Prologue About six months or so after my thirteenth birthday, my daddy changed into a monster. It was truly as if he woke up one morning with someone else in his body. We didn't take note of the actual day, because we all thought he was just in a bad mood, and everyone, especially someone who worked as hard as he did, deserved the right to have what Mama calls "a bad hair day." If my sister, Brenda, had one or Mama had one, or even I had one, the best advice was to steer clear, nod, walk away, or change the subject. The only thing was, we couldn't do any of that to Daddy. He had a way of focusing his eyes like tiny laser beams, and he always demanded complete attention. He wasn't to be ignored, and attempting to change the subject with him was like trying to step out of a speeding automobile.
Anyway, about this time, he stopped doing any fun things with us and started complaining daily about everything in sight. He never seemed to be able to get out of a bad mood or throw off this shroud of grouchiness. According to him, neither my older sister, Brenda, nor I could ever do anything right anymore, whether it was the way we made our beds, cleaned up our rooms, or helped Mama with her house chores. Mama started to call him Mr. Hyde from the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. No matter how she protested, it didn't seem to bother him, which disappointed and surprised my sister and me. Up until then, when Mama complained about something Daddy did, especially in relation to us, he softened. He would rather walk barefoot over hot coals than see her unhappy. She was
always our savior, but now she was like a fairy godmother who had lost her powers and her wings. She fell back to earth to wallow in the real world with the two of us. "It's like water off a duck's back," she muttered when he turned abruptly away from her or just left the room after she had protested about something he had said or done. "I might as well have addressed the wall. He was never like this, never," she said, wagging her head like someone who wanted to shake out what she had heard and what she had seen.
It became worse than that for her, however. Eventually, Mama cried a lot over Daddy's new ways and words when she thought we weren't looking. As a result of all this, the three of us changed. Brenda became Miss Angry Face, leaving her smile outside the front door whenever she came home from after-school activities, and I felt too numb and frightened most of the time, never knowing when Daddy would explode with another burst of complaints. That was the year Daddy started to criticize my weight, too. He looked at me with such displeasure in his eyes that I felt my insides twist, turn, and shrivel. I tried to turn away, but then came his words, which were like tiny knives poking at my heart.
"Your face looks like a balloon about to explode. Maybe we'll have to have your mouth sewn shut for a month and feed you through a straw like someone with a broken jaw," he said, bringing the blood so quickly into my cheeks I'm sure I looked as if I had a high fever.
It got so I was afraid to put my fork into anything on my plate. My hand actually shook, and my stomach tightened until I could barely breathe. A few times, I actually threw up everything I had eaten. Mama got very angry at him then. She widened her eyes and stretched her lips so thin they turned white, but even that didn't stop him. Brenda protested on my behalf, and when she did, Daddy turned his anger and criticism on her by saying, "What kind of a big sister are you? You should be on her back more than anyone and especially more than me. You know what it means to be physically fit and how being overweight can cause so many health problems."
Brenda was an excellent athlete. At five-foot-eleven in her junior year, she was the star of the girls' varsity basketball team and the girls' volleyball team. She had already broken all the school's scoring records. Her picture was almost always in the weekend paper's sports pages. Scouts had come from colleges to watch her play. There was talk that she might have an opportunity to play for the United States volleyball team in the Olympics. Other fathers attended the games and sat watching with proud smiles on their faces. About the time Daddy became our own Mr. Hyde, he stopped going altogether and then started to ridicule Brenda by telling her things like, "You're not going to be a professional athlete. Why waste your time?" He told her he thought her grades could be higher, even though she ran a good B+ average with all her extracurricular activities.
"If you didn't waste your time with all these games, you'd have As instead," he said. "It's about time you got serious about your life and stopped all this childish nonsense."
He had never called it that, had never tried to discourage her from participating.
When he spoke to her like this, Brenda's eyes would become glassy with tears, but she would not cry or respond. Sometimes, she could be harder than he was, and she would stand there as still and as cold as a petrified tree while he rained his lectures and complaints down around her. She looked as if she had turned off her ears and turned her eyes completely around. I cowered in the corner or ran up to my room, crying as much for her as I did for myself and Mama.
Because of all this, our family dinners turned into silent movies. The tinkle of glasses, dishes, and silverware was like thunder. Brenda wouldn't talk about her games anymore, and Mama was afraid to bring up any subject because Daddy would either be sarcastic or complain. He would sit there scowling or rubbing his temples. If Mama asked him what was wrong, he would just grunt and say, "Nothing, nothing. Don't start nagging me."
I kept my eyes down. I was afraid to breathe too loudly.
After dinner, Daddy often retreated as quickly as he could to his law office, claiming he had work he had to finish, and on weekdays he was gone before any of us had gotten up for breakfast. He never used to do that. Mornings were a happy time for us once. We greeted one another as though we had been apart for weeks. Soon there were days when he didn't come home at night at all, claiming he had to make trips to service clients or deal with business matters. It seemed he would find any excuse he could to avoid being with us, and when he had to be with us, he was there only the minimum amount of time possible. Although Mama was ashamed to tell us, there were nights when he didn't come to bed. Instead, he claimed he had fallen asleep in his office on the sofa.
At first, Mama thought that he had found a lover and he wanted to get rid of us. She theorized that in his eyes, we had become a burden, dragging him down into waters that aged and weakened him. She was sure he blamed us for every gray hair, every wrinkle, every new ache.
"Men go through their own sort of change of life," she rationalized. "It actually terrifies them. He'll get over it," she said. It sounded more like a prayer she wasn't getting answered, because neither Brenda nor I saw any signs of his getting over it. On the contrary, he was getting worse.
Mama spent hours and hours sitting in what we called her knitting chair, where she made our sweaters, gloves, and hats, only now she wasn't knitting. She was just staring at the wall or through the television set, no matter what we were all watching. She didn't laugh; she didn't cry. Her face, the face that people called the porcelain face, began to show tiny cracks around her eyes and her quivering lips. The sadder she became, the angrier Brenda grew, and the more frightened I was.
Eventually, we found out why Daddy had turned into Mr. Hyde. The revelation was a bright flash that lit up all our dark confusion. It was like lightning piercing the walls of our home and making the air sizzle around us. All of our lives were caught in mid-sentence. Our hearts tightened like fists in our chests. Even our tears were caught unaware and too far down, buried under layers of anger and disappointment, to come quickly enough to the surface. I thought the whole world had stopped in surprise and shock. Everything I had thought real turned out to be illusion, and everything I thought was just an illusion turned out to be real.
The hardest thing for us to learn and accept was that Daddy had done all he had done, said all the nasty things he had said, avoided us as much as he had avoided us because he loved us so much. To love someone so much that you would rather hurt them now than have them unhappy forever is a love so powerful it is beyond understanding.
Mama felt betrayed because he hadn't told her, Brenda hated herself for the things she had done and said to him, and I wondered what the difference really was between love and hate.
It took me a long time to find out, and I'm still not totally sure I know.
Copyright © 2005 by the Vanda General Partnership
