It Was Me All Along: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

called him a faggot. My eyes darted around the room from Dad’s red-hot face to Anthony’s quivering bottom lip to Mom with one arm wrapped around her son and one arm outstretched toward her husband, keeping him at bay. I walked toward Dad with leaden legs. I bent slightly so that our eyes met—Dad seated in a kitchen chair that creaked under his 350 pounds, and me standing taller and twenty pounds heavier than any girl in my second-grade class. I felt as though my eyes were on fire. I moved my face to within inches from his, our noses nearly touching.
    And then I told him that I hated him; that he was a bad, bad man, and I meant it. Mom drew my shoulders back, but I leanedfarther into him as if to press my rage on him. I used words I hoped would cut into him in the same way I’d seen him cut Mom, cut Anthony, for the eight years I’d lived. I wasn’t even sure at the time what my words would mean to him. In fact, I wasn’t sure I even knew what I wished for him to be like, what I wanted out of a father. But then my thoughts rewound to episodes of
Full House
and
Little House on the Prairie
, where I came to know fathers like Danny Tanner and Pa Ingalls who were protectors and providers. And I was reminded briefly that my own was neither of those things.
    When I finished hurling every angry thought I held at him, I searched Dad’s eyes for recourse. I waited for him to do to me what he’d done to everyone else. I breathed hard, panting from adrenaline, into his face. I braced myself for whatever would come. He closed his eyes. My teeth gritted once more, as if tightening my face would harden my whole exterior into a shield. He opened his eyes, and the look he gave me wasn’t anything I could have anticipated. What I saw in his eyes made my heart sink, made it deflate, just as it had two weeks earlier when the boys in my class called me fat while the girls looked on, smiling.
    That day, my classmates had been running around the school yard at recess, laughing and whispering. I figured it was just boys being goofy about our second-grade teacher. It wasn’t until one girl in my class—the one who had been teased for accidentally farting during gym class—approached me on the swings that I realized any of it had to do with me. She told me, as matter-of-factly as she’d once told me that I’d forgotten to return her pink mechanical pencil, that the boys wanted me to get off the swing set because they thought I was so fat that I’d break it. For a few seconds, I satmotionless, stunned. My face burned as I realized what she had just told me, and I looked around the playground, racking my brain for a joke, anything to say in return that would belie my embarrassment. And then I saw the group of them, all the boys and a handful of girls, standing on the pavement just under the basketball hoop, laughing at me. Laughing because of me. I turned my head down, tears welling and threatening to spill out and onto the peaches of my cheeks. I couldn’t help but notice the way that the thin black rubber of the swing seat dug into the fleshy sides of my thighs. It reminded me of the way Mom tied up a pork roast, how the meat bulged between the thin white lines of string. I blinked a dozen times, hoping the flutter would fan the tears from my eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to look back up. I feared she’d still be standing there, watching my humiliation. Worse, I feared she’d have one more mean thing to say.
    The things I’d told Dad—they’d done what I’d intended for them to do. They cut him deeply. And when he turned his face away and picked up his beer can, upturning it into his mouth, I hated myself. I hated him for making me that angry. For teaching me that people listen when you yell louder, that you not only can cut them with your words, but you can pour hatred in their open wound. I hated Mom, even if I didn’t realize it at the time, for letting me see his rage and then unleash my own. For letting me believe,