My mom wouldn’t let me get out of the car in the driveway. Not out in the open where the neighbors could see. Stay there, she hissed, slamming the car door and opening the garage. Once we were in the garage, I got out. I walked through the darkness and stepped into the brightness of our space-age living room with its aerodynamic, futuristic look. The ceiling slanted sharply upward and had been decorated with tiny colored rocks. Huge glass windows looked out on the Polynesian-themed backyard pool. The fireplace was set into a wall of giant rough white rocks. The furniture was sleek and silver.
My father stood by the fireplace, still dressed in his Frank Sinatra suit, holding a martini in one hand and a lit Camel cigarette in the other. The kind of cigarette John Wayne smoked—a good American smoke. He looked at me through his wire-and-tortoiseshell-framed glasses. So you’re back.
The doctors say she’s fine, Winston, my mother said.
Is she?
I should have told the old prick to go screw himself, but I just stood there, wilting like a flower beneath the punishment of his gaze. I knew now the price of making a spectacle. I was clear on who had the power in this world, and it wasn’t me.
She’s crying, for God’s sake.
I hadn’t even known it, not until he said it. But still I kept quiet.
I knew now what was expected of me.
* * *
When I came home from the loony bin, I was an untouchable. I had done the unthinkable in Rancho Flamingo—made a messy scene, embarrassed my parents—and after that, I was like some dangerous animal only allowed to live in your neighborhood at the end of a sturdy chain.
Nowadays, shows like yours and Dr. Phil’s tell people that you need to talk about the wounds you bear and the loads you carry. In my time, it was the opposite. Some things were never spoken of and my breakdown fell in that category. On the rare occasion when my mother did accidentally refer to my time away—which she tried never to do—it was called my vacation. The only time she ever looked me in the eye and said the word hospital was on the very first day I came home.
I remember setting the table for dinner that night, trying to grasp what I was supposed to be. I turned slowly to look at my mother, who was in the kitchen, stirring something. Chicken à la king, I think. Her hair, still brown then—dyed, I think—was a cap of carefully controlled curls that wouldn’t have looked good on anyone. Her face was what you’d call handsome today; sharp and just a little masculine, with a broad forehead and high cheekbones. She wore cat’s-eye black horned-rimmed glasses and a charcoal-gray sweater set. There was not an ounce of softness in her.
Mom? I said quietly, coming up beside her.
She cocked her head just enough to look at me. When life gives you lemons, Dorothy Jean, you make lemonade.
But he—
Enough, she snapped. I won’t hear about it. You have to forget. Forget all of it and you’ll learn to smile again in no time. As I have. Her eyes widened behind the lenses, pleaded with me. Please, Dorothy. Your father won’t put up with this.
I couldn’t tell if she wanted to help me and didn’t know how or if she didn’t care. What I did know was that if I told the truth again, or showed my pain in any way, my father would send me away and she would let him do it.
And there were worse places than where I’d been. I knew that now. There had been talk in the hospital from kids with eyes as blank as chalkboards and shaking hands, talk of ice-water baths and much worse. Lobotomies.
I understood.
* * *
That night, without even changing clothes, I climbed into my little-girl bed and fell into a deep and troubled sleep.
He woke me up, of course. He must have been waiting all that time. While I was away, his anger had spread out tentacles and wound around everything, growing until I could see how it was strangling him. I had humiliated him with my “lies. ”
He would teach me a lesson.
I told him I was sorry—a terrible mistake. He burned me with a cigarette and told me to keep my mouth shut. I just stared at him. It made him even angrier, my silence. But it was all I had. I’d learned my lesson, remember. I couldn’t stop him from hurting me, but when he looked at me that night, he saw something new, too. I might tell on him again. Girls have babies, you know, I whispered softly. Proof.
He backed away and slammed the door shut. It was the last time he came to my bed, but not the last time he hurt me. All I had to do was look at him and he hit me. And I lay in bed every night now, waiting, worrying, wondering when he would change his mind and go back to his old ways.
School was worse when I got back from the sanatorium, too.
I survived it, though. I kept my head down and ignored the pointing and the snickering. I was damaged goods and everyone knew it. There was an odd comfort in it. I no longer had to pretend.
My mother couldn’t stand the new me, with my baggy clothes and untended hair and sleepy eyes. Whenever she saw me, she would purse her lips and mutter, Ach, Dorothy Jean, have you no pride?
But I liked being on the outside, looking in. I saw so much more clearly.
We were poised on the cusp of a new world in California at the end of the plastic decade. The suburbs were opening up; forming a new American dream. Everything was spic-and-span, Mr. Clean, wash-and-wear. We had shopping malls with Tomorrowland-style rooftops, and hamburger drive-ins. As an outsider, I saw things with the clarity that distance provides. It wasn’t until I lost my way that I noticed the factions that inhabited our school hallways. There were the “it” kids, the popular ones who dressed in the latest fashion and popped gum bubbles as they talked to one another and drove their parents’ shiny new cars along the strip on Saturday night. They gathered in bubbling, laughing pods at Bob’s Big Boy and drove up and down the street at night, waving and racing and laughing. They were the kids the teachers loved; boys who threw the winning touchdowns and girls who talked of college and spent their parents’ money. They followed the rules, or seemed to, anyway, and to me they seemed golden somehow, as if their skin and hearts were impervious to the pains that assaulted me.