The Best American Essays 2011 Part 2

The last time I drove past, the house was empty. As far as I can remember it had always been rented, changing hands from one family to the next with the same regularity as the seasons. This was only a few years ago, and though I know the house hadn't been empty long and would not remain that way, in my mind it stands empty now. There is no dining table, no phone hanging from the wall. There is no sprinkler in the backyard, and no one to run through it.

My first daughter was born in the hospital where my nephew died. We lived in a small house at the time, on a small side street in a small town. When we brought my daughter home, my wife held her for days. At night we lay in bed together, the three of us, my daughter between us, her chest rising and falling rapidly, her lungs small and frail, and neither of us could sleep for fear of rolling over on her. Late at night I carried her to her crib, and my wife and I stood staring down at her. Later, when the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, I went out and stood in the backyard. It had snowed a few days earlier, and at some point I realized it was the anniversary of Keith's death, but I don't remember what I did there, or what I thought about, only that the stars were bright and the night was cold.

I have never told my wife this story. Lying in bed late at night I open my mouth to speak, then close it again. On the second floor above us, our daughters sleep. I wonder what they dream, if, when they get older, they will know the kind of fear that sometimes creeps into my heart.

When my first daughter was eighteen months old my wife came home from a routine doctor's visit crying. Our daughter's head was forming incorrectly, the doctors told her, the sutures misaligned. Her brain could be squeezed together, trapped between the bones of her skull. A few days later we took her for a CAT scan. My wife dug her fingernails into my arm as nurses slid our daughter, unconscious, into the machine. She was asleep for hours afterward. We sat in a little alcove, separated from the main room by a curtain. We could see the feet of nurses pa.s.sing outside, and every few minutes one would stick her head through the curtain and check on us.

I don't remember the details of that little room, or what my daughter was wearing. I remember her waking, and smiling, and the nurse coming to tell us that the CAT scan showed nothing abnormal. Afterward, we drove home, though I have forgotten what time of year it was, or how bright the snow might have been or if the sun was shining or if it was night, and sometimes I wonder how, if there had been something wrong, it would feel twenty years later. Would I have to dredge up the memories or would they come to me at times unbidden, moving from one to the next: her riding her tricycle in the driveway; shying away from the neighbor's dogs that barked at her; running through the sprinkler in the backyard?

There was no picture of the stepfather in the paper, just as there was no picture of Keith. What I have, I have had to recreate from memory. I hold hard to my recreation of the little house because it is easier than understanding or forgiveness: the truck idling in the driveway, the stepfather's hands opening and closing, the ice on the roads as I drove to the hospital.

But sometimes a different memory creeps in, no matter what I do to keep it out. It is Thanksgiving, four months before Keith's death. We have gathered at my grandmother's house. We have eaten until we are sick with food and now we lie back and watch football on TV, or else walk slowly in the yard to work off the food we have eaten. It is damp, and cool. It has rained the night before.

I am standing in the kitchen, looking out onto the backyard through the sliding gla.s.s door. The stepfather is playing with Keith. The stepfather holds his hands up and growls like a monster. Keith laughs and tries to get away but he totters and falls. He is fourteen months old and has just learned to walk and the world beneath him is still shaky and suspicious. But when he falls the stepfather scoops him up and holds Keith above his head and Keith squeals with delight as the stepfather laughs. The boy's eyes are bright. When he laughs, I can see his front two teeth, just coming in.

I wish I were more forgiving. I wish the world made more sense sometimes. I wish some memories did not drive wedges through others, that a moment could be defined in sharper terms-black or white, love or hate, good or bad. I watch the game of chase, laughing with them, until the stepfather turns and sees me. He offers a little wave, and I wave back.

My father has not spoken his grandson's name in twenty years. But sometimes, in the years after it happened, before I moved away and went to college and then started a family of my own, I'd come home late at night and find him smoking in the dark of the living room. He never spoke to me on these nights, just nodded his head as I pa.s.sed, the smell of his cigarette following me to my bedroom, where I would try to sleep. In bed, I'd think of him in there, smoke curling above him, headlights from the road occasionally sweeping the wall. I knew he was thinking of something. Some nights I'd climb out of bed and join him. We'd sit until very late, until morning was coming outside, both of us staring into whatever thoughts occupied us, whatever dreams we could not handle while asleep. We'd both be very quiet, listening to the silence gathering around us.

My family does not mention Keith's name. I wonder who visits his grave. I do not even know where it is. There was no graveside service, not until weeks later, when the state medical examiner had outlined the history of violence on his body. I could find out, could make the long drive back to Arkansas and stand some November with the wind in the trees and the clouds racing above me and look down at his name. But I wonder if I would only be doing it for me-if whatever comfort provided by the act would be for me alone-and it saddens me to suspect this about myself.

Six months after we moved to North Carolina I rose past midnight and dressed. It had been snowing all day, and earlier my wife and I had taken our daughters out to make snow angels and snowmen and chase each other with s...o...b..a.l.l.s. Late that night it was still snowing, the roads blanked out, everything bright in the reflected light. I walked to the university where I took graduate cla.s.ses. My youngest daughter was about the age Keith had been when he died. My oldest daughter was years older than he had ever been. On a small hill overlooking the soccer field, I knelt and watched the snow fall. There were no cars on the roads, no sounds pa.s.sing in the night. The lights in the dorms and buildings were out, and it was easy to think I was alone in all the world. In the cla.s.ses I teach, I have heard myself saying that winter often represents death, the world shriveling and dying, until spring comes and life bursts forth once again. When I get home I will lean over each of my daughters, my youngest still in her crib, and when my wife wakes and finds me there, I will not be able to explain any of it to her.

The stepfather was sent to prison in December. I do not how it was arranged, if he was forced to turn himself in, if family members stood and watched him go, watched the handcuffs put on, watched him loaded into the back of the waiting car. He might have been forced to surrender himself the night before and to spend his last night in jail, but I know none of this. My imagining of how this occurred comes from prison movies, where white vans wired with steel mesh roll through gates topped with concertina wire, and the veteran prisoners whistle at the newcomers, who look around wild-eyed and frightened, while a burly guard with a shaved head slaps a nightstick into his palm.

Nor can I imagine the inside of the prison without a movie or TV show creeping in: a stacked tier where burning paper rains down on the normally stoic guards, or a yard where every s.p.a.ce belongs to one gang or another, and even standing in the wrong place can lead to a violent attack, and though I was raised by forgiving people there are times when I feel he deserves a violent place, that there should be no forgiveness.

But at other times I can begin to find sympathy for him, if not exactly forgiveness. I see him sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows propped on his knees, staring at the wall. Or shuffling through the prison yard alone on a cold day in early February, or waking up in the middle of the night to a m.u.f.fled sob, what might be a strange sound in a world of violent men, and wondering if he had made it.

I was the first to hold my oldest daughter, before the doctor, before my wife. We were on the fifth or sixth floor of the hospital, and I could see the city stretched out below, dingy in winter but ringed with blue hills all around. Her eyes were not open and she was crying as only a newborn can, but I held her near the window as if to show her the world she had come into.

The first year of her life is chronicled in pictures, and in each one I am holding her, or my wife is, or my mother or father or brother, each of us with a hand cupped gently under her head. She grows larger in each one, until she is standing, holding on to the edge of a chair or the coffee table, then walking unsteadily from parent to parent. There are pictures of her fine blond curls, of her riding a tricycle in the driveway, of her standing by a j.a.panese maple I planted in our front yard.

While she is growing, my mother comes to our house every day to see her. My father makes strange faces at her and babbles like an idiot, something I have never seen him do. When I make fun of him for it, he tells me to shut up, then hugs me with enough strength to compress my ribs and kisses me on the forehead, as if I am two years old. When we move to North Carolina, my parents fly in three or four times a year. By this time my wife and I have a second daughter, and our oldest starts kindergarten. We stand outside one hot August morning and watch her get on the bus. As the bus pulls away, my wife cries for several minutes, holding our youngest and kissing her repeatedly.

When they are gone sometimes, when the morning is quiet, when my parents have not flown in unexpectedly, when I am turning some old memory over and over, trying to make sense of it, I dig through an old s...o...b..x of photos. I go through the pictures one by one, seeing the linear and vertical progression of my daughters' lives, or myself, looking slightly older in each one, yet somehow less wise as the years go past.

In the pictures in my mind I see a house, a carport, a man coming home from work. His stepson is crying. The man is tired. He wants a drink and to sit in front of the TV, but the child is crying. The rattle doesn't work. The cartoons the child watches don't work either. The teething ring, the blue one with fishes on it, also does not work, so he reaches for the child, and what were cries before become something else entirely. Outside, the crunch of ice under tires.

Once before my nephew's death his stepfather brought him into the grocery store where I worked, near closing time one night. Keith was crying, throwing his head back and screaming, and the stepfather had little idea what to do.

I was a teenage boy then, and many years later, I would grow up to be a writer who spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the past. The stepfather looked frustrated or angry or even lost, so I held out my arms and Keith came to me and stopped crying. There were few people in the store, so I wandered around talking to him while his stepfather bought cigarettes. He smelled fresh and clean and I thought we had something in common, though at the time I couldn't put a name to it, couldn't see that what we had in common was the life that lay ahead of us, both of them just beginning. In a few years I would be a young father holding a daughter for the first time, worried and scared for all the things in the world that could happen to her, but of course I knew none of that then. Winter had just set in and the dark came early and no one knew Keith had only a few months to live, and when I handed him back to his stepfather he started crying again, though it would have been impossible, I am sure, to have known the reason why.

Beds.

Toi Derricotte.

FROM Creative Nonfiction.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside us in the absence of an empathetic witness.

-Peter Levine, The Unspoken Voice.

I.

THE FIRST WAS A Ba.s.sINET. I don't remember what it was made of; I think it was one of those big white wicker baskets with wheels. When I couldn't sleep at night, my father would drag it into the kitchen. It was winter. He'd light the gas oven. I remember the room's stuffiness, the acrid bite of cold and fumes.

My father didn't like crying. He said I was doing it to get attention. He didn't like my mother teaching me that I could cry and get attention. Nothing was wrong with me, and even if I was hungry, it wasn't time to eat. Sometimes I screamed for hours, and my father-I do remember this-would push his chair up to the lip of the ba.s.sinet and smoke, as if he were keeping me company.

After a few nights, he had broken me. I stopped crying. But when he put the bottle to my lips, I didn't want it. I was too exhausted to drink.

II.

My second was a crib in the corner of my parents' room. We moved to the attic when I was eighteen months old, so it must have been before that. I still didn't sleep at night. I'd see a huge gray monster outside the window, swaying toward me and side to side. I was afraid that any moment it would swoop in and get me. But I couldn't wake my parents. What if it wasn't real but only the huge blue spruce outside the window? If I woke them for nothing my father would be angry. I was more afraid of my father than I was of the monster. If I just kept watching, it couldn't get me.

III.

My aunt brought home a present for me every day when she came from work. I'd wait by the kitchen door as soon as I could walk. Sometimes she'd fish down in her pocketbook, and the only thing she could find was a Tums, which she called candy. But mostly she'd bring colored paper and pencils from the printing press where she worked.

When I was two or three, I began to draw things and to write my name. I wrote it backward for a long time: I-O-T. I drew houses, cars, money, and animals. I actually believed everything I drew was real; the house was a real house, as real as the one we lived in. I held it in my hand. It belonged to me, like a chair or an apple. From then on, I did not understand my mother's sadness or my father's rage. If we could have whatever we wanted just by drawing it, there was nothing to miss or to long for. I tried to show them what I meant, but they shrugged it off, not seeing or believing.

(This sideways escape-the battle between my father's worst thought of me and this proof, this stream of something, questioned and found lacking, which must remain nearly invisible-pressed into what leaks out as involuntarily as urine, a message which must be pa.s.sed over the coals, raked, purified into a thin strand of unambiguous essence of the deep core.) IV.

When I was seven, we moved to the Forest Lodge. We lived in D12 on the fourth floor. My mother and father slept in the living room on a bed that came down out of the wall. I slept on a rollaway cot kept in the same closet and pulled out at night. I helped my mother roll it into a corner of the kitchen, push the kitchen table back, and open the cot, its sheets and blankets still tight. (Whatever I had, I kept nice. I had to. My bed was my bed, but it was in my mother's s.p.a.ce. If she needed the s.p.a.ce, my bed would go.) Someone had given me an easel-shaped blackboard with a sheet of clear plastic that you could pull down and paint on. In the morning, my mother would set it up in a small area between the dining room and the kitchen. She didn't mind if the colors spilled, if a few drops fell on the newsprint she had put down. After she scrubbed every Sat.u.r.day, she liked to put newspaper over the linoleum to keep it clean of our footprints. Wednesday, halfway through the week, she'd take the torn, dirty papers up, and underneath, the floor was like new.

V.

Most times I liked my food. I didn't mind eating until my daddy started making me clean my plate and either struck me off my chair if I didn't or lifted me up by my hair and held me midair if I was slow. He wanted me to eat faster; he didn't have all day.

He'd hold me off the floor until I pleaded. I'd sputter in fear and humiliation-I don't remember pain-but I had to b.u.t.ton up before he put me down to do exactly what he had told me to do, fast.

Slowness was a sign of insubordination. If I missed a pea or a crumb, I was trying to outwit him. I must have thought he was stupid. And if I pleaded that I hadn't seen the pea, he'd know I was lying. 'Your story is so touching till it sounds like a lie."

I swallowed it down; I wiped that look off my face. But still he would notice my bottom lip beginning to quiver. This was a personal insult, as if I had taken a knife and put it to his face. If my brow wrinkled in a question-"Do you love me, Daddy? How could you hurt me like this?"-this implied I was pursuing my own version of the truth, as if I were his victim.

It was a war of wills, as he so clearly saw, and these were my attempts to subvert him, to make my will reign, to plant my flag.

He was the ruler of my body. I had to learn that. He had to be deep in me, deeper than instinct, like the commander of a submarine during times of war.

VI.

Thinking was the thing about me that most offended or hurt him, the thing he most wanted to kill. Just in case my mind might be heading in that direction, here was a stop sign, a warning: "Who do you think you are?" But the words weren't enough. They'd bubble out of him like some brew exploding from an escape hatch, a vortex that pulled in his whole body, his huge hands, which grabbed me up by my hair.

Where could I go? I was trapped in what my father thought I was thinking. I couldn't think. My thinking disappeared in case I had the wrong thought.

It was not the world that I needed to take in, but my father's voice. I had to see exactly what my father saw in me-and stay out of its way.

VII.

In the morning, I'd fold up my bed and put it away. On those days and nights when my father didn't come home, we didn't need the s.p.a.ce in the kitchen for breakfast or dinner, so we didn't put my bed away. I'd make it without a wrinkle, the pillow placed carefully on top, and it would stay in the little s.p.a.ce under the window.

Maybe the black phone had rung saying he'd be late. Or maybe she had put him out.

I didn't know how they slept in the same bed because they never touched. Once, I saw them kiss. Maybe it was her birthday or Mother's Day. They blushed when they saw I saw them.

VIII.

Those caught in such a vicious abuse-reactive cycle will not only continue to expose the animals they love to suffering merely to prove that they themselves can no longer be hurt, but they are also given to testing the boundaries of their own desensitization through various acts of self-mutilation. In short, such children can only achieve a sense of safety and empowerment by inflicting pain and suffering on themselves and others.

-Charles Siebert, "The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome" New York Times Magazine, June 11, 2010 I am trying to get as close as possible to the place in me where the change occurred: I had to take that voice in, become my father, the judge referred to before any dangerous self-a.s.sertion, any thought or feeling. I happened in reverse: My body took in the pummeling actions, which went down into my core. I ask myself first, before any love or joy or pa.s.sion, anything that might grow from me: "Who do you think you are?" I suppress the possibilities.

IX.

My mother used the small inheritance she received from her mother to put my father through embalming school. He moved to Chicago for the few months of training at Worsham, the college for black undertakers. She hoped to raise us up-her mother had been a cook-to become an undertaker's wife, one of the highest positions of black society. But when he came back from the school, my father wouldn't take the mean five dollars a week his stepfather offered him to apprentice. He wouldn't swallow his pride. He also wouldn't take jobs offered by his stepfather's compet.i.tors. That too was a matter of pride, not to sell out the family name.

My father never did practice undertaking for a living. Though sometimes, when I was young, friends would ask him to embalm someone they loved and my father would acquiesce. He would enter the embalming room at Webster's Funeral Home, put on the robe, take up the tools, and his stepfather would step back. His reputation grew in this way. People who saw the bodies he had worked on-especially the body of the beautiful and wealthy Elsie Roxborough, who died by her own hand and was buried in a head-to-foot gla.s.s casket like Sleeping Beauty-marveled at his art and agreed he had the best touch of anyone.

People praised him for conducting the most elegant service; for knowing exactly what to say to comfort the bereaved, for holding their arms and escorting them to the first funeral car, for convincing those who needed to cry that it was all right, yet knowing too how to quiet them so there were no embarra.s.sing "shows."

My father knew the workings of the heart; that's why so many people-my grandmother; his stepfather; and even his best friend Rad, whose heart he had crushed-loved him even after he let them down completely and many times, even after he abandoned them or did the meanest things. My father was with each of them, holding their hands, when they died. My handsome, charming father, the ultimate lover, the ultimate knower of the heart.

X.

My father knew all about the body. He had learned in embalming school. For a while after his mother died, he stopped smoking and drinking and came home at night. He'd get out the huge leather-bound dictionary (Webster's -the same as our last name!) that my grandmother had given him when he graduated. He would open it to a picture of the bones in the middle of the book, which had three see-through overlays: on the first, the blue muscles; on the second, the red blood vessels; and finally, on the third, the white nerves.

He loved the body, loved knowing how things worked. He taught me the longest name of a muscle, the sternocleidomastoid, a cradle or hammock that was strung between the sternum and mastoid. He'd amaze me with long, multisyllabic words; then he'd test me on the spelling.

My father always explained. He always showed me the little smear on the plate that I had set to drain before he'd make me do all the dishes over again. He'd explain how he had studied hard so he knew where to hit me and not leave a single mark. He'd brag about it. He wanted me to appreciate the quality of his work. Like any good teacher, he wanted to pa.s.s it down.

XI.

During the summer when my mother and aunt were cleaning and wanted me out of the house, I would go out to the side of the house with a fly swatter and command the flies not to land on my wall. There were hundreds of flies, and though I told them not to, they continued to land. I don't think I said it out loud. I think I said it-screamed it, really-in my mind. Sometimes I believed that the things in the world heard your thoughts, the way G.o.d heard your prayers. When I was very young, not even out of my crib, I'd ask the shades to blow a certain way to prove they had heard me.

The flies were disobeying me. Whenever one landed, I would go after it with the fly swatter. I was furious that they would do what I had commanded them not to. I knew they understood, or would understand finally. I killed tens, hundreds-didn't they see?-but they wouldn't stop.

I knew I was murderous, and yet, was it murder to kill flies? My aunt and mother never stopped me.

XII.

Before my grandmother died, when I was ten, she had three dogs. Each had a short life. Patsy was the "good" dog, who died of a chicken bone in her stomach, and Smokey was the "bad" dog who growled at people and would jump over the second-story banister on the porch and walk around on the outside of the rail. When my grandmother and grandfather were downstairs in the undertaking parlor, they would leave me alone with Smokey. I was about seven, and I had learned the voice the nuns used to say cruel things to the children who were slow. Sometimes the nuns. .h.i.t those children over the knuckles with a ruler, but mostly they just humiliated them, made them sit in the back and never called on them to do errands. I tried to teach Smokey to stay behind the gate to the pantry. I would open the gate and tell him to stay, and when he went out in the kitchen, I'd hit him with his leash. I believe I hit him hard, maybe as hard as my father hit me. I wanted to feel that power.

I did this two, three, or four times, and though it seems impossible that my grandparents didn't know, no one stopped me. One time I came over, and my grandmother said Smokey had escaped, jumped over the second-story banister to the street, and didn't die but ran away. He was never seen again. Was he that desperate to get away? I felt sad and responsible. I felt glad.

XIII.

I was nine when we moved to a bigger apartment on the first floor. Now my father had only one flight to carry me up by my hair. He didn't mind going public-the stairs were right in the lobby-but he refused to allow me to scream in terror when he grabbed me. Not because he was afraid people would see. My screaming made him furious because I knew he was only going to carry me up the stairs and scream at me, only beat me on the thighs and calves (where it wouldn't show), and only until I made every look of pain, confusion, and fury disappear from my face. He knew I knew that. So what was all that broadcasting, as if something really bad was going to happen, as if he was going to kill me?

XIV.

Life is something you have to get used to: what is normal in a house, the bottom line, what is taken for granted. I always had good food. Our house was clean. My mother was tired and sad most of the time. My mother spent most of her day cleaning.

We had a kitchen with a little dining s.p.a.ce, a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and two halls, one that led to the bathroom and the bedroom and one that led to the front door. There was a linen closet in the hall between the bedroom and the bathroom. My books and toys all went into a drawer that I had to straighten every Sat.u.r.day. There was a closet in the bedroom for my mother's clothes, a closet in the front hall for my father's, and a closet off the living room that held my mother's bed.

It was a huge metal apparatus that somehow swept out on a hinge. I can't imagine how my mother and I, as small as we were, brought it out and put it back every night and every morning, for my father was hardly ever there. We just grabbed on, exerted a little force, and pulled it straight toward us. It seemed to glide by itself, swinging outward around the corner; then it would stand up, rocking, balancing, until we pulled it down.

XV.

My father and I shared the small bedroom, and my mother slept on the pullout in the living room so that she wouldn't wake us when she got dressed in the morning to go to her new job. We slept in twin beds she had bought us, pushed up close together.

I had special things given to me, special things she paid for: the expensive toys I got for Christmas that took a whole year to pay for and the clothes I wore from Himelhoch's while my mother wore an old plaid coat for eleven years. Now I was a big girl moving from a little cot in the kitchen to my own bed in a bedroom. My father and I always got the best.

XVI.

My mother shopped after work every Thursday, so my father would come home and fix dinner for me. He'd stop at Fadell's Market and get a big steak with a bone in it. He'd bring it home and unwrap the brown paper, slowly, savoring one corner at a time, like someone doing a striptease or opening a trove of stolen diamonds. He'd brag about how much money he had spent. He'd broil it right up next to the flame, spattering grease, fire, and smoke, only a couple of minutes on each side, cooked still b.l.o.o.d.y, nearly raw, the way we liked it, he said-different from my mother. He'd say he liked it just knocked over the head with a hammer and dragged over a hot skillet. His eyebrows would go wild, and he'd rub his hands together like a fly.

XVII.

Once my father took me to the movies. We walked downtown to the Fox Theater on one unusually warm Thursday evening during my Christmas vacation to see Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary's. My father frequently promised things he didn't deliver, like the time he promised to come home and pray the family rosary every night for a week when I carried the huge statue of the Virgin home in a box as big as a violin case. He never came home once. When I turned the Virgin back in at school, I had to lie to the nun. After that, I rarely asked for anything. But going to the movies was his idea.

I was never happier than when I was with my father and he was in a good mood. He liked to tease me and make me laugh. He was so handsome that I felt proud when people noticed us. I thought they were thinking that my father really enjoyed me, that I was a very special girl. I acted like a special girl, happy and pretty, until I almost believed it. I had dressed up, and we stopped for a Coney Island and caramel corn, which were his favorites.

XVIII.

By this time, my father didn't come home most nights. Sometimes he and my mother wouldn't speak to each other for months. Sometimes they wouldn't even speak to me when we were in the house together, as if we had to be quiet, like in a church, and respect their hatred for each other.

My father thought I hated him like my mother did or else he didn't think I was worth talking to, for he'd often go months without speaking even when we were in the house alone.

I tried to make him change. I'd make up special names like "D-dats." "Hi, D-dats," I'd meet him at the door when he came home at night. I knew he liked to feel young and hip. I'd make my voice happy. I actually was happy when I was with him-I had to be! He could see inside me. He could tell my moods. My unhappiness blamed him.

Maybe all that silence and beating was because he thought n.o.body loved him, not my mother and not his mother. He told me how his mother had knocked him down when he was a grown man. He told me how my mother always picked up his ashtrays to wash them as soon as he put his cigarette out. I tried to make him feel loved. Sometimes we played "Step on a crack you break your mother's back" when we were coming home from his mother's house, the two of us in cahoots.

XIX.

Once, when I was ten or eleven, he came home for lunch, and I asked him if I could dance for him. I had seen Rita Hayworth dance the Dance of the Seven Veils. I had stayed home sick and practiced. I liked to dance on the bed so I could see myself in my mother's dressing table mirror.

I wore old see-through curtains and my mother's jewelry on my head like a crown. I must have had something underneath for I knew some things mustn't show. I thought maybe if he saw I was almost a woman and could do what beautiful women do, he might find a reason to love me.

At the end, I spun around and around until most of the drapes, towels, and my mother's nightgown fell to the floor. I don't remember what remained to cover me.

XX.