Originally dated Wednesday, March 21, 2007 -
In every story, the hero or heroine is faced with an antagonist. Sometimes in deep thinking books, the antagonist is the heroine itself. In less intellectual novels, the villain is a clearly defined and separate entity. But in both scenarios, the bad guy is or becomes apart of the hero’s psyche. Even when the villain is gone, the hero is left with the residue of evil inside. Even in real life, we are faced with villains outside and inside. They come in forms of annoyances like noisy neighbors or toxic friends. Sometimes they come in darker shades like attackers and rapists. Mine came in the form of a Catholic Great-Great Aunt.
My mom and I had stopped living our gypsy life and settled in a small town with my grandfather and his aunt. I was seven years old and ignorant of our family’s history and secrets but the initiation was quick and painful. Equipped with romance novels and a shrill, disobedient Hellhound, this woman planted the seeds of her power with speed. At first, it was her dog. I raced up the stairs to escape the sharp teeth of her dachshund as he nipped at my tender heels. As a once beloved child, I expected to be defended. “Don’t run up the stairs, Meghean, you sound like a herd of elephants,” the words dangled in the dust of my escape. I was assigned chores to dust and clean. As irritating as it was to a once favored child, I fluffed my weapons of feathered destruction against the enemy hordes of dust bunnies. My efforts met with criticism and finally my chores taken from me because I was an inadequate soldier. Jane Eyre once remarked how unaware children can be to the abuses of their elders. However I was aware of the sly references of her martyrdom and how selfish my mother and I were for not assisting her in the housework. I waged my silent war against her, doing as little as possible. I kept myself upstairs to avoid the arrows of her words, especially the words about my “ungrateful” mother.
It was not difficult for me to come to the conclusion that she did not like us. What I didn’t understand was the silence. Both my grandfather and my mother upheld their silent resentment. They bore her words and dragged their anger with them but never defended themselves or me. This became even more apparent when I brought a friend home to play with me. My antagonist refused to allow this in a home that was not her own. We were too loud to be indoors but should be in someone else’s home or outside like animals. I would not submit. A rebel dwelled within me even then. Even as my friend left, I roared and screamed for everyone to hear my rage. “I hate her, I hate her” I cried. I sobbed into my mom’s pillow, unable to be soothed by my mother’s sympathy.
“She’s a lonely, bitter woman,” my mother said. She told me of the story of her lost love who died in World War II and the married man that later broke her heart again. I was to feel sorry for her because she didn’t marry and have children. But I couldn’t. My grandfather came to me and said the same thing. She hated me because I was an illegitimate daughter. If I learned anything at all that day, I learned that simple fact. I was a bastard and must sympathetize with the righteous. No one would defend the bastard.
I swallowed my rage until it began to rot in the pit of my stomach. It left behind a stench that began to invade my dreams, causing them to haunt me in my waking life. As much as my mother loved me, I felt like an orphan. I became accustomed to hating the spinster that it became as second nature as breathing. As obvious as my hatred was to me, it never occurred to me until it later that she was the reason I left home. I remember the day before, I held my mother tightly knowing that I was going to leave her. A child does not think of forever, only today. The morning that followed, I had already packed a bag. I didn’t know where I was going but I knew I had to leave. I began to hear messages in sorrowful music, urging me to run away. The nerves in my tiny body quivered with the knowledge that I would suffocate beneath the weight of the spinster if I did not leave. No one else would defend me against her. I felt I had no other option. I woke up early, relieved that I would break from my silent prison. The warden appeared, complaining of the invisible Pop-Tart crumbs I was surely leaving behind. Something inside me began to splinter and break but I bore it, knowing this would be my last meal. I would no longer trouble her with my illegitimacy and the inevitable mess it left behind. I left that day under the pretense of going to school. They never saw me. Instead, I headed as far away from my home as possible, stopping at Burger King to sit and write. No one asked questions. I was invisible in my new life.
The freedom was exhilarating and terrifying. I felt like a freed convict. Every stranger was a potential threat, a hidden ally to the spinster. Anyone could turn me in. I chronicled my journey and quickly left before I was found. I have no idea how long it took for my mom to know I was gone but I knew it would be soon. I headed for the highway that led out of town. The walk was long and the air still bore the morning chill but I didn’t look back. A car pulled up to me and an older man offered me a ride. I made a small movement towards the open door but backed away from his hand as it reached towards me. “Come in,” he said, “You must be far from home.” His eyes looked innocent and he bore no traces of a villain and yet I hesitated. He was a stranger by every definition and I turned him away. Inside I knew what my head did not.
My journey left me in brooding thoughts of my survival. Food was no longer available to me in a fridge. I decided to shoplift a meal before I headed into the wilderness of the new world. I walked into a small roadside convenience store and wandered through, trying to gather the nerve to do something completely against my honest nature. The woman behind to counter looked at me. She knew me without saying a word. I don’t remember what she said to me but I do remember spontaneously sobbing into her arms. I think she may have said, “Are you lost?” I sat behind the counter and she gave me food. We talked about nothing in particular. She said, “I can tell you’re smart by the way you watch me with the register,” I didn’t understand what she meant but I was glad to be recognized. She reminded me of my mom which made me like her more. She asked me about home and why I wanted to leave it. I couldn’t come up with answer. I didn’t know why. I had been silent for so long I couldn’t speak the language anymore. I told her that I would go back home and I left. She willingly let me go.
I was off the highway by the time the police arrived. A man and a woman looked me over and asked me who I was. I planned to lie but I wasn’t able to. I’ve always been a bad liar. I let them usher me into the back like a criminal. The same song that urged me to run away was the same that played on the radio. As I look back, I wonder if the woman who was so willing to let me go called them when I left. How would they have found me in the small parking lot? I asked them to drop me off near the house next to mine. It felt too much like a prisoner being returned to their cell. My mom rushed outside in tears, scooping me up in her arms. I couldn’t help but cry with her.
However the spinster did not relent and no amount of therapy ever made me understand the hatred I had for her. I could no longer put my emotions into words but instead I stifled them until they choked on my rage. For years I schooled myself into the art of logic and reason in order to protect myself from her. It didn’t always work but I eventually killed the child inside to stop her from crying.
It was years later before I knew the story of my prison mates. My mother and my grandfather accused the spinster of driving me away. They knew better than I why I left. They spared her no sympathy and voiced their rage and sorrow. It wasn’t until later that I understood their love for me. We were prisoners of family obligation and duty. They grew up with the same empty words of, “Feel sorry for her, feel sorry for the one that wrongs you,” They swallowed their rage like me and killed their crying child. The spinster, too, was the same. Rules and obligation bound her to an unhappy life. I was an affront to those rules; I was born despite them. I was a reminder of what she could never touch or own herself. How my childish happiness must have twisted inside her like a knife for all those years. My mother, too, was a mockery of her self-imposed Hell. We lived in a symbiotic hatred of one another, waging war between the righteous and the right to sin. We are a legacy of guilt and duty. I recall the mountain of romance novels near her chair to replace the life she never led. I remember the toys she bought for children she never had. They lined her closet as a monument of her noble sacrifice. As deeply as I hate her, I see myself in her loneliness. I build the same monument inside with words unspoken, bearing the same secrets and carrying to same burden of duty. My greatest fear is to become my enemy and yet with each passing day, each lost opportunity, I see myself becoming colder. How long will it be until I see her face in the mirror? The girl that fled her captor, thwarting the authority that kept her there has never come home. I don’t know what’s left.
