A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [3]
Elinda could never come up with a clear, solid reason why she was there in the first place. No specific label or complicated acronym. “The simple way of expressing what I could have had is crazy,” she has told me. “But they wouldn’t label me crazy. I’ve got to fight my brain all the time now.”
When she left, she was worse than when she entered.
Saved
Matt told me a story once about how I almost got lost at the Medical Lake hospital when I was four. We had gone with Mom to visit Elinda and he was supposed to be watching me. I ran off somewhere, scampering around corners, hiding behind doors, trying not to laugh. Finally Matt found me, just before I walked into the outstretched arms of a drooling old woman in a tattered nightgown.
After Medical Lake
When Elinda turned twenty-four, she left Medical Lake and was married soon after. Joseph, her first husband, like Mom’s first husband, was a terrible mistake. He drank and smoked all day long and was physically and emotionally abusive. He treated Elinda like less than an animal and accepted money from friends who wanted to have sex with her. She became pregnant with the child of one of his friends and, despite her situation, wanted to keep the baby.
Elinda and Joseph were living in Pasco at the time, not far from Mom and Dad and the rest of us, across the bridge in Kennewick. I was just a toddler.
Mom discussed Elinda’s circumstances with Dad, knowing that Elinda would probably not be allowed to care for the baby herself. The baby was going to be half-black, and whether that was part of the reason or not, Dad refused to be a caregiver for another child.
When the baby, a girl, was born, Elinda was allowed to be a mother for a few days before the baby was taken away and given up for adoption.
Elinda’s troubled marriage soon came to an end. Joseph became more violent than usual and kicked her front teeth out and broke her nose. He told her that if she didn’t leave, he was going to kill her. So she left.
She served him with divorce papers after that, wanting to cut him out of her life, but he didn’t file the papers properly and thirty years later, after he died, she found out that they were never legally divorced.
Bird Whistles
One of my earliest memories of Elinda is the bird whistle trick. Matt and I had these plastic whistles that were shaped like birds. You would put water in them and blow into a hole by their tails and it would sound like the fluttering tweet of a bird. My sister was sitting on the front porch of our house, watching the traffic on Washington Street or maybe squinting at the giant neon cross of the Nazarene church across from us. Matt and I would hide around the corner and blow on the whistles. Elinda would whip her head around and shout, “Where’s that bird at? Birdie? Birdie birdie?”
Dad saw us through the window and shook his head. Mom finally came out and told us to knock it off.
Bedbugs
Elinda stayed with us sometimes at our house. She would sleep on the couch. One night, she awoke at 3:30 a.m. and felt Dad touching her. He didn’t say anything but she could smell alcohol on his breath. She didn’t know what to do and thought for a moment that maybe she was dreaming. The house was quiet and she felt paralyzed. He climbed on top of her. She decided that she could not scream because she didn’t want to wake up any of us kids.
I was probably four at the time. Matt and Mark and I were sleeping upstairs. I remember that every night in that house, Mom would tuck me in and say, “Good night.” Then I’d answer, “Sleep tight.” Then she’d say, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” We would repeat this, back and forth, even as she left my room and walked back down the stairs. Her voice answering my voice until I stopped saying, “Sleep tight.”
“Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
I did not know about what happened between Elinda and Dad until the day after his funeral. Mom wanted to have some one-on-one talks with her kids before we all scattered again. So she and I ended