When my father decided to marry his 3rd wife, he came to our mother’s house to ask for permission from me and my siblings. My two little sisters and I were the only ones there so we sat in his car, parked in Mom’s driveway, while he explained the situation to us for the first time. We had never met the woman before. The wedding was scheduled for the next day.
I liked Juanita well enough, but Dad seemed very worried, clutching the steering wheel, staring ahead, anxiety written all over his face. I asked him repeatedly, “Well do you love her, Daddy?” That was all that mattered to me.
Each time I asked him if he loved her, he shook his head, and grimaced. “Oh, love. Love’s got nothing to do with it.” he kept replying. “I’m lonely. I need companionship. I’ve got to have companionship.”
I was disappointed by his answer, being a 14 year old girl and wanting to believe that love was the end-all and the cure-all, and it didn’t actually turn out well for him because by the end of it all, she had drained him of spirit, of time and ambition, and funds (according to Dad’s personal accountant), while driving away his children, one by one, along with his mother, step-father and a number of friends .. only for him to discover that she had not named him as beneficiary to her private little bank account in the end. “That goddamned bitch!” was the last thing he ever said about her, before his memory of her completely faded.
But, to begin at the beginning, I thought my father’s latest girlfriend, was the nicest girlfriend a girl’s father could ever have. She took me out for an ice cream cone, gave me a couple of nice gifts, and I tried to be comfortable with her. She was unlike anything I’d ever known before.
She wore thick make-up painted on like Cleopatra, 6 inch stiletto heels and had jet black hair that fell in gentle waves all the way down to her knees, although she rarely ever let it hang down like that. The only pictures of it hanging down were on her honeymoon where she wore a leopard print, single-strapped swimsuit that fit very well with their jungle themed honeymoon suite. She clung to a heavy vine that was hanging in the plush shower/bath, clad in her leopard skin swimsuit, long braid swinging beneath her bottom. With shock I realized that my Dad was Tarzan and Juanita was his Jane, a perfect Jane.
For the rest of the time, Juanita kept her long, knee-length hair in a large and shiny braid that was tightly wrapped around her head. My dad had replaced my stiff, cold, passionless mother with a sex kitten. I was far too young to see this at the time. I would not realize this until I was in my 50’s, looking at old pictures, finding their sex costumes in drawers after she passed. She was exotic. She was fascinating to me. She seemed kind enough.
I encouraged him to marry her.
I completely forgot that kittens also have claws.
My little sisters were 7 and 5. They kept asking our Dad if she was going to be like the mean step-mothers in Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. I thought it was funny and would giggle, assuring them that Juanita would not be like those stepmothers in the Disney movies. What did I know?
And so it would come to be that I was living with my father and his new wife about six months after this visit. He married her the very day after our visit. I realize now that he was having cold feet at the last minute and was looking to us for a way out.
I went to the wedding and had caviar for the first time. Her expectations brought him into a higher class of living than I had ever seen. I had my hair up in a bun and was dressed like an adult for the first time. I stood at the caviar tray all night, having never had anything so delicious, both the red and the black goop, shiny, glistening little balls of salty gelatin, on tiny little pie wedge crusts. I’m sure I must have come across as totally classless.
I moved in with my father, shortly after the marriage. In fact, my mother took me there and dropped me off while they were away on their honeymoon. Much to their surprise, they found me standing in the living room when they returned. Without a word, my stepmother whirled around and walked out of the house. It took some convincing from my father to get her to enter her new home.
One morning, while Dad was shaving in the hallway bathroom, door wide open, as he’d always done, I was standing in the doorway, casually talking to him when Juanita brushed past me. My father looked fearful and whispered to me to go away. Later that day, my father explained to me that it was bothering Juanita to see me spending time with him chatting in the morning. It took me by complete shock and surprise, the first time I’d ever been made to feel ashamed of spending time with my father, a very unsettling feeling.
The first time her claws literally came out was when Dad took us on a trip to a Dallas football game. It was a long drive and it was freezing outside. Dad and Juanita and a man with big, giant belly sat in the front seat of the car. The man with the belly was smoking a big fat cigar and he opened the window all the way down at Juanita’s request. An icy wind shot through the back seat and my friend and I were so cold we laid down on the floor of the car in an effort to escape the stabbing pain of the icy wind. It was so incredibly miserable, breathing that awful smoke and fighting off the inescapable wind, that we began to laugh hysterically at our situation as we lay on the floor of the car.
The next day, when Dad could get me alone , he said, “Why did you two laugh in the car like that? Every time you did, Juanita stabbed me with her fingernails.” I was horrified. What kind of woman was this that he had married?
This is probably the first time I’ve mentioned the name of my eldest sister in this journal because every time I begin to write about her I get a big lump in my throat and then my eyes fill with water and I can’t see to type.
Nancy was the sweetest sister a person could ever have. She was my Cinderella. Long story. Our mother was not her mother and never pretended to be. Nancy took better care of us than anyone else in the family when we were young. She was my heart and soul. My parents picked on her for reasons having to do with my mother’s jealousy and Dad’s attempt to assuage that jealousy. I stood and witnessed this. Some people jumped in on it and participated.
Nancy was a stunning beauty and never fully knew it. She was timid, shy and fearful much of the time, and I was one of the few persons in her life who understood why. I didn’t like it when people hurt Nancy, and had spent a good deal of my childhood defending her against bullies.
By age twenty-one, Nancy was engaged and I was now living with my father and new step-mom when we drove to Austin to meet her new man. Nancy’s fiance wore a large cowboy hat. My father was not a fan. None of us a knew it at the time but Nancy had just become pregnant, thus the sudden wedding announcement. Nancy was feeling more fragile than ever. It was so exciting to see her. She’d been my best friend all my life and having her stripped away from me, not even allowed to visit my mother’s house, had been more devastating to me than losing the company of my parents.
We all went out to eat, Nancy’s new fiance included, and everything went fine, but after we dropped him off and were driving Nancy back to her apartment, my father began to tease Nancy, as had been the pattern for all of our lives.
“Why does he wear such a big hat, Nancy? And it’s purple! He wears a purple cowboy hat! Ho, ho” and Dad laughed and laughed at her. Nancy and I both argued with Dad that David’s cowboy hat was brown, not purple. But he only laughed more.
Suddenly, just as we pulled up to Nancy’s apartment, our step-mother jerked her head around and lashed out at Nancy, “Face it, Nancy, you’re only with him because he’s all that you can get!”
It was the most vicious thing I had ever heard said against the kindest person I had ever known. Nancy burst out crying, jumped out of the car and ran straight into the door of her apartment, never looking back. I couldn’t believe it when Dad just drove away. It breaks my heart to this day. I should have started screaming and demanded he go to her door and straighten things out but I wasn’t accustomed to speaking out against my step-mother.
As cruel as my mother, father, big sister and cousin had been to Nancy with their teasing and belittling, no one, absolutely no one, had ever been this cruel. And so I proceeded to ignore my step-mother and pretend she was not there for the next few days. I pressed my lips together, looked straight ahead and walked into my room, shutting my door, every day when I got home from school.
I planned to never speak to my stepmother again until she apologized to Nancy and Nancy’s wounds were healed. Just a few days into the silent treatment and Juanita had a fit of such epic proportions that I was flung upon a journey that would take me through many foster homes and institutions for the next five years.
I was sitting atop my little twin bed in our new apartment, thumbing through a Teen Magazine, with my door closed, when I heard my father yell, “Kay, Lock your door!!” …
Of course I responded by jumping up and doing the exact opposite. I flung my door open just in time to see my father tackling my step-mother as she’s trying to get into my room, pinning her to the floor with his knee, her arms and legs flailing to get free and Dad’s yelling at me to get out of the apartment, which I promptly did.
She’d gotten herself so worked up about the cold shoulder that I was giving her she was ready to tear me apart with those long pointed fingernails of hers.
It so happened that I hung out at Dad’s newspaper office, sometimes working, mostly being babysat by some of his younger employees, during the summer and other holidays. So Dad asked one of them to take me home for a few days until things simmered down at home. He asked my favorite friend, Sandy, to take me to stay with her for a few days and she did so joyfully at first.
Sandy could not have been more than 20 or so, but she seemed like a much older and wiser woman to me at the age 15. I was thrilled with the idea. Sandy had a great big hairdo and had a great big smile. She wore cowboy boots and listened to country music that I adored. It was new to me.
Sandy lived in a one room cabin where the stove, refrigerator and bed were in the same single room. It was comfortable and cozy, but Sandy had a boyfriend, Jeff, who wanted to be alone with Sandy sometimes. Sometimes she’d stumble home in the middle of the night, fall into the double bed that we both shared, smelling of booze. It was a little cramped.
Dad wasn’t offering Sandy any financial help, so that too was becoming a problem. Dad used to send me in to the local store to grab groceries and tell them to put the groceries on his tab, so they knew me. I finally got the idea I could do it without him and began to do that for Sandy.
This did not solve the problem of boyfriend, Jeff, however, so, in the meantime, Sandy had been pressuring my Dad at work, asking him how much longer it would be. I guess that at some point she grew impatient with him and accused him of being unable to control his own wife at which point he became so angry that he fired her on the spot and he never even looked into the whereabouts of me.
Sandy was beside herself, now unemployed and still stuck with me. Sandy and I went to my mother’s house and explained the situation to her. Sandy still wanted me to live with her, she was such a generous hearted person, but she explained to my mother that she just couldn’t keep me without financial help, at which point my mother offered her $50 a month for her services.
Sandy and I were thrilled, but I was also perplexed by the amount, as my mother had always told us kids that the $50 per child per month that my father was paying for child support was a joke, nothing but a token amount, and didn’t nearly cover the expense of us. But Sandy was happy about the amount, so I was too.
In order for Sandy to get a weekend alone with her boyfriend, for the first time in months, she took me to her friends’ house, a married couple with a four year old son, and dropped me off for the weekend. I will always love Sandy and never blame her, but she never did come back for me and I never saw her again after that.
I suppose Jeff talked her into dumping me and I hope she didn’t walk around with guilt about that for any time of her life. I’ve always wanted to thank her for what she did, the time she helped out. Not to mention apologize for the fact that she lost her job. The family she left me with was just what I needed.
Nora and Oscar were a gracious young newlywed couple that were about the same age as Sandy. They had an adopted four year old son named Bobby, who became my little brother for about a year of my life. Nora taught me how to cook beans in a pressure cooker, fry chicken in a cast iron skillet and make spanish rice from scratch. She taught me how to make white gravy and brown gravy, fried spam and homemade potato salad.
Nora also taught me how to clean a sink, toilet and a kitchen floor down to their original shine and we took turns with the job.
Their first home they rented was in New Braunfels, a charming little wooden house with a screen porch just steps away from the banks of the Comal River … a large river with fresh, rushing white capped water and a little bridge that overlooked it that only hikers could reach from behind our back yard.
From that house we moved to a much smaller town, to a rental farmhouse that was in the middle of huge cornfields all the way around. It was a quarter mile off the highway and there is nothing between the house and highway except for the cornfield. I believe that the house is still there. It has a big wrap around front porch. There are several houses like that on the same road in Geronimo, Texas, along the highway that connects Seguin to San Marcos. The house was so far off the road that Nora and I used to sunbathe in the nude, when Oscar was at work, out in the yard, in peace, and if anyone turned onto our road we could see them coming long before they could see us so we had plenty of time to jump up and run into the house.
We raised chickens, planted a garden, had a big bird hunting dog for a while. He used to follow me down the quarter mile walk to my bus stop every morning and every day after school he would be sitting there, waiting for me when the bus brought me back home. Then they had to give him away to the pound because he wouldn’t quit killing the chickens. After that sacrifice, the chickens got diseases anyway and all of them died. Farm life is more work, and less pleasant, than one might think, the three of us quickly learned.
Still my memories are mostly fond of the farm life. The high school I attended was housed in the same building with all other grades. K – 12. The population of the town was 500. There were four females in high school before I got there, count them, four. And there were at least forty males. You can imagine how popular I was with that ratio. Two of the girls had grown up with the boys. They were very old news and this gave me an advantage that I’d never asked for.
I could not get down the halls without a cloud of males encircling me, so many layers thick I could barely see the two original females, standing in the background, glaring in my direction. It was impossible to eat in the lunchroom, with forty pairs of eyes watching your every bite and swallow.
Nora and Oscar took me to a bar every weekend. Clear Springs Bar, owned by Reuben at the time. It’s now an extremely successful and popular catfish barn, an actual landmark, one of my Dad’s favorite restaurants where we went once a week while I took care of him. It’s an actual landmark now.
The old bar is still in place, exactly where it was when I used to sit at a table and babysit little Bobby while Nora and Oscar drank and partied with their friends. Stinky old men tried to dance with me and I’d watch Reuben serving drinks from behind the big thick wooden bar that remains to this day.
This is where my appreciation for country music came to an end because I began to associate it with drunken men hovering over me, drooling, stinking, trying to dance with me. And drunken adults slinging fists at each other, with blood and spit flying, cheating women crying and jealous men causing fear in me.
Things were growing rocky with the newlywed couple so I had conflicted emotions living there. I suppose that’s why I didn’t resist when my charming life on the farm came to an end in a swirl of dust when my big sister came racing through the cornfields, down our quarter mile dirt driveway, spinning her tires and throwing up a cloud of dust so large that we didn’t even know who was coming until she got to the door. There she was in her brand new little blue convertible that Mom had just bought for her.
“Mom says it’s time for you to come home.” she said to me. So she took me back to San Antonio where our mother had made plans to take the three of us on an economical Eight countries in Eight days in Europe tour … My mother loved to travel and I believe she visited every continent on this earth in her lifetime. She always found a willing travel companion but I was never one of them after this trip. We lived in different worlds. I have a plane phobia, among other phobias.
I thought I’d be going back to my foster family after that 8 Days in Europe trip, but I never did. When I tried, they said they wanted full custody or nothing. I was a little worried about that proposition and my mother was adamantly opposed. Not that she wanted the responsibility of me. She already could not handle what she had on her hands and she knew it. But she wasn’t going to openly admit that I don’t suppose. She would continue to boot me around from institution to institution, and even try to get me married off, to get me out of her hair, until she needed me back, at which point she begged, and I accommodated, without blame I might add … but I got so much blame shoveled on me when I began to make my own mistakes that I have to speak up now, lest I let myself be buried in a lie that others choose to tell.
In retrospect I suspect the sole reason my mother wanted me back was to babysit her other daughter so she might have some peace on her tour through Europe. My sister and I shared a room. My mother had one of her own.
<<<< Assaulted in London >>>>
To have time to herself, our mother hired a tour guide in London who was to take my older sister and I on a tour of the local Pubs. Most of the places that we visited in Europe I found to be both fascinating and charming. There were a lot of cobblestone streets with families playing together in the parks, and young, polite men trying to flirt with me as I strolled by, in Paris, in Rome, in Portugal. But I didn’t feel the charm at the British pubs that we visited. The places seemed dark, dank and chilly to me, and the beer was warm, nothing like my Papa’s ice cold beer that I’d been hoping to find. The guide was boring and arrogant to top everything off.
Suddenly a second guide descended down the dark stairway into the underground pub where we were now seated. It was the dankest and least pleasant pub yet. Thankfully it would be our last pub.
The new guide and my sister locked eyes and before you know it the two of them disappeared. My guide told me they would not be back and I had to ride back with him, alone, in his car. We drove for quite a while and he was saying things to me that I could not comprehend and didn’t want to. He kept asking me why I didn’t see what kind of person my sister was, that everyone could see it and I was a child. I just wanted to get back to the hotel. He kept rolling his head back and forth and bemoaning to me, “You have the body of a woman and the mind of a child!” And I would think to myself, “I don’t know what you’re talking about but you’re an idiot. Just get me home.” but I was polite and did not say it.
He pulled up to the hotel, got out of the car to open my door and as I got out he reached for me. To the casual onlooker it might have looked as if he were just giving me a goodbye hug. But what he really did was growl like an angry animal and then dig his knuckle into my nipple so deep that pain shot through my breast and straight through to my back, pushing all the air out of my lungs and doubling me over in pain. I stood there at the curb, in front of the hotel, hunched over, unable to breathe, as the guide jumped back into his car and sped away.
I never told anyone that story. I sat in the lobby until morning since my sister had the only key. By a very odd coincidence she came in through the lobby entrance and my mother came down from the elevator at roughly the same time. I kept my mouth shut as my sister pretended we’d just come down from the elevator together.
I was a coward. The little bastard should have been turned in and fired and even charged with assault. Fear of one particular person dominated my entire childhood, except for a few fortunate years in foster homes.
<<<< B. beat Mom and robbed my baby brother >>>>
Just before my mother, sister and I left for Europe, B. had stolen our little brother’s wallet. I noticed it when she came to pick me up from my foster home on the farm, and I thought it was curious that she would carry such a manly style of billfold.
Shortly after I’d arrived back home with the family, my brother burst into tears crying that his wallet had gone missing. It had his entire life savings in it. A big wad of cash that I’d been watching my sister throw around.
I immediately put the pieces of the puzzle together and exposed her crime of such cruel proportions. Already Johnny was coming home every day and collapsing into tears after another day of being bullied at school for being a special ed student. In those days, special ed classes were completely separate from the regular classes. The last thing he needed was to be mistreated like that by a big sister, but this was nothing new, it was just sad to return home to witness again.
So, you’d think I would not have been surprised when shortly after our trip to Europe, B. mauled our mother when she needed a fresh supply of cash.
Mom was sick with the flu, sleeping in her bedroom at the top of the stairs and B. was standing at the bottom of the stairs yelling obscene things up the stairwell, about a man that Mom had been dating. I’d been gone for years and didn’t know the man or the history behind any of it. “All you want is his d&ck!” my big sister began to yell repeatedly, to my horror and disbelief. I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about as she shrieked in rage, “You just want his d%ck! You just want his d%ck!”
After not too very long our mother came to the door of her bedroom, dressed in a robe, curlers in her hair, using the frame of the door to hold herself up, begging mournfully for B. to stop her screaming, at which point B. flew up the stairs, grabbed hold of the curlers in Mom’s hair and pulled our sick mother down to her knees, dragging her down a couple of steps, pulling half the curlers out of her head.
Then B. darted around her and into her room and back out in a flash with Mom’s purse in her hands. While flying down the stairs she grabbed a big wad of money and tossed the emptied out purse on the floor as she flew out the front door, leaving my mother sobbing on her knees, disappearing into the night in her little blue convertible.
I’m ashamed to say I didn’t do anything but stand there in horror with my mouth gaping open. I don’t even recall if I did anything to console my mother. We were like strangers after the three years of separation.
By the next day, or soon after, B. was back home and everything went back to normal as if it had just been another day in the life of the family.
I was home again. After three years of foster homes and institutions I’d never seen this level of insanity or any violence whatsoever. This was life with this big sister. Every year of my life that I lived under the same roof with B. I had to stuff a significant amount of unexpressed terror. For the most part I did whatever she told me to do, being far more afraid of her than I could ever have been of my parents, as she never suffered a single consequence for her endless violence against others.
There were times when I begged for protection from her but I never got that. So I learned to get along and go along with whatever her shenanigans happened to be, when I was forced to be around her, but I also stayed away from her as much as possible, whenever I could get free of her. And she would often cling to me like a jealous boyfriend and that was almost worse than her violence it felt so creepy.
I learned my lesson well, laid low and kept my mouth shut. I hated myself by the time I grew up and realized I’d become nothing more than my anti-sister … whatever she was, I did not want to be. I realized I had little to no identity of my own, except to be certain that I was not her … I dedicated my time to making sure to be the opposite of everything that she stood for.
So, I became a coward. “You want what I have? Here, take it all. I’ll give you double what you wanted. I’ll give you everything. Are you satisfied now? Will you leave me to live in peace now?”
My sister’s choices in life always seemed alien to me, and returning home to an environment that revolved around her rage, after having had a break and been around kinder people for a few years, was utterly miserable. I couldn’t wait to get back out of the house again and I accomplished exactly that, eventually, ironically, with the help of my sister in her little blue convertible.
Onward to Chicago, onward to Hollywood, onward …
Oikos 