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And that's where Sister Geraldine is wrong again. She wants me and Eileen to stay together; she doesn't say so but I can tell from things she says that she wants it. Now Sister Geraldine is another intelligent person, but certain things she don't know anything about. I think she thinks I hit Michael, but I don't. Maybe a tap on the bottom, but that's all. I'd never hit Michael because I know how my father used to hit me, with the stick end of the plunger. I still have the marks.
I was one of 21 children, would you believe it? My father lived with my mother and my stepmother at the same time. He made me quit school when I was eight, so that I'd stay home and help clean house. The only one who tried to protect me was my mother. My father used to punch her in the stomach when they were in bed together. When she screamed, he said she was leaping for sex. She left when I was four. She wouldn't take me with her. I remember it today, isn't that something? I remember like it was yesterday.
Then I left home too. I ran away a lot, so they put me in Willowbrook for the crazy kids, because I was stealing bikes and radios, little things. I was 15. Some of the Willowbrook kids banged their heads against the wall all day, just sat and rocked and banged their heads. Some of them would get sexual and funny with me. I don't remember if they attacked me, because I didn't know what they were doing.
When I got out of Willowbrook I was 20, and I went to live with my father. He was an old man then, 70, but he got sexual with me too. He said it gave him strength. I felt awkward. You know what I mean? With my own father.
Excuse me for all this coughing. It's worse than when you were here before. I really have been sick; I don't care what they think at the office. My dentures are killing me too. The uppers don't fit. My gums shrink.
After six months I moved in with my mother. I think I began to grow for the ! first time in my life, living with her. I went to night school to learn to read and write. I started to teach myself to read in Willowbrook when they locked me up for 30 days after I jumped out the second-floor window, trying to escape. I used the detention time to try to read. I tell Michael: "Reading is the biggest thing." At night school I was doing well. I began to feel like somebody.
Nine years I lived with my mother, till I got married. I was 33, she was 20, a Jewish girl. I wanted to get married so badly. I didn't like her really. But she talked to me. I love to talk. It gets me thinking, worked up. I like talking right now like this.
What I'm saying is that I don't want the things that went wrong for me to go wrong for Michael. He's the happiness of my life. Yesterday he comes home with a rip in the seat of his pants. I tell him: "Throw 'em out, we'll buy new ones." Sometimes he gets upset with his lessons, rolls up the paper in a ball. I tell him: "Stop. Put the book away and relax." The only thing is I don't want him to grow up on cloud nine, which is why I make him learn. His life's got to be better than mine.
Not that my life is over yet either. Know what I mean? I'm intelligent. Don't you think I'm intelligent? And I'm still learning things and doing things and growing. I don't know where's the end of it.
XIII GERALDINE AND
MARY PAUL