Generals and Majors

Generals and Majors always seem so unhappy ‘less they got a war.”

Generals and Majors/XTC

My pre-teen mind couldn’t understand my mother’s sadness. I couldn’tunderstand these adults and the choices they made. How could this woman still love him after all the abuse? My mother, Rita, cried out for my father in every way after the divorce. The good and the horrid memories that she tried to make sense of. The grief dripped from her tongue like blood. Blood that she tasted with military repetition from my father’s large military hands. These hands fixed things and broke things. Regimented, controlling hands that folded sheets and tucked them properly while making the beds in the morning. Three small beds, one set of bunk beds, and one crib for Michael-Baby.

My memory serves me wrong; Michael-Baby, was already three, and he had a twin bed. I missed his crib; we were still a family then. We were a family ruled by fear, but still a unit. Before I started calling my mother by her first name, if only to get her attention. Before I took on the role of housekeeper and therapist. Be careful what you wish for, the devil you know, and the devil you don’t…we were soon to be in territory that had no obvious borders, no obvious enemies.

It was my birthday, October 30^th, 1979, and I waited for Rita to come home from the last day in court. Lucky thirteen I was, this day, and I saw the irony of it. The late afternoon lit every corner of the front room while I sat on the couch, wondering when it would end. Dust filtering in the sun’s rays at a sharp forty-five, dirty walls with the same paintings clinging to their rusty nails that hung with me straining from the weight they carried, waiting, praying that it was finally over.

Enter Rita, Rita’s lawyer, and my eldest cousin, Terry. It was as if the show was not what they expected, and I found it odd; the lack of celebration, it was more like a funeral procession. They looked like they had witnessed something beyond comprehension, shell-shocked. Their eyes drained, and their posture collapsed, knees slightly bent and about to give way. Each of them would take a few steps, then turn to the other and mumble something, then turn and take a few steps in another direction. Rita’s face strained with desperation, clutching files with her purse close to her chest. Her whole married life in those files, all nineteen years. I tried to assess the situation, I tried to debrief, but the murmuring and whispers were difficult to decode, and the adults kept swirling about. No one explained what had happened, and no one said happy birthday to me.

It was done. My father was no longer living in the house. It was quiet, empty. Fear was no longer the sludge water we waded through, waist deep, but there was a new kind of fear: the fear of what’s next. Our muscle memory hijacked us when we just wanted to be normal. We still jumped at the front door slamming. We still flinched when someone raised a hand to say hello. We still sidestepped and even ducked when a voice was raised. Yet, this new fear was just as debilitating because we did not know how to process it. We did not know what to do next. How to pay the bills or fix a clogged toilet. How to motivate the weed-smoking and the whiskey-drinking older brothers to snap out of it. How to get them to pull themselves up and stand tall, wash their damn hair, get it cut, look respectable, pay attention, stop dulling the senses for one lousy minute with the drug of the moment. How to manage my panic attacks to help Rita, how to stop my sister from having a meltdown in the middle of the store at the age of ten, looking like a seething five-year-old who wanted a Clark bar from the tier of candies at the checkout of the I.G.A. How to function when you are no longer in survival mode.

Rita had to get a job. Rita had to lead this late 1970s disheveled pack of six, aged eighteen to six. She was not mentally capable during this time, and neither were we. The oldest three boys were angry, so angry and confused by the lot they were dealt. The younger three, including me, were trying to escape the disease of apathy, trying to find something to occupy our young lives that was meaningful and safe.

A list of my siblings and me, according to our later diagnoses and misdiagnoses that were given to us in adulthood, along with nicknames our father gave us, is as follows:

1. Daniel Supreme with Chronic Anxiety and Depression
2. Paddy Joe with Chronic Anxiety, Depression, and Undiagnosed Asperger’s
3. Chris the Cracker Man with Alcoholism, ADHD, Anxiety, and Depression
4. I am Shellmire, Shelephant the Elephant, Millicent, Millibird,and several others with Chronic Anxiety and Depression
5. Bethel-Ethel with Bipolar Disorder and Undiagnosed Asperger’s
6. Michal-Baby, surviving, invisible, neglected, and surrounded by misery.

What a crew. The dust settled a few months later, and our leader, Rita, started to drink heavily. My mother would collapse every evening at the kitchen table with her bottle of Southern Comfort, head down, weeping. Rita loved that bottle; she loved the way it made her feel. It gave her the courage to say what she felt, over and over, without receiving a backhand to her small, yet full mouth. That caramel-colored honey on her tongue was better than reason or reality. Her remorse became a record for us, a song she would sing as if she wanted to be haunted by it. The song rang in my ears, it suffocated any joy that I could find. I never had friends over, I was too embarrassed by her soliloquy. My friends thought Rita was a sweet and empathetic woman, she made them laugh. I began to resent the constant reminder of the abuse and what it did to her and her children.

Rita had failed in her duty as a wife to keep the marriage together in the eyes of God. She would slur her intentions on me or whoever would listen. She would wave her small slender hands about accentuating her attempts to fix the damned union. She considered herself a devout Catholic, a woman who would never give up on her husband. Her idea of marriage was a hopeful illusion of two people who would share their lives, love for children, and create a happy family. But that was not how it went, and she could not accept this.

I sat there every evening at that ugly, mahogany brown, unsteady Formica table flanked by dirty brown paneling coated in nicotine. I sat there hating that table that my father would flip with a full dinner on it to put us in check when he was drunk. I sat there and held Rita’s hand with both of mine, trying to make her drink a cup of coffee, which she never did. Sitting in an unmatched chair across from her frail, little body curled inward on itself, I was trying to think of what to say to reach her. Not wanting to ruminate over what went wrong or how the rug was pulled out from underneath all of us. She knew this; why bring it up? Her brain was pickled with that tea-stained liquor; no sense in making her cry. The older ones disappeared when she fell apart. I faintly remember them blending into the dirty paneling and the dark recesses of the room. The shadows of them moved about quietly. The doors would creak and shut closed with a soft click as if they were never there.

She still loved him after everything that happened. She drank until she passed out. I would carry her petite frame to bed, change her, and wait to see if she would throw up. If she did, which happened often, I would clean her up, change her again along with the bedding, wash the dirty clothes and linens, and then clean up the kitchen once she was asleep. That is all that could be done; just clean up the mess. Clean up the broken bits, the shattered dreams, the illusion of life. Just clean it up and wipe it down. Make it less obvious, make it blend, and make it orderly and neat. That is what I did well. Manage the aftermath of the scene. Like a secret company coming in to clean up the blood, the splatter stains, the remains. That was my niche as a young person. I managed the bodily fluids, the sickness, and the unruly behavior. Rita was incapable, as she believed all people were innately good. She did not know how to deal with this cruel lesson. She looked at me one evening while I tried to help her and said, “You are just like your father.”

She kept saying it over and over.

“You are just like your father.”

“You are just like your father.”

“You are just like your father.”

“You are just like your father.”

She exhaled it, playing with the emphasis in a theatrical fervor. I could smell the sweet drink on her breath from across the table. Tears flowed quietly down my new teenage cheeks. I just sat there, afraid to blink, afraid to say a word. She hated me. She hated that I looked like him. I was tall and lean like him. I spoke like him. I acted like him. I handled everything like him. I was him. I was nothing like him, but to her, I was. I reminded her of everything she did not want to remember, I was a painful memory, not her daughter, not her child.

At that very moment, something inside me snapped. At that moment, I became detached from my surroundings, as if watching a war unfold. Tired, weary, bloodshot eyes seeing the flashes of gunfire, ears deadened by the mortar going off in rapid succession. Sweat beading from every pore, a sick taste in the mouth, the slow motion of time, and knowing it could not be stopped.

I never asked for this war, Rita. I was not going to fight a ghost any longer. I was not going to make another plan of attack to save her. I decided at that moment to retreat, there was nothing more I could do at the age of thirteen but wait to get out. I served in that house for five more years, then left to seek out how to live the life that I wanted. I had no idea how to do this, and the familiarity of remorse would revisit me again and again…like the haunting record that Rita made, worn in grooves, skipping over and over.