Beneath Her Smile

After Gramma died, I lived with a set of parents who were both unhappy. Mommy was still sad and I didn’t know why and Daddy missed his mother. Our house was quiet and yet I felt the tension of unspoken words. We pretended all was okay when we went out of the house or if someone came to visit. I was the middle child and the only sibling that could see that something was not right. No one said anything. We came home from school one day to find Mommy packing all of our things into boxes. “Mommy, what are you doing?” I looked at all the boxes in the dining room. Mommy looked like she’d been crying. “We are moving,” was all she said. “Moving? Where are we moving to? Will I have to go to another school?” I was very confused. Mommy didn’t look at me. She continued to wrap the dishes. “You’ll have to ask your father about that.” I couldn’t wait for Daddy to come home so I could see what all this was about. When I went to bed that night Daddy hadn’t arrived home yet. But the next morning in the kitchen and I ran up to him. “Daddy, why are we moving and where are we going?” “We are moving to a brand new city,” he said, “We're going to meet new people and it’s going to be so much fun!” He smiled as he patted the top of my head with the palm of his hand. I wasn’t so sure. I knew Mommy wasn’t so sure, either. Two days later we moved from a 4,000-square-foot mansion in the best part of Utica to a three-bedroom split level overlooking a busy street in the suburb of DeWitt. I started at my fourth elementary school, Genesee Hills. Overnight I left a world consisting of only Italian restaurants, delis, grocery stores, dry cleaners, doctors, tailors, and close family and entered a mostly white community that was completely foreign to me. My mother was overwhelmed. She didn’t want to let go of anything. Much of what was in that big house was suddenly crowded into the tiny house. There was just too much furniture and boxes for that little house. For about a month we climbed over things and had a hard time finding anything. The tiny cellar was so packed we couldn’t even walk down there. Of course, Mary Lou and Frankie no longer lived with us and we never saw Helen again. This was a very confusing time. There was no one to help Mommy. She rarely smiled. She always looked like she was ready to cry. I realized that while my neighborhood friends’ mothers all had friends, my mother had none. She rarely left the house. We’d been in the house about two months when an unexpected and unforgettable experience left me traumatized. Lying on my back on the bed in my room, all I felt was terror. Who was this woman on top of me, straddling me, pinning down my arms with her legs on either side? I couldn’t move. She slapped my face back and forth, over and over, as if she hated the very sight of me. “Liar!” My mother shouted with each slap. “Liar!” She was crying and her tears hit my face like sharp needles. I was too startled to cry. In her fury she accidentally cut the left side of my face with her diamond ring. It broke the skin just at the edge of my eye and drew blood. She stopped, gasped, and paused a second, as if she wasn’t sure what had happened. She got off me and ran into her room, slamming the door. I lay there stunned. This was not the mother I had grown to love. With shaky hands I gripped the fuzzy fibers of the pink chenille bedspread covering my twin bed in the room I shared with my sister. It was true. I had lied. I don’t remember what I’d lied about, but she was furious with me until she realized I was bleeding from the cut on my face. At that instant, whatever demon was driving her rage seemed to abandon her. Never before or since have I felt her fury so intensely. She was not my mother in that moment. She was a beast and I was helpless prey. When she left my room the only sound was the hum of the heater and the pounding of my terrorized heart. I was too afraid to move. We never talked about that painful scene. It was ignored as if it had never happened. But the scar on my face reminds me to this day of the first and last time I truly felt terror. I tell people it’s a chickenpox scar. I realize the irony: I lie when anyone asks about the scar my mother gave me when she hit me for telling a lie. My eight-year-old mind didn’t understand why she got so upset. Of course, looking back and knowing what I know now, I see that lying was a deep sore spot for her. She despised liars. I don’t think she was hitting me in the moment, I think she was hitting my father. The next morning the sound of bus #49 coming down the street made my heart lift and my eyes brighten. I inhaled and felt my heart pounding. The screech of brakes as it stopped at my corner encouraged me to smile. With a clank, the doors opened and Rusty, the driver, smiled wide and said, “Good morning, Sunshine!” I climbed the three steps onto the bus and sat alone in the first row, right behind him. I sat up straight. Rusty saw me. I was not invisible. I mattered. That morning I wanted to tell Rusty what happened the day before. I wanted to. But I didn’t. I kept it all to myself. I simply put the incident behind me and moved on.