Daily Excerpt: Blest Atheist (Mahlou) - Defiance
Today's book excerpt comes from Blest Atheist by Elizabeth Mahlou.
Defiance
Physical abuse quickly became routine for us. We just expected to arrive home to a daily rain of blows, kicks, bites, deliberately inflicted sprains, or airplane rides.
We all feared Ma’s airplane rides. She would grab one arm and one leg and rotate in the middle of the room like a dervish, swinging us around and around in circles, allowing the free arm and leg to hit pieces of furniture one after another after another until she was out of breath and let us go. When she let go and we flew into the wall or the furniture, the impact was stunning, and often we lost consciousness from it. Not only were the airplane rides painful, but also they left us feeling dizzy and disoriented whether or not we lost consciousness.
As we got bigger, airplane rides became less manageable for Ma, and these were replaced with sled rides (being pulled down a flight of stairs by our hair). I did not accept that type of punishment meekly. My defiant nature rising to the fore, I would cling desperately to the slim, round rails supporting the banister and marvel at the strength of human hair. Sometimes Ma would end up with a handful in her hands. Sometimes the angle was such that I could not hang on and would end up being yanked down the rest of the stairs. But sometimes, just sometimes, the hair would hold fast, and one of the rails would loosen. The damage to the railing, of course, made Ma even angrier and the sled ride down the stairs, with rail in hand, inevitable, but that loose rail for me symbolized another successful form of revenge. I would laugh and laugh. That laugh increased the severity of the pelting I got at the bottom of the stairs, but it was, indeed, a heartfelt laugh.
It was a laugh of defiance, and that defiance always got me into trouble—and still does. It is not that I forget about the trouble it has caused. I have a constant reminder of that from a frequently aching finger, thanks to another interlude with Ma, in which she grabbed my hand, trying to force me to my knees in front of her by bending back one of my fingers.
“Say uncle,” Ma insisted. “Tell me you’re sorry.”
I no longer remember what it was I was supposed to be sorry for, but I do remember that it was something for which I was definitely not sorry. There was no way, no matter what, that I would lie and say that I was. “
Say you’re sorry,” Ma repeated, as she continued to bend backward the middle finger on my right hand. She had caught me off guard and now had me in her complete physical control. I was nine or ten at the time and still too small to take her on once she had me in her full grasp, but I was determined, whether or not I could get away, that she would not win because no matter what, I would not say I was sorry for something that I thought was the right thing to do.
“I will keep bending this finger until you say you’re sorry,” she said. And she did.
“I am not sorry,” I repeated.
She bent the finger farther backward. “I am not sorry,” I repeated again. She bent the finger even farther backward.
“I’m sorry you’re such a bitch,” I snarled, as the pain went off the Richter scale. The finger went limp. It could not be bent any farther because Ma had apparently broken it.
She pushed me away. “Don’t you ever call me a bitch, and don’t you complain about that finger. It was all your fault.” With those words, she stormed off, ostensibly in search of one of my siblings.
Breaking fingers, hitting, biting—the trademarks of a playground bully—served as Ma’s childrearing techniques. In essence, we children were being raised by a child. Ma had never developed the emotional maturity to guide and support us. In fact, the thought of having to support us in the fuller meaning of that word terrified her. We found that out one evening when I was about eight years old. Dad had left the house around midnight for a reason we never learned. Ma pulled all of us out of our beds and sat us on the staircase. I was near the bottom, and the others, two to a stair, were lined up above me. Ma had a box of rat poison in her hands.
Shaking—at the time I thought it was with anger but now realize that it was probably with fear—she scolded us, “Your father is gone, and I will not bring you up alone. I can’t deal with all of you. So, if he is not back by 5:30, I am going to feed you this rat poison. When he finds you dead, he will be sorry.”
I did not think Ma would really kill us. My unshaking vision of a future over which I would eventually have control propelled me past Ma’s histrionic moments, allowing me to ignore her faked heart attacks and threats of many sorts. Able to sleep nearly anywhere, I dozed off. My siblings, though, were terrified.
The minutes tiptoed past, and Ma grew increasingly agitated. I opened my eyes to find that a couple of hours had passed, Dad had not returned, and somehow while I had been dozing, Ma had fetched a can of kerosene and matches.
“Forget the rat poison,” she said. “It will be quicker to douse you with kerosene and set you on fire. If he is not back here by 5:30, I will show him.” (She was always going to “show” someone.)
And so we sat for another couple of hours. I was annoyed at this attempt at drama and wanted to sleep in my bed. My siblings’ faces, however, registered fear. To this day, they tell me that they are convinced that Ma fully intended to carry out her threat and that my blasé sleepiness was naive. Fortunately, Dad came back at 5:00, and Ma quickly shooed us all back to bed with a threat that if we told him, she would get us good.
Wanting to eliminate us, whether by fire or poison or some other means, was nothing new. Ma was always demanding that Dad get rid of one or another of us, I being the one that she most often wanted to get rid of. During one rage, Ma insisted that Dad get rid of me or she would leave. In one of his more supportive acts, Dad refused, saying, “I will not choose between my wife and my child.” In response, Ma grabbed a pillow and blanket and flounced off to the woods, where she spent the night
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