make sense for them to continue telling me this.

Finally, one night, when she thought I was old enough to understand the truth, she
sat me down in the kitchen and told me everything, laying it all out like one of her
biblical stories that had a bad ending to illustrate some sin.

She ended with “And it came to pass that you were born without the grace of God.”

That made it sound as if I was born without a soul, and when I asked her if that was
true, she said, “We’ll see. We’ll see what you become.”

What a horrible childhood I had endured, and what a hard life I still had. To this
day, I would like to blame my mother for everything, especially leaving me to live
with them, but under the circumstances that were finally revealed to me, that was
impossible. I never believed she fled from me because she saw evil
in me. She never looked at me long enough. She never wanted to, but how could I blame
her? If anything, the truth left me feeling just as sorry for her, if not sorrier.

How do you blame a young woman for being raped and forced to have the child who was
created, a child no one wanted, a child whose grandparents feared she would bring
the wrath of God down on their heads?