Wings

I didn't question why she sold her body and her time to older men, I asked her why all she bought for it was drugs. She hadn't bought underwear in fifteen years, but soft bare skin beneath tight jeans or sheer dresses was more inviting for her purposes. Three babies shared the floor while Mama got the couch, and around the house she wore the raggedy old cotton under pants. Her eyes had grown dim and distant, her cheeks and sockets hollow, and sharp angles outlined her frame. Hungry for home, for love, for shelter, she was starving for safety. The tender embraces of strangers became a comfort to her.

After years of abuse she’d finally left the lover who gave her those three young boys, only to take a phantom to her bed. This time, her bed was warmed by the darkly shrouded father of dreams, heroin. She used him to quiet the aching of her battered body, to soothe the scars left in her heart by a life time of cruelty from those who should have cherished her. The oily darkness of her somnambulist state made her numb to the heart break of her own inadequacy, and to the tragedies of the heartless world.

No one is born this way. So many words are inspired by her, words of resignation, words of condemnation, epithets. Ava's own mother had three husbands and five children. A bed-ridden, arthritic pill-popping middle-aged woman, she offered little support to a difficult situation. Her father was denied her by a set of ugly circumstances, riddled with misdirected accusations, leaving Ava with the guilty stepfather her mother favored. 

Her step-father molested her when she was under the age of four; memories of it were put aside firmly in her mind, and blurred distinctly by the terror of those disturbing experiences. Her favorite elder brother began the affair which made her the object of his sexual appetites and explorations when Ava was only six or seven, and he was seven years older than she.Her step-father was not, in fact, her brother Randy's father either, though Randy too, had spent part of his child hood in a home with his mother where he was also a step child of this man. His behavior begs the question as to where he picked up this pattern of exploitative sexual abuse. The strange illicit affair continued through and beyond her confession that her "Daddy" had touched her, in reaction to the good-touch/bad-touch lectures she received in school for the first time in second grade. She said, looking back, they didn't say anything about kids touching other kids, she just thought as a little girl that maybe it was just something brothers and sisters did sometimes. She was, in a way that is often instinctive of human beings, loyal and protective of her beloved brother, also; she wouldn't have wanted him to get into trouble. The illusion of willingness she held protected her from acknowledging the fear that compelled her to be complacent to the demands which held behind them threats of force, violence, and cruelty. The more she could convince herself it was okay, that she was truly her older brother's willing lover, the more compliant she would really be, and there fore, the safer from violence and aggression on top of the interactions she was already being compelled to perform and participate in regularly. 

Time and circumstance swept in again separated her from her brother, when her mother kicked her out at around age twelve, forcing her to go live with the only father she'd ever really known, her step father. She was insulated from fearing him, and instead trusted him and loved him, having been convinced by her mother's insistence over many years that Ava's biological father, not her step father, was the one who had abused her. Being an early teen of twelve, she had begun to push her brother away in what ways she could, and his attentions had grown distant as he began developing relationships with girls his own age. Moving out only solidified that distance, but it was still a great relief to Ava, because one of her other brothers had just begun to show a similar perverted interest in her. She caught him a couple of times peering through a crack in her bedroom door, or boldly just sneaking into her room at night where she accosted him and sent him away. 

At her step-father Charlie's town house, it was just her and Charlie, and in keeping with the story Ava had been fed, he didn't try to touch her again. Only, she would catch him, looking at her now and then, in a way a father shouldn't look at his daughter. She spent her high school years holed up in her room with friends. She found herself a female friend, they had one of those kind of high-school girlfriend relationships where they were glued to each other's hip; their names became one, synonymous word: Ava&Courtney, Courtney&Ava. With a flare of bisexual curiosity, they developed a sort of infatuation for each other that meshed well with their close friendship. Both only fourteen, Courtney, on Ava's invitation, moved into the little condo Ava shared with her "Dad" Charlie. Courtney's mother was also estranged from her, and her father was neglectful and absent-minded regarding his children, so it was a simple matter for Court' to gather up her clothes, favorite books, diaries, and teddy bear and move into Ava's bedroom full-time. They lived like that in a little bubble of girlish adoration and dysfunction, sharing anorexic diets and Adderall binges to whittle down their already tiny, frail, 110 pound-bodies. They decorated the walls of Ava's room together, from floor to ceiling; painted it in finger paints, wrote messages in marker, pinned up posters, photographs, event flyers, music show tickets, movie ticket, stolen street signs, pieces of silky underwear, and all the flotsam and jetsam of an unsupervised teenage love-affair. 

Of course it didn't last, and the end was in it's own way, a small tragedy. A boy came along a shift their tight duo into an awkward, ill-fitted tri. Courtney fancied George, but George fancied Ava. Ava was famously susceptible to flattery and false sense of acceptance she received from the sexual attention of males. Very soon, Courtney gathered up her things, and moved back home.

The high school sweet heart she escaped with, bore three sons for, and remained loyal eight years to, beat her, controlled and belittled her, and turned her into a pet. Love never did her any favors, not with Charlie, not with Randy, and not with Courtney or George. True to human nature, however, Ava kept right on loving in all the ways she knew how. 

She spent eight long years trying to love George, but George was just another model of the same trope she'd had to fight for her life all her years against. He was an abuser; he pushed her, shoved her, poured boiling hot coffee on her, told her who she could talk to, where she could go, who she could be friends with, put her down, accused her of cheating on him, punched her, pulled her hair, screamed at her, threatened to kill, and coerced her into sex any time he wanted to, disregarding her desire or notable lack there of. She tried to be complacent as she learned to be, complacency was supposed to protect her from beatings and cruel words. But George and his drinks weren't satisfied by her complacency, and he made sure she knew it every time he got drunk and decided to tell her all the made-up, jealous, insecure delusions he used to justify beating her. Often as not, he smack her around in a drunken rage, and once he got out the adrenaline and started to cool off, he'd be touching her, holding her close, stroking her arm, kissing her face, and trying to work his way back into her pants. All of this she endured while she suffered through three pregnancies, three births, and spent all her time caring for, teaching, providing for, in general, properly Mothering, the three sons that he fathered with her. Ava was consumed by mothering, she ate, slept, and breathed motherhood; it became everything she was. Ava had lived a hard and confusing life, and finally, she had a sense of purpose: Love these children, care for these children, be a good mother and make them know they are loved. But if anything, rather than appreciate or admire Ava's devotion to motherhood, he seemed jealous. His accusations of infidelity generated by this sense of jealous were just laughable; with three children under the age of four, and only a husband to provide some half-assed help, she didn't have time for even a one night stand. 

Eventually, she had endured all she could take. Trying to be a strong woman and good mother, she left him and took a job. She was smart and charismatic, and tried to start a healthy life. A low rent, utilities-included apartment and right below her rediscovered blood-father Allen and half-sister seemed cozy. Meeting Allen again for the first time in seventeen years induced several revelations in Ava. His love and support, and constant reminders of her inherent value as a woman, a person, and a mother helped give her the strength to walk out on George. Meeting Allen cleared something else up for Ava too. For years she has harboured secretly in her heart her misgivings about the story her mother had fed her about who had abused her. Interviews with the young Ava had yielded reports from psycho-analysts that she had been essentially brain-washed by her mother to blame Allen, and in her interviews provided little details as to the experiences she has actually had. She feared it was true, and feared for many, many years for the half-sister she knew Allen was raising. Nestled in her mind, though, was the true memory she had been to delicate to reveal to investigators, or in detail to any one, as a child. Having loved and trusted Charlie, her heart pressed her over and over to distance Charlie from the details of that memory. When she met Allen, though, she found he far from filled that space. He did not fit the memory of the man who had sexually abused her in the shower when she was two or three. Suddenly, in the wake of that realization, she realized that Charlie was the one who fit into her memory; suddenly she re-integrated a memory of him admitting to her, once, when she had grown into an adult, that he had touched her, that he had just been, "curious," supposedly because of Allen having touched her. It all came together with sickening clarity, his half-hearted admission, his weak justification attempting to redirect the blame at Allen; her memories, the fact that her mother had recently broken up with Allen when the accusation came out, and that Ava's mother's relationship with Charlie had still been new and fresh. Many parents don't want to believe these revelations when they are revealed, especially when the person who stands accused is a trusted friend, beloved family member, or worse, a spouse. Ava's mother had every motive not to want to believe that Charlie was guilty, it was much safer for her to blame Allen, whom she had already rejected and pushed out of her life. She blamed him, attempted to press charges, leading her 5 year-old daughter into telling the story in a way that implicated Allen, (strongly enough that investigators noted the obviousness of this psychological tampering,) and, when the investigation failed to demonstrate his guilt, she simply took Ava away, moved somewhere with out telling Allen, and hid Ava from Allen for the rest of her childhood. By doing this, she protected her relationship with Charlie, protected herself from the awfulness of the revelation that a man she was currently in love with had molested her child, and acted in a way that she and others in her life could see as adequately protective of her traumatized daughter. Its doubtful Ava's mother realized her bias, and likely even that she didn't realize the degree to which she had led Ava in her retelling of events. She acted based on her own instincts, her own perception of what the truth had to be. 

Unfortunately, it just so happened in the end, that the person who had truly been wronged in the situation eventually came to believe that her mother's version of events was incorrect.

Painful as it was at first when she realized the man who had actually raised her had been the one who had betrayed her in that awful way, she also rejoiced in discovering her real father as a loving, caring, invested man; and her long-estranged half-sister whom he had largely raised on his own to be a healthy, content, normal teenage girl with no battle scars or horror stories from sexual or any other kind of abuse from their father. The greatest scar Ava's sister Rachel seemed to bear was the neglect and eventual abandonment by her mother, exacerbated and likely partially caused by Rachel's mother's methamphetamine addiction. Her father, however, had always been there for her, remaining by his wife's side, believing for many years that despite his wife's issues it wouldn't be fair to Rachel to rob her of her mother. Finally, when Rachel was nine years old, she told her father, Allen, that she didn't want them to live with her mother anymore; that she didn't like sharing her life with the life her mother was living. Almost instantly, Allen had them pack up all their necessary items and pick up and leave; all he wanted was to do what was best for Rachel, his baby. All of these details served to further encourage Ava in the trustworthiness of Allen, and she accepted him into her life as her father, and as the grandfather of her three sons.

Allen wasn't perfect either, though, and it's hard to form a strong bond with an adult daughter who has been estranged for nearly twenty years. He had lost the chance to see her grow up, to know her in that special way that only parents who raise their children can known them. His patience was often short, he was, much like Ava, a perfectionist about cleanliness of the home, proper hygiene and personal care. He found the sprawling presence of Ava's three sons, their squeals, shrieks, laughter, and mess-making, initially charming and lovable, but soon grew to find them very frustrating and straining. Initially, he'd been delighted to have her come to live in his apartment with her children, to help her escape the awful abusive marriage she had been trapped in for so long. 

Soon, though, trying to make the most of the situation and be supportive despite his increasing short fuse, he had helped her to get the deal on the apartment downstairs from his. When she struggled to make rent, for a little while, he helped with that too. Much like his patience though, his financial resources were not infinite. Ava struggled to work enough hours to make enough money, while still being available for her children as Allen and Rachel were her only source of child care, and they were growing less and less accommodating. Life taught Ava to be willing to sell herself out for security, if the things she face seemed too hard or too frightening. She fantasized about a man with resources whom she could enchant and entice with her beauty to rescue her and her sons from poverty.

Then, a sweet talking man as old as her Daddy promised to save her if she would just be his. She quit her job and rent was paid for months. Gleaming, she primped and smiled, cleaned house and read self-help books. She grew righteous with his sage advice, she was obedient, and she played only the games her told her to, dreamed only dreams he allowed. So needy of patience, gentleness, shelter and love, she gave him her heart and hoped to gain his devotion in exchange.

Months went by, and his promises grew, his financial investment in her bloomed, and so did her hope. Rent was paid and her sent her to bar-tending school, attempted to help her get her GED, and took her to nice restaurants. He talked business, and let her help him on his landscaping jobs. He lived in a city a thirty minute drive from her north Phoenix apartment, and would pick her and her kids up to spend days at his place. Then his eldest daughter visited, and saw Ava in a pair of sneakers she had rejected a few months earlier. Disapproving whispers grew and spread among not only his older children, but his friends also. Over time he began to falter at her entrance, stopped smiling, and stopped giving her advice. He stopped holding her after he used her body, and stopped asking her over and stopped using her at all. Finally, complaining of work, grown kids, ex-wives, and trust issues, he stopped kissing her goodbye.

With almost no family and no affluent friends to help her, distanced from her step-father in light of the revelations she had come to about his deeds, at the limits of the financial and emotional support her father Allen could provide, and with friends who mostly faced similar hardships to her own, she faced parenthood, unemployment, empty cupboards, and eviction, alone. With her loneliness, the pain in her body that had haunted her intermittently for years expanded, rendering her motionless and apathetic on the couch. Just after the birth of her third son, she had seen her primary care doctor, and then rheumatologist; the first told her she had Fibromyalgia Syndrome, the second told her that in addition, she also had  juvenile osteoarthritis, and that it had been ravaging her spine undetected for at least 6 years. Suggestions that the cause of the latter condition might be genetic offered little comfort, she was twenty-four year old and her body was already falling apart. 

She needed a man, she insisted. The doctors warm, glowing Percodans came to dampen the pain, along with x-rays exposing the brittle spine of an eighty-year old woman in her curvy, winsome twenty-four year old body. She started chain-smoking and drinking black coffee. She searched and hoped for a stable, healthy life.

Instead, a cherub-faced mulatto with the body of a Greek god came along and wrapped his arms around her. Honey filled his voice, poured over her bitterness like balm. He was a dancer at a club, but he said he loved her. His pockets held a remedy for what ailed her: crystallized excitement, meth-am-feta-mean. She was off the couch and dancing in no time. She moved so fast she became invisible. The boys played as if she weren't there; they screamed and destroyed, stole from and hit each other. She planned schedules, chore charts, discipline strategies, ways to make money. She planned so much she was too busy to do the work. Her wings grew so big she forgot how to fly. The patio of her sub-level apartment became a meeting place for the neighborhood, full of people waiting, telling stories, making phone calls, and meeting up. She would laugh and dance, leave and return, all through the night while the children slept.

One day she woke as if from a dream. Flinching with a start at the mess and the noise, she sent her cherubic gladiator packing, swept the patio, and closed the door. She was alone again. She bartered, cleaned houses, begged and cried. A ten here and a twenty there wasn't enough to pay rent. Finally, she gave in and reconnected with her reluctant step-father, having never confronted him with her revelations, but non-the-less playing on his guilt which he couched in the guise of fatherly affection, and persuaded him to pay her rent. She was too bewildered by the chaos and the demands of motherhood to look for work, and after a year of trying to be free, she sulked back to her ruthless, wreckless high school sweet heart.

“I just want us to be a family again,” he said. He came with pockets lined with anesthetic. Pills were hard, but she used to stop; coke was worse but she quit that too. Meth was bright and terrible, but she had put that behind her before. Then there was Smack. Nose, mouth, veins, no road was too good for the dream-maker, the faster the better. By this time, I’d been gone a while from Ava's world, trudging through my own disasters and hiding from the heart break of her downward spiral.

I was sixteen, and the walls of the room she had in her step-father’s condo were covered in an impressive collage of posters, paintings, and stolen street signs. She beckoned me forward. She grasped my face in her hands and planted her mouth on mine. Hers were the first lips I kissed. Warm, wet, and full of passion, I didn’t expect to be sparked a light, for my cheeks to burn. She released me and laughed raucously with jaded eyes, and our friends hooted and laughed with her as I tried to orient myself. For months after that, passing her in the hall at school, it was hard to grasp how she could pretend to so much passion.

Eight months pregnant with my daughter, my belly swollen and round, and her son was still in swaddling. She’d disappeared junior year of high school, trading text books for menus. My fiancée, Danny, hadn't really had the change get used to the presence of babies before, having been five when his twin brothers were born, and not having much close contact with extended family, so she brought Xander over to remedy the issue. Xander was her first son, seven months old on the day she brought him to visit us; no hints were even being whispered yet of her two other boys, yet to come. She was eighteen, and I was nineteen, about to turn twenty a month before my little girl would be born. “Before you have the baby,” she advised me, “get a pedicure. It’s really relaxing and soothing to your swollen feet, and then when you’re in labor you can focus on your pretty toenails.”

When she had a bad day back then, she would vent her rage sanitizing bathtubs, washing dishes in scalding water, vacuuming, and rearranging furniture. He husband, George, she said, was completely self-absorbed, didn't take fatherhood seriously, and only wanted one thing from her. We began spending a good deal of time with each other, a pair of the few members of our small social circle who had children early on, weathering the storm of new motherhood alongside the seasoning process of transforming from an uninitiated youth into a hopefully competent, respectable adult. Yet even when I visited, George remained a shadowy figure in the background; he seemed to have little to do with who Ava was, what she wanted, or what mattered to her; not because she didn't love or want him, but because he was so aloof and disconnected from her interests. She seemed so indomitable with her plans, her routines, her laughter. I’d get sick or have to work doubles when times were hard. She’d arrive at my door, mop, broom, and sponges in hand to scour my apartment. “You deserve it,” she’d say. “We have to take care of each other.” I couldn't argue with that, life is hard enough with out having people you love and trust who you can rely on to help you through the tough times. She wouldn't have so much as let me touch a mop handle in her apartment if I’d tried, but sometimes I’d come over and sneak in a meat loaf or a casserole. I got my license and a mini-van long before she did, and I'd drive over to the apartment she shared with George, and she'd load Xander up in the van next to my little Ayala, and I'd take her with me to grocery store. This spared her negotiating favors from dubious relatives, or having to negotiate the public transit system with an infant, a heavy stroller complete with baby carrier, and a load of groceries on her own.

We were artists, or, we were becoming artists, together. I’d pull together desks and tables, set out canvas and acrylic paint, and cook a lean meal. We’d spent the night singing to music and making beautiful messes. No anesthesia needed then, we had our laughter, our creativity, and our friendship to carry us through. We’d go down town on Wednesday night and help teach spiritual art to teens at a down-town church in a struggling neighborhood with our former high school art instructor, take trips to first Friday and admire the glowing galleries. Life began to whisper hope into our hearts of a life in which we could make beautiful things, do beautiful things, make a difference in peoples lives, and find good and honest ways of taking care of ourselves and our families.

We were still swapping recipes and editions of Family Circle Magazines when she told me she was pregnant again. Her lips pressed into a thin line and she cursed in fear, said she didn't know what she’d do. I knew what I would've done, but then, I wasn't her. I tried to help her stand by her decision to bring that child into the world, with love and hope, but I was scared too. Along came Zachary, born big and always growing at a pace that seemed to allow him to outgrow his older brother, Xander. Two months after Zach was born, I was getting married. After four years of a turbulent and passionate love-affair and the birth of our mutual child, I finally tied the knot with Danny, in my iridescent olive-green a-line wedding dress and black combat boots, crammed into the courthouse with thirty relatives and our chubby-cheeked eighteen-month old daughter in tow. Ava was overcome by the demands of a two-month old infant and one-year old son, and wasn't able to make it that day, but our friendship continued to grow. Six or seven months later, it was Ava's birthday, I was throwing her a birthday party at my apartment for grown-ups only, and as I tried to hand her one of my special margaritas, she shook her head, smiling wanly. “I’m pregnant.” She said. Knocking back the glass of triple sec, lime and tequila myself, I admired her bravery as I counted my blessings.

We both bore the brunt of our husband's short-tempers, harsh words, and demanding temperaments, but while George got physical occasionally he hadn't yet pulled the horror-film evoking stunts that Danny had. The youngest boy had just been born and my own life as I knew it, and all that I expected to come, was counting down to the day of reckoning when it would all turn upside down. My little girl was growing taller every day, and more timid and watchful of father's hair-trigger temper as she did. She had already begun to develop a charming sense of humor, aimed at diffusing tension, in response to the constant sense of hostility between her parents. “You need to leave, he’s going to kill you,” Ava told me one day, as I sat sobbing on her couch in her apartment after fleeing from a particularly brutal conflict with Dan. So I left. Married June 15th, 2003; Separated, September 8th, 2004. Likely I'd succumbed the common delusion, that some how imposing this sense of "legitimate" commitment would some how resolve the failures of my relationship. I cried as I watched my hopes and dreams crumble, and she soothed me and hugged me tight. She told me I deserved to be safe, I’d find love again, and I’d be happier alone. When I had to return to the apartment for my things, sweet Ava came with me, armed not only with her usual tools but also with boxes, packing tape, and newspaper. She brought her indomitable sense of organization, and her overwhelming smile. I howled and pulled my hair as the remains of my life were packed carefully into labeled boxes. She did most of the work and told me again how wonderful I was, and how things would get better.

That was years ago now, and after holding my hand at a pivotal time in my life, her own flight to freedom led her instead to a fall. Perhaps the weight she carried in her wings was heavier than mine, for no words and act of help I offered could assuage the oncoming descent. Her fall was the kind that strips a woman of her titles: mother, wife, friend, artist. Part of me says inside, “There but for the grace of the universe go, I.” I know, behind her jaded eyes is the woman with the overwhelming smile, the mirthful laugh, who is determined, hopeful, and striving; the woman who once helped me save myself. Though I can’t take her weight, or give her my wings, I will always remember.