Split Entry

Amazing how much an elbow can bleed. Blood all around: on my clothes, on the varnished wood stairs, the avocado-gold-and-white diagonal stripes of the linoleum floor, the banister, the pale-yellow wallpaper—even splattered on my father’s pants, unnoticed, while he continues flailing, lashing, screaming at me, blinded by his tsunami of anger. In the living room above us, my mother is wailing, my sister, as usual, hiding and watching.

All of the houses on our street were painted different colors, but inside they had the same design, quite trendy in the 1960s: the front door, with its three staggered diamond windows, opened onto a small landing, with a few steps on the left going up and some on the right going down. The upward staircase was open to the living room on the left side, and there was a metal banister, painted a gold-flecked off-white, attached to the wall on the right.

I stumbled and fell down those stairs on that Sunday afternoon, after my father pushed back his chair, stood up from the table, took off his old brown belt with the brass buckle, and chased me out of the kitchen—shouting, already whipping me with the belt when he got close enough, not waiting until he cornered me. As I fell, I cut my elbow on the sharp, ragged end of the banister—my right elbow, where the scar is, pale and shiny now, right here, near the outer edge of the crease.

The living room was still pretty empty then, with only a gold sofa, covered in plastic, that we didn’t sit on. My parents had scrimped and saved, nickel by nickel, for the house—for every first-gen American’s dream back then: out of the three-story walk-up in the city, into a home in the suburbs that you would spend the rest of your life buying from the bank, more than half of each paycheck, one month at a time. Not much left for furniture.

We didn’t know yet that it would be a very long time before anything else was added to that living room. We didn’t know yet that my mother had been misleading my father about money for years, that the mortgage was overdue and the bank account overdrawn, that my father would have to borrow from Uncle Harold and take on a second job to pay him back. It would take several years—piecework on the night shift at a machine shop, home for dinner, then leave again—to make sure they wouldn’t lose the house.

I don’t remember who cleaned up the blood, but I do remember finding all kinds of reasons to stay away from that house: babysitting, other part-time jobs, after-school clubs, new boyfriend with a car, overnights at a friend’s house. About five years later, I would be the first one to cram everything I could into a backpack, walk down those stairs, across the landing, and out through that door. I split, before I even finished high school.