THE WIND PHONE
They Were All Of That
We will always fail our children
When I was about ten, which would have been 1960, my mother decided, in the interest of frugality, to start giving me haircuts at home. This might have been OK if her hands were not so shaky due to her alcoholism. She used large, pointy-ended shears, repeatedly stabbing me in the side of the head. When I cried out and flinched away, she barked, “Well, if you’d hold still!” Try holding still if you are ten years old and trying to avoid a gleaming, menacing dagger.
She never nailed me in the eye. In retrospect, had she put out one of my eyes, the shock of it might have opened a trap door to rock bottom and started her on the road to recovery right then and there. Instead, she waited more than a decade for my father to divorce her before joining AA. Considering what me and my siblings endured during the intervening years, perhaps the sacrifice of an eye would not have been too much. Yet, when I look back on it all, I do not feel as if I was abused. On the whole, she was a good, loving mother.
One of my earliest memories is of my brother and I running into our parents’ bedroom, wailing with terror from an exceptionally violent electrical storm. In my memory it was like that Ron Mueck installation of a woman in a bed. The woman and the bed are so large it…
