Uncle Royce smoked cigars. Sometimes he didn't bother to light them but chewed the ends so thoroughly they seemed to have exploded behind his teeth. When he wasn't mauling the cigars, he was stuffing his lower lip with fat wads of tobacco that he pulled from a Red Man envelope.
Royce was often our babysitter. Scooter and Sally and Diggs were his own children, but my sister Marie and brother Junior and I were outsiders. When Marie was still a baby, Uncle Royce would rock her carefully while he told us tales of Greylocks, the monster who lived in closets and under beds. If I got close enough, he would pinch me hard.
Uncle Royce worked at the post office. My father had his own business, but our families spent a lot of time together. My parents had trouble conceiving children, so until I was born, cousins Sally and Diggs had two sets of parents available. Uncle Royce liked to tell me I was the ugliest baby he had ever seen, that I looked like a dry, shriveled apple. My mother said Uncle Royce loved children. I know he loved the fears of children. I know he loved my fear.
I remember that on Sundays Uncle Royce would pick us up after church in his station wagon and take us to Griswold Park. We each got a box of Cracker Jacks and I studied the prizes inside, puzzled that they weren’t any better. We fed the swans stale bread. The swans were mean and elegant, gliding eerily, like dreams.
In summers he drove us to a big lake with boats, stopping along the way to buy us Cokes and little bags of peanuts out of vending machines. I liked to pour the salty peanuts right into the Coke bottle and then suck them back through the narrow neck. Once, when Uncle Royce got drunk and came home late, Aunt Doodles opened their front door and shouted, “Why'd you bother to come home?”
Uncle Royce smiled, wavering hugely, and said, “I came home to see my little Doo-Dolls.”
Uncle Royce loved cows. In the winter we once went for a weekend to visit our grandmother’s farm. She was a tall gray-haired lady who baked biscuits. At breakfast in her kitchen, the honey had wax combs in it, and the milk was warm, dipped from a pail. One morning I watched Uncle Royce milking a cow. He touched her tenderly.
Uncle Royce liked to come up behind me and pull my pants down, exposing my butt. “I see the moon rise,” he'd say. This was supposed to be a joke, but only a foolish child got near him with her back turned, or, worse, forgot and sat behind him when he was driving. The tobacco spitting was legitimate then. Once he yelled “Duck!” and the dark spittle flew through the open window and landed on my shirt and face.
Momma and Aunt Doodles both yelled, “Royce!”
I was six or seven years old when he put a wooden clothespin on the soft underside of my arm, bruising me badly. Maddened by pain, I crossed the room, made my arms into a battering ram—my fists locked together— and hit him at full speed. I nearly knocked him down. Later my mother spanked me.
“You hurt him," she said. “You hurt your Uncle Royce.”
I tried to show her my bruised arm. She said my father was tied up at work, but I couldn’t understand. If he was tied up at work, how did she know if they were going to untie him?
When I was in high school, we moved to the country, and one day my father went to his office and didn't come home. A car wreck. His foreman was driving.
I didn’t get to say goodbye. I can't remember if we had breakfast together that morning or even if we were in the kitchen at the same time. At the funeral, the casket was closed, and I started thinking, What if he’s not really in there?
Later some people came to the house and my little brother sat on the floor of the living room playing with his Lincoln Logs. He made a brown log cabin with a green roof and a red chimney. “Daddy's dead,” he kept smiling and saying, because he didn’t understand what was happening.
Uncle Royce liked to play a game with his own dog: he would try to hit him with the car when he drove into the yard. We would all shriek as the dog disappeared under the wheels. Miraculously, when we looked behind us, the dog would still be chasing the car. One Sunday, soon after my father was buried, there was a nauseating thud, the sound of flesh hitting hard.
Uncle Royce stopped the car, and we all stood around in our Sunday School clothes looking down at the dog. The dog was bleeding from the mouth, staring up at Royce.
He made us walk on to the house. Later my mother said, “Royce feels terrible over his dog.”
“He hit it on purpose.”
“Don’t be silly. Royce loved his dog.”
By the time I was fifteen, the dark was full of nightmares, and I took tranquilizers to sleep. At breakfast I was so stupid I’d sometimes miss my mouth with the fork. I didn't have a boyfriend yet, except for Scott, who was shorter than me and a year younger.
Scott was feminine, graceful, and a good dancer. We saw La Dolce Vita together three times and called each other Maddalena and Marcello. In nightclubs which shouldn’t have admitted us, we danced wearing our large dark glasses. Outside, in parking lot, we drank martinis from a glass jar and gave each other worldly looks. “I can't tell cruelty from love,” we both liked to say.
My sister Marie stayed pretty through adolescence, but she was sick a lot. She could pull our mother and me out of our stupors when she stopped breathing. There was an oxygen tank in Marie’s bedroom, and asthma inhalers lay scattered around the house. Once, when I took her to the hospital and she was lying in one of those emergency-room cubicles, gasping like a guppy that had jumped out of our aquarium, I leaned over her and whispered, “Did Uncle Royce do something bad to you when you were little?”
Marie’s brown eyes were frightened, her blond hair damp with sweat. She was too sick to speak.
“Did he do mean things to you?”
The doctor came in behind me, but I couldn't stop. “Did he burn you with his cigar? Did he touch you really hard?”
In college my family history seemed to recede. I got interested in civil rights, astronomy, and partying. During the day I thought about social injustice, and at night, drunk, I looked up through the ceiling at the stars.
The man I married liked to touch me, which made me feel ashamed. Nicky was a scientist who did volunteer work for the civil rights movement. He was no one dramatic. When we made love I saw rows of numbers rising over his shoulders through the roof, curving toward infinity.
I liked being married to Nicky, liked the sound of his breathing and the feel of his warm body in bed at night. His personality stayed as smooth and impervious as a stone. He told our marriage counselor I was inaccessible, an accusation that seemed misplaced.
Several years after our divorce, I went for a weekend to an ashram in upstate New York. My drinking was getting out of control, and I’d developed an inner-ear disorder diagnosed as psychosomatic.
An old friend of mine from college told me about an Indian guru who'd helped her in some way she couldn't explain. “Maybe Rama's a shyster; maybe he's not. If he’s a fraud, he's a hell of a good one.”
The ashram was in a converted hotel in the Catskills. There were statues of Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jesus and the Virgin Mary arranged across the pristine lawn. The guide told me, “These are people Rama likes.” It all seemed so hokey I felt quite safe; but then, the first time I saw Rama, I fell to my knees. This reaction surprised me greatly— I wasn't raised Catholic— and I began crying, which stunned me because I’m not much of a cryer.
“I've come here about my balance,” I finally choked out.
Rama, wrapped in an orange silk robe, sat cross-legged on a kind of throne. He worked through an interpreter, who, on this occasion, didn't even bother to translate what I’d said. Rama looked bored as he tapped me with a peacock feather. I didn't respond to this feather business, but later, when the crowd— there were at least five hundred people in a converted ballroom— began to chant, I started to shiver at the beauty of the sound.
Then, the next day, Rama stopped me in the hallway as if I were a passing thought, and, with his palm, struck me sharply on the forehead. For a few seconds I saw a blue light so lovely I felt willing to spend the rest of my life trying to see it again.
I stayed in the ashram for six weeks, using up my sick leave and paid vacation. I didn't drink at all, and I held still a great deal. Sometimes I could hear the chanting even while the ashram was silent. I slept in a dormitory-style room with five other women, and at night I lay awake, listening to us breathe.
Not all my inner traveling was pleasant. Sometimes awful noises came out of my mouth in the large meditation room, which could sound like a ward for the dying. Rama called this “karma cleaning,” the light of God burning away our personal suffering. I began to see the blue light during meditation and within it a tiny white pearl, an unwinking point of light that Rama said was my individual soul.
Once, during meditation, I began to drift toward an enormous black sun with an orange corona. As I neared it, I flew faster and faster. At the last minute I realized it was not a black sun but the pupil of an enormous eye, and I shot through it into outer space. I was careening through stars when I thought, Oh no, this is real! — and immediately woke up.
“A very high experience,” Rama said when I told him about it through his interpreter. “You have passed through the eye of God.”
This interpreter was a former professor who specialized in Hindu religions before finding, as he put it, the deep end of the pool. He had a narrow face and was losing his hair, and his expression as he translated my story was peculiar. I wondered if he was jealous.
I was living in Boston at the time, and when I got back to my apartment I set up a little altar to Rama in my bedroom closet but quickly lost interest in meditation. I began drinking again, not as heavily. I continued seeing the blue light occasionally— out of the corner of my eye, or as I was falling asleep— but I felt contented enough with my work and my life, and my balance problem was gone.
I worked as a book editor and handled minor writers. Mostly I oversaw projects that generated income, like Japanese Gardening in a New England Setting or The Ninety-Second Diet. I liked my job and made a decent living at it.
“I'm achieving normalcy in some areas of my life,” I told my sister when she came to visit.
I hadn't seen Marie in several years. She came alone, although by now she had a husband and two children. This was her first time North, and her first time away from them, and I sensed that she wanted something from me she couldn’t articulate.
Although her blond hair had darkened to brown and she was twenty pounds overweight, Marie looked as beautiful to me as ever. We did minor sightseeing— a visit to Faneuil Hall, dinner at Durgin-Park— but mostly we sat in my Back Bay apartment and drank gin.
“I have a normal life, too,” she told me more than once; only she said it as if it were some kind of joke. I did imitations of the guru and his translator for her and described the ashram in detail, and we laughed a lot. She brought me the family news. Aunt Doodles had a fibroid tumor the size of a cantaloupe removed. Doodles’ doctor took a color photograph of the tumor, which she enjoyed showing to anyone who would look. “Maybe she'll put it on her Christmas card,” Marie said.
Our cousin Sally had finally figured out what to do about her Christmas tree: she wrapped it in Saran Wrap so she could leave it up year-round. “Thank God for artificial trees,” Sally said, “because this would never have been possible with a living one.”
Uncle Royce had killed another dog. The local dog pound had shown a clip on TV about a Doberman pinscher that was so vicious it was being put to sleep. Somehow Uncle Royce got possession of this dog. He penned it up and starved it for six weeks, until it was obedient and dependent on him. The dog growled at everyone else. Marie didn't let her sons near the dog, or near Uncle Royce either.
“But Uncle Royce loves children!” we said in unison. We were standing in the kitchen, and we laughed so hard we had to hold each other up.
My sister wiped away her tears and drained her gin and tonic. “Momma thinks you're so different since you left, but you’re the same.”
“No,” I said, “I'm not the same.”
“I wish you lived nearer home.”
Uncle Royce had been asleep on the front-porch divan when his new dog attacked him. “It tore his arm up,” Marie said, and we giggled. “Seventeen stitches!” We kept laughing. “He hung it,” she said suddenly, and now the tears were not from laughter. “My sons saw him do it.” She got out her inhaler.
“We’ve had too much gin, Marie. I wish I wasn’t drinking again.”
“You just look so much easier,” she wheezed, “in your face.”
Soon after Marie's visit, my mother telephoned me. During her Episcopalian years my mother had secretly remained a Baptist, and now she was going through a brief extremist phase. She had heard from Marie about the ashram and was certain I was going to hell. “Don't worry about it,” I told her.
She argued fiercely with me against vegetarianism. “It's not normal. Did it occur to you, when you were in that place, that they could've been drugging your food?”
“Momma, I keep telling you I’m not a vegetarian.”
Two months after visiting me, Marie dropped dead in a grocery store. “She couldn't breathe,” said the clerk who gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “She had an inhaler but it didn't help her.” The inhaler didn't help because Marie was having a heart attack. I hated thinking of her trying to breathe, with a stranger's mouth locked over hers, forcing air down her throat.
Rama's followers do not wear any special clothing, but I went to Marie's funeral wearing bright red silk, as if I were a follower of the guru Rajneesh. I wasn’t sure my mother would know about Rajneesh, although he'd been on TV a lot, so I painted a red dot on my forehead.
My mother grabbed my wrist at the funeral home. “How can you do this to your sister? How can you do this to me?”
“Do what?”
“You’ve always been wicked, and now you're going straight to hell.”
My sister's sons, who were six and four, were holding my hands. At their age, no one looks strange.
“She's a nun,” Toby, the six-year-old, said.
“Catholics,” my mother sneered, “the very worst.”
The boys and I retreated to gaze at the tank of tropical fish in the receiving room. The room smelled of air freshener.
“Did your mother tell you I was a nun?” I asked Toby.
He was tracing across the glass of the aquarium the path of a fish with a red dot on its stomach. He nodded without looking up.
“I'm not a nun, honey,” I said. “I'm not even a careful person.”
I took the boys into the church and we sat in the pew beside their father. Keith was a kind man, and I felt grateful to him for letting the children be with me this way. Despite my outfit and the dot on my forehead, I thought he could see Marie in my face.
Uncle Royce was one of the pallbearers. He limped. He’d gotten fat and old. The doctors had told him that if he didn’t quit drinking he'd die, and without alcohol he looked timid and uncertain. Just before the funeral service, I whispered to Toby, “Are you afraid of Uncle Royce?” Little Keith, who was called Kit, clutched my red silk.
“He’s bad,” Toby whispered, and Kit nodded, echoing “bad” loud enough to make my mother lean forward in the pew and glare.
The ceremony was sanctimonious and crude. My mother’s minister was a blustering glad-hander who radiated falseness and called my sister saved. Marie had not even believed in God.
Near the end of the service, a woman in an evening gown stepped from behind a curtain and, accompanied by canned backup music, sang a love song about Jesus.
I was breathing hard when Toby whispered, “Are you sick?”
I felt dizzy and confused. A voice inside me said angry.
“Angry,” I said out loud. My mother leaned over and slapped my arm, as if I were a child.
When I got back to Boston, I tried to take up meditation again, but I had gone black inside where the blue light had been, and when my inner screen finally lit back up, what I saw was ghastly: black horses vomiting blackness; a silver knife protruding from my navel; a cave full of snakes that I was chloroforming one by one while I joked, This will make a great living room! Twice I woke up from meditation, gagging.
I went back to the ashram and asked for a private audience with Rama. I told him about my sister and my uncle. “I know he did something terrible to us, Rama, but I can't remember. I'm full of hate, and I can't feel it.” The interpreter was enjoying this translation.
“Ah, yes, hate,” Rama said. “You must go to your uncle and make amends to him.”
“Make amends? Rama, that can't be right.”
“Your hatred is your enemy,” Rama said, "not your uncle. You must make amends for your hatred, for your own sake.”
The interpreter was grinning now, showing stained, uneven teeth.
I wish I'd done something dramatic, like hitting Rama with his own peacock feather, but instead I merely brooded about his advice overnight. In the morning, I said, "I can't accept what you told me.”
Rama seemed unsurprised. “I'll miss you.” Even gurus make jokes.
Uncle Royce picked me up at the airport. My mother was busy having a manicure from a Korean woman. “Those Orientals are so smart, honey,” she told me over the phone. “They’re going to take over the whole USA. I'm glad you’re coming home.”
“It’s just a short visit.”
Uncle Royce was driving his old white Cadillac, which now looked like a movie prop, and chewing a cigar. I put my own bag in the trunk. He was still huge but seemed weak.
As we pulled away from the curb I said, “How many miles you got on this thing?” The interior of the car smelled of tobacco. A pack of Red Man lay on the seat.
“Two forty,” he said, spitting thick black juice into a Coke bottle.
“I remember when you tried to get us to drink out of those Coke bottles.”
He nodded almost imperceptibly.
“I remember a lot of things.”
We drove in silence to the house.
My mother had moved in with Uncle Royce and Aunt Doodles. They lived in a fifties’ copy of a plantation house, complete with white columns, because Scooter, as soon as he got rich, had bought this house for his parents. There were formal rooms no one used, a massive living room, a dining room, and a study. Everyone hung out in the family room and the kitchen, which were chaotic and messy. A television played continually, and almost every night a card game formed around the kitchen table.
The adults liked to play a game called “Go to Hell.” I remembered this game vaguely from high school, and on the first night I sat by Uncle Royce and won.
During a break I sliced a pepperoni.
“I thought you were a vegetarian,” my mother said, studying her new acrylic nails.
I was supposed to sleep upstairs in one of the bedrooms, but the windows up there were painted shut and I felt claustrophobic, so I went downstairs and stretched out on a sofa in the family room. I lay awake watching the stream of cool air from the vent moving the heavy curtains. My anger seemed gone. My uncle was pathetic, the deflated figure of a nightmare.
I awoke to the sound of my mother crying.
She sat across the room from me in the dim light at the kitchen table. She was wearing a red nightgown with “Coca-Cola” embossed across the back. Her head, helmeted by a hairnet, rested forehead down on the blond wood table. “It’s too hard,” she was saying. “It's too hard.”
I went over and sat beside her. I didn't know what to do.
“Marie's dead, and your brother won't even come home for her funeral. And you don't live here anymore.”
The pores in her cheeks were waxy and bluish without makeup. When I tried to put my arm around her, she shoved me away. “Oh god, Ellen Larraine, it really is too hard.”
I put my arm back around her, and she turned and embraced me. “Ellen Larraine,” I said aloud. No one had called me by both my names since I was a child.
We sat that way for maybe half a minute. Then I said, “Momma, do you know what Uncle Royce did to Marie and me when we were little?”
She pulled away and the light caught her artificial nails. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know what Uncle Royce did to Marie and me when we were little? I know he did something, but I can’t remember.”
“Your Uncle Royce loves you.”
“Momma, this really matters.”
She peeled the acrylic nail off her thumb, exposing a pink, bitten nub.
“Momma.”
Bright blood formed at the base of her nail. “He burned you,” she said.
I tried to keep my breathing even. “How did he burn me?”
“With matches.”
“Where?”
“In your navel. With a match. I caught him once. I don't know what else.”
“What about Marie?”
“I don’t know. Isn't that enough?”
“Why did you let him?”
“I don't know . . . scared. Honey, he’s my brother.”
“Me too. I was scared too.”
I stroked her shoulder, and after a while I led her back upstairs to bed. She let me tuck the sheets around her and kiss her cheek, which smelled of cold cream. She looked frail and old. “It’s all my fault, Ellen Larraine. It's my fault, isn't it?”
“It’s no one's fault,” I said, although I wasn't sure.
For the rest of the night I lay awake on the sofa, burning. Matches flared in my mind and were extinguished. I smelled sulfur. There were other memories I will not name. Sometimes I could hear my own voice screaming, and sometimes I heard Marie's. I tried to hold Marie's face before me. “I’m listening,” I kept saying out loud. “I hear you, Marie.” I stuffed a pillow between my legs to help the pain.
In the morning, for breakfast, Aunt Doodles made blueberry pancakes. She heated Aunt Jemima syrup, and we all sat around the blond wood table.
My mother’s thumbs were bandaged. She seemed afraid to look at me, but I felt oddly okay. I even made a joke to Uncle Royce, my favorite from childhood. “What’s green and has wheels?”
He shook his head.
“Grass. I’m just kidding about the wheels.”
Later, because it was Saturday and there was a new mall, we all went shopping. The new mall was very long and had two stories, with escalators in the middle and at each end. Cathedral ceilings made it seem like a church. I smiled, imagining the mall filled with the sound of Rama's followers, chanting.
Momma held on to my arm as if she were a child. “This must seem strange as the moon for you,” she said.
“I live in Boston, Momma. They have malls in Boston.”
She squeezed my elbow. “I mean strange to be home.”
“Yes, it's very strange to be home.”
“Would you let me come visit you?”
“Of course.”
She insisted on buying clothes for me, so I picked out some serviceable pants and a pullover sweater. “I wish Marie was here,” she said.
“I do too.”
For the last few years Aunt Doodle's arteries had been hardening, and she'd become increasingly anxious outside her house, so as we explored the mall, she stayed close to my mother. Uncle Royce, unsteady on his feet, sat outside each store on the benches by the ashtrays, chewing his cigar.
We were going upstairs for lunch at the cafeteria and while riding the escalator I felt, through the metal steps, an unexpected jolt.
“Royce!” I heard Doodles shout.
I looked behind me. Uncle Royce had tripped and fallen. He was on his hands and knees, a cigar still stuck in his mouth. The escalator continued to move, and he couldn’t stand back up. For several seconds we rode that way, our eyes fastened on each other. I wish I could say some kind of acknowledgment passed between us.
The escalator stopped, and a harsh alarm sounded. Two security guards ran toward us.
“Oh no, oh no!” Doodles shouted.
My mother wailed once, “Royce!”
I crossed the few steps separating Uncle Royce from me and stooped down beside him. A few strands of gray hair hung across his wide, emotionless face. I put my hand carefully on his shoulder. “Don't be afraid,” I said.
Thank you.
Childhood trauma, such a cruel legacy.