All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [92]
There were other, more disturbing memories from that time, though. The road from Lexington to Camp Wig was narrow, winding, with elevation changes, and had only a puny guardrail. Dad gave me rides on a borrowed motorcycle a few times, and I remember being very scared. The motorcycle did not have a backrest, and it felt as if the only thing preventing me from falling into the hollow, as we tipped from side to side, taking the curves, was the strength of my seven-year-old arms. To this day, I have an unreasonable fear of tipping. Nothing else, only tipping, and I know it is from being on that road. I am perfectly at ease in a car with my husband driving 170 miles an hour. I’ll sit cross-legged, giggling, popping Malteezes, a Scottish malted milk ball. I can go upside down on any roller coaster in the world (after multiple corn dogs, even). But I cannot ride a golf cart up a modestly sloping putting green or anything else that creates in me the sensation of tipping.
What happened after that year at Camp Wig was mainly lost to me. While I know facts, I don’t recall basic experiences. As I’ve said, my mother, sister, and I moved, without Dad, to Berea, an idyllic and creative town forty miles south of Lexington. But how did I land there? One day when we were visiting our grandparents, Mom came by and swooped us up. At our new home, Dad never came to visit, and no explanation was offered for his absence. He had vanished once more, establishing patterns of deeply traumatic, abrupt changes that scarred me. But once we began therapy, Dad informed me that Mom never told him we were moving. In a way, she had stolen us. He shared with me how he drove around central Kentucky feeling equal parts rage and despondency, looking for us until he found out weeks later where we lived. But he realized there was no point in confronting her about visiting us; she would just disappear with us again.
I had a strange physical experience as he described what had happened, a nonthinking, nonverbal sense of memory sluiced within my body. I felt my feet tingle on the floor on which they were placed, and a feeling of hyperreality buzzed through me, culminating in dizzy light-headedness. The more we talked, body memories such as this began to occur frequently, as my body confirmed that what my head was hearing made sense.
After our one year in Berea, in the lovely home on the hill, Mom’s next cross-country move was triggered by her mother asking her to testify against her dad in their divorce proceedings. Unable to figure out how to respond, how to set boundaries, she chose to flee.
My sister was furious at being uprooted from a place she had come to love, and she started acting out her anger on me during the drive to California. Mom and Uncle Mark had rented a U-Haul truck and laid a mattress in the back for our travel space for the 2,434–mile trip, propping open the rear door a foot to give us some air. During one long day of driving, in an inexplicable rage, my sister started climbing onto the high piles of furniture and boxes and jumping on me, then holding me down and licking my face until I was hysterical. Desperate for it to stop, I took off my small shirt and waved out the back of the trailer, trying to flag down some help. I was more afraid of my sister than of falling onto the interstate. Sister remembers that a state trooper pulled us over, and she received a humiliating spanking from our mild, kind uncle for being so cruel to me. I don’t remember most of it. I know it’s something she regrets deeply, and I have done what I can to help relieve her of her guilt. I regard her behavior, like that of every child, as a perfect reflection of the environment in which she was being raised. And just as I was in many ways not having my needs met, neither was she.
During our two years in Marin County, I don’t remember hearing from my father once. The few times I saw Dad at Mamaw and Papaw’s while living with them during summertime, I felt so awkward and