Lips Unsealed (2 page)

I didn’t understand. We played together almost every day.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because my mom says your mother is bad.”

My mother was bad?
I didn’t understand what he meant or why he said such a hurtful thing, and his words left me bleeding from a hundred little wounds. I held back tears as I raced home. I ran into the garage, sat on my bike, and cried while trying to figure out why my friend’s mother would’ve said such a mean thing about my mom.

It didn’t make sense. My mom was a sweet, shy, young woman. She wasn’t bad, and she didn’t have the capability of being mean. She fought with my father when he called from the road, but she sounded defensive and usually hung up feeling scared.

After a few minutes, I went inside and looked for my mom. She was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I stared at her through tear-filled eyes. She asked if I had been crying. I lied and pretended nothing was wrong. I felt like I would hurt her if I told her that someone thought she was bad, and my instinct was to protect her.

She was twenty-five years old. Her hair was in a ponytail and she was wearing a cute dress that she had made herself, as she had most of her clothes, as well as my school outfits. None of that was bad. She liked to watch movies. She also sang around the house, played piano, and clapped when I danced for her. None of that was bad either.

At worst, she was troubled. But bad?

I could think of only one possibility for Eddie’s words—Walt. He was at our house for dinner and often still there in the morning. He was more of a companion to my mom than my father was. I grew used to him being around without really thinking about why he was there. Of course, in retrospect I know why. My mom and dad had split. I don’t know if they had officially separated or divorced, but they weren’t together anymore.

My mom never mentioned it. Walt’s presence was assumed. He continued to show up after we moved to Simi Valley, and then to a rental in Reseda, and yet again to an even smaller home in Burbank that was so close to the freeway that I went to sleep and woke up to the sound
of cars speeding past. Even after the final move to Burbank, my mother, sister, and I continued to shuttle back and forth between my grandparents’ home in Saugus and those of various friends of my mother.

Just as we were never given an explanation of Walt’s presence, my brother, sister, and I were never told why we were constantly moved around. To this day, if I shut my eyes and think back to that time, I can feel the sense I had of being unsettled and uncertain and of wondering why we couldn’t stay at home. It was confusing and chaotic. Maybe this moving around was why, years later, I took to the road so easily—it reminded me of this time in my life.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I asked my mother for an explanation and she finally gave me one. She told me that her split from my father was volatile, and she felt the need to hide us while she tried to work things out with him. I didn’t understand why she wanted to hide us from my father, but there were a lot of things going on between them that were beyond my comprehension.

At seven years old, I simply wanted to know where my dad was and why he wasn’t coming home. I also wanted to know why he didn’t want to be with us anymore. When he did call, why didn’t he want to speak to me? And why did my mom always hang up in tears?

For a while I got into the habit of perching next to the living room window after dinner and staring into the darkness, looking for my dad. I thought that if I looked long and hard enough, I might wish him back and see his truck turn onto the street and pull into the driveway. As I sat there, I used to play his favorite 78s on our stereo, albums by Donald O’Connor and Burl Ives, as if they might help lure him up the driveway and through the door.

They didn’t.

My mom let me go through that ritual without explaining that my dad wasn’t coming back home. One day I finally threw a fit and insisted on knowing why he didn’t want to be with us anymore. She said, “One day I can tell you. One day you’ll understand. But not now.”

Soon after that, Walt moved in with us permanently. The arrangement
was never explained, even after my dad showed up one day with a girlfriend with red hair like my mom’s. He parked outside for a while—I don’t know why, maybe just to unnerve us—then brought her inside, where she stood uncomfortably to the side as he got into a fight with my mom in the living room.

I stood in the hall and eavesdropped from behind the door, which was open a crack, just enough so that I could glimpse them as they moved back and forth across the room. I didn’t want them to see me—or my brother and sister, who were behind me.

Looking back, I guess it was the final straw between them, because after a while my dad screamed, “Good luck without me,” and then stormed out of the front door.

A short while later, my mom picked me up at a friend’s house and told me that she and Walt had gotten married in Las Vegas. She said we were to refer to him as Dad. Other changes happened more gradually but were no less profound and hard to understand. First there was an unmistakable bulge in my mom’s tummy, and then some months later she gave birth to my sister Mary, the first of four children (the others are Josh, Joe, and Sarah, who was born when I was twenty) she had with Walt.

Given how fearful she was of my dad, I can see why my mom was drawn to Walt. He was about five-eleven, well built, very strong, and kind of rugged looking from all the time he spent working outdoors. He walked with the swagger of a badass, which he was. I know two versions of Walt. There’s the man who got sober after I left home and turned into one of the most remarkable, loving men I have ever met. Then there’s the Walt with whom I grew up.

That
Walt was impossibly bad when he drank, and he drank a lot. The booze lit up the demons in him, and he turned them against us. He went out drinking most nights after work. As he squandered money on himself that could have helped the entire family, we ate oatmeal and Bac-O-Bit sandwiches for dinner while trying to ignore the empty place my mom had set for him at the table.

We worried about whether he was going to make it home, and if so, what kind of shape he was going to be in. We only let ourselves think of
two choices, bad or worse, though all of us knew there was another possibility, a drunk-driving accident. But that was too terrible to consider.

After doing the dishes, my mom paced the living room, chain-smoking cigarettes and listening for the sound of his truck. The TV was always on in the background, but somehow she could hear his motor from half a mile away. I waited in bed, listening for the same sound. Every so often I tiptoed out of bed and spied on my mom through the hallway door.

I had to bite my tongue because more than anything, what I wanted to ask was “Do you think Dad is coming home soon?”

By this time I referred to Walt as Dad—and still do to this day. But I resisted saying anything and always made it back into bed before my mom sensed my presence. I continued to wait. Sometimes it was hours, and other times I lost track of how long I waited in bed. Then when I did finally hear him, I braced myself for the inevitable fight he had with my mother.

She was ready, too—not because she liked to fight or had contentious fiber in her body, because she didn’t. But he came in angry and short-tempered and put her through such worry every night that she needed to yell back at him or she’d go crazy. Their voices ripped through the nervous silence that had settled over the house, and no matter how tightly I squeezed my pillow over my head, it wasn’t enough to block out their back-and-forth.

My dad’s tirades never carried into our room, thank goodness. If he did open the door, it was only to poke his head in and make sure all of us were asleep. My eyes were squeezed tight.

In the morning, I climbed out of bed and looked for my mom in the kitchen, pretending that none of the yelling the night before had happened. She pretended the same thing. My way of communicating that I knew what had happened was trying to help her as much as possible. I spent all day attempting to get that message across to her. I fed the babies, changed diapers, and helped in the ways I could.

My dad wasn’t drunk
every
night, but it was often enough that it left me with the impression that it was more often than not. Nor did he and my mom scream at each other every night, but they did it enough of the time so that I expected it to happen. Each day was a walk through a
minefield. Even when there was calm, I didn’t trust it, and as much as I hated it when they fought, at least it relieved the stress of anticipation.

With his quick temper, my dad lacked certain basic parenting skills, such as patience. He was of the old-fashioned school that believed in spanking children, and not only that, he seemed to think children should be spanked regularly. My mom looked the other way as we screamed. I don’t know if she condoned such punishment, but once, after I complained, she said that she had read that a popular TV talk-show host also spanked his kids, as if to say that made it okay.

Butch and I made light of the beatings we received by comparing the red marks on our skin or the number of lashes. It was our way of surviving. But beneath the jokes and the half smiles were lots of pain and tears. Butch came into my room one night with red, puffy eyes and a crooked smile on his face. He sniffled.

“Twenty-seven,” he said.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Yeah. He hit me twenty-seven times—a new record!”

Deep down I resented my mom for putting us in a situation where we were subjected to Walt’s volatility and violence. I don’t know what I expected her to do, but I didn’t think the way he treated us was right, and I wondered why she didn’t say anything to him. Maybe she did in private. I just wished she had done more.

There were good times too. We would pile in the camper of my dad’s truck, all of us kids crammed together, and we would go on weekend camping trips to Santa Barbara and San Diego. We enjoyed both the beach and the forests. There were so many of us and we were so poor that between the lack of space and the scrimping, we were either fighting or laughing hysterically. I remember more laughter than anything else.

It was always a relief to be away from home and setting up a tent in the outdoors. My dad was usually sober, and I loved having space of my own, something that was in short supply in our small, crowded home. It was liberating to run around. It felt good to exhale, and I swear to this
day I have tasted few things as delicious as the bologna sandwiches my mom made on Wonder bread smeared with French’s mustard.

My mom was a good sport and she knew those trips brought out the best in my dad. He was able to loosen up and relax. It was as if he left all of his demons at home. My mom was a very religious woman, and I wonder if, as she went to sleep on those nights when we were under the stars, she felt like God was answering her prayers.

Her faith was extremely important to her. It got her through the worst of times. Every Sunday, she sat through sermons and found hope and strength in the promise of God’s love. It was a beautiful thing for her, something I didn’t appreciate at the time.

To me, church was a big bother. Every Sunday morning, my mom dressed all of us kids in matching outfits that she had sewn, and she marched us like a mother duck with her ducklings into the little church around the corner from our house. I felt like I was on parade. Everyone went except my dad. My mom always had a reason why he couldn’t go, as well as a reason why we had to.

When I think about it now, I am pretty sure my mom didn’t want my dad there. She was happy that he stayed home. She wanted those Sundays to herself, to be able to sit quietly with her children and feel the presence of God, hoping that He would steer all of us to salvation.

I found it all a turn-off, starting when my mother had me baptized when I was eight. I didn’t want to do it, and I was doubly and triply repulsed after I was baptized Belinda Kurczeski. That was Walt’s last name, not mine. What was wrong with my name, Belinda Carlisle?

Despite this, I attended Sunday school until I was in my teens and hated every minute of it. I always wished I were someplace else. I can still picture myself going home and taking off my Sunday school clothes as if I was shedding a skin. I also tried to forget everything I had heard. I didn’t buy those stories. I didn’t care about what was going to happen to me after I was dead.

I wanted to be saved now.

ON THE PLAYGROUND at Burbank’s Bret Harte Elementary School, I looked like any other kid my age scampering around. But in fifth grade, I had one of those moments that changes some girls for a lifetime—I discovered style. My aunt gave me a box of hand-me-downs that a friend had given her. It was full of old sequined square-dance dresses and matching shoes, including an eye-popping hot-pink outfit that I immediately wore to school.

I didn’t care if my classmates stared or made fun. How could they not stare? When I put on that dress, I thought I looked like a beautiful princess. It was better than being me.

In sixth grade, I had only one so-called normal dress, a black and white polka-dot pinafore with a ribbon around the waist. My mom bought it on special at Sears and I loved it as soon as she brought it home. I wore it as much as possible, along with the colorful outfits that I got in the annual delivery of hand-me-downs. During recess one day a girl came up to me and put me down for wearing the same outfit nearly every day. I can still hear her high-pitched voice:
“You only have one outfit! What’s wrong with you?”

I walked away, hurt and humiliated. I felt like she had glimpsed a part of the reality I tried to hide, my family’s lack of money. The last thing I wanted was for someone to know the truth about me. As for the truth about the way I dressed, I was unable to express such complex feelings then, but slipping into those colorful outfits let me flee into a world of imagination, a place where I was freed from reality and kept from feeling like everyone else.

I was also the class clown and one of those girls who was good at sports. I was built like a barrel, but with skinny legs that carried me across the ball field and track as fast as, if not faster than, most of the boys. I ignored my classmates when they referred to me as fatso and Belimpa.
Ha-ha-ha
, I laughed.
You can’t hurt me
. But they did.