Wednesday, July 12, 2006
"pour some sugar on me"
Thursday, July 06, 2006
"walking on broken glass"
Precious Moments
By JLF
˜™
The first memory I have of disappointment is connected to him. It’s an old story, almost an anecdote; I don’t even know if it’s true or if I just made it up. But I remember it like it’s true, kinda like how I remember getting stitches in my ankle (though Lora remembers it all quite differently, but that’s just so she doesn’t have to admit that she fainted at the sight of my blood and shiny white bone showing through the large tear in my skin). I remember we had a morning ritual: he would go to Dunkin’ Donuts and get plain glazed for Mom, donut holes for Lora, and a chocolate donut (or two) for me. Sometimes I would get to go with him in the blue and grey Suburban that was the same age as me, born in 1983, riding in the coveted front seat for once, not caring if my legs stuck to the plastic car seat during those hot summer mornings. I would say “Hi” to everyone in Dunkin’ Donuts regardless of whether I knew them or not, most often clinging to his hand or leg. And he would let me order, picking me up and holding me level with the counter so I could actually see everything going on behind it as they sprung into work at my very command. It was our special thing, Dunkin’ Donuts, and I cherished it.
If I couldn’t go, if he had other errands to do before DD and I would become a typical two-year-old nuisance (as I often was at grocery and department stores alike, hiding in clothing racks and begging for toys and candy, pitching fits, all things little children do to disrupt shoppers’ tranquility), then I would make him promise to bring my obligatory chocolate donut, and he always did. Until that morning.
I remember him packing up the Suburban, Mom looking sad, Lora crying, but I didn’t know what was going on. I just thought everyone else was acting really weird for some odd reason. As he finished packing, I ran up to him, took his hand, and asked to go with him to Dunkin’ Donuts like I always did. He said I couldn’t. I pouted and cried, but it did no good. Then I said, “You promise you’ll bring me back a chocolate donut?” though in much cuter, two-year-old talk, to which he replied, “Of course, Bubba.” Then he got into the Suburban and drove away. I waited for him to do what he promised. I waited all day, refuting any attempts by Mom to appease me. With Minnie tucked under my chin, I’m still waiting.
Minnie has always been my nearest and dearest friend. Closer than Mom, closer than Lora, closer than Blair, closer than any other friend I’ve ever had. Closer than even Jesus.
Minnie is a twenty-year-old Precious Moments stuffed rabbit. At one time her fur was a light, girlish pink with matching satin-lined ears and a darker pink velveteen nose, a small smile stitched on her face in a matching bright pink. And her eyes were classic teardrops, black at the bottom, then a bright blue, and finally white at the very tips.
My Aunt Karen gave Minnie to me when I was two. I don’t remember if she was a birthday present or anything, but I don’t think she was. I think she was just a here’s-something-to-make-you-feel-better-since-your-dad-left present. A consolation prize. I just remember Aunt Karen handing her to me in the front bedroom at Mammaw and Pa Dale’s house. I remember being delighted with my present. But that’s about it.
After that Minnie and I were attached at the hip. I had other stuffed animals and toys who would occupy my playtime and bed at night, but Minnie was the constant. I couldn’t sleep without her, couldn’t function. She chased the nightmares away, protected me from the boogeyman in the closet and under the bed, absorbed my tears when I cried, let me twirl her around by her feet or ears, kiss her nose when I was feeling affectionate or throw her across the room when I wasn’t.
I also had a pillow and blankey (both made for me by Mammaw) that I slept with all the time (more nightmare prevention) but eventually Mom talked me into leaving those behind to be stored and hung on blanket racks for future generations to admire (or cats to climb on as we later found out with Smoky and Mr. Darcy). Mom wanted the same fate for Minnie, an honored place in the china hutch Pa Dale had made, but I refused. Minnie would never leave me, no matter how old I got or how ragged she became. I would never let her go.
He never liked Minnie. He called her “Rat” and refused to call her by her rightful name. At night while tucking us into bed he would try to snatch her away while threatening to flush her down the toilet (“where a rat should be,”). Other times he would hide her from me so that I grew frantic with worry at the loss of her. He would say he’d fed her to Shadow, his Australian Shepherd. I’d cry and finally, after a good laugh from him and yelling and scolding from both Lora and Robbie (our normally wicked stepmother) he would give her back. I would cuddle her right below my chin, safe and sound, telling her I would never let the bad man get her again. I learned to hide Minnie, under my pillow or inside a blanket or back in my suitcase, bothered by his irrational hatred of a stuffed animal. He didn’t treat Lora’s monkey George (who wasn’t all that curious) that way. But then, he’d given George to Lora when she broke her arm falling off the monkey bars (ha ha), me watching from the porch steps. George was also a consolation prize, but he wasn’t like Minnie.
I began to figure it out a few years ago. I don’t know if Aunt Karen knew what she was doing when she gifted me with Minnie so soon after his leaving, but I wouldn’t put it past her. She is kinda crafty, teaching me my multiplication tables when I was in the first grade so I’d be more than ready for it in the third, ahead of the class, and she knew all my little youngest-daughter tricks having an even trickier youngest daughter of her own. But this was a more sophisticated kind of emotional warfare than crying of injuries two hours old just to get your sister in trouble; this was brilliant. How could a one-foot tall stuffed animal with sightless eyes bring down a 5’11” man? With lots of self-made psychological rivalry, by replacing his position as love-giver to his own easily replaced younger/middle daughter.
I can see now how he resented Minnie. How he fought an untenable battle to win back my heart and his place as father, no matter how dirty he had to play. But he’d given up my heart blithely, of his own free will. That was a thing Minnie would never do no matter how badly I behaved. While he was busy “living his new life” he gave up being a dad to us and sought to instead only do what was prescribed, what was necessary: sending child support payments in the amount of $150/month/child, calling on birthdays and holidays and sometimes sporadically in between, and picking us up when we came to visit, taking us to movies and going bowling and buying us books and CDs and movies only if Robbie approved, never spanking but disciplining by threats of having to kiss one another and hug for ten minutes on the couch in front of everyone, and the rest of the time pretending we weren’t there. And then he wondered why his eldest daughters scoffed at his stern tones, ignored his fatherly edicts, and replaced him with stuffed animals who love blindly.
There are some sore subjects when it comes to him, quite a few actually. But most of all, there’s the drinking.
It’s not so much that his drinking always bothered me. For the most part it wasn’t a big deal. He drank beer, I often fetched them from the fridge for him; I didn’t care. Mom never really said anything despite being a very conservative Church of Christ born and raised worshipper as well as someone who had seen first-hand how drinking could hurt a family due to her adoptive brother’s own rebellious behavior. But Mom wasn’t the type to tell stories on him, to bash him in front of us. She trusted us to make our own decisions about him.
It wasn’t until around the 4th or 5th grade that I began to see a problem: he drank a lot. Sometimes he drank while driving. I remember him asking for a beer while driving the motor-home on one of our interminable family trips, and I remember refusing to get one for him and then scolding him for drinking after he had Wrenn fetch the beer instead.
But even then I didn’t really think the drinking was that bad. It was around that same time that I had my first taste of beer: a cheap Canadian beer, warm from the summer heat. He shared it with me as we sat in the shade of the motor-home awning in the RV park somewhere near
In junior high we’d have little parties down at the grove of trees behind my house, passing around a strawberry/watermelon wine cooler between about four or five of us as we gossiped about boys and huddled together to preserve warmth, occasionally also sharing a cigarette stolen from Lucky’s step-mother. For my birthday I had a big party in our front yard and first tried Jack Daniels and Dr. Pepper thanks to Josh (though I thought it was a waste of good Dr. Pepper). I wasn’t exactly the goody-goody C of C girl I suspect Mom thought I was.
But then, freshman year, everything changed. I was baptized and suddenly I left all the old, bad stuff behind. I took a new, harsher look at the drinking and partying my peers did, and I was on my way towards becoming an outright right-wing fundamentalist. All through my high school career I had a strict no drinking policy, though my abhorrence lessened over the years with more exposure to people who could drink responsibly.
I remember being really embarrassed by him and his drinking at Epcot during our Disney trip my sophomore year of high school, though not by the most obvious thing, not when he let out a loud, resounding fart in the middle of a crowded Disney avenue to which someone, a stranger, asked in a posh almost faux-sounding British accent, “Did someone step on a duck?” Sure, we were embarrassed, enough so that Lora and I took off with Farron in her stroller, all the way from
We were waiting for them to catch up with us in
Of course, the real problem wasn’t really the drinking itself, but when he stopped drinking. His quitting always left a bitterness in the mouths of his two eldest daughters, all because of the timing.
The first time he quit was after Farron was born. He said that when she was born, he just needed to quit. Her birth was the impetus he needed to stop.
His saying that Farron’s birth made him need to quit, left us feeling like the rest of us, his three other daughters who had come before her, weren’t as important. Our births didn’t warrant his quitting, but this last one, this unexpected one did. I think Lora felt the same way; she seemed to nod whenever I would make snide comments about his quitting, about our own birth’s not being worth such a sacrifice, but she never played the bitter role quite as well as I did, the curse of being the middle, less well-known child. It was my turn to be bitter, her turn to be sympathetic.
He stayed sober for a pretty long time, replacing his fanatic drinking of cheap beer with a just as fanatic drinking of knock-off Dr. Peppers and Cokes (which do not taste the same, no matter what they say to make you think the cheaper price is worth it). That lasted a year or more. I don’t really remember how long exactly. But I guess old habits die hard, and by the time I was a sophomore, he was back to all of his.
Recently he quit again. No births served as the catalyst this time. Instead some mysterious occurrence that he refused to share with us, some “bad thing” fomented his sobering up. I think he stopped in November, maybe October. He told Lora first, who in turn passed it on to me (I apparently don’t even warrant a phone call for such a momentous occasion. More cause for bitterness I suppose). I scoffed, she scolded me. By Christmas he still wasn’t drinking, and we were both a little surprised. I delighted in telling him stories about my latest drinking escapades with my friends at the local bars and restaurants, how I could now take up to three shots of vodka at one time without feeling too drunk. I loved to see the look of shock and a pinch of horror as well as fascination and almost envy come over his face. He calls me a lush now, seems to worry about how much I seem to go out drinking and partying with my friends (even though I don’t go out that often. I just love to tell him stories about it so it seems a more regular thing than it really is). And I can’t wait to tell him about all my latest adventures whenever I get the chance, though only in person, over the phone you can’t see the jealousy lingering just behind his eyes for my “wild lifestyle.”
I’m amazed at the change, the flip of our characters: me, the once almost puritanical martinette who scorned him for drinking is now the lush, and he, the alcoholic-and-proud-of-it man is the one who worries about my bad habits.
**
—
I began to get really scared when I heard the whole story of my paternal grandparents’ divorce. Until two years ago, I had only known that Granny Leona and Papa Sunny had gotten divorced when he was young and then, around the time he was in the second grade, she’d married Papa Mert. He didn’t really talk about what exactly happened. Kinda like how he never talked about exactly what happened with us. And he never took us to see Papa Sunny, though we saw Papa Mert every visit.
Mom took us to see Papa Sunny and his second wife, Grandma Margaret, whenever she could. I only really remember jumping on the trampoline with Lora and Grandma Margaret (“because she’s younger than most grandmas,” Mom used to say when I asked why Mammaw never did things like that) while Mom and Papa Sunny watched and laughed. But I vaguely remember it; most of what I remember comes from the pictures we have where Lora and I are sharing Papa Sunny’s lap in his big, leather rocking recliner, and the picture where I’m charging at the camera, half in the air mid-bounce, in my lilac Tweety Bird sweater, Grandma Margaret watching from the side, ready to dive in for a catch should I get too zealous in getting to Mom and forget where the trampoline ends and the earth begins again under it. Once he died, we kept in contact with Grandma Margaret, sending and receiving Christmas and birthday cards.
He didn’t keep in contact with Papa Sunny. I’m still not sure exactly why. But I’m too chicken to ask. One time, during a visit, Lora found a letter from Grandma Margaret practically begging him for pictures of all of us girls, her having never really seen or met Wrenn and Farron. So Lora and I covertly took pictures of the four of us during one of Robbie’s family picture frenzies and sent them to Grandma Margaret. Still I didn’t know why he was so adamant about remaining aloof from his own father.
I guess Mom thought I already knew the whole story, otherwise she probably wouldn’t have told me while really sharing gossip with Desi. I’m fuzzy on the exact details; all I really remember is that Papa Sunny was in the hospital; I think he’d broken his leg, and while he was on pain medication or otherwise incapacitated. Granny Leona had him committed and then ran off, taking her young son with her. Later she filed for divorce, got it, and remarried one Merton Ferguson, wealthy oil man and rancher. Papa Sunny then promised his son he’d leave everything to him as long as he didn’t change his last name. However, when he got older, he did adopt the
I couldn’t believe the cruelties that had been enacted within the small circle of my family, the pain they had dealt out to each other like the Flop, Turn and River in Texas Hold ‘Em. I always worried, in the back of my mind, that his actions, his cruelties and thoughtlessness could affect my own life, scar me forever, make me somehow unlovable and doomed to the same fate. Knowing the rest of this history, this legacy that I carry in my blood and in my bone, I’m now more afraid than ever that I am truly doomed to never have love, or, if I do have it, to lose it in some horribly painful way, one that I may even cause. No inherited money or oil wells for me; just a legacy of heartbreak and divorce. Maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to love. Maybe it’s too dangerous to love, at least for damaged people like me.
**
™
After 20 years worth of child-hugging, tear-collecting, secret-keeping, hope-listening, nightmare-chasing, playing, and machine washings, Minnie is a very different rabbit. Her fur has faded to a slightly dingy off-white. The only remnants of pink to be found are in some of the stitching in the corners where her ears and arms and legs and tail are joined, in the dim and faded and slightly shredding satin of her ears, and in her small, medium pink plastic nose, whose velveteen long worn away. There’s a large, gaping hole on the right side of her ear, where the satin meets the fur, a smaller one on her left at the bottom, and several places throughout that are slightly torn. There are two more holes in her right leg, and she’s balding in some spots, especially on her tail. And her eyes, well, I hardly even remember when they were last a bright blue. They began to fade when I was in Elementary school (though Mammaw and I diligently tried to paint them back on with a paint-by-numbers kit that didn’t quite match in color and didn’t last for more than two washings). Now they are a pale, milky white with only bare hints around the edges of their former glory, specks of blue and black in the creases of the buttons. My friends all say Minnie freaks them out with those white, sightless eyes. A possessed toy from some cheesy horror movie.
Maybe she is blind. Maybe that’s why she sees me so well; she doesn’t see all my outward faults. She doesn’t see my hair go flat or that I bite my nails. She doesn’t see my lack of make-up or that my shoes don’t always go with my outfit. She doesn’t see all my sarcasm or cattiness or heartlessness to people I don’t even know. She doesn’t see my imperfections, my impurities. Or maybe she does.
Maybe she sees everything but just doesn’t care. She loves me anyway, unconditionally, wholeheartedly. No reservations needed, no expectations. She sees everything and still loves me. Her eyes see everything despite being blind, the beautiful and the ugly, and nothing changes. Her love is constant, immutable. The truest love I have ever known. What I imagine in my heart of hearts Jesus’s love is like.
A couple of years ago, back in Morris dorm, Jacque and Kim decided to hide Minnie for April Fools Day while I was in the shower. I got into bed, ready to read a chapter in my book of the week before sleep, but I couldn’t find Minnie. So I got up and started to look for her. Under the bed, between the bed and the wall, at the end of the bed piled up in my dirty laundry and books, under Kim’s bed, on Jacque’s bed, in my closet, the living room, everywhere I could think of. I couldn’t find her. I grew frantic tearing up the scant area I called my own in my efforts to find her. I couldn’t go to sleep with her lost. And I couldn’t fathom that my roommates would hide her for some joke, some innocently malicious excuse for a prank the implications of which they could not know. But what else could have happened? I began to cry, sitting half-under my lofted bed with books and papers and pillows and comforter scattered everywhere. I just sat and cried, wishing she would just miraculously appear. After a few moments Kim came in and performed my miracle, retrieving a boot from the top of her wardrobe and pulling Minnie from inside, a quiet and contrite “April Fools” the only sound in the room before she retreated back into the living room/kitchen.
I sat, unbelieving, tears still rolling down my cheeks but now getting caught in Minnie’s fur where they belonged for a few moments before climbing into bed, pulling the comforter up to my chin, covering Minnie in her coveted spot, and turning my face to the wall, back to the room, allowing the sobs to come, now able to muffle them in Minnie’s fur. Jacque came in and accused me of sulking (what English majors we are), making too much out of a harmless prank; she couldn’t understand why it hurt me so much. She couldn’t understand the need I had for Minnie’s constant and irrevocable love, couldn’t understand that his favorite childhood torture technique was hiding Minnie until I was driven to tears, left sobbing quietly at his intentioned cruelties, couldn’t understand that I wasn’t crying because of her, but because of him. Kim apologized, hugging me and letting me cry on her shoulder for a moment; Jacque and I fought, keeping us all up until about
Finally, we calmed down, I explained that I knew they had never intended to hurt me and couldn’t know all the history of hurt I had never shared. We forgave, we hugged, and she kissed Minnie and promised to never hide her again.
I still sleep with Minnie. Sure, I’ll hide her from friends and roommates and overnight guests (though not Mom because she knows all the reasons why without us ever saying a word about it). Still, I tuck her into my pillowcase and smuggle her out when the lights are off and nobody’s watching. She finds the usual, ready spot for her tucked underneath my chin, comfy and cozy as can be, chasing away the ghosts of my fears that I’m damaged, that love will never find me, that I’ll turn out like him. She’s the one who replaces willingly lost fathers and tells me that I’m not unlovable. My closest friend.
Even now, he still calls Minnie “Rat” and makes threats to flush her or feed her to Shadow. His tenacity for resentment amazes me. Yes, it’s true that I’m twenty-two years old and still sleep with a stuffed animal (though no more formal blankey and pillow), but he still resents said stuffed animal. Twenty years later he still feels replaced. And Minnie still loves, absolutely, blindly, no reservations needed. __________________________________________________________________
and now to finish in my customary style a little diddy from the great Cole Porter "So In Love" from Kiss Me, Kate
"Strange, dear, but true, dear, When I'm close to you, dear, The stars fill the sky, So in love with you am I. Even without you, My arms fold about you, You know, darling, why, So in love with you am I. In love with the night mysterious, The night when you first were there, In love with my joy delirious, When I knew that you could care. So taunt me, and hurt me, Deceive me, desert me, I'm yours, till I die. So in love... So in love... So in love with you, my love... am I..."