My Dangerous Ally
Sissy’s great grandfather died at the Alamo. Her father was a Mason. She is an Eastern Star. She was also Mama’s third cousin, best friend, and she was my baby sitter. Mama was ten years older than Sissy. Sissy is ten years older than me. She used to come and stay with us during the summer and take care of me while Mama was at work.
When I was a toddler Sissy sat me on the washing machine while bouncing a red rubber ball to make me laugh. At one point she let go of me for a second to retrieve a stray bounce. When her steadying hand left my side, I fell off the washing machine and the top of my head hit the concrete floor first. It was a hard fall. Everybody was worried about a concussion. There was much discussion about whether I could have brain damage.
Sissy was relieved when I finally stopped crying. Everybody was relieved when I began to speak. Mama said I immediately began talking like an adult. I could speak in complete sentences, pronounce big words correctly, and I use them properly by the time I was two.
Uncle Eddie, Mama’s little brother, was in high school at the time. He enjoyed teaching me new words. He would also encourage me to go tell people things that surprised them and made everybody laugh, often much to the chagrin and embarrassment of my parents.
Instead of being praised for my superior articulation skills, I was frequently shamed for saying things that a child isn’t supposed to say. For example, one time Eddie told me it looked to him like the preacher’s wife forgot to comb the rat’s nest out of her hair, and he was afraid spiders were gonna crawl in the mess and lay eggs in it while she was asleep.
“Go ask Mrs. Heller if she forgot to comb her hair this week.” Eddie encouraged me.
Eager to please Eddie, as always, I hurried to find out.
“When was the last time you combed that rat’s nest out of your hair, Mrs. Heller?” I asked.
She looked at me with an amused expression on her face and said sternly, “I have you know I comb my hair every single morning, and today was no exception!”
“Well it’s a good thing!” I said. “People have been worried a spider might jump out of that mess on your head and bite somebody!”
The preacher and his wife looked at me stunned and didn’t know what to say.
Grandaddy yelled, “EDDIE!”
Mother was horrified. “Do you want me to give you a whipping?” She asked.
Memaw was mortified and apologized to Ms. Heller.
Daddy was steaming and muttering under his breath, “I swear to God I’m gonna kill that Eddie when nobody’s looking.”
Despite all the fun Eddie had playing with my articulation skills, people noticed something was different about me. I wasn’t like other children. Adults said I was mature for my age. Childhood games didn’t interest me much. Mama was always scolding me for letting my imagination run away with me. I had the tendency to be overly friendly, trusting, gullible, and excessively curious about things I was not allowed to know.
Mama knew it was important to keep a close eye on me. She would panic and get extremely angry if she didn’t know my exact whereabouts at all times. I was adventurous and didn’t understand why she wouldn’t let me out of her sight. If I disappeared for very long, there was always hell to pay when she figured out where I went. She would whip me in front of everybody for wandering off and scaring her to death. I was frequently embarrassed by her behavior. It always seemed to me like she was over-reacting.
I am a person who expected other people to be kind and tell the truth. Because that is what I do naturally. When I had yet to realize the usefulness and sometimes seeming necessity of lying, the concept of deception seemed odd and counter intuitive to me. To lie and risk getting caught in deception, did not make sense to me. Erring on the side of excessive trust has always gotten me in trouble. Practical jokers and liars consider me gullible and stupid. How strange that something like trust can cause so much suffering.
I was never very good at understanding jokes, either, even if someone explained them to me. I just didn’t see why some things were supposed to be funny.
“You don’t get that!?” My cousins would say, and try to explain.
“No. What’s funny about it?” I’d ask.
They would tell me again and explain in detail.
“I understand that, I just don’t see what’s funny about it.” I’d say.
“That IS why it’s funny!” They’d try to explain.
“But why?” I’d ask.
They would would laugh because I couldn’t get it, call me a genius, and say it was Sissy’s fault because she dropped me on my head when I was a baby. Everybody thought me falling off that washer was funnier than the jokes they were telling. The story about me falling on my head got told over and over again in my family. I was never quite sure why, but I laughed along with everybody. Not because I thought it was funny, but because I was embarrassed.
The only reason my sense of self-esteem wasn’t destroyed for being the family genius was because Sissy told me that geniuses are a whole lot smarter than everybody else, and that’s why it was so hard for me to relate. People have been calling me a genius all my life. Not just in my family. My friends have said it, too. I always took it as a compliment, until I was in my fifties. I was participating in a discussion on a social media forum when someone I admired and respected called me a genius.
As usual I said, “Thank you!”
“I didn’t intend that as a compliment, geniuses are retarded! Look it up!” V replied.
I was stunned. I couldn’t believe what I was reading and immediately looked up the word genius. That’s when the truth hit me. I’ve always been a stoic. It’s not easy for me to cry. Expressing grief wasn’t allowed in my family when I was growing up, unless someone died. I began to stuff my feelings under threat of punishment at an early age. I’m very good at it. It’s a useful skill. For the first time ever, I couldn’t stop crying when I realized that people had been calling me retarded all my life, and I didn’t even know it.
Despite all that, I still love my friends and family very much. Especially Sissy, who was my ally and defender when I was growing up. She did her very best, short of destroying her best friendship with my mother, to protect me from Mama’s “spare the rod spoil the child” wrathful parenting style. Sissy was the one who empathized with me, comforted me, and assured me that I was loved and lovable. Sissy gave me the support I needed to survive being raised by a parent who demanded perfection for my own good.
I always loved it when Sissy came to stay during the summer, even though something terrible always happened to me while she was there. One time everybody was sitting around the dinner table having supper. I was sitting in my high chair and accidentally knocked over my ice tea. Mama jerked me out of the high chair, gave me a whipping, and told me to be more careful. Watching me get a whipping made everybody uneasy, especially Sissy. When my punishment was over, the mess was cleaned up, and I was back in my high chair, everybody resumed eating very quietly and carefully. Sometimes being extra careful increases the odds of an accident happening. This time was no exception. Sissy reached for the ketchup and accidentally knocked over her ice tea, too! And it spilled right in my father’s lap.
Daddy was a practical joker who was always coming up with ways to make people laugh. He sat there quietly for a few seconds, looking down at his lap full of ice tea, thinking about what to do next. Sissy burst into tears and began apologizing profusely. Mama was complaining loudly about having another mess to clean up. Uncle Eddie and Sissy’s sister Suzy were watching with bated breath to see if Mama was going to give Sissy a whipping too. Daddy slowly and deliberately reached over, picked up his ice tea, and dumped it in Sissy’s lap. Suddenly everybody was laughing and having a good time.
This is another story my family enjoyed telling repeatedly when I was growing up. Why they thought it was so funny, too, remains a mystery to me. Apparently they didn’t know I was in shock from getting a whipping and totally numb when the food fight broke out. And the impression that lingered the strongest in my mind was not fun. It was heaving a long quivering sigh of grief when Mama put me to bed after supper that night. Living through that event made me sad. It changed me. It made me realize my fate is to live by a different set of rules than everybody else. I’ve done so with clandestine rebellion ever since.
Another time Mama had a bad migraine headache that was causing her to be especially hard on me. I couldn’t do anything right. Everything I did annoyed her. It was one of those sick headaches that affected her vision and made her throw up. The headache finally got so bad that she decided to take a valium and go to sleep for a while. When Mama was sleeping, Sissy told Eddie and Suzy she wanted to cast a spell of protection over me before Mama woke up. They thought that was good idea, too. Eddie found a piece of granite in the yard they could use to ground the ceremony. Suzy broke a branch off the willow tree to swish around me and cleanse the negative energy in the air. Sissy anointed me with her perfume. They sung the hymn, “A mighty fortress is our God!” Then prayed for angels to surround me forever, and protect me, and give me the strength to be more powerful than the anti-christ on a broom, so I could scare the devil out of anybody who ever intended to harm me. Apparently it worked. I’ve experienced many close calls in my life, but always some how managed to miraculously survive. I do indeed feel protected.
When Sissy turned sixteen, she had just learned how to drive. Mama let her to drive our car to the church and pick me up after vacation bible school was over. On our way home we had a wreck. They hadn’t invented car seats to keep little kids secure yet. I flew out of the passenger seat and hit my face on the dash board. Blood was gushing out of my nose. A lady was standing in her yard watering her flower beds and saw us crash. She came running as fast as she could with an ice pack to put on my nose. It hurt something awful.
They weren’t sure whether to call an ambulance and have me taken to the hospital, or what. I didn’t want the to go to the hospital because I was afraid they would put a cast on my nose. They called Mama and asked her what to do. When she arrived, my nose was no longer bleeding, so we just went home. By the time Daddy came home from work, my eyes were turning black. He laughed and said I looked like a raccoon. Mama asked if he thought they should take me to the hospital and have them look at my nose. He said there’s not much they can do about a broken nose, unless it’s crooked and needs to be straightened. But mine still looked pretty straight to him.
Sissy was a dangerous ally, but I never doubted her love. Sometimes people can’t help hurting those they care about the most, even if they don’t want to or mean to. Perhaps that is how life teaches us to forgive.