Sonny Boy

cw: abuse

 
Grandmother always has a crochet hook in her hand. Yellow yarn in a loop, memory beaten into muscle. The day I am born, in photos taken on cheap disposables at the hospital, blue yarn knotted into a baby blanket. When I am sixteen, the same color from the corner of my eye in the emergency room, twisted into a prayer shawl. Seven, a candy pink cover for my cast.
 
The fluorescent lights made my wounds look ugly. Scraped knees and a broken wrist—a boy had shoved me off the swings.
 
Wood chips burrowed their way into raw skin while the August sun beat the nape of my neck. He laughed, and I used my good hand to grab at the bits of debris around me, but when I aimed for him, all they did was scatter in the breeze. The boy’s mother came, caressed his face, scolded me for throwing things. It wasn’t until then that I cried. My father looked over, came and scooped me up, stroked my leg, and shushed me over and over, whispering, “I know, I know.”
 
My father did not take me to the emergency room at first. It was not until that evening, after my grandmother saw me wince holding my fork, that I was put in front of a doctor. He told us to come back in a month to get the cast off.
 
At school, I repeated my grandmother’s words. “I fell.” I would watch the sun catch in his gold hair while his mother waved from the car. My right arm hung limply at my side. In class, my left hand gripped the pencil as I copied sprawling sloppy letters onto the page, answers to math problems slanting this way and that.
 
When it was time for the cast to come off, my grandmother picked me up from school and took me to the hospital. When a different doctor asked how I’d got the cast, she told him I’d fallen off the swings. “You need to be more careful,” he told me, “Don’t want another accident like this to happen.”
 

*

 
An accident. The lights were dimmed in the room, the yellow hue highlighted the edges of the bruises on her body. My mother wheezed in her sleep while I was curled up like a dog at the foot of her bed.
 
In the hallway, my grandparents spoke with my father. He had been driving, had called them from the ambulance. My grandmother asked, “Is it just too much, Jason? Are they just too much for you?”
 
My father said something in response, but it lacked the clarity of her timbre. I don’t remember much else from then. I couldn’t really say anything with certainty beyond “it happened,” and I can’t place any memories of my mother afterward. I knew better than to ask him where she went, but sometimes I did anyway. I liked to watch each of his muscles tighten, his tongue bruising purple and red between gritted teeth. I knew better than to push it, but sometimes, I did anyway. It was like a game. How little it would take, how long until he would pull the car onto the shoulder. How many words until his fingers would start fidgeting.
 

*

 
“Stop fidgeting.” My grandfather told me.
 
In the same hospital, age ten, my grandfather dying, and me, kicking my legs as they hung from the chair. Ten dollars in my pocket for lunch and a paperback of Percy Jackson. I couldn’t quite grasp the whole of it then, but it is not as if we were particularly close. My grandmother read aloud to him, sometimes the Bible, sometimes pulp mystery novels.
 
That day, it was the Book of Job. I stared at my own book, trying not to listen. My father told me the same stories when I was bad—Job, total depravity, poisoned fruit. Sometimes he would cry.
 
When I grew too agitated to read, I stared out the window and daydreamed about joining the hunters of Artemis, considered where I might find them, contemplated if my father were someone else. I had always loved to swim, hadn’t I?
 

*

 
My father. Out golfing. Sometimes, I dreamed I turned into a ball and his club crashed into me, and he would have to shake me awake, telling me it was okay.
 
He went with his college buddies, usually Stephen. When my dad went on his dates, he often dropped me off at Stephen’s house. He would take me out for pizza and ice cream, until my grandmother found out about it. She arranged for me to spend Saturday nights with her crochet group, where they had potlucks of dry chicken breast and salads with grapes and apples dressed in mayonnaise. I mostly just pushed the food around and said I wasn’t hungry.
 
Once, in high school, I snuck out and went to dinner with Stephen again, and on the way home at a red light, he reached over and gently put his hand on my thigh. He pulled into an empty parking lot on the next street and turned and kissed me under the white glow of the fluorescent lamps. It wasn’t so harsh under the night sky, with all the concrete-covered space it was tasked with illuminating.
 

*

 
Sixteen. The dress was stiff and mourner-black. In the bathroom during the first recess: his mother, the word slut, then no sounds. All my senses were dulled down—like nothing was real but the knotted threads in my mind that tightened as I pulled. The doctor from the hospital on the witness stand: he said something, photos of the bruises and the damage that was done. All I could think of was an Adrienne Rich poem, the bit about the thing itself and not the myth.
 
I tried not to think. Bleach into molding gray matter. I drank sips of bleach diluted into water, and took baths in it. I bleach my hair, first yellow, then white, a halo of frizzed tendrils that forgot their shape. My skin was ravaged and inflamed, scaling over in dry flakes that I scratched until they bled. His hair catches in the overhead light, gold. He looks the same. I can see myself in the third person speaking into a microphone to a room full of men, his mother, glaring.
 

*

 
My freshman year of college, I recounted my experience to a friend on the porch of an off-campus house, and she said to me, “There’s just something about mothers and their sons, isn’t there?”
 
I wouldn’t get what she meant for a few more years, so I just nodded, took a drag from the cigarette we were sharing, and tried to think about it. The moon hung through darkened tree branches, and I thought back to Artemis, considered how she cast out Callisto for her rape, searched for her constellation but couldn’t find it.
 
A semester later, I took a seminar on mythology. I usually slept through my alarm, but sometimes I stumbled into the humanities building and listened as twenty different eighteen-year-olds discussed Homer and Ovid. It was all the same when you really got down to it—a man, exalted, would rape a woman. Leda, Danaë, Persephone, Callisto, Medusa. Sometimes, she would be made a monster; sometimes, she would birth one. It didn’t particularly matter, none of it did, and when I said as much, I was told I was missing the point, so I stopped going altogether.
 
Instead, when I woke up, I would read the Crime and Fire Log for the campus and count how many had been referred to Title IX. I started to make over-under bets with myself. At times, I would hear bits of a story and connect them to an existing report number; sometimes, I’d wait for the new report to appear—usually it didn’t. Occasionally, I turned in essays about pomegranates and severed heads. At the end of the semester: a C and a note from my professor wishing I had contributed more to class discussions.
 
In retellings of the story of Medusa, it was a gift to be made a monster. Some even claimed the original meaning of the myth. The thing itself and not the myth. The wreck and not the story of the wreck. Athena, punisher or protector? Was it a blessing to be made a monster, or a curse? I figured I understood what my friend meant then.
 
Athena as punisher, Metamorphoses. Enraged, she beat Arachne. Arachne turned spider, turned weaver.
 
Athena as protector, reconstructed. Narrative produced in hindsight, woven in a new ethos. Medusa metamorphosed.
 
I don’t want to talk about my grandmother.
 
At the end of my freshmen year, I sat in the passenger seat as my father drove me from campus. He asked about my classes, and I told him about the series on Medusa’s severed head I had done for my final in a painting class. He asked if I was taking anything practical, and so I told him the truth, not really.
 
“I was just like you once. You’ll figure it out.” He said.
 
“I don’t want to be anything like you,” I responded, turning to face the window.
 
“I know, I’m always the fucking bad guy, right? Everything is my fault, isn’t it?”
 
As he spoke, he pressed his foot onto the accelerator and cut off a white hatchback.
 
“You know what? You’re right; you’re nothing like me. You’re just like your mother, running when it gets hard. You can’t commit to anything. That’s what you’ve always done.”
 
A black pickup truck.
 
“I get it, you fucking hate me, you wish I wasn’t your dad, you wish I was more like your mom.”
 
Blue sedan.
 
Black sedan.
 
Red pickup.
 
Red minivan.
 
“It’s always been this way between us.”
 
The car slowed as he turned off the highway. In the first parking lot, it stopped. He began to cry, asked me why I hated him, what he did wrong.
 
It came out of my throat like bile, “I’m sorry, Dad.”
 

*

 
August sun. Everything is spinning—blurred. The ground is stiff, and the sky looks like a vortex has opened. The metallic merry-go-round is still spinning beside me. I can’t get up. When I do, I fall again. The wood chips leaving indents on my skin. Out of the corner of my eye, my mother before she spins away. I try to call out to her, try to crawl, the grass against my cheek. When it all goes still, he is the only one there. I climb onto a swing and pump my legs, hopeful the height will summon her again.
 

*

 
Sitting at the edge of her flowerbeds, I watched my grandmother spray weed killer on the dandelions, the bits of green poking up between the cracks. The weeds, she said, would creep further into the beds and grow and choke out the flowers, and then the flowers would die. I watched a spider pinned beneath her boot, a caterpillar crawl across where she had just sprayed. It moved slower and slower until it curled up at the edge of the brick. I started to cry, and my grandmother paused. She held me in her arms and asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t breathe enough air between my sobs to waste on what was wrong. A butterfly flew past, and I thought about the caterpillar that would never get to be one and the dandelions that would never get to watch it fly.
 

*

 
Grandmother tried teaching me to crochet just after my thirteenth birthday. I wanted to learn. I’d watched her for years, how she would weave different strands of blue yarn into an afghan that mirrored the pattern of waves, produce a new prayer shawl for her church in a single day, sit and count each row to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.
 
I was terrible. Watching her, it looked so easy, but the yarn slipped from my hook, and I couldn’t get beyond the starting chain of stitches. She tried to guide my hands, create muscle memory in each finger, but as soon as she left me alone, told me to work on a second row, it fell apart. She would return to find my dropped stitches and yarn tied into knots. Carefully, she would reverse each step, pulling the messy thread back into a singular strand.
 
I think I’m ready to talk about the hospital.
 

*

 
The summer after I graduated, my grandmother sat by my bed, calm and serene, with yellow yarn and a crochet hook in hand. She started to talk to me about something she called Sonny Boy Syndrome. “Well, you know, my Grandmother Ruth had a Sonny Boy.”
 
The sun’s glare left my grandmother backlit. She sat motionless in her chair, except for her hands, softly folding the thread of yarn through loops and around her hook. Eventually, her lips moved again, and she traced the genealogy to her own mother and her brother. She did not have to explain. I had heard, since I was a girl, the chill of contempt in her voice when she spoke of him. Before his death, my grandfather would use the same tone when speaking about me or, when he was honest, about my father.
 
“I never understood it. Not until I had your dad, at least,” my grandmother said as the yarn slipped easily from her hook to form neat stitches—a square of yellow for a patchwork tapestry. I had seen similar squares laid out on the floor of her sewing room just twenty-four hours earlier.
 
Twenty-three, and my dad would pull a golf club from his trunk. Twenty-three, and from the window, she would see him throw it at my shins before I jumped and fell. Twenty-two and fifty minutes, and she would call. “Jason, that’s enough now,” as it slammed into my ribs. Twenty-two and thirty, expired aspirin and a hot bath. Steam, like breath on my neck. A locked door, small wrists pinned. His belt buckle, fingers fidgeting. Twenty-one, limping through the last woods of a suburban development. His voice sharp, “Come on, that’s enough now.” Climbing higher, hopeful the height will summon her again. A branch gave way.
 
In the hospital bed, I said nothing for a while. I just watched her fingers move across the rows of yarn, counting each stitch to make sure she hadn’t missed anything. She smiled, satisfied.
 
The doctors told me my wrist was broken in the same place it had been all those years ago.
 
My grandmother stopped counting. “She fell.”
 

*

 
When I was sixteen, I prayed that he would stop, and when he did, I thought if I didn’t move, the only evidence it had even happened would be the rip in my dress. I laid there for a while.
 
My grandmother drove me to the hospital. She didn’t ask me any questions, just held my hand in the waiting room. I thought if she knew it was me, it would be different. That had been foolish. On the mantle, a photo of her with a boy with gold hair. Her darling boy.
 
I thought about crying, but I wasn’t sure what would spill out if I did.
 
Before I was discharged, I went to the maternity ward. I looked into the rooms of mothers holding their children and wondered what they would become. I wondered if Rhea knew who her sons would be when she first held them. I wondered if it would have mattered—if she would have still hidden Zeus from his father. If he would’ve still been her golden child, her Sonny Boy.