CHILDHOOD

I never learn don’t block the blows because he’ll just hit harder. This wisdom comes with me into the world, like how to breathe.

My father casts about him for something to beat me with. I would suggest an instrument and save him the embarrassment of coming unprepared to child abuse, but it entertains me. He settles on an ugly brass candelabrum, and I hate brass. It shines false, like being obliged to smile. I wish he’d pick something else.

“Cry, damn you!” he gnashes on the backswing, unable to gauge his own impact in the absence of upset. I refuse, knowing it means more hurt: he thinks he takes, but I withhold: a triumph.

I pull a girl’s hair out in kindergarten. It’s quite a handful, and a piece of bloody scalp comes attached. The principal puts it in an envelope for my father to see. He brings it home, makes me eat it, and when I throw up makes me eat that too. My stepmother leaves the room, protecting herself from the sight instead of protecting me. I decide I don’t deserve protection, because then its absence is irrelevant. The girl at school has careful lunches packed neatly, and no bruises: she deserves care, and apparently I do not. I decide I’m bad because then this makes sense.

I don’t do sports or go swimming. My father gets mad, screams “why can’t you just be a normal kid?!” and I gawk because does he forget? To protect him I conceal my thighs, but his thanks are insults.

When he can’t find anything to scream about it puts him in a worse mood, so I’m compelled to assist. All I have to do is drop something. He makes me crawl around collecting its bits while he kicks me screaming “hurry the fuck up!” when they fall, again and again, from my hands.

He has no clue how I make his job easier, but I don’t do it for him: if I don’t annoy him the babies will. I am ruined already, buckle end imprints that stopped fading at pink, a scar above my eye from the door handle, but their skin is still perfect. Maybe the rest of them can stay perfect too.

The belt wrapped around his fist, like he can’t decide which to hit us with. It is brown, the carpet is brown, blood stale brown in my teeth it seems. My older brother beside me, our eyes locked to galvanize, our stepmother somewhere safe on the periphery, whimpering. This recurs weekly at least.

Chris stops meeting my eye, starts taunting me instead when I’m abused. He sets me up for beatings and watches grinning from under furniture and behind doors. Maybe this is just despair: the opposite action can have no effect. I remember when he climbed on top of me, said let’s make another family, this one sucks. He had wiggled a bit, then rolled off and we went to sleep, certain that in the morning there’d be a baby. I miss him so much now that he’s an accomplice.

My father tries to kill him in the portico, hitting the gas when my brother is backed against the wall. Chris jumps on the hood to avoid being cut off at the waist. My father’s reflection in the rear-view is blandly curious, as though this were a toy experiment. On my brother’s face panic, pleading, disbelief. It’s what I see instead when he tortures me.

In the morning we have pancakes. My father passes the syrup smiling, and I accept it like a contract to pretend. I hate this benign but somehow equally damaging ritual, how it cleanses my father but makes me feel crazy for remembering yesterday.

He has the poker under Alison’s ribs at the end of the hall. He looks over his shoulder, features crazed, says go back to bed/you’re having a nightmare. For some reason I do. It doesn’t occur to me to intervene. I don’t fear being hit. I fear being proven ineffectual. She packs another bag, again. Again he gloats: you can’t leave me. I have you wired to Oxycodone. This might solve the mystery of my baby brother’s maladies.

Adam cries incessantly, and Alison’s response is to lock herself in her room. I hold him, try and console him, but it doesn’t help. My father throws the bassinet to the floor. Adam is unhurt, and stops crying briefly to catch his breath. Before he can start up again I run with him into the forest, where we sleep in a cradle made by roots. No one comes looking for us. A possum in the moonlight, the creaking of pines, they soothe my baby brother. He is angelic sleeping, and I curl myself around him, a promise of safety I can’t keep.

Our neighbour comes over with a shotgun because, he says, my father has diddled his daughter. Dad counters with her skirt length, like some pedophilic cliche. He’s got his thirty-eight, and there’s a screaming standoff in the yard; they wave their weapons not just at each other, but us. Later he shakes me awake, says grab your toothbrush and a change of clothes. The van is running in the driveway, and we cross the state line at daybreak.

I have left my friends behind so often I stop making any. I am approached by guidance counsellors, letters of concern are sent home which my father replies to disingenuously, then beats me for: I am a freak and it embarrasses him. In fourth grade I’m put in enrichment class. My father considers this verification of his intelligence in me only, and never asks about my progress there.

We return to Louisiana much the same way we had left: without notice, without possessions, without permanent connections having been forged. The house he buys is rotting, and we replace the walls ourselves. I’m sure we breathe black mold and possibly asbestos, but my father is concerned only with our effectiveness as labourers. He screams the whole time we live in that endless renovation.

My father pushes my sister down the stairs in Natchitoches. I catch her on my way up, and she is a stone in my arms. She doesn’t cry, but breathes in tiny little frightened moans. I look up at him looming there self-satisfied and say if he touches her again I’ll kill him. I watch him wonder if I might be capable.

My stepmother says we’re going to see her parents, but when we get there puts me on the phone with my father. She wants fifty grand, and I guess I am a hostage, like in movies. I look my mother up in the white pages and there is nothing Alison can legally do but let me go.

I have seen my mother twice since I was five. I sleep in the room they used for storage, and my mother threatens constantly to send me back to my father. Pretty soon she does, frustrated by my neuroses, and things are much worse when it is he and I alone.

His apartment is infested with cockroaches. He’s never done a dish, but buys new dishes instead, and they’re stacked on the festering counters with half-eaten meals stuck to them. I ask why doesn’t he use the dishwasher, and am beaten for pointing it out. He has maybe been so drunk so long he didn’t notice there was one.

I am tasked with making the place presentable, as he as dating, and wants to bring her to our place. This includes months of laundry: again he’s simply bought more clothes instead of washing what he has. I am up and down the stairs with heavy baskets for days, with no assistance from him. Eventually I’m so exhausted I cry in the laundry room. An old woman approache me and asks what’s wrong, and somehow her kindness makes it worse.

I have developed early, and apparently men notice. My father accuses me of trying to seduce them at the pool, and to teach me a lesson strips me naked and locks me outdoors overnight. The best I can do to hide myself is the pad from a patio chair. In the morning he’s solicitous, and I should know something’s wrong. He hands me my walkman and says he’s recorded me a song. It is a sweet tune played on the ukulele to lyrics about me being gang raped, knifed from vagina to nape. I listen to it on the school bus.

Marilyn is my father’s girlfriend, and he is sweet to me for her to see. I put on a show with him about how happy we are, so she will keep coming back. My father and Marilyn get married, and on the trip to Cancun he and my brother, who joins us, fill the turtle pool with tequila, so the iguanas who cool themselves in it will get drunk. They die, and I have to bury them in the sand.

My father asks me what I want for Christmas, and I say a dog. I am lonely, and need affection, but my father hurts Wrinkles to make me do things. Later, when he moves in, my brother will flick him in the testicles and make me watch helplessly. When we go to Canada for Christmas I say I’m not going back. This means abandoning my dog, and I feel terrible, but I guess have to save myself. I wasn’t able to protect him anyway.

On the phone with my father a few weeks later, he says Wrinkles has been adopted by an old man he looks like, but when I talk to my brother afterwards, he says my dog has been sold to a guy with a boa constrictor.

My mother won’t give me a key. She won’t make after school arrangements, so I wander the town until well after dark. On a particularly cold day I stay to help my teacher shelve textbooks, and he says listen. I can’t look after you. Go home. I tell him I can’t, and eventually a worker shows up and puts me in a foster home. Later my brother, who had followed me to Canada, will say our mother told child welfare to come “get this crazy bitch out of my house.” I had been washing my hands too much, and cutting myself in the closet.

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SEX WORK

I no longer qualified for family housing, and was moved to a smaller apartment the day after I watched my daughter walk away for good. A few weeks later my subsidy stopped being paid and I couldn’t afford the rent anymore. I went to Toronto where at least my squalor would be diverse and not monotonously suburban. Shelter no longer mattered as much as irrelevance, and I was glad not to pass evocative landmarks in the course of my daily business.

People write of leaving everything behind, but I had nothing I couldn’t drag to the dumpster or carry on my back. In some memories that exodus is like stepping into traffic, but the traffic is a senseless flow: there is no impact. I don’t remember getting on a train or bus. I just remember being there, then being here without my kids or a plan or really caring what happened next.

I rented hotel rooms and turned tricks to pay for them, never having enough all at once for an address. In short skirts and sleeveless tees even the streetcar passing counted as touch, I missed holding my kids so much. By turns I was hypersensitive, to the point that the seams in my clothes chafed, and utterly dissociated, so that a rough john hardly registered as more than anecdotal.

I became the swarming heat and swooning stink of the ceaseless screaming city, and took it all in greedy but starving. It was everything except my kids without me, and there was no barrier between me and it. There was never much left after expenses, but what I did save, despite periodic robberies, I gave to my son’s adoptive parents.

I was not what they referred to in the forums as prime beef. I had a baby apron, my tits sagged to my waist, and my limbs were scarred by self abuse, which certain clients would decide meant I enjoyed pain. Often a man would show up and refuse to pay. If he wanted to fuck someone who looked like his wife he’d go home and do it for free. He often booked whole afternoons knowing I couldn’t fill that time on such short notice if he walked out. I usually took what he was willing to give, as the alternative was homelessness the next day, but this information was of course posted in the forums too. I started asking more than I expected to get, knowing they’d barter me down flaw by flaw, beginning with my age. I suspect some of them chose me for the joy of doing this. In most cases I was merely the best they could afford, so they approached the encounter with extant resentment, and did not tip. I hadn’t made a contingency plan for life after sex work, because I didn’t expect to survive it. I was dredging the blackest barrel of johns.

Most of them didn’t bother to clean themselves, and they liked making me suck it that way. I didn’t remember their names from one appointment to the next. I didn’t call them anything, and maybe that’s why they left their condoms for me to pick up off the floor. Because they shouted insults, invectives, for impact, and I moaned empty syllables back. I’d rub where they’d gripped and wrung me, and memorize the pattern of the wallpaper again. I found its repetition soothing.

It’s not because I took the money that they hated me. It’s because they knew I’d been treated worse for free, or I wouldn’t have wound up in those rooms. Why should they pay when they’re being what can pass for relatively kind? Kind as compared to stories they’d heard, stories they’d hoard so they could constantly compare themselves, imagining the slight of getting less for more.

One day I accepted apologetic pity for three hundred bucks above the room fee. I had lost even more weight. It was time for a new bra and panties. I am not a standard size, so went to a place where they fit you, and the saleswoman averted her eyes from the bruising, the scars, the state of my existing undergarments, and kept presenting what she made sure to note were modestly priced items. She handed me a box of wipes so I could cleanse my underbust area before trying them on. The condescension was an undertone, like when someone holds their breath beside a homeless person on the streetcar. I chose something lacy, and a corset to hide the worst of my stretchmarks. I was told the total with a skeptical inflection, and paid in crisp hundreds because fuck her, then took myself to dinner. It was the first time I’d eaten in a restaurant where the menu wasn’t on a sign above the cash register.

The best trick financially, the worst trick psychologically, was a rescue sadist. I was pathetic, exactly as he required. He would cry as he released my throat, as though such releases were parallel, and I was meant to hold him afterwards. He specified which portion of a hundred was meant for this, and left the rest on the nightstand, a reminder of what, if anything, my own release was worth. I would conceal the purple neckband with a lace choker and build my ensemble around it with the corset and a velvet bolero, so it looked premeditated. I would always buy my son something extravagant with the money from these sessions. It couldn’t be new socks or underwear. It had to be a board game or a box set.

I can’t stop picking at my cuticles. There’s always one more corner that I need to peel. I don’t remember when it started, but I used to have nice nails. I kept them short and clean so when I clawed at the drywall in my sleep I didn’t wake up with gypsum underneath them.

I rented rooms in borrowed clothes I reattached the tags to after I filmed myself wearing them. I got my money back and washed the same bra and panty set by hand with hotel soap in the hotel sink every sad, tired night. I hung it from the shower rod on a wire hanger, and by the time the first client came the next day it’d be dry. The sameness of very shit was somehow reassuring.

What did I do with that suitcase, the one I dragged behind me from The Super 8 to the Motel 6? I wish I could remember this and what I used to tell them I was working for. Some liked to think they were helping out with something, as though fucking whores were charity work. Others assumed I was an addict, because why else would I sell myself? I wondered how they even fucked with such undersize imaginations, and if they’d ever been so hungry they licked take out containers in the College Park food court.

To stand out I had to be unique. I wasn’t reviewed on my ruined body, jagged scars, or advanced age which, unlike most, I didn’t attempt to conceal. I wrote them naughty haikus and drew them cartoons of themselves. I think this harmed me, because the point of paying was to fuck something unrelatable. If I had anything in common with their daughter or their niece, it’s possible some old asshole could be fucking their daughter or their niece. I needed to be some vacant, outlandish slut to prove these lonely planets could never align.

Finally, as though it were something I’d been waiting for, I was beaten unrecognizable, and couldn’t turn tricks to fund the room. I called a shelter, broken as badly as any domestic victim, but the woman on the phone was hateful. She said hookers have tons of money, and shelters are for women who are actually desperate. So I called another shelter and gave them the kind of sad fiction they took women’s studies courses to hear. They told me it was normal to feel numb, while passing me tissues in case I exploded in the more expected tears. Nothing about being so detached your voice sounds like it’s coming from across the room is normal. Nothing is normal about the hotel holding your deposit because your blood is in the carpet. I wished they would stop using that word as though it were a comfort.