When you go to the ballet, sitting up in those nosebleed seats, don’t look up at the ceiling. You might find yourself dizzy with the height, lightheaded on the knowledge of the distance between you and the stage. The ballerinas are fleshy blurs, their tortured feet rustle and tap, sounding the effort of weightlessness. The chandelier, heavy with crystal and planetary glass, is so close you can practically touch it. Your bones flutter with the thought.

Your mother has put you between him and her, and you are wearing a floor-length skirt, a little quilted number that befits the time. 1973. His fingers are thick. You remember the marks they made when you were bad or weren’t, red welts across your bottom, three broken circles around your skinny arm. When you are three years old, it doesn’t matter who makes the rules or what it means to break them. To be a three-year-old girl is to be too much of everything: lower lip pout and high screech, pounding footsteps interspersed with tiptoes. You are flesh-and-blood will.

His hand kneads the bulb of the lacquered armrest. As he reaches across your back to touch your mother, the scent of underarm sweat, whiskey and Vitalis floats into the air. Below, the dancers’ feet hover above the wooden planks of the stage, hard legs defined under delicate pink.

His smell envelops the three of you.

From a prompt that morphed into a longer piece. The longer piece currently lies dormant on my computer, waiting for me to be ready again.

Image from DanceHelp.Com.

Tags: John the Murderer, memoir

The house teeters above you in a nimbus of red light. A pillar of cracked, uneven steps capped by burning jack-o-lanterns ends at the front door, where cackles and howls animate the night air. “A real witch lives there,” the boy next to you says as he tentatively places a cardboard hoof on the bottom step. You hold your mother’s hand a little tighter and keep walking. Down the street, a sickly-looking woman with a black pointy cap perches by a cauldron. She waves her gnarled hand, pours a ladle of steam into a styrofoam cup. You start to run, but your mother catches you by the collar

She and Paul shepherd you into a blank-faced building with a mirrored lobby. There is a gorilla in the elevator. He stands upright and powerful with black fur that tufts over his arms and legs. You dig into your mother’s thigh with angel nails. “It’s all right. It’s just a costume,” she says and the gorilla, with some difficulty, removes his head to reveal another one underneath. “See?” he says. “Just a costume.” Your heart flip-flops. The gorilla struggles to replace his head and turns toward you, ape face askew and fixed in a lipless grin. He attempts to give the thumbs-up sign with a rubbery hand. “Shit. How am I supposed to hold a drink with this,” he says, tugging awkwardly at his digits. More people collect in the elevator: a flapper, a man in a Nixon mask, a woman mimicking the hangdog face and lanky body of Cher. Paul, making a joke, has dressed in prison stripes, while your mother has Cleopatra-flat hair and a beige tunic with gold accents.

You flow out with the crowd toward a door in the hallway. It swings open and Catwoman steps out, revealing a room cloudy with smoke and conversation muffled by faux fur and latex. She reaches out with heavily lacquered nails and rakes the hair under your halo. People are always touching your hair, cooing over your thick blonde ringlets as though you were a doll.

The gorilla closes the door.

This is an excerpt of a work in progress. The entire piece isn't written in second person, just those bits of dredged-up memory. For another Halloween story, read The orangutan did it.

Image: Man in gorilla costume from Compassionate Spirit.

Tags: Halloween, costumes, John the Murderer, memoir, man in a gorilla costume, Halloween 1972

At my grandparent's house during the John The Murderer era.

It was a dark place, with a cavernous bathroom, small squares of mint-green tile above the white, a pedestal sink, the tall window adjacent to the toilet covered by a pullcord shade. Outside of the bathroom, the rest of the old Wilmington rowhouse loomed: shadowy rooms; marked-up walls in need of paint; hardwood floors scratched and worn from decades of footsteps, the worst places covered by faded area rugs; a raggedy couch there, a threadbare recliner here; the folding tables with chipped veneer. Because the windows were painted shut, the air was stuffy, smelling of overcooked food.

I don’t remember other kids. I don’t remember playing. I do remember lying on the floor (or was that a cot?) for my nap, but not sleeping. Maybe that’s why the bathroom is so solid in this elusive memory – those that don’t nap are made to stand in the bathroom. Bad girl.

Tears and stubbornness. It wasn’t fair. No one could make me sleep in this place.

The woman who ran the home-based daycare knew John the Murderer (click here for more on him), my mother’s ex-boyfriend. So when he showed up after the breakup, after we moved out, when he came by to pick me up during naptime, she let me go. I was quiet and polite – this was important, to go along, to not make him angry, to stay safe. He took me to a store, had me pick out a huge stuffed animal to take home, and returned me without harm. It was a somewhat threatening attempt to get back into my mother’s good graces. When that didn’t work, he pursued us to my grandparent’s place, "kidnapped" my mother for a brief time, another sketchy story of violence that isn’t mine to tell.

Recently, when my little one, my sweet, sometimes maddening almost-three-and-a-half year old was behaving just like a preschooler should, testing boundaries, being frustrating, I felt the anger flame up inside of me, the low boil going immediately to steam. After calming down, I thought about my life at his age and how small and defenseless and maddening I must have been myself, a little person in the midst of some very bad things, trying to protect her mother, to keep it together. The past was reaching out to slap me in the face again, the suppressed anger of long-ago, the abuse I both witnessed and experienced.

I’ve asked my mother to tell me what happened while we were living with John. Some of it I vaguely remember (or know from past conversations)– being made to stand at the table for meals, his physical abuse of my mother, his tendency to drink – but there are gaps in my knowledge. I need to know, to confront it, to feel the suppressed feelings. It will be another step toward emotional wholeness, a step toward being an aware parent.

My mother has agreed, apologetically, guilty, worried that I will be angry with her. There is no cause for worry. I just need to know.

It's the next hurdle.

Tags: John the Murderer, existential angst

I have a lovely image of a happy family gathered round a dinner table. Dad is carving the tofu roast, Mom is sipping her white wine and grinning at the fresh-scrubbed kids. Then everyone digs in, talks about their day. The children politely ask for seconds. The dog may catch a few stray scraps originally meant for a napkin, maybe Mom has the occasional second glass of wine and gets a little giddy. But no one lectures or complains. There are no silent, glowering presences. No teardowns. Everyone talks and everyone enjoys the food because it's all good.

Yes, this may be a fantastical image, though I am hopeful that my family will have happy, stress-free meals. I want my son to associate eating with being social, with other people.

I don't.

Once Mom realized that Kevin and I clashed as dinner companions, she dropped me. Suddenly eating for her was all about fat, meat, sugar, and Kevin. She cooked real french fries and bacon cheeseburgers, the plates dripping with grease, and ferried them to Kevin's place. She shopped at a special butcher, burning up the moped rubber to get there, for the proper ingredients for Swedish meatballs. The woman who used to prepare hot carob was baking trays of brownies oozing with real chocolate. I wasn't invited to the party. She always left me a plate, though.

Even before that were the dinners with Silent Tim. Was he not talking on purpose? Was I such a terrible dinner companion? What did I do wrong?

But long, long before dinners with Silent Tim were dinners with a man that we still call John the Murderer (if you ever want to read about John the Murderer, Calvin Trillin has an essay about him, "I've Always Been Clean," in the 1984 book Killings, taken from his New Yorker essays). We lived with John when I was about three, for less than a year. Since he only had two chairs at his kitchen table, I stood for meals.

This has always been a little factoid of my life, perhaps made slightly more interesting by the Trillin coverage (my grandmother kept a file of clippings from the local newspapers on John's later trial for perjury; I wish I had that file). I barely remember standing at the table. What I do remember is being proud that I could play quietly in his presence. I also remember being afraid.

This factoid has legs.

Tags: meals, step-father, John the Murderer