Violent Acres

I’m walking down the isle of a large, bright grocery store. I’m not paying much attention to my surroundings. Instead, I’m staring intently at my list. I decide to start my search in the dairy section, so I shuffle past the orange juice and the raw cookie dough in the search for eggs. Before I get there, I see the butter and I pause and peer at the labels. I’m looking for something unsalted. Just then, someone taps me on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” a very feminine voice asks, “But were you ever married to Derrick ______?”

I cringe when I hear my ex-husband’s name. Briefly, I consider denying it, but then I realize if she’s asking me, she probably already knows the truth anyway.

“A long time ago,” I say to the unfamiliar young lady.

“V!” she squeals, excitedly, “Don’t you recognize me? It’s me! Amanda!”

All I once, I do recognize her. The memories boil swiftly to the surface. I never knew Amanda as the adult she is now. Instead, I knew her as a small child with scrapped up knees and Popsicle grease adorning her wrists and arms. The very last time I saw her was from my old bedroom window in my Mother’s house as she helped the neighborhood kids clean up my used tissues and hide them away before my Mother saw them.

My first instinct is to throw my arms around Amanda and hug her fiercely. If she were still a child, I would have. But now she is a grown woman and I am not the type to hug adults.

Instead, I say, “Oh, Amanda. You look so beautiful!”

And she does. I am blown away by her beauty. She is a long way away from the gawky kid with the missing front teeth that I used to baby sit for back in the day.

Amanda thanks me for the compliment and volleys a few back my way. I brush them aside and urge her to tell me everything that happened. Everything, everything that I missed. Almost immediately, I regret my request for updates.

Amanda is a Mother of 3. This wouldn’t be so bad, mind you, if Amanda wasn’t also an unmarried, 21 year old girl living in government subsidized housing.

“But Amanda, you’re so young,” I blurt out before I can stop myself.

“I’ll be 22 next month,” she reminds me, as if that makes all the difference.

I ask about her younger sister, Pam. I have many bittersweet memories with Pam. Many times I would rock her to sleep, whispering made up stories into her tiny ear while both of our Mothers got drunk downstairs.

“Pam’s pregnant,” Amanda informs me.

“But she’s only….only….” I stutter.

“15,” Amanda smiles cheerfully, “I know that’s too young. But the baby is already in there. Nothing we can do but make the best of it, right?”

“Of course,” I agree. I try to keep smiling so Amanda doesn’t notice that my heart is breaking. “What about your brother? Matt?”

“Oh, he’s in jail,” she replies airily. She sees that I look stricken and she laughs a little. “Don’t worry! It’s not really serious. He’ll be out in 6 months.”

Six months in jail is nothing serious to Amanda. What kind of world did I leave behind?

Amanda tells me more about all the kids she grew up with. I have watched and cared for almost all of them, at one point in their young lives. I had too, there was no one else. Our parents all ran in the same drunken circles, pissing away their days in dark rooms with mirrors on the end tables covered in small piles of white powder while we, their children, ran the streets aimlessly.

I was the only one who knew the way we were all living was wrong. And I only knew it because I had lived a different way, a long time ago, when my Father was still alive. For 7 glorious years, I lived in a family where the parents asked where the children went before closing to the doors in their faces. I once lived in a family where I was still expected to be home for dinner.

The children of my Mother’s new friends did not have this luxury. They simply did know any other way of life. As a teenager, I became determined to take them under my wing. I felt it was my duty to teach them that there was another way. I spent every day of my life with those kids. Feeding them, dressing them, pounding on their doors every morning until their parents roused and let me in so I could make sure they made it to school every day. Summer days I would gather them all up and we would all hop into the back of Derrick’s truck so we could spend the day at the beach or the park. Half of the time, their parents didn’t even know that Derrick and I had taken them. However, once they found out, they didn’t even care. They were happy for the free babysitting.

But I abandoned every last one of those little kids for good after Derrick and I divorced.

My penance for this misdeed came in the form of Amanda, standing before me in the grocery store, updating me on the whereabouts of all of those little kids. The little girls are all teen Mothers. The little boys are all in and out of jail. Just to mix things up, there’s even a suicide or two thrown in just for good measure.

Bad news. It’s always bad news. I can’t stand it anymore. Constant, never ending bad news.

As I’m listening to Amanda, I’m trying my best to keep my face looking calm, although all I really want to do is sweep all the butter off of the shelves. I want to rip the cheese off of the little metal hooks and hurl them across the isle. I want to smash eggs, kick over displays and scream at old ladies. But Amanda does not need to see me morph into all the other adults in her life right before her very eyes, so I don’t. Instead, she needs me to listen to her and approve of her because there is no going back now. She needs me to hide the pity in my eyes and the judgment on my face lest she think it’s her I’m judging and not the bitch who failed to raise her.

That bitch could be her Mother or it could be me. My grief won’t let me allow either one of us completely off of the hook. I swallow the lump in my throat and start wondering how many cocktails I’ll need to blot out the memory of this trip to the grocery store.

Suddenly, Amanda pauses. She takes a deep breathe and asks the question whose answer she wanted desperately enough to tap me on the shoulder to obtain.

“V? Why didn’t you keep in touch….with anyone?”

I search my mind for an answer, but all I can think about is Jacob.

Jacob was a guy my age and we started hanging out after my marriage with Derrick officially went on the rocks. We were co-workers and although we hung out with the group often, we didn’t really interact much with each other at first. But one day, a mutual friend of ours walked up behind Jacob, grabbed his wrists, and playfully forced Jacob to pretend to box. Jacob responded by twisting away from our friend.

“Whoa…whoa…whoa…” he told him, “You’re cramping my style here.”

Something about the way Jacob said that line, smoothly and superiorly, appealed to me on some level and he immediately caught my eye. I found myself wanting to be around him all the time and he seemed to welcome my presence. After Derrick starting fooling around with Janice, my relationship with Jacob got a bit more intimate.

On the surface, Jacob and I were complete opposites. He was tall and gangly, with a clean shaven head and a goatee. His eyes were wide and contemplative and they set off full, expressive lips. Jacob wore trench coats way back before trench coats were considered cliché and sometimes he’d wear a long, dark green skirt underneath just to piss of the world. The music Jacob listened to was dark and moody and he toted around notebook full of drawings of dragons and swords dripping with blood.

Jacob called himself an artist and I, at 16, had a weak spot for boys who felt consumed by their pad and pen.

But as I said before, Jacob and I did not look right together. I was small and perky with pale skin and bright eyes. My clothing was casual and my hair was always swept up in a jaunty ponytail.

“You’re almost like a cheerleader,” Jacob would marvel.

“Say that again and I’ll never speak to you again,” I’d answer, completely serious.

However, where Jacob and I lacked in physical compatibility, we more than made up in mental affinity. Our childhoods, in particular, were both vaguely similar.

Jacob’s Father believed himself to be God.

Jacob was raised to believe he was Jesus. Apparently, it wasn’t until he was 13 years old that he that he figured out his Father was not a deity, but in fact, a psychopath. This realization fucked up his head and he could recount story after cynical story about the crazy shit his Father used to make him do in the name of his divine presence. Now while my Mother did not raise me to believe I was the second coming, she was insane in her own right and I could definitely hold my own in the Fucked Up Stories Department of our conversations. Jacob and I spent a lot of time discussing the pain of our childhoods.

At first, it was good to talk to Jacob. I felt like we understood each other and it’s always nice to find someone who understands. So many nights we’d stay up late, drinking coffee and listening to melancholy music and pouring our souls out to each other. We’d share our sadness like one might share a funny joke or a useful piece of knowledge.

But, after awhile, it quit feeling like we were sharing. It felt more like we were wallowing. All we ever talked about was pain, pain, and more pain. Every story and every anecdote was dressed discreetly in misery; every memory cut deeply and inspired tears. We cried and hugged and cried and hugged. With our fingers and our eyes, we desperately attempted to emphasis our anguish.

It suddenly occurred to me one day that we were feeding off of each other. I imagined that we were leeches, sucking the sadness from each other until we were big enough to pop. I conjured that imagine so many times in my mind that it got to the point where I couldn’t even look at Jacob without picturing little bloodsuckers attached to face.

The more time Jacob and I spent together, the more depressed we got. Sometimes, I’d struggle against it.

“It’s not normal to be unhappy all the time,” I’d insist.

“The world is fucked up,” he’d reply.

“I know it is. I know it is. But there’s gotta be something positive.”

“Fuck positive.”

If I would have stayed with Jacob, I would have spent my entire life crying. I’m convinced of that. So, I dumped him. At the time, I saw it as a form of self preservation. I figured the only way I could be positive was to surround myself with happy people.

I’ve spent my entire life seeking out polar opposites of myself to befriend.

This is what I’m thinking about, standing in the grocery store, while Amanda stares at me with eyes that are half accusing and half inquisitive.

“Why didn’t you keep in touch….with anyone?”

“Because you can’t,” I tell her, “You can’t keep in touch with anyone. If you stay around them, you’ll become them. You’ve got to get away.”

I know I’m not making sense, but she looks at me like she understands what I’m getting at.

“Not me,” she says, “I could never leave my friends and family behind.”

That hurts. That hurts so bad.

I blink back guilty tears before she can see them. I tell her she’s a good person, better than me, and I’m proud of her. She beams because this is what she really wants to hear. Somewhere, in the very back of her brain, she knows her life is a mess, but she still needs someone to tell her it’s OK even though it’s not.

Finally her boyfriend and her children catch up with her. All three of her children have scabby knees and Popsicle grease on their arms. Their hair is knotted as if it hasn’t been combed in weeks, and their clothes are tattered and dirty. The two littlest girls aren’t wearing shoes. Obviously, Amanda doesn’t have a teenage babysitter available to her who will give her children a bath and put their hair up in butterfly clips for her.

As Amanda’s family drags her away, I think about all the things I accomplished after abandoning her and all those other children years ago. What, exactly, have I gained?

I have more money. I have more time to myself. I have an education. I’m married. I’m clean and warm and safe. I fool myself into believing that because of this, I’m so different from the people I’ve left behind.

But, in clawing my way out of that pit, stepping on anyone and everyone who got in my way, oblivious to anyone’s needs but my own, how am I different again? How is abandoning little children who needed me and looked up to me any less selfish and evil than what their parents did to them?

Tonight, when I pour myself a drink, I will know the truth. Although I may be sitting in a much more comfortable chair, I will know that I am no different from the people I worked so hard to escape.

I am no different.

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