By: A.T.Cross
When I was six years old, I had a little red wicker chair with my name painted across the back in yellow letters. I used to sit in it for hours, staring out my bedroom window.
When we’re young, it’s easy to misunderstand why a Lego piece down a heating vent deserves corporal punishment, or why a mother hamster with her newest brood will eat her young if you tap on the glass. It’s easy to lose sight of the possibility that it might not be your fault, but just a matter of instinct; nature playing out some twisted paradigm of faultless indiscretion.
I remember the day we left my mother’s apartment to live with my father and brand-new stepmother. Pop came to pick us up in his station wagon, a long blue chariot with room for our meager belongings. He loaded boxes while mom and I sat in her plush rocking chair for as long as it took to finish the loading. I slept in her arms. I’m sure, although I hate to admit it, that I cried. When at last they took me from her, I joined my little brother Phil and older sister Jen in the backseat of the station wagon. I sat directly behind our stepmother. She kept her window down a few inches, and I suffocated in the smell of a woman who was not my mother. She wore a lot of makeup, perfume, lipstick, and hair product. I’d never smelled anything like it. I hooked my pinky around the door lock and stared out the window. I watched the grass beside the highway, the lampposts sailing past, the pageant of proper change, and I was lost. To this day I get nauseous walking past makeup counters.
Phil and I shared a room and bunk beds. We were almost a year and a half apart, but we were the boys, and they treated us like a single insoluble entity. Seniority got me the top bunk, but that was about it. My sister got spoiled, Phil and I split the rest. I suppose he and I were the lucky ones. We bore our punishment together. Everything that Jen got came at a price that was hers alone to pay. The more my father tried to ease her suffering, the thicker our stepmother’s jealousy became, and her wrath was metered out in kind. If Phil and I got a solid spanking, Jennie got a hairbrush. If the boys got a belt, the girl got a wooden breadboard. Of the few things I remember from that time, I remember the day that the breadboard broke over Jennie’s ass. I remember our stepmother’s fury and her wrath, as if Jen had broken it on purpose. She flung the remaining half away and beat Jen mercilessly. I remember the screaming that was both of them, some hellish harmonic to the staccato rhythm of flesh and bone against flesh and bone. What I don’t remember is why we all deserved to be punished that day. Maybe we forgot to knock before walking into the bedroom or left the cap off the toothpaste. Somebody tapped on the glass and the mama hamster just had to eat her young.
To think back on the hours I’ve spent watching a world pass beyond a pane of glass, I have only the memories of the other. There was someone out there, out beyond the car window with my pinky gripping the lock, or from my little red chair, gazing past my bedroom window. He was bigger than me, everything that little boys look to in heroes, but with one great unforgivable exception. The boy I saw outside my windows was the one boy I knew that had wings.
I used to blame people for the struggle. I blamed my stepmother because she could slap the shit out of us one minute and sing bible hymns to Jesus later that day. I blamed my father because he was bigger than us, and he brought us into that monstrosity. I don’t blame either of them anymore. If we are victims by choice, then we were all victims in that house, every one of us. For whatever reason, nobody knew any better.
I’ve learned a lot about my father since then. When he was about six, his father beat him with a hunk of two by four and left him for dead. His brothers and sisters brought him home and nursed him back to health. Under the circumstances, I suppose it’s easy to understand why he couldn’t raise a hand to stop the violence. He learned fear even before he learned to read. It might also explain my little wooden sword and shield.
My father was a closet carpenter. He kept a small selection of tools in the garage. On the weekends he holed himself up in there, generally dinking around at a project that might take him several months to complete. For the most part, he built furniture, a giant dresser that barely fit up the stairs, or a coffee table that sat a few inches too high and wide to be of any real use in a social situation. I think that, despite his efforts in furniture building, the time spent in the garage was more escape than productivity. It was a chance to flee a house that was haunted to him.
It was during one those garage sessions that my father set about arming his offspring. In a rather inspired one day session he entrenched himself in the garage with the radio up loud. He worked over his table saw with a long piece of lumber, cutting it down into shorter lengths, and then sectioning a few of those into even smaller chunks. He wouldn’t tell Phil or me what he was making, but he told stories of angels as he worked. Not those fat, frilly Raphael cherubim, but the six-winged, Old Testament archangel emissary sort of stories, flaming swords and wrath of God and all.
By mid afternoon he gave us each a sword and a plywood shield. They were simple, blunt wooden tools. He didn’t bother to sand them much, but I guess they didn’t need much of a finish; just our own hunk of lumber to wield, and a decent mythology.
At the time, we didn’t understand mercy. In those most troubling moments, he was six years old, watching himself, and paralyzed with fear. The best he could do to clear his conscience was even the score by offering us our own child-sized two by four. But it didn’t stop the bad days. And so I was lost to a little red wicker chair, a place that I could watch some far too distant future, some winged child of the wind, perched merrily, or doing barrel rolls around lampposts. For every hour lost, I learned a hero. For every quick and easy merciful moment, I found my escape, watching a window, watching a boy who had wings.
We didn’t live there long. None of us remembers it well, but together we’ve pieced together a little over the years. My sister took the brunt of it. Her third grade teacher found bruises on her and called CPS. They took us to the cancer ward at Children’s orthopedic hospital. Doctors and psychologists poked at us. We sat on cold examination tables while they checked our bodies, and on plush couches putting together puzzles while they checked our heads. In between tests, we played with a bunch of bald kids. After a week, Mom came to pick us up and take us home.
A therapist once told me that victims of child abuse generally suffer from a mild form of posttraumatic stress disorder. Soldiers get the same thing after a war. For a while I believed it, and I decided that I would never have children, afraid that one day I might snap and start beating the hell out of them because they forgot to put the toilet seat down or something petty like that. Funny how easily fear affects us. It’s true that I have a mean streak, but like that blessed wooden armor, it is a righteous mean streak.
Years later, Phil and I stood in line at an airport concourse, waiting to catch a flight. It was a red eye back to Seattle for Christmas. Ahead of us, a man stood with two children. He talked on his cell phone while one of the kids clung to the hand railing, hanging, and swinging back and forth, knees brushing the floor. After a few minutes the kid bumped his dad’s leg. Without warning, the dad grabbed the kid by the arm, rattled him like a rag doll, and cuffed him twice with the hand that held the cell phone. I heard the sound of something solid hitting the kid’s skull above the hairline. Without thinking, I stepped forward and bumped into the man. He glanced up.
I glared and shook my head. “Don’t do that.”
“Mind your own fuckin’ business,” he said.
My brother spoke up beside me, edging over my shoulder. “You touch him again, and I’ll touch you.” My dear little brother was already a few years hard punk and had scars to prove it.
The man looked shocked. “Are you threatening me?” He let the kid go and stood up, facing us with his chest swollen.
An airport security officer watched us from a few feet away.
“Touch him again,” Phil said flatly, “and I will kick the holy Hell out of you.”
I didn’t look at Phil, but I recognized something in his voice, a sort of sick glee. My heart pounded wildly in my chest, waiting at the edge, anticipating the weightless fall just before my wings opened.
The man glared, but he turned forward again and inched away from the both of us.
When I glanced back, Phil shrugged and pulled his earphones back on. We followed the guy through line, and he never once looked back at us. Whatever I heard in my brother’s voice, that guy saw it in his eyes, and it was something dark enough to scare us all.
After we took off, I rested my forehead against the window, watching something in the cloud banks. I don’t know how long I sat like that.
Phil leaned over. “What’s out there?”
I shrugged.
“Flying?” He raised his eyebrows.
I nodded.
He smiled and didn’t say anything else about it.
Over the years, he and I have agreed on certain memories. They’re all somewhat suspect, though. When we’re together, telling stories, we try to stick to the facts, but most of the facts are long gone, and what remains isn’t exactly the world we wanted, but it’s a decent compromise. Like all history, the truth depends upon who is telling it. But to this day, I have fond and detailed memories of my life then, the cul-de-sac, the greenbelt, the whole damn neighborhood, from a hundred feet above it all. I remember blue sky. I remember the smell of the wind in my hair.
Andrew Tomacelli 