chocolate chip cookies, thunder storms, and a broken nose
The Recipe
adapted from nestle tollhouse and my mom
Serves: breakfast and emotionally soothing snack for household of two, as needed for four days
Pair with: denial, gaslighting, iced coffee
INGREDIENTS
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
1 cup butter
2 large eggs
1 or 2 or 0 cups chocolate
THE QUICK AND THE DIRTY
Preheat oven to 375º F. Forget about it.
Combine flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in small mixer bowl.
Look stressfully for hand mixer. Find hand mixer but no attachments. Add attachments to amazon cart. Feel guilty for supporting amazon. Beat sugar and butter in large mixer bowl by hand until creamy. Is it hot in here? Jesus Christ.
Beat in eggs, preferably without shells.
Gradually add flour mixture.
Stir in chocolate if you so choose, or mini-marshmallows and cornflakes, which you found in the pantry. Spread batter into ungreased 15 x 10-inch jelly-roll pan.
Bake for 18 to 20 minutes or until lightly browned. Inhale immediately.
The Essay
Now.
Godzilla hated my father.
“That dog is the only one who had your back in that house,” Abel jokes.
When we were there, at my childhood home in the rural gulf coast, he consistently (and exclusively) shat under my father’s chair at the kitchen table. Every day. Sometimes, multiple times a day. I tried, obsessively, to keep my eyes on him to beckon him away from my father’s chair whenever he trotted determinedly toward it; but, inevitably, I would get sidetracked—sucked into a group chat or an email or eyeliner—and, then, all of sudden, I didn’t know where Godzilla was and I’d look toward the chair. Shit.
The first time I left him alone at my parents’ house was for just a few days. Godzilla rarely barked at the apartment where Abel and I lived; and, while I knew the pee-pad thing would be tiresome, I didn’t think a ten-pound Chihuahua would be a big deal for my parents, who had always had two German Shepherd mixes at a time during my entire childhood.
Plus, I had fallen victim to the lies I told myself when I watched my friends’ functional families. Their parents dog-sat and, sometimes, became the rehomed pet’s parent. They had happy homes where they—and their pets—were welcome. I didn’t anticipate Godzilla’s being a problem because I thought, with fierce belief, that I could rewrite my house as a happy one, where I, and my dog, were welcome.
But once I got back, my mom told me he barked the whole time we were gone.
“Was dad mad?”
“Well,” she paused. “He wasn’t happy.”
I chose to believe this meant that he was frustrated: audibly sighing, rolling his eyes, maybe occasionally yelling. I chose to believe that my father, who is not a sitcom character, was Red Foreman about the issue.
By then, I had spent five years away from home—regularly away from home, anyway. Many people say space promotes healing and perspective. For me, the space and distance gave me the freedom to recreate myself and my family. No one lied to me—not in my whole life—more than I lied to myself during that time. I recast my father as a humorously aloof sitcom dad who engages in light verbal abuse but loves you underneath. I was Eric Foreman—you know the child whom the audience agrees should be lightly verbally abused and emotionally neglected. The premise that makes this politely tolerable didn’t quite match—I was high-achieving, phobic of getting into Trouble™, and generally nothing like Eric. As with all abuse stories, the truth doesn’t matter.
If I admitted I wasn’t like Eric, then my father’s vehement distaste for me wouldn’t make sense. So, I self-deprecated and tried to fit myself into the ne’er-do-well role. I cast my mom as a lovable lush—who sometimes needed to live in the guest room or make a public declaration of suicidal intent on a holiday—but, you know, storms always blow over. My father was dying, and we studiously ignored his contribution to that self-created situation. We were well-off, although living entirely off credit. I said my father was an engineer and not an HVAC maintenance worker. I didn’t discuss my half-brothers. It was embarrassing to talk about my half-sister Barbie until she went back to school and stopped waiting tables. My half-sister Cory was the mess, comically mentally ill at a time when women who struggled mattered even less than they do now. When I discussed my family, we all had palatable roles.
***
Then.
Around Christmas of 2014, my now-23-pound “chihuahua” had developed a habit of growling at me at night. He had picked it up in the year we spent at my parents’ home between my short bout of homelessness and law school. The growling was almost always brought about by my pulling him out of the tiny spaces in which he hid, made worse by my manhandling him and telling him what a pretty baby he was.
Respectfully, I then imitated his growling in my best Exorcist voice. “Oh, I don’t want to be a pretty baby!”
I was undeterred by the growling. I even recorded it and sent the videos to Abel, who also found them hilarious.
Godzilla growled and hid whenever he did something “wrong,” if company came over (especially a man), or if my father breathed within a three-mile radius. If I pushed something, say a ballet flat, under the bed to touch him, he attacked it—but never very hard. Aside from the pretty baby talk (a far cry, I would argue, from water-boarding), I never tortured my dog. But I had suspicions, which were later confirmed, that my father had. And I, foolishly, expected Godzilla to “forget” and pretend it didn’t happen—like I did.
On this day, I learned how foolish that was. My father and I planned to finish the Christmas shopping, emotional labor to which I was usually assigned alone because I am “good” at it. But things were different that year. During this winter break, my father seemed lonely, which made me feel uncomfortable and guilty. He also seemed like he, maybe, enjoyed my company, which made me feel… worthy, I think, is the word, but also uncomfortable and guilty and then, also, disappointed that it mattered to me so much.
He and my mom were on the outs, maybe for real this time. He was out of work and unwell. He was in constant pain, something both my mom (before that last big fight) and one of the latest cardiologists (sternly in a Pepto pink waiting room more recently) had told me. It all triggered an imperative desire in me to pretend like nothing was wrong and to do everything in my power to make things “okay” and cheerful.
Every day that I was home from school on break, he cooked a feast—literally, he cooked Thanksgiving dinner on December 13th. Ever the creative writer, I encouraged myself to imagine that he did this because I love the fresh baked bread and homemade bread dressing drenched in olive juice that we sometimes had when we performed Thanksgiving. But, that was a hard sell even to myself, when I watched him break his back over the turkey I’ve historically avoided. I hid my cringe when he, suddenly fond of Godzilla, fed him its innards. Godzilla, a pragmatic grudge-holder, ate them but, reader, please note that it did not deter his shitting campaign.
I think my father wanted the activity, from which he could exclude my mom, more than anything else. And it was an excuse to have Barbie over so that we could be loud, eating together in the kitchen, with our voices (exclusionary and gay) carrying into the dark guest room, where not even my mom’s actual daughter ventured to go.
Besides the turkey dinners (he cooked three), he also repeatedly baked a chocolate chip pan cookie that my mom used to make for special occasions when I was very young. Similar to a chocolate chip blondie, slightly saltier and thicker than the cookie cakes I used to get from the mall on each of my birthdays for which my dad somehow never really made himself available. The barebones recipe is printed on the back of the Nestle tollhouse milk chocolate morsels bag. Even though my father had reading glasses, he recruited me to read him the instructions (Are we bonding? Did he lie so I could spend time with him?) and then inevitably walked away (Oh.), leaving me to finish the recipe. Nonetheless, I leaned into idea that we were bonding, baking these cookies “together,” which I very generously defined, and immediately posted on social media, where all of our most honest assessments of family relationships belong.
“And, one cup chocolate chips,” I read the admittedly very small print.
My father—my dad, I thought—peered over at me and wriggled his eyebrows, which was unsettling for a minute because he had never done so at me before. “Nah,” and he doubled the chips.
I sighed and mustered up a smile. I preferred less to no chocolate chips, but I politely smiled. I loathed milk chocolate, and I had so expertly feigned an allergy to cheap chocolate in a clever disguise for my disordered eating for the entirety of my teenage years that I still have close friends who believe I am allergic to it.
“Yummmm.” I mumbled, without enthusiasm.
On the day of the Christmas shopping, I did the bare minimum to get ready. Law school, generalized depression, a then-undiagnosed autoimmune disorder, and the financial abyss into which I was quickly sinking had taken a toll on me—I was exhausted all of the time, nothing fit correctly or at all, most of my clothing was worn, and my hair had been falling out in waves. To my dad, I knew I looked messy. Maybe like my mom, who was also adrift in both depression and the financial abyss. He eyed me, in cropped leggings with an as-of-yet-unobservable-but-burgeoning hole in the upper, inside thigh seam, long v-neck t-shirt, and dirty TOMS with disapproval. But, he appeared grateful for the makeup—and, perhaps even more so, as I had begun using real makeup again instead of the cheaper DIY alternatives, like cornstarch as inadequate finishing powder that increased my breakouts and as dry shampoo that turned my naturally black hair grey.
“All right,” he sighed. “I’ll lock up the barn. Maybe take that dog out so he doesn’t piss all over the house.” He raised his eyes and used a lighter than usual tone to let me know that he wasn’t really angry but just a curmudgeon.
Godzilla, upon hearing my father’s voice, hid in his pet carrier in my bedroom. As I approached it, the carrier began to shake and growl. Disregarding this, I pushed him out and scooped him into my arms. Twenty-three pounds of squirming chihuahua required both of my arms—not because I am slim and femininely frail, like Barbie, but because the “muscles” in my chubby arms had atrophied in the law school library. He continued to growl as I carried him out of my bedroom, past the lanai, and onto the small concrete patio outside. As I bent to release him, my face grazed the back of his neck.
It happened in a flash. One minute, I was kind of pretty and the next disfigured. Godzilla’s head whipped around, and his little mouth—filled with healthy little razor teeth thanks to the expensive, organic teeth-cleaning treats I had been springing for on my eleven-dollar-an-hour salary—clamped onto my nose. As my head jerked back, he released for a moment just to chomp down harder and with more force on the tip of my nose.
At first, I felt nothing—except horror, of course. But, then, I couldn’t breathe out of my nose. I could feel something wet pouring down my face, but I thought for a moment that it’s just slobber, maybe? Hopefully? I dropped my dog during the second bite. He stood at my feet, but I couldn’t see him well. My hands flew to my face, thinking how inconvenient it would be to have a scratch on my face while my father and I went out and probably ran into someone I was actively avoiding on social media.
But then I looked at my hands, and they were covered in blood. In fact, large drops were plopping onto the cement floor. I cupped my hand around my nose to catch the drops, and I felt them sickeningly accumulate into a handful of blood.
It is a surreal experience the first time you see your hands covered—and, I mean slick—with your own blood (and you’re not drunkenly fumbling a Diva Cup). Instantly, I knew my nose was only barely connected to what used to be my above-average face. I rushed back into the house, my confused dog trailing after me as though he suddenly cared about my wellbeing.
In the bathroom, I was too afraid to look in the mirror. Instead, I dumped my blood from one cupped hand into the sink and cupped my other hand under the running faucet to splash lukewarm water onto my face. When I did look, everything below my eyes was covered in blood, which now—mixing with water—seemed to be everywhere. I could see only what seemed like huge gashes over my visibly crooked nose and purple flesh wherever the blood was smeared the thinnest.
I grabbed a washrag from under the sink and held it to my face, as I willed myself to breathe slowly. I walked through the house to the garage, feeling lightheaded and nauseated. I imagined the reconstructive surgery I would need to reconnect my nose to my face and, briefly, how much that would cost.
In the garage, I heard my father walking up the gravel driveway. All of a sudden, I felt faint. The edges of my eyesight darkened, and I sat down. I had never fainted before then, but I thought this might be it. I started praying: Please don’t let my nose come off, please don’t let my nose come off, please don’t let my nose come off.
When my father arrived to the paved part of the driveway, just in front of the garage door, I hollered—bellowed? like Grendel?—from floor, from within the shadows of the darkened garage, where I lay shaded by boxes of junk.
“I think I neeb to go to the hosbital.”
He squinted in the sun toward the screened-in garage, where I—yes, Grendel, a literal monster now—lurked, awaiting my chariot to the ER.
He said, “What?” His pace toward the door didn’t change. “Are you sure?” His tone of voice implied that things are probably quite fine, and I was being hysterical.
Once he opened the screen door, however, his face went slack. “What happened?”
“Gobzilla bit me,” I mumbled with embarrassment through the used-to-be-green rag.
“What did you do to him?” He sounded concerned, even though he had openly despised my dog since I first brought him home. I had now left probably a quarter of my blood supply on the garage floor. Seemingly contemplative, however, he looked at me, near death. “We should have your mother look at it first,” he decreed.
My mother is not currently, and was not then, a medical professional capable of intense wound care. She was once a certified nurse’s assistant for four months at a rehab facility about eight years before this incident—one of many jobs she would get, quickly become good at, be away from home too much for, and inevitably quit when my father would become suspiciously surly. She was, at that time, a pharmacy technician at CVS. Distantly, I considered this, reflecting on my almost-maxed-out Banana Republic credit card and the emergency visit co-pay. The thought of putting a possible, crushing thousand-dollar payment on it chipped away at my certainty that I really needed to go to the ER or have a nose. (I did later have to put a thousand-dollar payment on it for my visit, anyway.)
My dad helped me stand, and the garage swam around me. We walked through the darkened hallway leading to my mom’s bedroom, where I gently knocked on the door and my dad stood ominously in the shadows. Because she sometimes doesn’t answer, I croaked (so that she knew it was me), “I tink my bose beeds stitches.” I heard her scramble through the closed door, which quickly opened.
“What happened?” She gushed—much more sympathetic than my father. He grunted—must have noticed this too.
We all moved to the guest bathroom, where I again sat on the floor. I was still very dizzy. I tried to be careful of the lilac carpet and shower curtain. I apologized for bleeding on the white tile.
“Let me see,” she said, gently pulling my hand holding the washrag from my face. “Ohmygod,” she gasped.
We all stood (or sat) in silence for a beat.
“Do you want to see it?” She asked me.
Of course, I didn’t want to see it but she put a mirror to my face anyway. It was still covered in blood, but it wasn’t gushing anymore. My nose was twice its normal size, the general shape of a Muppet’s, and the color (and texture) of crushed lavender. I felt faint again, so I asked for water, “Wib a straw.”
My dad returned in a minute to the guest bathroom with a plastic cup and a striped straw. No fine china for this girl, I thought.
Unsurprisingly, my mom ultimately (and sagely) declared there wasn’t much she could do for me. “I can do a butterfly band-aid?” She gestured to the hurricane kit we last restocked in 2005. I looked back into the mirror and then at her.
“I tink I beed to see a doctor.”
My parents begrudgingly looked at each other. Now was the optimal time for them to engage in the stereotypical separated couple behavior by arguing over which one of them will take the twenty-five-year-old child to the hospital. So, they did precisely this.
Since my father used to work at the second-rate hospital in the next town over, he won the award of taking me there. My mom, as a consolation prize, got to clean my blood out of both of the bathrooms, the lanai, and the patio. And, presumably, off my dog’s face—which was bloodless when I returned home later.
On the drive, I got to hold my face together with one hand and sip my tap water through a plastic straw that probably has since killed a sea turtle. In a rare gesture of sweetness that I took way too seriously, my father sped the whole way. This, however, also made me dizzy so I stared at my knees for the duration of the drive.
When we arrived at the drawbridge that connected the mainland to the island, where the bad hospital is located, the bells started ringing to notify traffic that the bridge was going up.
“Aw, shit,” my father said, as the car in front of us sped through the setting gate and, after a millisecond’s hesitation, he sped through as well.
Unfortunately, the speeding car in front of us, with Georgia plates, decided now was the optimal time to stop for a photo. So, they did precisely this. I watched as the front and back passengers all pulled out cameras.
As if the bells on the drawbridge are not enough to get them going, my father laid on the horn. “COME ON,” he growled, making me shudder.
The car finally moved.
My father blew through every red light on the rest of the way, and perhaps I was still faint from the blood loss but I thought, for a moment, that the gesture kind of made up for the lousy childhood.
But when we arrived at the emergency room doors, even though there’s a free valet, my dad turned to me and said, “Well, there you go.”
“Are you combing insibe?”
“Well, I need to park.” He gestured around his immaculate F350, which obviously could not be entrusted to the valet.
“But there’s a balet?”
He grunted.
Cool, I sighed.
“I’ll meet you inside,” he grumbled, as though that was the concession and not the expectation.
My eyes narrowed. I felt stupid. Was he just going to wait in the parking lot until I was stitched up and done? Staring at him, I left my plastic cup, purposefully not in the cupholder. Quite the rebellion. I awkwardly half-fell out of the truck and stumbled toward the ER doors. The three teenage boys at the valet go silent and gawk at me as I continued this performance art and neglected to wish them a merry christmas.
“Don’t forget your wallet,” my dad hollered through the open window as he tossed it my way, which I—of course—missed.
***
Now.
My disownment was a long time coming. I had teetered on the edge of being cut off for a decade before it happened. My transgression has always been that, when things inevitably got bad (and they always did), I was too willing to remember all the previous times things went bad. And, I was hesitant when things weren’t bad. I pointed out a pattern. I applied a label. And, therefore, I was disloyal.
When we were teenagers, I invited Abel home on spring break. After he witnessed a particularly gruesome argument, I asked him, conspiratorially in the dark, “Did you think I had been lying to you when I tried to tell you what my family was like?”
Ever diplomatic, he said, “I didn’t think you were lying; I thought you, maybe, exaggerated.”
I’m fascinated with the way we disbelieve abuse survivors—especially when we have known them for a long time. We would have noticed something was off about our friend if she had really been afraid to go home, wouldn’t we? Surely, if the abuse had been physical, she would have told me. Right?
My disownment marked the end of my being able to hide the bruised contours of my family life. That meant there were secrets I could now freely share—things I couldn’t have told normal people who could have met my family afterward and maybe would want me to hold them accountable for things I could not. It meant I could stop gaslighting myself on what was “okay” and what “really happened”—a self-soothing technique that often sounded like, “Well, my dad is mean because he’s sick and in pain,” or, “My dad is cruel because he had a hard life,” or, “I am just overly sensitive.”
It meant I could stop framing my trauma as quirky, easier-to-digest comedic tales, if I were strong enough to do so.
Censoring, omitting, and colorizing my family life was an obsessive hobby in which I became highly skilled. Disclosing the abuse in my house, more than just hinting at it late at night at a sleepover here and there, was unthinkable.
My father kept a tight reign on how we presented to outsiders. Even in good times, he hinted at all the ways in which my mother and I lacked credibility, were prone to exaggeration, and were, in sum, just difficult. And, when he sensed that I might be gaining credibility—I was, after all, competent and stable enough for prestigious school programs and competitive jobs—he sought to enlist me as an ally in case my mom ever disclosed what a hell our home was. Whenever he was on the outs with my mom, he would show up in my life in ways he never had before, which left me feeling dizzyingly special, uncomfortable, and guilty.
***
Then.
When I walked into the emergency room, I was the only person—not even the only patient, the only living soul in the room. It was December 21st in the middle of nowhere Florida, so this seemed normal. As I shuffled toward reception, two ancient, sundried volunteers in pink smocks appeared on either side of a paid receptionist, whom I thought I remembered from high school. No one appeared to have any evident medical training.
“Ugh, we’re going to have to call housekeeping,” one of the 104-year-old volunteers said as she glared at my face in the emergency room lobby. “Maybe tilt your head back,” the other non-professional, living-mummy advised.
“What happened?” The receptionist asked.
“Dog bite,” I mumbled.
“Oh, my,” she gasped but quickly moved and turned to her Gateway desktop monitor, circa 1999. “Date of birth?”
I told her, remembering that she might have been a freshman when I was a senior. I suddenly felt kind of embarrassed to be there, in teenage cosplay with my Banana Republic credit card with a $2,500 limit as the only value toward my name. I watched her type with her gel manicure, wearing tiny but respectable diamond studs, a generic Pandora bracelet, Kohls sweater set, and real pants with no elastic that probably actually button. She seemed mildly surprised and clearly did not remember me.
I handed her my entire wallet, like a sacrificial offering, when she asked for my insurance card. She thanked me, and then, as if an afterthought, said, “Oh, I’ll get you a wheelchair.” She nimbly moved around the stationary volunteers, whom I feared may die at any moment.
After a minute, a nurse confidently strode out of the ER doors and fetched me in my wheelchair. Immediately, because I was raised partially by nurses, I apologized for even coming in. I should have died in the garage, I know. Nurses put up with so much from the insufferable public, I know. She waved away my concern and acknowledged that it is, in fact, understandable (although still probably unnecessary) that I came in. My nose is, after all, only just attached to my face. She asked me to remove the rag, which was now stuck to my face as the blood had dried.
“Oh, my,” she sighs. “I’m going to try to clean it up a little,” she said through a forced smile.
Another nurse stopped in with my identification bracelet, and my father confidently followed this new one into the private, curtain-walled area.
A third nurse—with tall, crunchy bangs and too much chunky, nickel-plated jewelry—appeared and screamed in delight at the sight of my father, a reaction I—a former theatre kid—could never fathom performing realistically. She wore thick, brightly colored, plastic hoops and had overlined her lips with magenta lipstick.
Apparently, the first nurse was done with me. Plastic Hoops took over. She eyed my nose critically, after having paused from her loud conversation with my father, and said with disdain as she glared at the tiny gold stud in my left nostril that either marked me as a bisexual or—worse—a liberal, “You’ll have to take your nose ring out.”
Plastic Hoops wasn’t chewing gum but gave the impression that she was. Her beige skin was full of precancerous freckles. Her voice was tobacco-deep. She told me not to worry, that I can still drink on antibiotics, and then laughed like a shotgun went off. She was nice to me in a showy way that was entirely for my father’s benefit.
For the next hour and a half that I was in the ER, I get yet another nurse, two unidentified male workers, a physician’s assistant (who told me that an infection was a big concern since the bite is so close to my brain), and a doctor. Before several of the individuals pop in, I heard them reading my chart with suppressed amusement: chihuahua attack. I appreciated that it sounded funny before you saw it. Ultimately, the doctor decreed no stitches for fear of sewing in an infection. My lacerations were cleaned; my torn septum and broken nose were given a pitying half-smile. I was instructed to keep it clean, slather it in Neospirin, and hope for the best.
On the drive home, my dad said he didn’t even think about the possible infection, as if to console me, a medical layperson, that going to the hospital was necessary after all.
***
Now.
“Godzilla hates men,” I shrug and say with an apologetic smile.
“Oh, poor guy. He’s a rescue?”
I don’t know what to say, even though I am an adept liar, as we’ve established. I yearn to tell the truth, so much so I guess that I’ve even staked an entire career on being forthright and honest.
Sometimes I say, “Oh, he lived with a piece of shit who kicked him.” It’s not a lie. I don’t say I did, too. It is a perfect jigsaw puzzle piece of truth whose jagged and oddly cut edges satisfy both my earnest desire for openness and the person who presumably asked for the truth but does not really want to know it.
When I left advocacy for a living wage, I had to sit through a domestic violence training at the new job. I am more open about growing up in a Bad Home™ now, but there is always a cost to that openness. You’re unbandaging a wound that will never heal, you show it off to validate whatever opinion on DV you feel you need to share in the moment, and most of the time the people you’re talking to are horrified. You’ve made it weird. And, now, you need to find somewhere private to rebandage the wound, which smarts a bit from the sudden cold air. And, look at that, it’s bled a little on your new coat, which you can afford now because of the new job, which employs only people who apparently need a 4-hour training to understand what DV is.
This training featured an exercise, devised by well-intentioned people who had not themselves survived trauma. They therefore approached the topic with the earnest, blundering ineptitude of those who truly believe they understand. A chipper, young, white woman handed me several index cards, which were supposed to represent money—cash, credit, and the goodwill of our social network. (If you don’t think the goodwill of a social network is the functional equivalent of money, you should take this training.) Over the next forty-five minutes, all of our luck ran out. Each of us, gifted a different amount and combination of the cards, spent our fortunes temporarily escaping from and then coping with our violent husband while we fretted over our stolen birth control and children’s schooling and what they would eat and how we could maintain our friendships. I was the first participant to become homeless, and I stood in the corner designated as the homeless shelter for the entire game, which culminated in our husband’s killing the family dog.
I have something to say about that, but it’s caught deep in my chest and, so, I am not ready to talk about our last family dog, yet. Another recipe, perhaps. Maybe something with peanut butter, which she liked to eat.
I was heavily pregnant at the time and wore cheap maternity pants that had split earlier that morning, so I was wearing my long wool coat, sweating, feeling too much of all the things. I promptly turned around and stared at the window glass, focusing intently on the smudge of a fingerprint, until the tears dried from my eyes and I could blink without dislodging them. If I had left to compose myself in the bathroom, I knew everyone in the room would watch me leave. Better they think I am just not paying attention or that I am hormonally impacted by the sad story line and not that I have lived this game already.
The homeless shelter sign above my head hurt, too. I had, after all, spent the night in my car before finding a place to stay when my father had decreed that I was not welcome home after graduation from undergrad in 2011. Not, unless, I gave up “that goddamn dog.”
It didn’t matter that my parents already had a docile, hundred-pound white German Shepherd, husky mix. It didn’t matter that I had no savings and ample student loan debt. It didn’t matter that I was graduating summa cum laude—or, rather, that made it worse. I needed to be taken down a peg. I needed to be reminded how, at the end of the day, I owed any success to my name to my father, who could take it away and remind that I actually had nothing. And, as I had apparently forgotten that, I would need to make a sacrifice to return.
***
Then.
At home, the house smelled like bleach. My blood was stubborn, and it ultimately wouldn’t get out of the patio concrete. When the house later sells, two years from this event, I will think that I have literally left some of myself behind—a piece of me ripped from the rest of my body.
I got a prescription for antibiotics and a sore arm from a tetanus shot. My mom brought me to the drugstore on the corner of our street to drop off the prescription and buy supplies for my torn-up face. It is, of course, the pharmacy where she worked and, yes, I am her daughter, the one away at law school, yes, up north, where it is, indeed, cold, Merry Christmas, to you, too, sir.
It would have been prudent of me to wait in the car, but I didn’t want to be alone. I got a lot of stares as I roamed the first aid aisle. I debated hissing at them, but I didn’t ultimately have the confidence to do so. I wondered what people think happened to me when confronted with my face: Car accident? Mugging? Domestic abuse?
There was no combination of gauze or pre-designed bandages that was manageable on my face. At home, I attempted to fashion one out of gauze pads but I (with my expertly applied eyeliner just minutes before the bite) look like the sexy Halloween version of Goodnight Mommy.
“You should probably just let it breathe, anyway,” my mom said.
She was right. And, so, I later decided to leave again with a bare face. A sensible person would have stayed home, but my parents’ house beat the sense out of everyone. In addition to the suffocating marital tension, the house itself was constantly freezing thanks to the cold tile floor that my father refused to let my mother buy a rug for—“It will just smell like the dog.”—and the inadequate curtains that my mother bought on a whim. In the living room, there was a loveseat (ha) on which my mother occasionally slept and which, among several other marital assets, my father would later secretly sell on Craig’s List. It was a reclining leather one, and it was missing a significant amount of stuffing near the metal frame.
Because the loveseat moonlights as my mom’s away-game bed, it seemed profane to me to sit on it. Instead, I planted myself on the matching reclining chair of the same future fate—the only other piece of lounge furniture in the large, cold living room, nicely accented by the dead plants in the corner of the room. The chair was uncomfortable, so I built a nest of blankets on top of it that I knew my dad hated but just barely refrained from yelling at me about. He wasn’t that bad, I thought.
The living room didn’t always used to look like this. There used to be a full-size sofa in here, but my dad sold it—along with any of the absolutely not necessary furnishings in this room, like the coffee table, side tables, and lamps. Before this leather set (which my father forced us to get because he claimed the uncomfortable cheap leather would smell less), we had a comfy overstuffed, fabric set—a loveseat, sofa, and huge arm chair with ottoman that I loved. At some point, I believe, we had a rug under it and it looked like happy people might’ve lived there when we weren’t around.
My bedroom was still comfortably furnished; it contained furniture I purchased myself but couldn’t take with me to law school. It’s always warm. The east-facing bay window took up almost half of one wall and captured so much heat that my room was pretty much unbearable to everyone except me. My comfortable, golden-hued oven only becomes unpleasant to me in August, and even then it’s not that I dislike it so much that my body physically rejects it by vomiting from heat stroke. But, if I adjust the air conditioning, my father yells, so I just deal with it.
Aside from reading, which is hard to do when half of your face is twice its normal size, there was nothing for me to do in my bedroom. My mom cancelled the internet two weeks after I left, in a passive-aggressive campaign to either force Barbie to assist with the bills or to move out. (She and her kids moved out.) My refurbished MacBook Air doesn’t have a DVD player on it and the portable one I ordered somehow only plays the Doc Hollywood DVD I bought at a Blockbuster that was going out of business.
Knowing that tedious boredom or depressing suffocation awaited me, I gamely told my father that I still would like to go Christmas shopping and bless the county with the sight of my face. First, we go to the craft store, where I accidentally sneezed and sprayed blood all over the linoleum floor to the horror of a sales associate, who had been enraptured, watching me peruse the various sketchpads just moments before.
After the craft store, my father took me to Target at my request. I asked him to come into the store with me because I was afraid that people would stare at my disfigured face, which they absolutely and understandably did. After we entered the store, however, my father turned to me and said, “I’ll be right back.”
I was somehow stunned. It was clear I was not invited on his solo expedition to whatever part of the store he was headed toward. He turned and walked away, abandoning me in the flower-scented (not that I can smell) soap section. On my way to get whatever I needed—space from my suffocating childhood home, new and better parents, a time-turner to make the next week go by faster—I looked down and pretended to scratch my eyebrow in order to minimize any head-on surprises for the merry shoppers around me. While not necessarily finding anything to meet my specified needs, I did buy makeup cleansing wipes that would help me bearably wash my face.
After retrieving the wipes, I was then tasked with finding my missing father. I was also becoming acutely aware of how Frankensteinian I felt. I called his cell phone, but he didn’t pick up. I stealthily lurked behind the carrells, peering into aisles for my father. Between my face and the mounting exhaustion of being home, I was just a monster bumbling around the aisles, unintentionally horrifying everyone unfortunate enough to be met with my bloody face looming around the holiday displays.
Finally, I descended upon my father, who was happily chatting with some man and his preteen daughter. I shyly approached, and the man’s eyes widened much more than seemed possible. My father turned and nodded at me. “Ready to go?”
I nodded.
My father finished talking to the man, without ever introducing me or explaining my face. The man curiously looked at me from time to time as my father talked and talked. His daughter mercifully stared at her own feet rather than at me. As we finally walked away, I asked my father, “Who was that?
He paused for a moment. “I have no idea what his name is, but he used to work for a company I’d buy things from at the hospital.”
“Ah,” I said, telling myself he probably didn’t introduce me because he didn’t know the man’s name and not because I’m his disfigured, liberal daughter.
***
Now.
My father used to get a real kick out of scaring me. If I walked too close to his truck or was the first one arriving at it in an empty-ish parking lot, he would set the alarm off and laugh as I jumped. “Can’t you take a joke?”
I would shriek every time he quietly snuck up behind me and “jokingly” grabbed my shoulders, and then he would scream back at me. “Jesus Christ, what do you think of me?”
We both knew what I thought of him: he was abusive—emotionally and physically. He was a bully and a narcissist. He was dangerous and controlling. And, letting him know that I knew that was my fatal flaw.
He continued to do the jump scares, though, knowing I would always scream and then he would yell at me for screaming. He did it to me at Sea World, once, after I had admitted—foolishly—that I did not want to walk through the underwater tunnels because I was afraid. I knew I could not scream in public, not because it would be embarrassing or let others know we had a real problem in our home but because he would have been even more angry. So, I just gasped. And, that quiet terror—my having finally learned to be silently afraid—was a real thrill for him.
“Jesus, lighten up, will you.” He said quietly with a wink, as our private joke went unnoticed by the general public.
I still catch myself waiting for the next jump scare. Loud noises still make me jump. Loud voices put me on alert. I still feel like rabbit with a racing heart.
I used to be afraid of everything back then. In addition to regular fears a typical child enjoys, I was positively phobic of… well, a lot. AIDS, spiders, lurking heart defects, elevators, fast cars, planes, small spaces, high places, speaking in class, and so on. One of my worst fears was thunderstorms.
As a small child in the Midwest, I dreaded the warmer months. I hated the loud storms that rapidly descended upon our house, making it feel like we were alone on an angry planet with an Old Testament sky. Thunderstorms in the night were particularly problematic because I hadn’t had hours of fearful anticipation in which I could beg God to keep my family safe as I whimpered in a corner, growling at anyone who tried to turn The Weather Channel off.
Having grown up split between the Midwest and the southern gulf coast, I would pick hurricanes over plains tornados. Granted, in this would-you-rather, I don’t own property, pay flood insurance, or lack the privilege to have a preparedness plan, and I have the financial means to leave. So, in that cozy hypothetical, I pick hurricanes over tornados. Hurricanes are big and slow-moving. You get up to a week to prepare or leave. Tornados are sudden and vicious. Hurricanes turn busy little cities into ghost towns. With a tornado, you’re sitting at a crowded football game one moment and running for cover the next. Many times, hurricanes get downgraded to tropical storms and then depressions. It’s a lot of rain—unrelenting but just warm water. With tornados, the sky turns green and the thunder rattles your bones and the lightning strikes at you like a viper.
My dad was a tornado. When we lived up north, I was too young to read him. I was always wrong. And, then, there would be this terrible storm destroying everything—ripping the phone off the wall, overturning the kitchen table, punching through the dry wall. And then cleaning up the debris the next morning, taking stock of what was left. At least with real tornados, we all acknowledged that a storm had passed through the night before. In my childhood home, talking about the last storm could bring upon a new storm.
I became a better emotional meteorologist as I got older. And in some ways, because my siblings weren’t allowed to move with us when we moved to Florida, there were less aggravating factors—whole warm and cold fronts—that disappeared from the typical weather stream. By then, too, I had learned some of the signs. The particular frown, an easily missed warning sign. His hand on the back of my neck. I became adept at disappearing, at being just out of reach. I found places to sneak off to and “forget” to be in the storm’s path.
Back then, we got regular 4 o’clock thunderstorms. These storms were just as loud as the worst storms I had made myself sick watching roll in over fields up north. But they never inflicted the same kind of damage. There was more lightning, but they were shorter. The winds were never as intense. My father claimed to love them. He watched them through the screen doors in the garage while smoking a cigarette. He said he thought they were “cool” and implied I was pathetic for not liking them. I was stupid—and, worse, infuriating—for being afraid.
My fear incensed my father. Like a dog supposedly smells fear, he picked up on the scent—scent, I am being generous to myself. I was very obviously afraid. I would hyper-ventilate once I could hear the very distant, very low rumblings of thunder. And, then, when the thunder really started, I would start to cry and audibly whimper. My father would roll his eyes and huff, louder as I got louder. I tried to be quiet, both because I was embarrassed and because I was now also afraid of my father coming after me.
“I’ll give you something to cry about. Quit crying.”
“Jesus Christ. Will you shut the fuck up?”
“CUT IT OUT.” And, this, punctuated by a raised hand.
My mom, trying to soothe the expected outcome of my father’s screaming, tried to manage my fear—not resolve it but make it silent so it would not enrage my father. She instructed me to put on headphones so that maybe I could stop hearing the thunder claps, and then, without having heard the thunder, I could perhaps not wheeze in such an infuriating way as I cried.
There was never an option to soothe, or even mitigate, the fear I experienced. My fear appeared to be a problem that needed to either be beaten out of me or completely silenced. If we were expecting storms, my mom would turn off the television or put it on a channel that wouldn’t show storm notifications. She instructed those around us in the know about my fear not to discuss it, which meant I would get sucker-punched by the storm later.
But then, my father enjoyed piling us—my mom and me—in his truck when the storms were coming because he purportedly wanted to see the churning waves as the storm rolled in. “Let’s go look at the waves,” he would say to my otherwise disinterested mother, who has always hated water.
I was too young to remain home alone. So, led by my warden and executioner, I walked to the truck and climbed inside and buckled myself into the tiny backseat, where I would try to swallow back my panic attack and cry in silence, lest the sound of my absolute horror trigger my father to slam on the breaks and try to hit me from the front seat as we drove directly into the storm.
Now that I am older—and safe—I think it was a hobby, this sort of ingeniously executed way my dad developed to torture me without leaving any visible bruises. Each time we went, he made a point of asking if I wanted to go. If I was honest and I said no, he belittled me for being a baby (and made me go, anyway). It was good training for me to learn to live with fear and to get conformable with saying yes when I meant no.
***
Then.
As if the general disfigurement wasn’t enough, the following day’s task of slathering the Neosporin (to prevent the possible infection that could spread to my brain), clogged my pores more completely than all of the oil my face produced from twelve to fourteen combined. The appearance of several blackheads on my ravaged nose was a new horror. As I inspected my face several times a day, in a magnified mirror to clean it, I noticed also that one of Godzilla’s teeth has slashed a gash from one already large pore to another already large pore, creating a linear extra-large pore. More worrisome, there was a flap of skin at the tip of my nose that hung, connected only by one side. I wondered how that would reattach.
Each time I exited the bathroom, I felt deflated. Every time my mom saw me, she sighed and said, “Your poor face.”
Each morning, I swallowed a giant horse-pill-sized antibiotic along with instant iced-coffee that my father (who couldn’t be bothered to sign my birthday cards as a kid) now buys from Publix ahead my visit every stay and a generous serving of the pan cookie we baked together. Besides my father, I was the only one eating it because my mother refused to eat anything my father made or bought. Nonetheless, each time he cooked and I am present, he pointedly shuffles to her bedroom, knocks on the door, and tells her that he’s made dinner. Sometimes, she doesn’t say anything at all. Other times, she declines, “No, thanks,” in a tone that is more “I loathe you” than “I regret to inform you I will not attend.”
By Christmas night, we were totally out of the pan cookie. My father pretended that my mom has been sneaking it in the middle of the night, but I knew she also doesn’t particularly care for chocolate. I also knew that my dad ate regularly in the middle of the night, especially in the few minutes where he struggled not to have a cigarette before ultimately giving in. I actively chose to be touched by my impression that he was lying about the over-eating and the smoking because he maybe cared that the smoking and overeating would upset me. To be honest, it was an intoxicating thought, to matter so much to someone who never saw me as more than a bit of trouble my whole life.
The pan cookie lived on the counter in the corner between the stove and the sink, under a cabinet reserved for chips and candy. Incidentally, it lived where I had stood in January after I graduated college, when—after months of stressing about where I would live with $250,000 in debt and a $10/hour job because my mom told me that my dad said I could not come home with Godzilla—my dad finally told me to my face that I couldn’t move back in because of my dog.
“I’ve had enough dogs. I’m tired of dogs,” he had said. It seemed so simple. I just had to give up the dog to live in his house—we, kids, were never allowed to call it our house. I just had to give up the little black and white cuddle bug who slept in my bed and licked my tears and ate cucumber slices as a treat so that I could temporarily stay in my father’s mostly empty five-bedroom home. Instead, I slept in my car and moved into my aunt’s empty condo until my father’s next heart attack. When he was incapacitated in the hospital, my mom quietly let me move back home.
Incidentally, this part of the kitchen is also where I will later stand when he will say, “I don’t know why your mother told you I didn’t want you to live with us after you graduated. I never said I hated your dog.”
And, this spot of floor is just five feet from the spot where, even later still, I will finally scream back at him in response to his screaming at me that I remembered his telling me I couldn’t live in his house with Godzilla and he couldn’t just bully my memories away. He will look so shocked that it will hurt to remember it when I finally write this five years after that, but I didn’t know any of this back then. That area of the kitchen was just where the cookie was, covering up a memory I thought would fade away.
***
Now.
This is the kindest light in which I can write about my dad. There are things I can’t yet disclose and huge, black gaps in my memories where my brain mercifully checked out. Editing this, I am inclined to write Godzilla’s attacking me in a self-deprecating, funny tone but the tone doesn’t work unless we all buy into, but somehow still ignore, the important foundational fact that Godzilla turned mean because my dad kicked him, that a sweet animal who had only ever known me had grown hostile because I had brought him into an unsafe home, where I ignored his boundaries and refused to acknowledge the constant tension and inevitable violence in the air.
Did it work? Did you chuckle even though you knew? Did you feel bad for my lonely dad?
Me too.