I know there is something wrong with me because my parents said so ever since I can remember. When I took the heavy comforter to be with me because the temperature in our house in New Jersey in the winter dropped to thirty-two degrees at night, according to the little thermometer my mother hung in the kitchen, I was obviously delusional to think that I deserved to be warm while the rest of the house was cold.
“What’s wrong with you?” my mother would shriek as she ripped the heavy, warm cover off me, wrapping it around her shoulders with fingers trembling in the chilly air. “Do you think you’re the only person in this house?”
I was not allowed to ask why it was cold. Why the little heater in the living room only sent up a thin shaft of heat that reached the ninth stair on the staircase, creating the only warm spot in the house. I could just barely see the television from that warm spot. I spent most of the winters of my childhood perched on the ninth step, watching television, which was another thing wrong with me—the habit of watching television.
But it was too dark on the staircase to read and too cold in the kitchen or the upstairs bedrooms to do anything from November through the end of April.
So I grew up accepting the fact that there was something wrong with me. There was something wrong with me when I was hungry. The cold temperatures in the kitchen kept my father’s bananas fresh long after other snacks had been used up between paydays. Sometimes I was so cold and so hungry at night that I wrapped a blanket or, if I was lucky enough, the huge comforter, around my shoulders and snuck down into the kitchen.
I’d stand on my tiptoes and reach for one of my father’s bananas—sacred bananas since he brought home the money and he was the king of our castle and as such, his special items were holy and not to be touched by the rest of us commoners. I’d break a plump yellow fruit from the bunch and slide down to the cracked linoleum floor, peel the skin, and wolf the banana, cramming my mouth so full with the sweetness that I couldn’t chew with my mouth closed.
I liked the “nyah, nyah, nyah” sound that the banana made in my mouth as I chewed it. I liked the big clicky gulp as the mashed fruit slid down my throat. I liked the way my stomach relaxed after it was filled with banana. Sometimes I was so hungry that I ate so many bananas that I got a stomachache.
Since I was only about five years old, I couldn’t hide my stomachaches from my mother. Though I so wished I could. I willed my body to relax, willed my stomach not to hurt. I even walked crouched down so it wouldn’t hurt so much.
“What’s wrong with you?” my mother would snap when she saw what I was doing.
Then she’d find the banana skins in the kitchen garbage and slap my face and tell me that if I thought I was in pain at the present moment, just wait until my father came home and he’d make my bottom hurt more than my stomach did.
Once, my stomachache wouldn’t go away. It was so painful that I had to walk crouched over, both hands clasped against my belly, all the time. It was bad enough that my mother even kept me home from kindergarten. I knew that was a big deal because the whole year before I went to school she gloated about how she would have time to herself once I was out of the way, in school.
I remember watching Bozo the Clown, which had been my favorite show before I started school. I tried to dance with Bozo as he entered the stage, but every time I tried to straighten up my stomach hurt so bad that I crouched down again.
