Chapter 2
I had to estimate that I was about ten because I really didn’t know exactly how old I was. I don’t know when or where I was born, and I didn’t know who my parents were. I assume I had parents sometime because that’s the way it works, but I have no memory of them. I don’t know if they abandoned me, or if they died or if someone took me from them. I don’t know if they were poor, if they were married or not, or if my mother was alone and scared and had no other choice. I don’t suppose it matters.
My earliest memories are of the foster homes. I don’t know how many there were or why there was more than one. The last one I remember was a house with five or six kids besides myself. The fat old woman who lived there insisted we all call her ‘Mama’. She would spend her days sitting in a big chair watching TV and eating candy and potato chips.
The man, who I assume must have been her husband, was a scrawny man with thin arms, a sunken chest, wildly unkempt hair and a scruffy beard. He would leave the house every day, probably to go to some kind of job, and then come home in the evenings to watch the TV and drink.
Sometimes he would bring home a bucket of chicken, which was never enough for all of us. Sometimes is was a box of donuts, with half of them already gone, probably left over from what somebody had brought in to work. Sometimes we would have white bread and either bologna or cheese, hardly ever both, and the older kids would make sandwiches for all of us.
I heard some of the kids say that the grown-ups were paid money to take care of us. They took the money but that’s pretty much all they did. They certainly didn’t spend much of it on us.
During the day, some of the older kids went to school, but I never did. I was too young. The rest of us played in the house, but if we got too loud, ‘Mama’ would yell, “Shaddap!” and sometimes smack whoever was closest.
There was one bedroom for the grownups, and two more for all the kids. The boys slept in one and the girls in the other, mostly on old mattresses laid on the floor or on a couple of blankets layered to make some padding. On cold nights we had the choice of lying with more blankets under us and being cold all night, or having more over us and putting up with the hard floor.
I didn’t really have clothes of my own. The older kids were responsible for doing the laundry, and when it was clean we would just take whatever fit us and put that on. I remember one pink sweatshirt that some of the girls fought over, but it was too big for me so I didn’t care.
One night after everybody had gone to bed, ‘Pa’ came into the room where I slept with the other girls. We didn’t have pajamas or nightgowns, but just slept in our underwear or whatever we had. I was wearing some underpants that had probably been worn by most of the other girls at one time or another, and a stained t-shirt.
‘Pa’ snuck in quietly and stepped carefully among the sleeping girls. I don’t know why, but I was awake, and I watched him cross the room. He came and lay down next to me and put his hand up to stroke my hair. He said something about me being a ‘pretty little girl’, and his breath reeked of the cheap liquor he drank.
His hand slid down over my stomach and he started to slip his fingers into my underpants. I don’t know why he was doing it or what he wanted, but I knew I didn’t like it. His other hand was resting near my shoulder and I turned my head and chomped down hard on one dirty finger.
He bellowed like an angry bear and leapt up, hollering obscenities. This woke up the other girls and they started screaming. I ran out of the room and flew down the stairs and hid behind some furniture in the corner of the living room. That’s where I spent the rest of the night.
When I came out the next morning, ‘Pa’ had gone off to work. After that he would occasionally glare at me, or he’d smack me on the side of the head when nobody was looking, but he never again tried to molest me. I don’t know how he ever explained what he was doing in the girls’ bedroom in the middle of the night
I remember being hungry most of the time. Some of the older kids could reach the upper cabinets, where they would find crackers or pop-tarts, or sometimes just uncooked pasta, but I was too small to reach that high.
One day I pushed a chair over to the counter, climbed up, and was looking for something to eat when I pulled something out of the cabinet and everything else came tumbling out with it. The old woman came lumbering out to the kitchen. When she saw what had happened, she slapped my face, yanked me off the counter and threw me across the room, where I crashed into the kitchen table and chairs and sent them all tumbling.
When the old man got home she told him what had I had done, and he took off his belt and beat me with it. He yelled to the other kids that nobody would get anything to eat because of me. We all went off to bed hungry, and some of the other kids beat on me too.
That night I waited until I was sure everybody else was asleep. I crept out of the room and went downstairs. I found a coat that fit me and stuffed the pockets with whatever food I could find, and I snuck out of the house. If I had to guess I’d say I was about five years old at the time. I never saw any of them again.