Worm Farm TKO

When men hit women.

(trigger warning: this post contains depictions of physical violence against women and children)

One of my favorite stories from childhood was the stuff of legends, or so I believed at the time.

I was around 10, and we were still living in the stately Tudor house Mother sold in order to uproot her four children like weeds from a manicured lawn and replant them in the lush, rich shit of worm beds. The pre-worm farm years carry some of our family’s most exciting stories, perhaps because young alcoholic parents are much more fun than the elderly, decrepit ones whose destiny is etched into the stars with every crushed Natural Light can.

The story goes like this: Every Friday night, Mother and Vietnam Stepdad would descend upon the North Dallas elite, Gatsby-esque Cipango Club while my brothers and I were left with a babysitter Mom found in the newspaper, a 65-year-old woman named Dorothy who smelled like ripe July garbage and whose shoeless feet shone black against the pale white swell of her ankles. 

One memorable evening, they were reveling in another high old time at the Cipango when a man bumped his chair against Mother’s. He did this two or three times, perhaps trying to adjust his seat to a more comfortable angle. Mother whispered to V.S., “Honey, that man keeps hitting my chair.” V.S. voiced no reply.

The next time the man’s chair nudged Mother’s, Vietnam Stepdad, with the ease and grace of an elderly Sensei, simply raised his right fist into the air and knocked all the man’s teeth out.

Legendary.

“I mean, they scattered across the floor!” Mother would squeal in girlish delight every time she told the tale. In my mind I could see teeth like bright white diamonds sparkling across the Cipango’s emerald shag floor. I never imagined how much blood must have sprayed across the room or what kind of animal sound the toothless man must have screamed. In fact, until I began writing this story, I have never actually thought about what that scene must have looked like. And this event happened almost fifty years ago. 

I don’t recall the story including any details of police, arrest, or jail time. Instead, I think V.S. just sat back down like Vito Corleone settling behind his desk with a lap cat. I see fellow club attendees, clad in glistening shades of gold polyester, applauding V.S. for administering justice with extreme prejudice. And that may be the way the whole thing shook down. It was the 1970s after all. 

I have always this story with glee. Unlike your boring old stepfather, mine merely lifted a fist in the air and teeth scattered everywhere. My mother was avenged. Maybe one day my prince would come and scatter some teeth for me.

                              ***
	Violence pervaded my childhood in the same way colds casually pass around each winter. To my knowledge, V.S. only hit me once, and it was a tiny spank on the rear when I was three and had, apparently, done something wrong. To hear him tell it: “Oh my God. You didn’t speak to me for a week. It broke my heart. I vowed never to hit you again.” I was probably 40 when I realized that my silence arose not from pique but from abject fear. And so, at the tender age of 3, I enrolled in the school of invisibility—as long as they don’t have to see or hear you, you will be safe. And you won’t be a nuisance like November colds and flu.

                            ***
	In fourth grade, Mrs. Walsh sent home a note paperclipped to some of my recent homework: “Julie’s handwriting is so tiny and pale that I can barely read it.” This alarmed my mother not one bit. “Julie. Write bigger,” was all she said as she strode out of the breakfast room, leaving my brothers and me alone with our bowls of Count Chocula.

                           ***
	V.S. loved me too much, in all the right and wrong ways, to ever hit me again, but that tenderness did not extend to Mother. After a groovy house party they threw in 1974, she stepped out of line somehow, and he broke her arm. I don’t know if I remember her in a cast, or I just imagine it. Decades later, to justify divorcing him, Mother would repeat, “He broke my arm. My arm!” If she were sitting next to me now, I would say, “Woman, you don’t need to justify divorcing that man. You need to justify why you stayed married so long.”

                                 ***
     I took my invisibility training to school, of course. Painfully shy, I would walk through the halls and neither make eye contact nor speak to anyone. My biggest fear, then and now, was to be an imposition. Saying hi to a classmate was tantamount to interrupting their very fine day with my unwelcome presence. Imagine my surprise, then, when I was 9 and my brother said, “Everyone at school thinks you’re a snob, Julie. You ignore everyone around you.” Mortification. How could I be a snob? How could I think that I was better than everyone else when I wasn’t even sure if I existed, or should exist? 

                              ***

My brother never talks about the worm farm unless I ask / goad him. Recently he told me a story about when he turned 15. He and Vietnam Stepdad were standing on the porch as V.S. dressed him down for yet another perceived failure—perhaps my brother had not watered the worms on time or stacked the hay properly…. Suddenly, Vietnam Stepdad punched him so hard that he somersaulted backwards over the porch rail. I have no memory of this. I mean, he must have come into the house bloody and dusty, right? Mother must have rushed to his side at some point, one would suspect. There was no privacy on the worm farm, so why can’t I pull this incident up in my mind? 

I recall neither the event nor the story of rectification that followed. Our elderly neighbor Merle heard what happened, and he marched down the white rock road to our trailer house. All 135 pounds of Merle bowed up against V.S. and bellowed, “I did not fight in Korea only to return home and see a young man treated like this!” V.S. cowered like a kicked dog, and my brother left home that very day to live with Merle’s family for the next year.

Despite how close my brother and I were, I have no memory of him being gone for an entire year. I love him tremendously, but I cannot recall how sorry I must have felt for him or how adrift my life must have felt in his absence. I take this as a personal failing.

Most disturbing to me is that Mother let a man hit her son and let said son move away for 12 months so that she and the rest of her children could live peacefully with a monster. 

Allow me to rephrase— Mother sacrificed her son to save her marriage at the risk of more of her children being beaten into flight. This made sense to me until I became a mother. Now I only have one question.

What the actual fuck?

                              ***

	Freshman year in college. I fell madly in love with a brooding sophomore named Jeremy, a French and philosophy double-major who smoked clove cigarettes. You get the picture already. He was magic. He really was. One night, like Romeo calling to Juliet on her balcony, Jeremy stood outside in the rain and tossed small stones against my dorm window until I stuck my head out. “Join me! Let’s take a walk.” I skipped down the stairs and met him with an eager kiss. 

	What I am about to tell you is the God’s honest truth. “Follow me. We will walk between the raindrops,” Jeremy said. Naturally, I believed him, and so we strolled a hundred yards to the central campus fountain and returned to my dorm. Bone dry. Rain poured steadily through the night, but we never got wet. I was breathless with love for this man.

     I don’t know why we began to argue after such a mystical experience, but we did. At one point, he raised his hand to me, about to hit me across the face. In a split second, I blocked with my forearm and bellowed with the ferocity of hell’s deepest demon, “NO!” He was caught off-guard, as was I. Where did that reaction come from in me? With the ease and grace of an elderly Sensei, he reached into his pants pocket and tossed three pennies at my feet. “There, you whore,” he spit, turning on his heel. 

	We dated five more months. To admit this overwhelms me with shame.
 
	But I loved violent men, right? The misty water-color memory of V.S. knocking out a mouth of teeth plus one of my earliest childhood movie memories cemented the bond. Dirty Harry, the Clint Eastwood crime drama, captivated and enraptured me. Oh, how I loved vigilante justice. When Harry shot the Scorpio killer and then stomped on his bloody knee to make him confess, I clapped my hands. What a show of command and power! I was probably 8 at the time.

                             ***
	I can say this much for the warm farm. I dropped out of invisibility school the minute I made cheerleader in ninth grade. Attending a very small high school dramatically increased the odds of me becoming something other than a wallflower. As I cheered every Friday night on the football sidelines, it was as though my life transformed into the world’s best teen TV show. I was popular! I was voted our chapter’s Future Farmers of America sweetheart! Boys, even senior boys, liked me! Goodbye, invisibility. Hello Charlie’s 4th Angel. I will never 100% begrudge the warm farm because those years in a small-town school filled me with the confidence I would need to get through the next 40 years. There would be no Dr. Steward without those pompoms.

                              ***

	Once, only once, a man hit me. Or should I say that I let a man hit me? I’m not sure which is the proper nomenclature. Years after the walking-in-the-rain incident, I swore I would never let a man even try to do me physical harm. This was the inviolate line in the sand. This vow is what separated me from Mother, and my survival often depended on believing I was, in no way, my mother’s daughter. 

	And yet. 

     I was old enough to know better. But there I was in a relationship with my soul mate. (I cannot describe to you the giant size of my eye-roll whenever I hear the stupid phrase soul mate now). We were fiercely simpatico, and I loved him with the heat of 1000 suns. One night he was driving us home from a party, and we began to argue, which was a rare occurrence. I snapped off some remark. Suddenly, with the ease and grace of an elderly Sensei, he simply swiped his right arm toward my passenger seat and smacked me square across the face. My glasses snapped and flew to the floor. The next morning, I woke with a black eye—a furious bruise that seeped black and blue around my eye and down my face like the fingers of the Mississippi reaching into Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota.

     I took a selfie and stared at it, trying to remember the line in the sand, knowing that I absolutely had to leave this man. I fucking had to. But I didn’t. Not for a long time.

     Instead, I said to myself all the things abused women say on TV: “He didn’t mean it. It was my fault.” Dr. Steward, professor of feminist literary theory, fled my body as she heard these lame phrases and watched Julie try to rationalize her way out of the darkest of corners. Quelle horreur mumbled Dr. Steward, turning her back on the pitiful creature Julie was becoming.

     It boiled down to this: I could not believe that in one. split. second. my world needed to tumble like cheap architecture in a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. One tiny moment in time; an eternity of heartache remembering this man who probably didn’t realize the force of his arm, this man I had egged on, this man whom I loved so much. The juxtaposition between then and now overwhelmed me. 

     I would be lying if I said that I began to understand or forgive my mother in that moment. Edging the shoreline of her life were a thousand red flags urging caution, signaling lethal rip currents and under tows. Here I was, staring at a red flag smack dab on my face, but I did not leave. To his credit, he never hit me again. But he didn’t have to. Every day I stayed was one more day I betrayed my deepest values and hurt myself more than he ever did. I could blame it all on the worm farm, on years of being socialized to accept, even love, violence. But we all know that isn’t true.

     Although the relationship ended long ago, I keep the black eye picture on my phone and look at it every now and then. I love the little girl who loved “Dirty Harry,” the girl who would bring Mother another beer if only she would tell the Cipango story one more time, the girl who required years of therapy to learn how to set boundaries for herself only to cross those boundaries with no one else to blame. She knew violence, but she also knew that ultimate peace required forgiveness. At least forgiving herself, for now.

These days I look at the picture and say to her, “I am sorry I didn’t stand up for you then. I am standing up for you now.”