Life on the Ramona Coaster (2 page)

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’Twas the Night before Christmas

’
T
WAS THE NIGHT
BEFORE
Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring . . . except me. Actually, it was the day before Christmas Eve, 2008, and I was anxiously watching the clock and pacing around the kitchen of the beautiful Southampton home I have shared with my husband, Mario, since our daughter, Avery, was six months old. As I fumbled around a drawer, looking for a bottle opener, I thought about all the holidays we had spent in that house, every Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and birthday for more than a decade. It is a home built on a foundation of love and girded with warm memories of lazy summer days spent by the pool and evenings entertaining friends. It is the home I always dreamt of as a child. It was the home I never had.

This house was my sanctuary—my refuge from the hustle and bustle of city life—but it was about to be penetrated by a potentially hostile force and I was a nervous wreck. For the first time since my mother had passed away from cancer three years earlier, I had invited my father to spend Christmas with us. His health and our relationship had steadily deteriorated since her death and I couldn’t even remember the last time we had spoken. I had no idea what kind of mood he would be in. Would he pick on me all week? Would he badger me with below-the-belt jabs? Would there be screaming matches in front of Avery and our other guests? Having located the bottle opener, I poured myself a glass of Pinot Grigio and tried to relax. I closed my eyes and took a long sip. “It’s going to be okay,” I told myself. But I wasn’t convinced.

When the doorbell rang, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I gulped down the last of my wine and placed the empty glass on the marble countertop. As I stood, I looked over at Mario with a smirk and rolled my eyes, as if to say,
this is going to be a disaster and it is all your fault!
A few weeks earlier, he had suggested that I invite my father to spend Christmas with us. “You know, Ramona, your father is getting older. His health is failing. We don’t know how much longer he has to live. I think it’s important for Avery to spend the holiday with the only grandparent she has left,” he reasoned.

My initial reaction was, “You cannot be serious!”
I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of having my father in my home, especially now that my mother was gone. The last time he visited us in Southampton he drank too much and insulted some friends who had invited us all to dinner in their home. It was such an unpleasant experience that I swore I would never let him in my house again. I had only tolerated being around him in the past for my mother’s sake. Now that she had passed away, there was no longer any reason to subject myself to his negative energy and verbal abuse.

“I know you,” Mario said, trying to reassure me. “You will regret it if you never get to see him again, never get to talk to him again. Do it for yourself. You need closure. You’ll never forgive yourself for not seeing him.”

He was speaking from experience. He had made a similar peace with his own father just before he died. Mario’s father was an austere German-Italian man who was very stern with his children. Their relationship was always tense, but it became even more strained because they worked together. After I gave birth to Avery, he started to get very sick and it turned out that he had cancer. We would visit him in the hospital and he was so miserable he would say, “Someone just take a gun and shoot me.” He deteriorated quickly and Mario became his father’s caretaker. He would feed him and help him go to the bathroom. They spent a lot of time together in those final days and bonded. For the first time in his life, his father told Mario that he loved him. He died the day after Avery’s christening, but because they had that time together Mario was able to find the closure he needed.

Mario’s father, Ernest Singer, visits us in the hospital after Avery is born.
He died the day after Avery’s christening, but because they had time together Mario was able to find the closure he needed.

So, there I was, against my better judgment, about to welcome into my home the man I had spent my entire adult life trying to keep at arm’s length. My heart was pounding. As I passed our beautifully decorated Christmas tree, I took a deep breath, drawing strength from its familiar piney smell. Half expecting an ogre on the other side, I braced myself and opened the door. No monster; just an old man, looking more frail and diminished than I had ever seen him, accompanied by his grandson (my nephew), Victor, and his mother, Gabriella, who had been serving as his caretaker.

“Hi, daddy,” I said timidly, forcing myself to smile. “How are you?”

He looked old, weak, and tired. There was no sparkle in his emerald green eyes. But, even though he was now a sick man in his seventies, when I looked into those eyes I could still see shades of the man who verbally abused my mother my entire life. I shuddered as I recalled a moment that would irrevocably shape the woman I have become . . .

My first birthday.

Me, age four.

I
AM
FOUR-AND-A-HALF
years old.

We live in a quaint Cape Cod-style home in a traditional middle-class suburban town—think Wisteria Lane—far from the Upper East Side. The streets are lined with row after row of houses, with plenty of neighbors and children around. Our backyard, surrounded by a white picket fence, is bursting with an endless variety of colorful flowers.

It is the middle of a sunny afternoon. I am playing with my dolls in the living room when I am jolted by screams coming from the adjacent bedroom. For a moment, I think I must be having a nightmare, but then I see my mother—or at least a woman who looks like my mother—sprinting towards me. Her porcelain white face is covered in crimson blood, her straight brown hair tangled and her brown eyes are wide open, glistening with tears.

“Ramona, call the police!” she screams.

I’m frozen in disbelief. I can’t move or speak. Is this really happening? Am I dreaming? I wish it were a nightmare . . . but it isn’t. This terrified woman is my mother.

She screams again. “Ramona, call the police!”

I just stare up at her. I drop my doll and run to the square end table. I look at the phone, then at my mom, then at the phone again. I am frightened and confused.

“Mommy, I don’t know how to use the telephone,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t know how to use it.”

A hulking figure appears in the doorway of the living room. I lean forward and stare at him. It is a large, muscular man, with blonde hair, piercing green eyes, and broad shoulders. I rub my eyes, hoping to clear away the terrifying image. He lunges toward my mother. My brown eyes open wider.
That scary man is my daddy!
I think to myself in disbelief. The man who takes me to church every Sunday. The man who passes around the parish’s collection basket. The man who takes me to the local bakery to buy cake and cookies. I watch in horror, as he pulls my mother’s arm and yanks her out of the living room as if she is one of my lifeless rag dolls. This is the first time I ever saw the monster my father could become when he was drinking.

Sadly, it wasn’t the last.

I don’t recall my father hitting my mother again until I am eight years old. That’s when his aggressive behavior becomes chronic and the abuse escalates to a whole new level.

When I am in second grade, my family moves from our cozy suburban home to a large four-bedroom house in the country. My father, a successful engineer at IBM, is transferred from Poughkeepsie to Kingston, New York. Rather than relocate us to a suburban town like Hyde Park or Rhinebeck, he decides to custom build a house in the isolated, rural town of Staatsburg. Our new home is literally in the middle of the woods; our backyard is overrun with squirrels and rabbits. Our nearest neighbor lives in another isolated house nearly a quarter of a mile away. To the left, seventy-five clear acres separate us from the rest of civilization. There are no neighbors for my mom to talk to; no one to hear her scream and cry while my father abuses her; no one she can run to for help. I think my father planned it this way. We are all alone. We are at his mercy.

The next few years of my life are a blur of nightmarish memories, punctuated by my father drinking too much, then drunkenly abusing and berating my mother. An endless cycle of screaming, fighting, and crying. I feel like I am living in a war zone. One night we are all sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner. My father has just returned from work. He reeks of Scotch. Tonight, as usual, he has stopped at a bar with friends for shots of Scottish whiskey before heading home to terrorize us. Although he would never admit that he has a drinking problem, my father is a functioning alcoholic and a mean drunk. As I shovel buttery potatoes into my mouth, I watch my father slap down his napkin and begin yelling at my mother. I grab my two sisters and brother and run upstairs. My siblings are crying and confused. As the eldest, I feel it is my responsibility to comfort and calm them down. We pile into my tiny bed and hide under the pink quilt, shielding ourselves from the lopsided civil war that is being fought downstairs. But, we can’t block out the battle sounds. We hear glasses being broken, ceramic plates shattering against the wall, and my father’s strong fist punching the table. Over the loud banging, I hear my mother’s small voice pleading, “Stop. Please stop.” But my father rages on, drowning her fragile voice out as if she is an inferior servant in his majestic kingdom. In desperation she screams, “If you don’t stop, I’ll leave you. I’ll divorce you.”

This actually makes my father— ever the Catholic—pause for a moment. It’s the 1960s. No decent Christian woman would ever divorce a handsome, respectable man who fathered her four beautiful children, had a successful job, and put a roof over her head and food on the table. Besides, she has no money. Knowing this, he just mocks her. “Where are you going to go?” He laughs loudly, “You have no money. Who would want you with your four kids?”

Feigning a confidence I know she does not have, my mother screams back, “I don’t care. I am getting away from you.”

He grabs her by the arm, looks her straight in the eye and says, “If you leave me, I will find you wherever you are. And when I do, I will kill you!”

We are traumatized. Our nerves are shattered. That night, I wet my bed. My sister and brothers do, too. The next day, it happens all over again; my father drinks his Scotch and then berates my mother, while my siblings and I hide under our covers and wet the bed. It happens again, and again, and again. I feel powerless, helpless.

Night after night I fall asleep to the sounds of their fighting. Morning after morning I wake up in a bed of my own urine. Day after day I go to school and pretend that my mother is happy and my father loves us. I am anxious and frightened all the time, but more than that I am ashamed. I can’t tell anyone what is going on in our home. I can’t invite friends over because I am terrified that they will witness my father’s drunken, abusive behavior. I can’t sleep at my friends’ houses because I worry that I will soil their sheets or my sleeping bag.

Every day I pray,
Please, God. Please make this stop. Please make my father stop picking on my mother.
I ask over and over again,
why is this happening to me? What did I ever do wrong to deserve a life like this?

But the abuse continues. My father’s aggression gets worse and worse until he pushes my mother to the breaking point. One Saturday afternoon, my sisters, brother, and I are playing in the living room downstairs. Once again, we hear my father screaming at my mother. He’s yelling at her for spending too much money on groceries. Beneath his stern, booming voice, we hear distressed cries from my mother. “Stop it. You’re going to kill me. Stop.”

Then, silence.

It is a silence so deafening that I question why I no longer hear my mother crying or my father shouting. Although we usually run and hide when they fight, the initial desperation in her voice and the fear that my father might—or actually did—finally kill my mother compels us to run into the kitchen. There we see our father, his eyes are venomous and he is breathing heavily. He grabs my petite, five-foot-one-inch mother and throws her across the tiled kitchen floor. She is whimpering, begging him to stop. But he doesn’t. In a wild rage, he picks her up and flings her defenseless body against the refrigerator. We are crying, jumping up and down, screaming, “Stop, daddy, stop!” But he is oblivious to us. He drags my mother by her long brown hair and thrusts her back and forth. We scream louder, “Daddy, stop! Stop! Stop!” Finally, he looks at us, his eyes coming into focus as if he is coming out of a trance. He storms out of the kitchen, grabs his car keys and drives away.

My mother is hysterical. “We are leaving now. I have to get away from him.” She gathers us up and herds us outside. We pile into our wood-paneled station wagon with nothing but the clothes on our backs. “Where are we going?” we ask from the back. She says nothing. She is just shaking uncontrollably, tears streaming down her face. She’s swerving all over the road. I have never been so scared. I wonder if I will ever go back home. About thirty minutes later, we are standing in the doorway of her girlfriend Eleanor’s house. My mother is begging for a place to stay, somewhere we can hide from my father.

On Sunday, my sisters, brother and I play with Eleanor’s four children. Just like other normal kids, we play kickball in the street and monopoly inside the house. We never talk about what happened the night before; we never even acknowledge it. It’s as if we have all silently agreed to bury this memory, thinking that if we don’t talk about it we can pretend it never really happened. Looking back, it’s remarkable what the young mind will do to protect itself from trauma. The next morning, we go to school in Eleanor’s children’s clothes—underwear and all. That afternoon, my mother picks us up from school and takes us back to our house. She tells us that our father is not coming home. He is never going to hurt her again. I am relieved that he she has stood up for herself and that we don’t have to be frightened anymore.

Three months later, my father is back.

Over the next few years, the physical abuse stops but the verbal assaults continue. My mother and father sleep in separate bedrooms, claiming that my father’s constant snoring keeps my mom awake at night. But I know better.

I guess the time away sent a message to my father that my mother meant business—that she wouldn’t take his
physical
abuse anymore. But that doesn’t stop him from
verbally
attacking her . . . or his children. He replaces the punching with nonstop derogatory attacks. And, as time goes on, these assaults worsen. It is as if he is playing a game of chicken with himself, in which he constantly dares to see how aggressive, offensive, and confrontational he can be without becoming physical. Although these attacks leave no bodily scars, they penetrate our psyches and our souls on a much deeper level.

One night he pushes me so far that I snap. I am fifteen. My mother and I are cooking dinner in our large, yellow, eat-in kitchen. I am standing next to the antique stove, preparing the salad, while my mother stands at the opposite counter near the sink. My father walks into the room and demands to know when dinner will be served. My mother tries to placate him, but the more submissive she is the more he bullies her. He’s confrontational and belligerent and, as he gains power from his rage, he begins to widen his attack. Suddenly, the abuse isn’t only directed toward my mother; it’s also directed at me.

My father growls that I am useless and I will never amount to anything. He calls me cruel and demeaning names, some of which I don’t fully understand. I try to tune out his voice; the hateful words he utters. But, no matter how hard I try, his badgering is getting to me. He gets in my face. I can smell the rancid alcohol on his breath and see the rancor in his eyes. Then he gets in my mother’s face, alternating scathing insults between us. Something he says, I can’t recall what, hits a nerve. I snap. My life flashes before my eyes. As if I am rewinding a horror movie, I see images of my mother’s battered face begging me to call the police, my father throwing plates, my mother being pulled by her hair, my mother grabbing me so that we can run away from my father, and finally her defeated face as she welcomes him back into our home. I feel so cheated; cheated out of a normal childhood and a loving father. I resent him for exposing me to all this violence and emotional abuse. At that moment, I promise myself that I am not going to be a victim. I am not going to take his abuse. I realize I have to stop him. I have to put him in his place or he will continue to bully me for the rest of my life. I am going to give it right back to him and not back down.

I look over at my mother. She continues to prepare dinner as if there isn’t a malicious man berating her in front of her own daughter. I see red. My anger grows like a restless brushfire. Why is she just standing there? Why isn’t she fighting back or standing up for herself? I don’t get it. How can she stay married to this abusive man? Maybe she’s given up, but I haven’t. I have to protect her. Sooner or later my father is going to cross that line again and I never want him to hurt her the way he did that night in the kitchen. In that instant, I resolve to stop my father before he takes it too far.

I am aware he is still yelling, but the sound of his voice is just background noise now. Slowly, I open the narrow drawer where my mother keeps the cutlery. I know exactly what I am looking for, the biggest knife with the longest and thickest blade. I pull the largest butcher knife out of the drawer and focus on the sharp blade as it slices through the head of lettuce in front of me. I remind myself,
I am not going to take his shit. I am not going to be a victim anymore.
Then, without hesitation, I lunge toward him, point the sharp blade directly at his face and scream, “Stop it. Stop it right now!” My eyes grow wild. “Stop it right now or I swear I will take this knife and shove it into your neck.”

He backs away, startled. But then his mouth twists into a devilish smile and he begins to laugh. This is not the reaction I was expecting. I pull the knife away and take a step back. It all happened so fast. I can’t believe what I just did. I don’t know who is more shocked—my father, my mother, or
me
. In retrospect, I think my father laughed because he liked that I threatened him. In his warped, sadistic mind he was probably amused by my behavior. Maybe he even respected me a little for standing up to him.