My Life as a Rat

I was twelve years old. This was the morning of the last day of my childhood.

(NOT OUR IMAGINATIONS. THE OILY PURPLE WATER LIKE SNAKES in the river had been real.

Alarmed citizens in South Niagara had noticed the phenomenon and reported it. There’d been many calls to local authorities and to 911.

On the front page of that evening’s South Niagara Union Journal it was curtly explained that the excessive discharge of sludge in the river that morning had been the result of routine maintenance of the Niagara County Water Board’s wastewater sedimentation basins and no cause for concern.

What did this mean? What was sludge?

When our father read the boxed item in the Journal he laughed.

“‘Routine.’ ‘Sedimentation’—‘no cause for alarm.’ Sons of bitches are poisoning us, that’s what it means.”)

Disowned (#ulink_43d362c3-92d9-5c25-bf8a-21550c1b09e9)

ONCE I’D BEEN DADDY’S FAVORITE OF HIS SEVEN KIDS. BEFORE something terrible happened between us, I am trying still to make right.

This was in November 1991. I was twelve years, seven months old at the time.

Sent me into exile. Thirteen years! To an adult that is not a long time—probably; but to an adolescent, a lifetime.

Who’s Daddy’s favorite little girl?

Violet Rue. Little Violet Rue!

When I was a little girl Daddy would kiss my pug nose, and make me squeal. And Daddy would lift me in his strong arms, and pretend to toss me into the air so I was frightened but did not let on for Daddy did not like scaredy-cat little girls.

There was an intensity to this, the lifting-in-the-arms, the impassioned speech. A delicious fiery smell, Daddy’s breath, fierce and unmistakable and I had no idea why, that he’d been drinking (whiskey) but knowing this ferocity to be the very breath of the father, the breath of the male.

How’s my little girl? Not afraid of your daddy are you?

Better not, Daddy loves his little Violet Rue like crazy!

ONCE, BEFORE I WAS BORN, MY OLDEST SISTER, MIRIAM, HAD BEEN Daddy’s favorite little girl. Later, my sister Katie had been Daddy’s favorite little girl.

But now, the favorite was Violet Rue. And would remain Violet Rue.

Because the youngest, the baby of the Kerrigan family.

Last-born. Most precious.

Daddy had named me himself—Violet Rue. A name he claimed to have heard in an Irish song that had haunted him as a boy.

It was said that Violet Rue had been an accidental pregnancy—a “late” pregnancy—but to the religious-minded nothing can be truly accidental.

All human beings have a special destiny. All souls are precious to God.

The family is a special destiny. The family into which you are born and from which there can be no escape.

Your mother was thrilled! A beautiful new girl-baby to take the place of the others who were growing up and growing away from her and especially the boys she hardly dared touch any longer, their downy cheeks, their prickly cheeks, the heat of their skin, fierce flushed faces she did not mean to surprise, opening a door without knocking, unthinking—Oh. Sorry. I didn’t think anyone was … Your big brothers who’d throw off Mom’s hand if even by chance she touched them.

A baby to love. A girl-baby to adore. The innocence of being loved totally and without question another time when she’d believed there would never be another time …

Of course, Lula was thrilled.

Of course, Lula was devastated. Oh God, oh Jesus no.

Hardly had she recovered from the last pregnancy—she’d determined would be the last. Thirty-seven years old—too old. Thirty pounds overweight. High blood pressure, swollen ankles. Kidney infection. Varicose veins like inky spiderwebs in her thighs fleshy-white as raw chicken.

And the man, the tall handsome Irish American husband. Turning his eyes from her, the bloated white belly, flaccid thighs, breasts like a cow’s udders.

His fault! Though he would blame her.

In private reproach he’d blamed her for years for she’d been the one who’d wanted kids and it was futile to remind him how he’d wanted kids too, how proud he’d been, the first babies, his first sons, dazed and boasting to his male friends he was catching up with them God damn it and boastful even to his father the old sod he couldn’t abide, as the old sod could not abide him.

And she’d been a beautiful woman. Beautiful body he’d been mesmerized by. Soft skin, astonishingly soft white breasts, curve of her belly, hips. Oh, he’d been crazy for her! Like a spell upon him. Those first years.

Six pregnancies. Not wanting to acknowledge—(except to her sister Irma)—that these were, just maybe, at least two pregnancies too many. And then, the seventh …

After the first pregnancy her body began to change. After the second, third. And after the fourth it began to rebel. Cervical polyps were discovered, that (thank God) turned out to be benign and could be easily removed. Another kidney infection. Higher blood pressure, swollen ankles. The doctor advised terminating the pregnancy. But Lula would never have consented. Jerome would never have consented.

It was not something that was discussed. Not openly and not privately. They were Catholics—that was enough. You just did not speak of certain things and of many of these things there were not adequate words in any case.

As boys went unquestioningly to war, in the U.S. military. You did not question, that was not how you saw yourself.

Those weeks, months your mother spent most of each day lying down. Terrified of a miscarriage and terrified that she might die. Praying for the baby to be born healthy and praying for her own life and in this way Lula Kerrigan not only lost her good looks (she’d taken for granted) but also became permanently frightened and anxious, superstitious. Looking for “signs”—that God was trying to tell her something special about herself and the baby growing in her womb.

A “sign” could be something glimpsed out a window—the figure of a gigantic angel in the clouds. A “sign” could be a dream, a mood. A sudden premonition.

In the later stages of her pregnancy no one could induce Lula to leave the house. So big-bellied, breathless and pop-eyed she’d become. Eating ravenously until she made herself sick. Gaining more weight. Knowing that her body disgusted her husband though (of course) (like any guilty husband) Jerome denied it. Last thing Lula Kerrigan wanted to do was expose herself to the eyes of others who’d be pitiless, mocking.

My God. Is that—Lula Kerrigan? Looking like an elephant! Making a spectacle of herself parading around like that.

Scornful expressions you would hear through your childhood, girlhood—making a spectacle, parading around. The harshest sort of denunciation a woman might make of another woman.

Parading around like she owns the place.

This would be charged of women and girls who exhibited themselves: their bodies. Particularly if their bodies were imperfect in obvious ways—too fat. Appearing in public when they should be ashamed of how they looked or in any case aware of how they looked. Of how unsparing eyes would latch onto them, assessing. Never was such a charge made of men or boys.

There appeared to be no masculine equivalent for making a spectacle, parading around.

As, you’d discover, there was no masculine equivalent for bitch, slut.

The Happy Childhood (#ulink_43e51ffc-6549-5907-89fa-dba3c818fd31)

WE WERE JEROME JR., AND MIRIAM, AND LIONEL, AND LES, and Katie, and Rick, and Violet Rue—“Vi’let.”

“Christ! Looks like a platoon.”