14. Hit Me Once
Any man will only ever hit me once, my mother said. Was that before or after my father kicked down my door in a rage and grabbed me by the shoulders and started shaking me? I have no idea. Both memories exist, separate and unconnected, in my mind. And yet I remember being about the same age when both things happened.
My father hit me more than once, of course, as fathers did in that time and place. To his credit, I never heard him say a disrespectful word to my mother; he hit us kids when he had completely lost control of himself. His violence revealed his weakness; it filled him with shame and self-loathing.
Of course, most things filled him with shame and self-loathing.
His father hit him because he thought it was the right thing to do. His violence revealed his strength, his authority, his control. His mother said what mothers said in that time and place: Go out in the backyard and get me a switch to beat you with.
Their parents hit them because they believed children were born sinful. Their violence revealed their virtue, their piety, their submission to God. They said what parents said in that time and place: Spare the rod and spoil the child. You have to beat the devil out of them.
So whatever our conscious ideas may be, generations of beatings are bred into us. Like pit bulls chained in the yard, rage oozes from our DNA.
Our instincts are bad.
To his credit, years later, my father told me about something that happened when I was too little to remember, maybe two or three.
I wanted you to do something and you wouldn’t do it, he said. And the way I was raised children were supposed to do what they were told. That’s what we thought then. So I started hitting you, he said.
To his credit, he volunteered this information. To his credit, he told me that he was sorry he had been so hard on me. He realized, to his credit, that I was sensitive, and that it might have been too much.
To his credit, he apologized.
You were crying and fighting, trying to pull away, he said. And then all of a sudden — you weren’t. All of a sudden you went limp, almost catatonic. And that’s when I realized I was hitting you too hard.
Of course, I have no memory of this.
Only my body has the memory of this.
My blood.
The memory of the door was broken, fragmented. My father and I pieced it together from our separate fragments. He remembered me calling him something, a name. I remember that the word was pathetic. I remember storming off to my room and slamming the door. I remember him kicking it down, splintering the doorframe. I remember the BOOM, the crash, the sound of splintering wood. He didn’t remember that. Which is odd, because of course, he was the one who later had to fix it. He bought a new molding strip, one that would match perfectly. He carefully nailed it, he sanded it, he painted it, he made it look like nothing had ever happened.
He remembered grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me, hard. I didn’t remember that. He remembered saying DON’T YOU EVER SPEAK TO ME THAT WAY AGAIN. I didn’t remember that.
But I wrote that line, that exact line, into a story, years later. I wrote it as fiction. I imagined it. I invented it. I made it up.
The whole thing began over a joke spoken in a low voice. I had tried to make a little joke, to say something funny, in the course of conversation. My father couldn’t quite hear it, so he turned and asked, “What did you say?”
I decided the joke wasn’t that funny, and being something of a perfectionist, I didn’t want to repeat it. “Nothing,” I said.
“What did you say?” he repeated, louder.
“Nothing,” I repeated, louder.
What I didn’t realize was that my father thought the joke was at his expense, that I was making fun of him, mocking him under my breath. So he repeated the question.
“WHAT DID YOU SAY?”
At this point the joke really didn’t seem funny.
“NOTHING,” I repeated.
We were head to head, will against will.
To his credit, my father tried to give me an accounting of the ways he had hurt me. He was too hard on me, he said. I was sensitive. Of course, he was sensitive too. And of course, he too had been hurt as a child. The usual things, his mother beating him with the switch from the yard, his father yanking him by the arm, lifting him off his feet, thundering in rage. His mother saying, don’t you know better than that.
No, my father said. I didn’t know better than that. I was a little kid. I didn’t know. The shame hurt worse than the beating. The shame circled in his brain, circling the drain, endlessly, endlessly.
To his credit, my father tried. He really tried. He tried to escape the depression, the panic, the endless rumination, the shame and self-laceration. He went to a psychiatrist on and off for thirty years.
Of course, I never really understood it until later, much later.
We were talking about the small town he grew up in, in eastern Kentucky, the mountains and rivers, the ragtag group of boys he ran with, his friends. It must have been nice to grow up in a place like that, I said. A small town, where everybody knows everybody else. Where you could all run free like that, all the adults looking out for all of the children.
Well, he said.
Every small town has its pervert.
And then he told me what happened.
What did your psychiatrist say about that? I asked. Did you tell her about that?
No, he said.
Why would I tell her about that.
The world is no damn good, says my father.
Compared to what, says my mother.
People are no damn good, says my father.
Compared to what, says my mother.
Here’s my question:
Where was my mother when my father broke down my door?
Did she see? Did she hear?
Did she say anything?
Did she say, put your hands on her again and I will leave you.
Did she say, touch her again and I will take the kids and leave you.
Did she say something?
Did she just look at him? At the broken door frame?
Did he know, on his own, without her saying anything?
Did the two of us just back away from each other, slowly, and then walk off, at an angle, like two grizzly bears, like two dogs?
We never spoke of it.
He never put his hands on me again.
He never got angry at me again, at all.
He tried to be as kind as he could. He helped me when he could.
He told me not to be so hard on myself.
And he carried on, continuing his process, slow, inexorable, steady, of breaking himself down, tearing himself apart, his own antibodies attacking his body, his own self disassembling his self, dismembering him, dismantling him, nerve by nerve, cell by cell, until finally there was nothing left.
He taught me how to do it.
Of course we didn’t know that at the time.
Neither of us knew that.
But his body taught my body how to do it.