My Story, Part III

I need to talk here a little about my stepfather's background. He was the only son of parents who owned and worked a citrus grove which was very near where Walt Disney World is now but used to be the very middle of nowhere. And they were profoundly poor. C. ate almost everything between two slices of white bread because that's how he had been raised. White bread, especially day-old white bread, had been cheap and the family used that as a filler. I remember C. forcing me to put crunched up crackers in my chili, even though I insisted I didn't want any more food than the bowl of chili before me. He wouldn't let us have more than half a stick of gum at a time. He was afraid of being poor again, I am sure, although actually he himself did quite well, financially. He loved going to the grocery store. I'm sure it made him feel rich to be able to buy whatever food he wanted to buy but he always bought strangely junky food. Store-bought cakes and canned pig brains. Generic cans of vegetables with their black and white labels. As with the food-on-bread thing, I believe he took comfort not in a food's quality, but just in having a great amount of it on hand.

I have no idea how (the GI bill, probably) but he managed to go to college at Florida Southern in Lakeland and then got a masters at University of Florida, which is where he met my mother. He was, as I have said, very intelligent. I don't even know what his degree was in but he even got his PhD eventually, through the Nova Program.

I never knew his father but I knew his mother and she was, without a doubt, insane. She had that pack-rat illness, for one thing. Her house was a poorly kept-up shack filled to the very brim with old newspapers, rotting food, old magazines, dishes, every thing in the world that no one would keep. There was only a slim pathway from the front door to a single bed in the living room and from there to the kitchen which had no room to cook in. Everything else was stacks and bags and god only knows what. She kept the other doors of the house closed. By the time she had to be moved to a nursing home there was hardly any room on the bed for her to lie down on. It too, had been covered with detritus.

I remember the smell of that house. It smelled of rot and decay and nastiness. The woman smelled like her house. I doubt she ever bathed. She wore strange hats and her fingers were oddly pointed and she creeped me out. She was not only eccentric, she was ill and she stunk.
I feel certain that either she or C.'s father (or both) had abused him as a child. That's how these things go. This is not, to me, any sort of justification. I'll talk more about this later, but for now, let me say that I'm sure C.'s childhood was a horror of poverty, hunger, and insanity. And hard work.

It is something of a miracle that he rose from that and went on to attend school and get advanced degrees and says a lot about his determination and desire to succeed.

C. had another mother. One he loved and one I grew to love. We called her Granny Matthews and she had an old small home in Lakeland and C. had rented a room from her when he attended college there. She had taken him under her wing and given him what I am certain, was the first real home of his life. She had two sons of her own but it was no secret that she loved C. as much, if not more, than those two sons. She was a squat little woman and she loved to wear negligees while at home. The silky nylon ones. This makes her sound like she was perverse, but if she was, I never felt it. She just liked the way those negligees felt. Black ones, pink ones, green ones, red ones. The gowns and the robes. Maybe they made her feel like a queen and they certainly felt good when I hugged her.

And here's a funny (not ha-ha funny) thing- she had a granddaughter about my age, perhaps a little older, whom everyone agreed just loved C. They talked about how she sat on his lap, how much she loved being around him. I look back on that and I think he probably abused her, too, before C. met us.
I wonder, if she were asked now, how much she had loved him what her answer would be.

So that's an overview of this man and his upbringing. He'd never been married before but had been in several long-term relationships, I think. He was a quite-possibly brilliant man with a lot of ambition. He had never had children, but as I said, he seemed to love them.

In fact, when he met and courted my mother, he courted me as well. I was really learning to cook during that time and I remember making him chocolate chip cookies which he praised as being better than any he'd ever eaten. I learned to make chocolate pies because they were his favorite. He treated me like a little girlfriend. In fact, after he and Mother were married, he used to take me out on a yearly "date" for my birthday. (Oh Jesus. Did I just figure out why birthdays are so traumatic for me?) I would dress up and he'd take me to a fancy restaurant, just the two of us and he frequently gave me jewelry. Silver pins, I remember silver pins. He wrote me silly poems. I hated those birthday "dates." He would have "that look" about him the entire time and it felt so weird and wrong to be on a "date" with a supposed father. I was afraid of him by that time. I had no desire at all to be in his presence alone.

But again- what could I do? How could I explain to my mother why I didn't want to go out for my birthday. It made her so happy to see him dote on me and she thought it was wonderful and really, what mother wouldn't love to see the man she loves falling in love with her daughter? There was never any part of her, I'm sure, which found this disconcerting or weird. Having never been abused herself, she couldn't imagine it happening. She had worshipped and adored her father and he had doted on her. It was the way things were supposed to be.

And yet, things were not even close to the way things were supposed to be. Not one thing. Not one thing was right.

What a lot of people don't understand about sexual abuse is the emotional component of the abuse. Some people are NEVER touched, never raped, never anything at all physical but are, as they say, emotionally incested. The father treats the daughter as a little wife. And as we all know our Freud, little girls are quite apt to be in love with their fathers. I remember one of my daughters, when she was about two, actually standing between her daddy and me as we kissed and with one hand on each of our groin areas, pushed us apart. It was funny but it was telling.
And in healthy families, the child is loved but the the main relationship in the house is without a doubt the strong bond between the parents.

But it was not that way in our house where things were only getting stranger and stranger.

We moved to Gainesville that summer where Mother, still profoundly depressed, worked on her master's degree. My brother and I attended the P.K. Younge developmental research school. That was fine but the thing I loved was that there was a library and I almost fainted from the sheer number of books it held. It should have been a good summer but of course it was not. C. still found ways to get me alone and one day when I got home from school he wanted to show me something. He had that look about him and he showed me a magazine with pictures of naked women in it. "I just want you to see these things because I know that other kids are going to show them to you and I don't want you to be shocked," was his rationalization.
Even at the age of eleven, I knew this was bogus. I got out of the room as quickly as I could.

I remember one morning while Mother and my brother and I were having breakfast, he appeared in the doorway of the kitchen dressed in nothing but a pair of Mother's sheer bikini underwear. He had a sick, sheepish grin on his face and she exploded.
"C! What in the world are you doing?"
He mumbled something and went back to the bedroom to change and we all sat there in shock and then resumed eating our cereal as if nothing had happened.

A few years ago, I reminded my mother of this incident. And she said, "Oh, Mary. That never happened." My brother, too, has no memory of it.
And all I can say is- I do have a good imagination but not nearly good enough to come up with that scenerio.

All part of the pattern. Perhaps the preditor knows that what he's doing is wrong and almost hopes to be stopped. And the non-protecting parent ignores the signs, out of fear of change or disbelief or whatever. I don't know. I don't know what my mother was going through that summer after she'd lost that baby. How she managed to go to class, study and try to take care of us is beyond me.

But she did. Well, she managed to go to class and study. The taking-care part? Not so much.
And I continued to learn to cook, to take on chores to free her up for her studying and to be molested by her husband.

It was a lousy summer, even with that library.