Middle Rage

Aimee -- Part 16

Aimee

In the morning, Annabelle and I took a walk around the park. We stopped at the playground after, but the chilly breeze off the lake had my daughter snuggled under my arm on the park bench, shivering. Giving up, we went to Story Time at the library, where I sat outside a little glass classroom with the other mothers while the children went inside with a librarian who read them a picture book about turkeys and then had them color a Thanksgiving-themed handout. My mind kept turning to what Oma had said at the lake about helping Jenn.

When I was a kid, both my parents worked. Childhood had been a stream of babysitters and housekeepers and after-school programs for me, until I was old enough to have a key for the house, inside the secret compartment of my backpack.

The housekeepers and babysitters rotated regularly, possibly due to the nature of the job, possibly because my parents couldn't afford to pay well. Possibly because my parents were always trying to get the babysitters to do some light cleaning or the housekeeper to be the responsible adult in a house full of children. It made for a hodgepodge of people, always new and different than the ones before.

Once, a new housekeeper named Sylvia showed up with what I thought was a beautiful, strange, tattooed necklace—green-blue marks with purple-red spots, interlinked around her throat. I'd never seen anything so interesting, but when I asked her about it, she wouldn't answer, pulling the collar of her shirt up to hide it.

It was late when my parents came home, and I'd had to hold on to the question all day, but I remembered to point Sylvia's throat out to my mother, in the secret hopes that perhaps I could have a necklace myself. Not one like that, but how cool she had one in her skin!

Sylvia looked like she might cry. My mother averted her eyes, thanked Sylvia, and dragged me to my room. I was the kind of kid with a million questions and zero social skills. Why was Sylvia embarrassed? My mother tucked me into bed, straightening the sheets.

After fumbling about for a moment, she said, "Those are hickeys. Some men do that. It's a romantic thing."

Even at eight or nine, I was mortified by my mother's embarrassment, ashamed I'd asked a question that made my mother so uncomfortable, so squeamish, and unable to look me in the eye.

It wasn't until eighth grade that I saw real hickeys on real necks and started to question my mother's story. The girls who already carried purses and wore black eyeliner and sometimes make-up so strangely colored that their faces and necks didn't match — some of them had small blue and red bruises on the sides of their necks.

"What's that?" I'd asked Cheryl Waters.

"Hickey," she'd shot back, snapping gum we weren't allowed to have in school.

For days I thought of Sylvia. She'd returned once, maybe twice after that, then disappeared like the rest, replaced with a new caretaker. Knowing now what an actual hickey looked like, I re-evaluated what I'd seen before — the elongated shapes circling her neck, a literal ring around her throat. Sylvia had been choked.

I hadn't understood back then, but surely the adults would've. Had anyone helped her?

Maybe. Maybe my mother came up with a plan to help her escape. Or maybe she'd been too embarrassed to return after I'd drawn attention to her injury.

Or maybe my mother had let her go.

Mothers are protective, and sometimes that means they'll go to bat for anyone they consider vulnerable. But mothers are also known to viciously defend their children from the threat of violence. Sylvia brought that threat into my mother's home, wearing evidence of it around her throat.