At 4:15 in the afternoon on a random Friday in July I was sitting on the bed in a hotel room, 575 miles from home, in Fort Wayne, Indiana and I was two seconds from drifting off for an unplanned afternoon nap. I had spent the day shopping and fellowshipping in Grabill, Indiana, Amish country, with two friends. I was tired, happy to be on vacation, and full of DeBrand chocolate truffles. Though I had intended to read, my eyelids were not cooperating. Suddenly, my text tone – a loud train whistle – scared the beJesus out of me. Since my husband was a block away at the convention center perusing antique fishing tackle and catching up with his friends in the National Fishing Lure Collectors Club, I got up to check the text, hoping it was about our dinner plans.
Instead I read, “Hey girl … did something happen to your daddy or Margaret today?” My hairdresser and family friend, Donna, was asking. My heart skipped a beat and I dialed her instantly to ask what she was talking about. My dad is eighty-five years old, and in good health for his age, but that text had me flashing back to emergency room visits and imagining all sorts of things; none good to think of when you’re 575 miles away from home. As soon as I got her on the phone she told me that a neighbor of Dad’s from Long Creek who had come in to get her hair done had told her she’d seen an ambulance at my dad’s house that morning and that it had been there for fifteen or twenty minutes. She wanted to know if Donna, whose shop is ten miles away in Charlotte, knew what had happened. She didn’t, so she texted me, not knowing I was out of state on vacation.
I phoned my dad right away and found out that there had, in fact, been an ambulance at his house that morning, but it had been there for an 89-year-old friend who was there for their regularly scheduled Friday morning Progressive Rummy tournament. She had lost consciousness and had been revived by paramedics after some time. Dad never asked me how I knew about the ambulance being there, even though I was four states away. I told him about the neighbor inquiring at the hair salon leading to this phone call. He wasn’t the least bit surprised.
That text and the subsequent call to my dad, then text back to my hairdresser to fill her in, got me thinking about the Long Creek hotline that has existed for many decades. The good and, even better, not-so-good news has been burning up the phone lines since Alexander Graham Bell invented them; fueled by concern, curiosity, gossip, and ill intent.
I thought about the time back before cell phones when I got home from work, exhausted after a busy day, and saw the red light blinking on my answering machine in our home office. I hit “play” and heard a neighbor of Dad’s (who also happened to be an employee at our print shop) say, “The Cantrells just called and said your Dad was just taken to the Emergency Room in an ambulance. He fell off a ladder and looked pretty badly injured.” I tried calling my mom, but, of course, no one was home. I called the neighbor who left the cryptic message and she told me that the ambulance was headed for Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte. I raced there, in rush hour traffic, not knowing if my dad had a head injury or a bruised bottom, and found my mom and dad in the ER. His hip was fractured at the base of the ball joint and he would be headed for surgery and weeks of convalescence. I was relieved that he wasn’t hurt even worse, since I had imagined every possible scenario after that relayed message on the machine from the neighbor. Neither parent asked how I knew he was there. They just assumed the neighborhood hotline was at work again.
I thought even further back, remembering the truly evil side of the neighborhood grapevine. When I was about ten or eleven years old, I was sitting on a grassy hill in the side yard of Buddy Pender’s house, my feet dangling down towards the ditch below, Buddy’s beautiful azalea garden at my back. Craig Sides, a neighbor and friend a year or so older than me, sat five feet away to my left. We were talking about problems he was having with his girlfriend at the time. I glanced up to see my mother coming down Mercia Avenue at a good clip. She looked like someone speed walking for their health, but I knew better. The hair on my arms stood up as I imagined what could have happened for her to be in such a state. When she got about a dozen feet from me, through gritted teeth, she said, “You get home right now!” My mind was racing as I hopped up and fell into step beside her. She did not say a word as we walked, giving me time to scour my memory for anything I could have done to get me into so much trouble. I was drawing a complete blank. This mama’s girl rarely broke the rules. Mom’s disappointment in me was always worse than any spanking I ever got, so I strove to never do anything of which I knew she wouldn’t approve. As soon as we were behind closed doors, I asked, “What did I do?”, truly bewildered. Mama faced me, her face red from anger, or the swift walk, or both. “Mrs. W (name redacted to protect the guilty) called and said that she saw you in the woods with that Sides boy!” I was absolutely flabbergasted. Craig and I were sitting maybe ten feet from the roadside, exactly where we had been for probably half an hour, when I had spied my mom coming towards us. Before that, we had been walking around the block, roughly in the middle of the sparsely traveled neighborhood road. I told my mother that what the nosy neighbor had said was a complete lie. I explained that we had never been further from the road than she saw me and, besides, we had been discussing Craig’s troubles with his girlfriend … which wasn’t and had never been me. We were just two friends, talking to each other. My mother’s anger was sparked by embarrassment when she thought the neighbor lady had seen me doing something untoward. She was worried about what she would think of me, what she would say about me. I was hurt that Mama would ever believe such ill intended gossip about me and I was furious at that adult woman who had flat out lied about what she saw. I was a good girl, through and through. It infuriated me to think she would spread gossip that said any different, especially to my mother, who was my hero. I never really knew if my mother believed what I said, but I did notice a shift in her attitude about that neighbor.
I never forgot the incident and I never forgave it. Time and again I overheard this same neighbor on the phone with her next door neighbor whose daughter was a close friend of mine. She was gossiping, disparaging others as she had me, to my friend’s mother. I wondered, as I listened, how far she had spread the false rumor about me and Craig. That was still on my mind when, at twelve years old, my friend’s brother molested me. I had been staying at the neighbor’s house after school on weekdays for a short time. This day, the neighbor was at a doctor’s appointment when we got home from school. My friend, her sixteen year old brother, and her younger sister and I were in the living room watching television. I got up to go to the bathroom. When I returned, my friend’s brother grabbed me around the waist, pulled me backwards onto his lap, then clamped both his hands on my crotch. As I struggled to get up, he gripped tighter, hurting me. I yelled for him to let me go! When he wouldn’t I sunk the nails of both of my hands into the flesh on the back of his hands and took out ten divots of bloody skin and tissue. He released his grip and cussed at me, calling me a bitch. I struggled to climb off his lap and ran out of the house and through the woods to my house. Breathless, I ran into the utility room and grabbed the hidden house key we always kept there. It took several attempts to get the key into the lock because my hands were shaking so badly. Once I was inside, I slammed and locked the door, then pulled out the chair at the desk my dad sat at to pay bills and slid into the cubby hole underneath it, curled into a tight ball, my knees on my heaving chest, my heart hammering in my ears. Fifteen or twenty minutes later I looked down at my trembling hands and saw his blood under my fingernails. Sickened, I crawled out of my hiding place and ran to the kitchen sink. I scrubbed my hands under scalding water with dish soap, dried them on the dish towel, and went into my room and shut and locked the door. Falling onto my bed, I sobbed uncontrollably until there were no tears left inside me.
I lay on my bed in the fetal position, thinking about what had happened and wishing my mom was at home. My brother was seventeen and was working after school at It’s The Levis Place. (A job I loved because he got a family discount on those popular Levis that were so stiff you could stand them in a corner until they were washed a dozen times.) My dad was on a service call, fixing a printing press in Uptown Charlotte, after a day of teaching Graphics at North Mecklenburg High School. My mom was at work at BASF and wouldn’t be home until about six o’clock. As I lay there, I began to wonder if Mrs. W had seen me fleeing from the neighbor’s house like a bat out of Hell. If she had, I wondered what story she was weaving over there in her house at that very moment. I thought, If I tell my parents what happened and they go over and confront the neighbor boy, or worse, call the police, it will take about fifteen seconds for Mrs. W to tap the first domino and, within the hour, everyone in the neighborhood will know what happened … or, at least, will know Mrs. W’s version of what happened. I already knew what she apparently thought of me, so I feared what ugly rumor she would concoct if she knew what had just happened to me.
By the time my mom and dad got home, I was resolute in the certainty that no one could ever know about what had happened to me. (Of course, my friend and her sister knew since they were in the room, but I was fairly certain that they would not tell on their brother.) I told my mom I didn’t feel well and didn’t want supper, and stayed in my room, in my bed, under the covers. Whether it was my great acting ability or her tiredness after a long day at a job she hated, she accepted my explanation and left me alone.
The next day, I got off the bus and went straight home and locked myself in the house. I wasn’t supposed to be there alone, but I was determined that, no matter what, I was not going back to the neighbor’s house for even one more afternoon. I didn’t go back to that house until about five years later when I learned that my friend’s dad had unexpectedly died, way too young, of a heart attack. Ignoring my aversion to the house and my resentment and fear of her brother, I ran through the woods and onto the screened back porch. My friend met me there and we hugged and cried for her loss. I didn’t go inside. We talked on the stoop. I couldn’t help wondering if she remembered that day; if she knew why I never came to her house and, instead, invited her to mine. Of course, I also wondered if he had ever done to her or her sister what he tried to do to me. I never asked.
I was a grown woman, in my thirties, long-married, before I ever told anyone what the neighbor boy had done to me. My husband listened, but I didn’t feel like he truly heard me or took it as seriously as I wanted.
The neighbor boy had remained a friend of my brother through all of those years, so I had been in his presence on several occasions, but I had made sure never to be alone with him. I despised him because he had made me feel afraid and ashamed and violated. I resented that my brother was his friend. When my brother, who lived hours away by then would casually ask if I knew how he was doing, I would scream in my head, “I hope he’s dead!” Finally, in my fifties, angry as a result of one of my brother’s casual inquiries after his old friend, I finally blurted, “I don’t care where he is or how he’s doing. He attacked me when I was twelve years old! YOUR FRIEND molested me!” Like my husband, my brother didn’t seem to recognize the impact this event had had on me. He heard what I said, then went off on some tangent, changing the subject. And I blamed myself. After all, I had not told anyone when it happened because I was worried about what would be broadcast throughout the neighborhood about me if I did.
It took that text from my friend Donna to spark my thoughts and memories of the Long Creek Hotline. I was touched by Donna’s concern for my dad. I was amused by the fact that the Hotline is still humming along even though old Mrs. W and quite a few of her co-conspirators are dead. I thought about the beauty of neighbors looking out for neighbors. For the first time in a long time I also thought about the ugliness of it at times. I remembered the gossip and rumors. It dredged up the memory of that innocent afternoon talk on the summer grass in front of Mrs. W’s house and her ugly insinuations about an eleven year old girl. For the first time, I realized that she was a major contributor to the fact that I have carried such a sense of resentment, of a wrong that can never be made right. A fear of her … of what she would think of me … of what she would say about me … silenced me, damaged me, as much as the neighbor boy.
“We reveal most about ourselves when we speak about others.”
― Kamand Kojouri
Robin's Eggs 