by Kelly Salasin
In the summer of my twelfth year, my family moved from Colorado to West Point on the Hudson. My mother and the four of us girls cried all the way out of the Rockies. I watched 2000 miles of clouds from the floor of our curtained van despite my father’s admonishments of all I was missing.
After her fourth child and during my father’s last year of residency in Denver, my mom began drinking. From my basement bedroom, I heard the screaming. In the months that followed, I watched my father empty the liquor cabinet in a fury, demanding that I reveal hiding places. ”Watch your mother, she can’t drink, she’s sick,” he resounded, “Don’t let her buy anymore.”
My stomach clenched.
Soon after we arrived in New York, my mother left, taking the littlest two with her. My younger sister and I began our new school without her. I was in the seventh grade and already attending the fifth school of my elementary career. One of our first assignments was to go to a fabric store “with your mother” to buy a yard of a material.
My stomach clenched.
I was both embarrassed and relieved when my new friend Trudy Conti asked her mother if I could go with them to shop for fabric. Mrs. Conti laughed when she measured my chest for the top we were to sew. You better hope they grow, she told me. I missed my mother.
Trudy’s mom was German. She made a noodle called spaetzle that was really good. Trudy shared the chewy fruit candies her grandparents sent from Germany too. Trudy was born there, but she hadn’t been back since she was five. That was when her mother met and married her stepfather while he was stationed in Germany. Now Captain Conti was an esteemed West Point TAC (a professor at the military school) who in his spare time sexually molested his pre-pubescent step daughter.
“Tell your mother,” I urged Trudy when she whispered these secrets to me on my frequent sleepovers at her house. When she finally did get up the courage to tell her mom, Mrs. Conti slapped her, saying, “Do you want to go back to Germany with nothing!” Trudy didn’t.
We were both too afraid of Captain Conti to tell anyone else. I once watched him hit Trudy across her face with the back of his hand–just because we had been talking to boys outside the movie theater. Trudy spent a lot of time around boys. She had developed early. At 12, she had pimples and breasts. In the hallways, the boys would grab at her, and she would just laugh–but she also looked sad.
When her mother wasn’t home, Captain Conti took Trudy into the locked bathroom to teach her about penises. He showed her how it changed and grew hard. Other times, he lay behind her in bed and then kissed her in the mouth with his tongue. Trudy confided bits and pieces like this to me, sounding both intrigued and tormented.
I can’t remember much else about the months without my mother. My father had taken care of us in her absence and that was… strange. For my entire life, he’d been in school–first college, then med school, then his internship and residency. Now he finally had a regular schedule as a physician at the base hospital.
On the evening of the neighborhood block party, my father was embarrassed not to have a wife, but he rose to the occasion, preparing a “Caesar Salad” in his mother’s large wooden bowl. Who knew he could cook! ”It’s my speciality,” he proclaimed to two bewildered daughters.
It was a school night, but we stayed at the party until dark! When we got home our father was magically warm and cheery–he didn’t send us right to bed. We watched him with cautious delight, sensing that he had slipped into that soft place we knew from our mother’s drinking.
During the bulk of her absence, my mother’s laissez-faire parenting was replaced with our surgeon father’s operating-room autocracy. He served us “his” favorite breakfast each morning. ”Eat them,” he demanded of the eggs before me, but I never liked eggs much and couldn’t stomach a big breakfast before school. More than anything, I didn’t like being told what to do by a man who had never belonged in our kitchen. I didn’t like life without the ease and certainty of my mother’s presence.
More than thirty years later, I find myself living nextdoor to a friend with chickens. “Jodi’s eggs are the best,” my oldest son says. He is a self-proclaimed egg officianando. And so I try them– even the green ones– and to my surprise I find that I can eat them now and again.
Recently, however, this “now and again” has unraveled into uncharted territory as I find myself eating an egg for breakfast for the fourth day in a row! My stomach clenches– and I don’t know why, until this story is hatched, taking me from age 44 to age 12.
I’ve made this trip at least once before- with my father. I was in my twenties, teaching seventh-graders myself. A speaker came to talk to the kids about sexual abuse, encouraging them to “tell someone,” and I realized that I was among those who “never told.” And so I did, a decade later.
My father listened and let me know that he could have handled Captain Conti. He would have taken him aside and threatened him with exposure if he didn’t get help. He would have insisted on weekly reports from the psychiatrist. He outranked him.
Although it didn’t change a thing about what happened to Trudy, I felt better.
When I was a freshman in highschool, my father retired from the Army and I never saw Trudy again. A few years later, she sent me a photo from Texas where her stepfather had been restationed. She had a boyfriend named, “Brownie.” She looked the same. Hopeful.
I think of Trudy when my dad comes to visit. Knowing that he might have helped, I return to that time over and over again and try to see my twelve-year old way clear to telling. But my friend’s confidence is too precious and Captain Conti’s threat is too looming to change a thing. Even as an adult, I’m not sure that it would have turned out better for Trudy if I had. I wish I could ask her.
My father is older now, still a physician, but no longer operating. He finally sits still long enough for me to make him breakfast. I fry him up some of my neighbor’s eggs– just the way he likes them– and we eat them– together.
(privacy note: the name of my childhood friend has been changed)
1 Comment
September 17, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Fascinating. You have a book in all this. Maybe a few.