She is wearing a cream-colored turtleneck and sunglasses as large as apricots. She is speeding through a strobe of pines, past the stretched morning shadows of the sweetgum trees, past the Burger Chef. We are driving to the J. M. Field’s department store.

In the vastness of the parking lot, I see my grandmother’s station wagon.

There are hugs and “oh, no’s”, and Grandma Vivian rubs Mother’s upper arm and says, “Oh my God, oh my God. Oh, Karlene, no.”

I stare down at the glints in the tarmac.

Mother tells me to open my hands and fills them with change.

They pull free a cart, the metal wheels grinding from concrete to linoleum as the doors slide open.

“You stay here in the front and get yourself something from the machines.”

I crank in the coins, pull the capsule from the flap door, and pinch out the rubber bat. I hold it up and bounce its wings into flight as Grandma Vivian and Mother click down the aisle.

The poker and tongs clang against each other and screech against the tiles. The fireplace screen gongs against the bricks. I hear the ottoman flip and the crack of the owl ashtray on the mantle as it thuds to the carpet.

Cottoned stop’s and no’s push up through the floorboards, muffle through the closets, smash up the staircase, and seep under the door. Deeper, deeper under the blue bedspread.

In the morning he’s gone.

I go downstairs, crawl up on the counter and make a bowl of cereal and stare out to the empty carport and across the back lane. I place the bowl gently in the dishwasher and slowly slide the lock closed and slip down to the linoleum.

I tip into the shadowed living room dodging the aftermath and squint through the drapes: the wicker furniture on the porch, the blinding lawn, there are people on the sidewalk over by the library, cars are passing.

“Are you looking out the window?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You better not, and make sure those curtains are pulled tight. Get up here and brush your teeth before we go; we have to meet Vivian by 9:30.”

She shakes the small bottle and taps it into her palm, unscrews the cap. I smell the makeup and the heat of the rollers on the counter.

She leans into the mirror tilting her head to the side and arching her brow. A dot more under the left eye, a slick more at the temple.

She brushes her hair hard at the ends, then lightly, delicately at the scalp. She flinches as she slides the hair pin over the rollers tight to her head.

She pushes up her sleeves and dabs the beige bubble that had formed on the bottle.

“You’re putting makeup on your arm?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“Oh, OK.”

A palimpsest of contusions and Covergirl. I look away, raking my toes through the shag.

She unrolls her hair, shakes it out upside down, and steels herself in the mirror. She juts her jaw and makes that weird kissy face that she only does in the mirror. She lifts the front of her hair and plumes a cloud of hairspray. I hold my breath.

“Go put your shoes on and get in the car.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Mother and I would later talk about that trip to J. M. Field’s. It was the morning Grandma Vivian, my stepfather’s mother, said she would help us escape.

It was early October, and I was in the third grade. What was known and unknown to me at the time kaleidoscoped with vivid shards of clarity and willful obliviousness.

Grandma V took me to the circus. There was popcorn and cotton candy and the smell of horses. She stifled tears and patted my hand as the lights dimmed. There’s a photo, I recall, of us outside the arena on a blindingly blustery afternoon. Her set-and-dry hair is windblown and partially obscures her face. She is trying to push it away with one hand and touch my shoulder with the other. My hair is in my face, and I’m wearing brown-and-orange striped pants.

Afterwards we drove to a place that rents trucks.

“I’m going to go inside, and I’ll be just a minute. Stay here.”

“OK.”

I watched her walk up to the wooden shed in the middle of the lot and talk to a guy in a jumpsuit. She came back with some mimeographed papers and put them in the glove compartment.

“If your stepfather asks you what we did today, what will you say?”

“You took me to the circus, and then we came straight home. Are you going to move someplace, Grandma V?”

“No, honey, I’m not going anywhere. Don’t you worry. Can you hand me a cigarette from my bag?”

It was the kind with a picture of Eve on it. I opened the ashtray and pushed in the car lighter and asked if I could light it for her.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, no way, Jose. Your mother let you do that?”

“Sometimes.”

She patted my leg. “You sure are a loon, you are.” She smiled and cleared her throat. She took a long drag and cracked her window. She was shaking her head. “Whew. Mmm, mmm,” she said.

I’ve just gone to bed when Mother calls me to come back down.

“There’s a Halloween cartoon on TV! Keep your lights off in case he comes home early!”

We sit on the floor in front of the large, white console television. She is smoking and leaning against the sofa. The ice clinks in her glass. I’m having Kool-Aid.

“‘Halloween Is Grinch Night’?’ What the hell is this?”

“Honey, don’t talk like that,” she says. “I reckon he’s gonna steal Halloween too, I don’t know. TV Guide says it’s a prequel.”

“OK, cool. I don’t know what that is.”

There’s the Grinch on the mountain and his long-suffering dog, and people are running around the town scared and…

Headlights klieg across the kitchen ceiling.

“Jesus God. Hurry, go, go, go.” Mother clicks the TV off.

The gravel crushes under the wheels. I grab my glass, bolt up the stairs, and slide in bed.

The car door. The coughing, the hacking. He grinds his cigarette into the back steps. The keys.

His voice becomes a tonal hum. Rising. I’m sinking into the bed.

A rumble. A smack. Mother’s voice pierces through. She’s trying to come up the stairs. I can hear her coming up. But now I hear her back in the living room. Rumbling. Thud.

I open my door. Stop! Stop! They see me. I go back to my room. Glass breaks. Now there’s movement in the kitchen underneath. I drag my desk chair into the hallway — StopStopStop — and push it down the stairs. It crashes against the railing before hitting the landing and gouging through the plaster. StopStopStopStopStopStop!

He’s coming. I run into the bathroom and turn the lock. Mother is screaming. I’m pushing everything out from under the sink — toilet paper, toilet brush, Comet, Q-tips, bubble bath, vaporizer, towels, Listerine — and grab onto the drain under the sink. I feel the sounds, hear the light, hold on to the drain, and shrink.

Consciousness like blue-green paraffin in a lava lamp rises, plaits, morphs, and gently descends.

In the morning I wake on the bathmat.

The cough. The door. The car. The gravel. Exhale.

I creak down to the kitchen, climb up on the counter, and quietly shake the Apple Jacks into the bowl.

“Are you awake down there?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Are you eating that cereal without milk?”

“No, ma’am.” I slowly open the Fridedaire and get the milk and fill the bowl.

“That stuff rips your mouth open, honey, you have to put milk in it. I told you that.”

“Uh, huh, I know.”

Mother’s in a housecoat with a big tassel on the zipper. She sits at the kitchen table. I crawl down from the counter and swivel in the chair next to her.

She asks if I’m OK, and I tell her I’m fine. “He didn’t get me, I’m fast.” I ask if it hurts, and she starts crying. She shakes her head and cries harder, then lights a cigarette. I play with the box, turning it on its side, and take out a cigarette and hold it aloft like she does. I did this once before at the pool when the neighbors came, and she laughed, and everyone laughed, but now she’s not watching.

“Can we go to that haunted house today?”

She’s staring off into the backyard, then wipes her face on her sleeve and asks, “Huh?”

“You said you’d take me to the haunted house by my school. Remember? You said we could go if I would just shut up for five-damn minutes? Remember? Please?” I swan the cigarette back and poof the air, “I swear this kid’ll be the damn death of me yet — just give me five-damn minutes of peace, Jesus!”

Mother is wiping her face and crying and laughing. “Oh my God, honey, you ain’t right. I swear to God.”

“Please?”

“OK, but give me five-damn minutes to finish my coffee.”

“Yay! Want me to go plug your rollers in?”

“No, no, no, I’ll wear a piece so we can get the hell out of here — we can’t be gone long. Can you get me that new fall from the wig bag in the makeup closet?”

“Which one?”

“That long straight one you like — the Sharon — the platinum one.”

“The movie star one?”

“Well, it’s the dead movie star one, but yeah, it’s Halloween.”

The line snakes around the haystacks and the bushels of dried corn.

“I’ll be damn if I’m waiting in line all day,” she says. “Hang on, wait here.”

Mother walks up to the guys at the front, and she’s smiling with her head cocked to one side. She tucks her chin down and pets her wig down over her shoulders. She’s doing that thing she does when she wants some guy to take the groceries to the car or when she’s apologizing to the handyman for not having enough money because “my husband is a cheap sonofabitch.”

They’re nodding, and Mother touches the vampire’s shoulder, and she’s laughing. Whatever he’s saying must be really funny. She’s shifting her weight from hip to hip, hands in her back pockets. Now she’s twirling her hair. She takes out her cigarettes and rips the top off the box and hands it to him. Now she’s digging in her bag and gives him a pen. Dozens of people are ahead of us in line, watching.

“Is that your mother?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do y’all know that guy?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t think so.”

Mother waves for me to come forward.

The woman in the big coat makes a face, shakes her head, and mumbles something.

I run ahead. “Bye!”

“Your mother’s here. Get your things and go to the principal’s office.”

My stomach fell. Mother was talking to Mr. Burkhalter by the window. “You can take your bag with you but set your books over on the sill,” he says.

“Everything’s OK, don’t be upset,” Mother tells me. “Go wait in the car; I’ll be right there.” She tosses me the keys. “Catch!”

I let them fall, snatch them from the floor, and walk out.

I slam the car door, crank the window down, and throw my feet up on the cracked dashboard.

Again? Again.

First grade, three schools: South Carolina when I drank the chocolate milk that was on the radiator and threw up at recess. Later at the school in Lake Tahoe I got on the wrong bus and had to go back to the school, and by the time Mother came to get me, it was dinner time. The next school was in Virginia when a boy tripped me in the lunchroom and said if I told anyone he’d beat me up.

Second grade: two schools in Virginia. The first one I started a month late. It had an open classroom, which made me nervous. We had to make thumbprint paintings, but I did it wrong, and the teacher wouldn’t put mine up. The next school I started after Christmas, and they told me to take the Wacky Packages stickers off my notebook because it was “something dirty, children shouldn’t have.”

Now, it’s one month into the third grade, and I have to leave my books.

Mother is carrying a large manilla envelope in her hands and is folding it into her pocketbook. She puts on her sunglasses and hollers, “Roll up the window, it’s freezing! Don’t throw up; everything’s fine. Jesus.”

She taps on the window on her side, “Unlock the door, for God’s sake.”

“Again?”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry. Put your feet down.”

“Again?”

“I’m going to tell you something, and you have to promise you won’t say anything. Look at me, honey. This is a big secret.”

I look back at the school.

“You’re going to have to look at me. This is very serious. Listen, when your stepfather goes to work in the morning, we’re going to move back to South Carolina and stay with mom and dad for a while. Then we’ll get our own place and we’ll…”

My back jaw jolts with saliva. I throw the door open, brace myself on the swinging handle, and splatter the pavement.

I couldn’t eat dinner. Mother told him I got sick at school. I can hear her telling him how I vomited all over the parking lot. They’re just talking and eating, and now I can hear him crack the newspaper open, and Mother is in the kitchen. It’s like it’s a normal night.

I sit up and look around my room, lit only by the American flag design on the Lite-Brite. Oscar the Grouch puppet, Little House on the Prairie box set on the bookcase, the brown-and-gold Jesus Christ Superstar album.

Try not to get worried, try not to turn on to problems that upset you, oh…

It’s the last night. I hear the TV come on. Mother slips in my room with a napkin full of Grasshopper cookies and sits on my bed.

“Aren’t you at least a little excited to go to Mamie and Papa’s?” She whispers.

“No. I don’t want to go to another school.” And then I cry. “I just want to stay in my room. I don’t want anything.”

She tells me to try to sleep and to think about what I want to put in the boxes in the morning. “Grandma Vivian will help you,” she says.

“What will she do? Can’t she come, too?”

“She can come and visit us once we get settled.”

“But he hits her, too.”

“She’ll be alright, honey. She can’t come now.”

I push back deeper in the bed, and Mother goes to her room.

Don’t you know everything’s alright, yes, everything’s fine…

The streetlamp slices through the Venetian blinds and bends across the room. The TV turns off. He’s hacking as he ascends the stairs. He closes their bedroom door. It’s the last night.

Close your eyes, close your eyes and relax, think of nothing tonight…

I can hear them talking while he’s brushing his teeth. Mother won’t have to be in that room with him anymore. It’s the last night.

I get up and look out the window to the back lane and turn off my Lite-Brite and lie in bed until the slats of light blur to morning sun.

One more time: the keys, the hacking, the thud of the car door, the gravel.

Mother’s lighter grinds. Now I hear the truck. Now the station wagon.

It’s so fast. The gold velvet sofa, the console television, empty boxes filled and swept away, the mushroom cookie jar, my desk, the white swivel kitchen chairs, my record player.

“That’s it?” the guy asks.

“I guess that’s it,” Mother says.

The large metal door rolls down and latches shut.

I don’t remember hugging Grandma Vivian goodbye. I don’t remember what we said to each other. I remember slowly pulling away down the lane and looking back. She is waving with one hand, and her other hand is tightly covering her mouth.

Let the world turn without you tonight. If we try, we’ll get by, so forget all about us tonight …

This article — possibly the first chapter of the author’s memoirs — first appeared in the French/English literary magazine L’Autre Rive in June 2021.