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By Root 1126 0

I could see her sometimes. She explained those were popular shifts and gave other reasons why she would stay on the three p.m. to eleven p.m. I rarely saw her except on weekends, when she would often fry chicken in an old family skillet, which I loved taking cold in my lunch on Monday mornings. My sister and I occasionally bonded in our shared neglect. She could take good care of me, being protective and fun, letting me do her civics homework for her or be around her friends (both of which I loved), but she could also turn domineering and crabby, hollering at me from her bed to bring her a glass of something to drink so she could take her asthma medicine. I would take her water, but she didn’t want water. I’d take her milk, but she didn’t want milk, either. She wanted juice, and when I brought it, I would be released from my butler duties to resume whatever I had been doing that she had felt entitled to interrupt.

By now my mother and sister had intensified their pathological attachment to each other. They needed, despised, and loved each other desperately, and were often at each other’s throats. Sister constantly obsessed about Mom, how to make and keep peace and earn her approval, which even I could tell Mom would extend and withdraw on a whim in order to dominate and control her older daughter. After one typical period of them not getting along, which could include fistfights that I heard and watched from my bedroom, and after which my mother would show me her bruises, saying, “Look what your sister did to me,” my sister placed little pieces of paper all over the house, taped to doorjambs, creatively hidden inside cabinets, even in the washing machine. They all said, “Let’s get along.” Mom, coming in from I didn’t know where, saw them and imperiously decided to allow herself to be provisionally charmed. She progressed through the house, finding the notes, a smile on her face, until she came across some household chore Sister had left undone. The smile dropped off her face, she withdrew her approval, and they were fighting again within seconds.

There was a fragile peace when they practiced their music. When they were singing, I could hear them behind Mom’s closed bedroom door, collaborating, respecting each other. Without the music, I realized as an adult, there might not have been any good times at all.

Gradually, I went from being somewhat content in my isolation, able to self-soothe and put a happy face on things, to figuring out that my job was to stay out of the way or out of the house.

I often spent school nights with my best friend, Beth Inman, whose own mother, when she gave Beth and her brother their good-night and off-to-school hugs, wrapped her arms around me in a way that both pleased me and made me feel ashamed, because I needed the affection so badly.

Initially while on Del Rio, I tried to stay in touch with my dad. During my first autumn there, I recall we spoke on the phone once, and he said he’d like me to spend Thanksgiving with him. Although I was only eleven, I proceeded to research Greyhound bus schedules, finding the gas station in Franklin at which a bus made a stop, and how long the trip would be, and how much it would cost, for me to ride to Lexington. I presented my plan to Mom with confidence. I remember I was sitting on a cabinet, chatting away about my wish to see Dad, swinging my legs. My high spirits were met with a curt and imperious, “You do not spend Thanksgiving with your dad. You are coming to North Carolina with me and Larry, to meet his family.” My legs stopped swinging midair.

Larry Strickland was a handsome gospel singer for whom Mom had fallen hard as soon as she arrived in Tennessee. Larry soon moved in with us on Del Rio Pike, and Sister and I began calling him “Pop.”

The trip to North Carolina was an unmitigated disaster. I was depressed, for one. Mom and Pop were wildly sexually inappropriate in front of my sister and me while we were in the backseat during the long drive. Once there, Mom, intent on making a good impression on Pop’s folks, had me on a very short leash.