door #104: erased



i walked into the house, face ashen, eyes red, the world tilting in a nauseating gait. i could hear my little girls fighting downstairs. someone had taken another one’s barbie. but it’s miiiiine, the younger one whined. but we picked, and i get to play with it now, said the older, using her mad 6–1/2-year-old mental-juijitsu skills on the almost-four-year-old.

i heard my mother in the kitchen. things were being placed down with force. i had told her that parent teacher conference would only take about forty-five minutes. i had been gone almost two hours.

i walked into the kitchen and my mother looked at me. it wasn’t like her to say it aloud. she simply made a great display of looking at the clock on the wall, looking at me with dispassion, and then returning her attention to her vicious, vigorous salad preparations.

i apologized for taking so long. i told her in a quaking voice that my soon-to-be ex-husband had attacked me at the school. i don’t remember what else i told her about it. i only remember that she looked at me, and then her face, eyes, body language, and a murmur made a concert, a simultaneous gesture that said, in one fluid moment, well isn’t that just tough shit for you.

i was late. she had been stuck with my kids for too long, too many times. her resentment was clear to me — clearer to me than if she’d said the words themselves. i look back now and see all the other things her dismissive gesture had said. underneath it all: that’s what you get for marrying a man like your father. that’s what you get for not listening to me. that’s what you get for being you. that’s what you get.

that’s. what. you. get.

back then, i saw her silent dismissal as simply another one of the many ways she had erased my experience, my feelings, with her bitterness. i didn’t know why she held so much for me. even then, i felt like it was displaced from somewhere else. herself? my father? i wonder if she had run out of ways to erase him — and i was simply overflow.

i needed to lie down. my head had waves of dizzy and sick running through it and down my torso. my neck had begun to seize. i could still taste the vomit in my mouth when i’d vomited at the school.

my dad got home. he took one look at me and asked me what was wrong. i told him i needed to go to the hospital. i had waved away the school secretary’s offer to call an ambulance while there. i didn’t want to make a fuss. i had been in shock. she had heard me vomiting in the administrator’s bathroom across from her desk.

dad drove me to the e.r. because i was so dizzy and sick. i didn’t have insurance, so they checked me with the least-costly tests they could to assess me. i remember a ct scan, i think. i heard the doctor tell me, in a faraway voice: whiplash, concussion. he told my dad to wake me every hour that night. take ibuprofen for the head. he recommended further tests. i had no insurance. my father couldn’t pay. i vomited beside the hospital gurney.

they gave me a soft neck brace. i told my dad what i remembered from the school, how my head was slammed against the car, then i was alone on the grass, my ex, gone. i can’t account for the time lapse. i just remember a woman with a stroller staring at me, asking me if i needed help. she looked at me with a mixture of disdain and hesitancy. like the stereotypical new yorker who says they ‘don’t want to get involved’ before slamming their grimy doors in the cop’s face. i don’t remember what else. i must have told her no. i didn’t want her involved, either.

i called the police the next day and they came to my house. i told them what my ex had done. my dad sat with me.

i don’t know if mom was angry about the short babysitting job that had turned into an all-evening affair, or whether she was angry that i’d allowed myself to get attacked.

my mother remained bitter, but i don’t know for how long. she’s dead, so i can’t ask her. i think she had it until she started losing her memory and mind, years later. then, free of all else, she just saw me as her daughter. my presence in her life became simple, and so she could love me, her bitterness, erased.

at court my ex laughed and made a show of disbelief, rolling his eyes when he saw my neck brace. he said i ‘fell down and bumped my head on the curb.’ to this day, that’s how he describes it. his head shaking, his laughter. if i fell down, i thought, why were you gone when i woke up?

i never asked him that. no one did . no one has.

he plead guilty in exchange for a plea in abeyance. in legalese, that meant he had to pay for my measly emergency room care, the bare-minimum tests they did. he had to pay for the damage my car sustained when he broke my ignition while yanking out my keys. right before he yanked me out of the car. i never got it fixed. after the attack, i lost both of my jobs. they repossessed my car.

a plea in abeyance meant that he had to keep his nose clean for a year, and then the charge would be expunged from his record. like it never happened. erased.

like how my mother looked at me when i told her what he’d done. like it never happened. like my daughters don’t know about it, like it never happened. i can never see those records, because they were expunged, like it never happened. erased.

and then it was about six months later, i was in college at the time, when i realized i could no longer read and understand what i’d read. i understood each word individually, but couldn’t connect them to the rest of the words in the sentence. and when i did finally comprehend, the information disappeared from my mind. i would read my textbook, but forget everything i’d read when i was done. as if it never happened.

erased.

— j.a. carter-winward