the devil's in the details

when i was young my parents were overprotective to the point of suffocation. i don't think they even realized at the time that what they were doing may have been considered abuse. i think now they did the best they could. i thought then they were the devil.

i grew up in several towns in the midwest. most were small and pretty tight communities. these were the days when my homemaker mother went to 'coffee' with the neighbor ladies.
one such woman and my mother got to be good friends. her husband eventually became my father's best friend. they lived a few doors down from us and had two daughters, one a couple of years older than me, one a year younger. i played with them both at various times, but never with both at the same time - they didn't get along very well with each other.

it was a time that i thought i was the happiest. i had a girl who lived next door who became my best friend and was in my class at school, and another one a few doors up the street who would play with us, too. one of us was always on the 'outs' with the other ones. it seemed it was always two against one and usually i was the one, since i was the new girl. when that happened, i would go down the block and play with the other girls - my parents' friends.

one hot summer day my parents and their friends were going to be gone for the day. i was supposed to stay at the other people's house where the older girl was going to babysit us younger ones. we were in fourth grade, so not totally helpless. the neighbors were going to have a backyard carnival and we were going to work on decorating while our parents were gone.

the older girl had some girlfriends over to help, too, and together we were all getting along pretty well decorating. at least i thought we were. As i mentioned before, it was a very hot day and the older girls decided to go inside and make some lemonade. after awhile, when they didn't reappear, the younger one suggested i go inside and see what the hold up was.

things went downhill from there.

i went inside, but instead of finding them in the kitchen, they were in the basement. i heard whispers and giggles as i headed down the basement stairs, wondering what they were up to. the lights were off, but there was enough sunlight sifting through the dirty windows to see them all huddled in a corner of the room, hunched together like some strange beast. i made some comment and it startled them, the oldest hiding something behind her back. i told them we were waiting for them to come back up and help....

to this day i don't know what they were looking at or why they turned on me. i can only speculate they'd found one of their father's playboy's or a hustler magazine. all i know is when i tried to turn around and go back up the stairs, a couple of them blocked me. the older girl that i knew had a strange look on her face - a grin that suddenly seemed cold. she looked at all the other girls and they started laughing and shaking their heads yes...yes...yes...

"we'll let you go back upstairs if you take your clothes off", she said.
"what?!?!" i replied
"you heard me. we want you to take your clothes off."
"no."

i tried to push through the girls, but i was a pretty scrawny thing for my age and even then a couch potato. i fought with two of them as the other three started pulling at my clothes. someone got my shorts down, then my underwear. i was too young to wear a bra, so there wasn't much to getting my t-shirt off. i was exposed. in the scuffle i lost my glasses, but i wouldn't have been able to see with them anyway, my eyes were so full of tears. i sobbed and curled in on myself and they called me 'baby' and 'sissy' and 'stupid' and 'cunt'. my mind was reeling - wondering what i had done to bring this down on myself.

they laughed as they went up the basement stairs, back into the daylight.

i found my glasses and put on my clothes. going up the stairs as quietly as possible, i went around to the front door and slipped out without them seeing me. i ran home to my empty house and waited shivering in my bed for my parents to come home.

when my parents came home a couple of hours later, i never got to tell them what happened. my father started yelling at me for coming home early and not helping the others with the carnival preparations. he called me 'lazy' and 'stupid' and 'unreliable' and 'bad'.

several months later when the neighbors went on vacation i was to watch their cat. i was to go to their house every day and feed it and water it. when they came home the older girl told her mother i'd stolen some money out of her room. she got me once again.

my parents believed me to be a liar and a thief. that brand stayed with me for the rest of my childhood.