Authors: Beth Ditto
I went back to Aunt Jannie’s. I wasn’t sure if I could—or even
wanted to—stay there without her. It felt like she was only in the other room, like you could find her resting in bed, wake her up to watch game shows, ask her to talk about the old days in Judsonia, dancing to outlaw jukeboxes in the woods. Aunt Jannie was mean, crazy mean, but I could only imagine the world had made her that way, that if I’d have had Aunt Jannie’s life I could have easily become her: so much fury and no power to do anything with it.
After she died, I stood in her house, which still stunk like Aunt Jannie’s cigarettes. Judsonia had made her. It had shaped the paths available to her; it had provided the punishments when she strayed; it had kept that wild Scorpio girl in some sort of shaky line. I hoped she was at peace, if peace was what she wanted. Maybe heaven for Aunt Jannie was a place where a woman could start a ruckus, speak her mind, and people would listen. When I thought about Aunt Jannie’s heaven I just hoped that she was in a place where she could be free.
Aunt Jannie’s place was a rough house for the three A’s to grow up in. Though my little ADD cousin often got the worst of Aunt Jannie, his older sister didn’t have it much better. For every bit of negative attention that her brother got, she got no attention at all. So it’s no wonder no one noticed the awful thing she confided in me one day.
We were very close. I couldn’t do anything about her brother’s situation and their baby sister was only six months old when she showed up on Aunt Jannie’s doorstep. I wouldn’t say there are any upsides to being the firstborn, but there are definitely no upsides to being the first girl. We were close enough in age that we related to each other and got along, but we were far enough apart that I felt protective of her. It must have been similar to the way that Akasha felt about me.
One evening, she came to me while the house was almost empty. She wanted to talk to me about Dean. She said he was doing things to her. You could hear the shame in her voice. I don’t think she was
afraid to tell me, I just think she was embarrassed to say the words. I wasn’t shocked, because Dean had asked me for a blowjob in the past, but I had just said no. What I understood was that what Dean was doing was sexual, not that it was sexual abuse. We were taught that predators were strangers luring pretty girls into vans with candy, or masked men in dark alleys covering your screams with gloved hands. Where were the examples of abuse within the family? We were all kids, me and Dean and my little cousins. What was going on between us couldn’t be abuse, could it? It was a norm. At that point in my life I thought that we all—as kids—had to deal with some form of hurt.
When I was younger, I was bitter at my brother for the relationship he had with my Uncle Lee Roy. Lee Roy is a perfect example of the famously incestuous South: Aunt Nancy, who is married to Uncle Lee Roy, is my adopted dad Homer’s sister. Uncle Lee Roy is also the brother of my birth father’s grandmother. So regardless of which dad I wound up with, Uncle Lee Roy was destined to be part of my family. I hate that name, Lee Roy, and I hate that man. It’s hard for me, because I look like him. I have his body—short and stocky—the same body as my grandmother. He was handsome-ish, with his hair slicked back into a pompadour. He wore thick, black glasses until the day he died. He worked at Wal-Mart, and I remember him most vividly in his Wal-Mart uniform. I can also remember some different outfits I had on when he cornered me; I can remember zoning out to the television while his hands gripped me, how I let my eyes lose their focus until the television was a kaleidoscope of shifting colors, the rise and fall of a laugh track. I remember a lot.
I would say Uncle Lee Roy was a creep. He oozed an inappropriate sexuality. Not all sexual abuse is about sex—it can be about power, humiliation, habit—but for Lee Roy in my heart I
know it was about sex. Every time we were alone, his hands were everywhere. Down my pants, down my shirt. It was a normal experience—Uncle Lee Roy had been coming at me that way ever since I could remember, beginning when I was about four years old.
Then it got worse. I would sleep at his house. I don’t know why everyone thought that was safe; Uncle Lee Roy had a reputation. My father lived with him for a while when I was five, and I would spend the night because one of my cousins lived there too. Their presence in the house didn’t stop him. I remember once being in the living room while a whole pile of relatives were in the kitchen. Anyone could have just looked over and seen what he was doing to me, but I guess nobody did. When I stayed with my dad I would fall asleep in his bed but I’d wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom or try to find a more comfortable spot to sleep. Lee Roy was a night owl.
I never wanted to kiss Lee Roy goodbye. In my family we kiss on the lips. I just couldn’t do it. I would come home to Mom’s house and I would be on fire. Below my belt would be on fire. I don’t even know how it happened—how I got from one room to another, how I got home. I just remember fire.
My mother knew Uncle Lee Roy was a pervert; she talked about it all the time, how he had felt her up when she was young. Great-Uncle Lee Roy, he was like fourteen years older than Mom, a real old man. One afternoon Mom was talking about him, how he was a known sleaze. A familiar feeling came over me, and there, for the first time in our living room, I told her what had happened. Also for the first time, I saw it for what it really was. Mom froze when my words hit her.
Your dad better not have known about this
. Then she called him. But it didn’t end then. When I was in third grade, one of my teachers tried to step in to stop the abuse too, but she did it so awkwardly it backfired, and I wound up feeling worse. Without meaning to, I told a friend from school that I was
being abused. I was so young then, and though I knew what was happening was bad, I also thought it was normal, and so I felt confused a lot about what to talk about and what to keep hidden. The girl who I had unwittingly confessed to told her mother about it over dinner. The mother called our teacher and the teacher sat me down at recess. I thought I was in huge trouble.
I heard you did it with a guy
, she said—a pretty blunt, unknowingly insensitive way to put it. I was speechless. I denied it. I just froze. My teacher let me go out to recess, and I found a place in the schoolyard apart from the other kids and I sat there. I just sat there. It made me anxious for days to know that people knew. It didn’t help, I only felt like I was in trouble.
Scared to death is how I felt after my teacher took me aside. I just felt like I’d been found out. How she said
I heard you did it with a guy
and not
Are you okay?
What third grader is doing anything with a guy and being okay? She must not have known how to approach such a taboo, uncomfortable subject, with secondhand information to boot. She was a good person, a good teacher, but as a result of her botched attempt at helping me I became even more silent. As for the girl I had told, I didn’t really talk to her after that. We were never close friends anyway.
The abuse finally ended when I ended it. I said to him,
You have to stop doing this
. I was getting older and could make the decision whether or not I wanted to visit Dad at Lee Roy’s house.
When enough time had passed to look back, I felt so angry at everyone for letting it all happen, for not seeing to it that I was protected. When I get upset, I have to talk about it. I talked about it with Akasha.
You think you were the only one?
she scoffed. But of course not. I never saw anything happen to my sister, and she has never told me about it in detail. I just know that we have this thing in common with who knows how many other females in our family. I thought that I was getting abused and Akasha wasn’t, and it was because I was fat and Akasha was not. She was a tow-headed, cotton-headed blonde, delicate, thin, and girly. Protected,
I thought, by this conventional prettiness. Safe and skinny. But it wasn’t true.
Years later, in the middle of the woods in Washington, Gossip’s guitarist Nathan Howdeshell and I were working late on a sad little somber song about secrets in the dark: “Holy Water.” From front to finish it was written and recorded in a matter of minutes. When I emerged from my vocal-booth time capsule it was very late. There was a message from my dad telling me Lee Roy had died.
Just thought you should know
.
I tried to look out for the other kids. I tried really hard to make sure my little cousins were taken care of. I saved pennies for the oldest one so she could watch them collect in a jar and then I’d slide them into wrappers when I had enough. I liked the weight of the rolls in my palm, the order of the change snug inside the paper. It felt like I was really giving her something she could use—giving her a little say. But what she really needed was the same thing her brother needed, and what I needed—help—and there was no one around who had any.
Like I’ve told you, Arkansas is a good ten years behind the times, so basically the whole country was well aware of grunge when I started getting my first, excited understanding of the phenomenon. While the rest of the country was in head-to-toe flannel, I was wearing my hair higher than my Aunt Jannie’s blood sugar levels. Things take a while to get to places like Judsonia, and then they take a while to leave. It was hard for me to abandon my big hair, no matter how cool Alanis Morissette was, or how cozy flannel could be. I lived to rat my hair, and I was good at it. Really good at it.
If I had a perm and bangs you can be sure I had the best curls, the tallest bangs. I knew how to do it. I was so good at doing hair that kids who wouldn’t look at me twice in the hall were risking major injury to their reputations by asking me to come to their houses and give them their prom updos. I could do anything with hair, so I had to find a way to fit my talents into my new grunge lifestyle. Out of all the friends I was making in high school—and there weren’t that many—I became the best at the Kool-Aid dye
job. I made up my own personal technique, which was to mix two packets of Kool-Aid with a creamy dollop of Noxzema—just about the size of a dime or a quarter—and let it sit on my head for hours, so my hair color was really bright. I still love the smell of Noxzema, how it sears your nose with that eucalyptus stink.
My Kool-Aid pink hair and Converse weren’t fooling anyone, though; I was still anything but cool, but I didn’t mind. In my own grassroots movement at my high school I orchestrated a hostile nerd takeover. When it came time to vote for Accolades—the smarmy who’s who of the school: who’s cutest, funniest, smartest—I persuaded the entire school to vote for my friends, the nerds. I campaigned on behalf of dorks and skanks, teenage moms, sluts, and weirdos, and it worked. We won everything. I was a lucky weirdo at my school, blessed with a total obliviousness to whether people liked me. If you care what the right people—your friends—think of you, you’re free to do anything, and I didn’t give a shit how my classmates regarded me. If you weren’t my friend, I didn’t care. Not getting invited to a party is worth it; that missing invitation can say important things about who you are and what you value. I didn’t get beat up, and that gave me room to be outrageous without fear of serious consequence. I made people laugh. I was that fat kid who beat people to the punch, who survived by being funny. And everyone likes a funny person. Everyone likes to laugh.
The crowning glory of the nerd takeover I’d orchestrated at school was successfully getting myself elected to represent my class at Fall Festival. Fall Festival is just a tiny little beauty pageant, but in Judsonia it’s a big deal, a time-honored tradition, a fund-raiser for the high school. Everyone wanted to be in Fall Festival, from the popular girls to regular ones.
All the people nominated for Fall Festival had to leave the classroom. All the popular girls—as popular as you can be in a place that isn’t very populated—and Mary Beth Ditto. This kid Trevarar made a noise and jerked around in his desk.
That’s all we need, a
skank representing our class!
And that year a skank
did
represent our class. I got elected to Fall Festival because all the nerds liked me and there are more nerds than non-nerds. I was the one nerdy fat girl, the weirdo, the punk Riot Grrrl, the Kool-Aid-headed funny girl up there on the stage with all the popular girls. All of those girls who were the exact opposite of me.
I had a lot of friends and, though we might not have been the A crowd, we were definitely the most fun. Tonya was my oldest and closest friend—oldest in the sense that she flunked a couple of grades and had been held back more than once. Tonya was cool. She ordered her clothes from the Delia’s catalog. I was so horribly jealous; she had the cutest T-shirts and baby-doll dresses. It was so simple for her; she just picked her look right off of the catalog page. She loved Sonic Youth so much I just couldn’t bring myself to listen to them for years. She could have Sonic Youth.
My fashion evolution went like this: right before I found punk, I wanted to look like Mary Tyler Moore from
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. I wanted to look like Janis Joplin, Patty Duke, and Mama Cass, all rolled into one girl. Never mind that all those women were rocking different looks to go with their different genres and scenes; to me it was all the ’60s, it was all the same, and I liked all of it.
I had three obstacles in my way when it came to clothes: money (didn’t have it), size (I was fat), and style (there was none in Arkansas). Then, something came to my rescue: old reliable resourcefulness. If I wanted something cool, I had to sew it myself. My mom and I would make patterns by tracing clothes that fit me onto newspaper pages. Almost every special piece I wore was either made by me or for me. In some ways, that still rings true.
I was desperate for subculture. I took it any way I could get it. I had access to old TV shows, old magazines, and old music. I was infatuated with the stories of my mother’s childhood friend
Dan—who, like me, is an escapee of White County. Even though I didn’t know him, he inspired me. I wanted to be just like him. When he was a kid he was arrested for spray painting stop signs. He simply added the word
WAR
, so when drivers in oncoming traffic read it, they read
STOP WAR
. By the time the ’80s rolled around Dan was long gone and making a living off of his art in Seattle at a time when to most people, “Washington” meant the nation’s capital. Thus began my fixation on the Pacific Northwest.