It has to do with my childhood. My parents had what I politely call a tempestuous relationship. My dad was both a loving parent and a violent monster with a vicious temper. He didn’t require alcohol for the monster to emerge, but alcohol had the monster knocking on the cage-door. And my mom often couldn’t prevent herself from opening the cage. It was the 1960s; wife-beating was socially acceptable, or at least, ignored by law enforcement. My parents fought over how much time (and money) my father spent at the bar at the American Legion, over my father’s infidelities, and over my mother’s inability to accept his behavior. As an adult, I can’t understand why they constantly egged each other on to greater and greater excesses while fighting. When they weren’t actively fighting, they were often quite loving to each other and to us children.
I was the sickly youngest child with a heart condition that prevented me from running or participating in typical child’s play; we had no neighbors with children, either. I taught myself to read and spent much of my time doing this (or just day-dreaming) in various nooks and crannies inside the house and around our spacious yard. I had hiding spots everywhere: behind two racks of clothing in the closet I shared with my sister; in various trees all over the yard; inside the woodbox in the living room; and in a fort that I had built for myself in an attic.
Our house had a number of attics; every upstairs bedroom had at least one. This attic was my favorite hideout. It had no windows and it was roastingly hot during the summer. Its tiny door was inside a small closet, but it extended over thirty feet long by about twenty feet wide. A bare bulb illuminated only a small portion of the space. It had no floor, but my father had stored extra wood from building the house and I was careful to spread some to span the joists. An old mattress served as a lounge while I read. I brought up Cokes or water to drink, and sometimes stayed hidden all day. I felt like I was literally inside “The Magician’s Nephew,” one of a series of children’s books by C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors.
I also had other, less formal hiding spaces, under and behind various pieces of furniture and behind the floor-length curtains in the living room. Inside my little fortresses, I often couldn’t hear the sounds of everyday life. Whenever my parents started to argue, I would flee to the closest hiding space, shut my eyes, and clutch my ears to block out the sounds. My parent’s violence terrified me. One warm spring day, I couldn’t escape.
I had been in the living room, lying on a sofa, reading, when I had to get up to get a drink. As I crossed through the front entry, I heard another argument erupting in the kitchen. I pulled the heavy front door shut as I slid into the tiny space between the front door and the screen door. Neither door quite shut as, although I was a skinny child, I was a bit more than three inches thick, the total space available between the doors. I was forced to witness, through the heavy door, a vicious argument as my parents moved into the front entryway. Once again, I heard my father strike my mother, the slapping sound echoing as a sharp crack, a not-uncommon occurrence. I froze, unable to escape without their noticing the screen door’s movement through the high windows of the front door.
Suddenly, in response to something that my father said about “not in front of the children”, my mother ripped the front door open and screamed that it was too late for that. My mother must have witnessed me slipping out the door, noticed that the screen door remained ajar, and surmised my hiding place.
Exposed, I burst into tears, fled upstairs without looking at either of them, and dove into the closet in my shared bedroom, pushing past my older sister’s clothing that hung on the high front rack, past my own smaller clothes that hung on the lower rear rack. I flung myself against the sloping wall at the very back of the closet, behind all of the clothes, completely hidden except to someone who was willing to kneel, bending even lower, and move the two sets of dresses. I cradled my head in my arms and cried for hours. I wanted my parents to stop fighting and for my father to stop hitting my mother.
My father soon left the house and my mother came in search of me. I didn’t respond, I continued to cry with hands over my face, my whole body turned towards the wall. I could not speak. Eventually, my sister coaxed me out of the closet (I didn’t want to emerge but I was afraid of wetting myself). I went to bed early rather than face my mother over dinner. I blamed both of them for the fights; I couldn’t help thinking that other kids probably didn’t live the way we did, with parents who seemed to hate each other in front of us but behaving properly in front of visitors. I didn’t know if other families acted like mine; my parents certainly didn’t act like the parents I read about or saw on television sitcoms, but maybe that was their trick for me, a visitor.
My sister brought me a snack to make up for my missed meal; she was accustomed to acting as a surrogate parent when our real parents forgot themselves in the passion of battle. Despite her kindness, I often felt too sick to my stomach to eat during my childhood. I remained little more than skin and bones until adolescence.
The attic was a safe place, but a place that always keeps its inhabitants safe from outsiders is a jail or a cage. I started to emerge from my cage years ago and I continue to work on not retreating back into it. I can’t hide in the attic any longer.
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