He figured his daddy could solve the rest. He could tell his mother not to drink any of her special stuff and then she wouldn’t be so mean to him. Maybe she’d even stop slapping him. And since his daddy was a boy, too, maybe he could help him with some things.
School, for instance. That was his biggest problem besides his mother. Maybe his daddy could help him with school. Maybe he could tell his mother that he didn’t have to go to school anymore. He hated going now, but his mother made him go there anyway. He was in second grade and it was terrible. He’d liked Kindergarten. They got to play and take naps and eat snacks. The teachers never got mad when he had an accident or did something wrong. Miss Reed had been his favorite. She was really, really tall and pretty and had long, long hair and she smiled at him and called him ‘Jeffrey’ instead of ‘Jeffie.’ She always liked his art projects that he made, too. He tried to give them to her, but she made him take them home to his mother.
“I’m sure your mommy will want to put them on the refrigerator or something,” she’d said, and because she was so beautiful, Jeffrey wanted to believe her. So he took the colorings and the finger-paintings and the macaroni projects home. He showed them to his mother (never ‘mommy’), who gave them a critical glance and tossed them on the table.
“Miss Reed said you should put them on the fridge,” he told his mother.
“Miss Reed does not run this house,” his mother snapped back. She took another drink from her water glass full of her special stuff. “Go do your chores and I’ll think about it.”
He did as he was told, but the colorings and finger-paintings and macaroni projects only sat on the table, never on the fridge. Sometimes, they sat for a day or two, sometimes for weeks. Her water glass full of special stuff made little ring marks on some of them. He imagined those to be like the little happy faces Miss Reed drew on papers when he wrote his numbers and letters really good.
Eventually, though, all of those papers all ended up in the kitchen garbage, covered in coffee grounds and empty bottles of her special stuff.
Once, he drew a picture of his family. The three figures took up the entire piece of construction paper. He made sure his mother and daddy were standing next to each other, holding hands. He gave his mother a giant smile, but then he drew the eyebrows wrong. They slanted inward toward the center, giving her an angry look. He tried to fix it, but everything he did just made things worse-
“All you ever do is make things worse!”
— so that his mother looked like she was enraged. There was nothing he could do, so he moved on to his daddy. He made sure to draw his Navy uniform as best that he could. He used the one picture he had as a guide, even making certain that he put the right number of stripes on his sleeve. Three below, then one on top with an eagle. After that, he carefully colored it in, taking his time and staying mostly inside the lines he’d drawn. When he’d finished, he thought it was perfect. In fact, it was probably the best drawing he’d ever made. Miss Reed agreed with him, putting her gentle, warm hand on his shoulder when she told him so.
“It’s a beautiful family drawing, Jeffrey,” she said, her voice soft and comforting.
He tried to give it to her, but she declined as always. “It belongs on your refrigerator, for your family to see.”
She was right, of course. Miss Reed was always right. She knew everything, he figured, or just about everything. So he took it home. Instead of presenting it to his mother so that she could toss it on the table on top of his other work, he found a piece of tape and put the drawing on the refrigerator himself. He stood in the kitchen and looked at it. After a few seconds, he realized that he’d started to cry and he didn’t know why. The picture made him happy when he looked at it, but it made him sad, too. That was confusing. He wasn’t sure what to think about it, but he didn’t know who to ask. His mother would probably slap him and tell him to ‘button it up’ or ‘zip it.’
He left the picture up. Maybe it would make his mother happy. Maybe she would agree with Miss Reed that it belonged up there.
By dinnertime, his mother discovered it. She ripped it from the refrigerator and shoved it into his face. She screeched about how he’d drawn her, asking him if he thought she was really that evil. She asked him if he wanted her to die and called him an ungrateful bastard. He thought the ‘pain you’ve caused me’ speech was coming, but then she veered into a series of insults against his daddy. She called him names he’d never heard and didn’t understand, but he could tell all of them were bad.
He stood in the kitchen, shocked at her rage. Inside, all the happiness that had come from drawing the picture seeped away and that part of him filled with more of the same sadness.
Near the end of her tirade, she tore the drawing into strips. She forced him to put the paper into his mouth and chew it up. He cried and begged her, but she slapped him hard and pressed forward. He chewed on the paper, his mouth quickly drying. He feared that she would make him swallow it. He knew that he’d choke to death on the huge wad in his mouth. Instead, she directed him to spit it into the garbage, take another strip and chew some more. They stood in the kitchen for fifteen long minutes while he chewed up and spat his entire drawing into the garbage can.
“That’s your goddamn family,” she snarled at him, pointing at the clumps of chewed up paper.
He didn’t understand exactly, but somehow he knew she was right.
When Kindergarten ended, he remembered how sad he was. He cried and clung to Miss Reed’s leg on the final day. He wanted to ask her to be his mommy instead of his mother, but even back then he knew that wasn’t the way the world worked, so he didn’t bother to ask. He just cried and hung on until she gently pried his fingers away.
“You’ll have lots of fun in first grade, Jeffrey,” she told him, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “You’re a nice boy and everyone will love you, just like we all did here in this class.”
He believed her, and that represented the first real betrayal besides his mother that he could remember in his life.
The lie hadn’t been immediately apparent. First grade had been all right at first, even though the elementary school was much bigger than where he’d gone to kindergarten. He got lost on the first day, but a nice woman almost as pretty as Miss Reed found him wandering and took him to his class.
He soon discovered that there were no naps or any snacks. There was recess, which somewhat made up for it, but not completely. And the boys and girls in his class seemed to like him. Some of them, at least. But then he discovered that there were second-graders, third-graders and fourth-graders at the school, too. Some of them liked to pick on the younger kids.
The fourth-graders were the worst. They pushed him down. They took his milk money away. When it was his turn to play four-square, they made him go to the back of the line. Sometimes, they pretended to be nice and let him play dodge ball, then all of them hurled the red rubber balls at him at the same time. Once, the force of Hugh Jessup’s throw knocked his head backward and into the wall. He fell to the ground, dazed. Black walls rushed in from the edges of his vision, collapsing toward his center. He may have passed out — he couldn’t remember. He remembered that no one noticed, though. The fourth-graders who’d thrown the balls (except for Hugh Jessup — he was a third grader who was big and so they let him play, too) scattered. The foursquare games, basketball, tetherball and tag all continued around him while he sat against the red brick wall, blinking. His head throbbed and when he reached back, he felt something warm and sticky. He looked down at his fingers and saw blood. The sight scared him at first, but what he worried about even more was everyone knowing. Everyone laughing. So he wiped the blood behind the knee of his Toughskin jeans and sat still, collecting his senses.