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| Vegetarianism |
| 04.10.04 (5:36 am) [edit] |
David was seven when Chad first hit him. He crumbled to the grass holding his stomach and didn’t make a sound. He just looked at Chad’s feet and waited for him to finish. Afterwards, I ran to his side. “Are you alright,” I asked. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he replied.
I told Mom what had happened later that night. She was very upset. “Don’t ever hit my son again,” she said to Chad. “Don’t ever tell me what to do again,” he replied.
He spanked David the next day. David’s legs jerked and his toes curled, but he didn’t make a sound. Afterwards, he tenderly walked to his room. I walked with him. “Are you alright,” I asked. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he replied. And he shut the door.
For a long time, I stood outside that door listening to him cry. I was just six years old then, but I knew I couldn’t watch him hurt. It hurt me too much.
The next day, I slipped on the flowerbed in front of the house. Chad smacked me. Later, I didn’t sit up straight in my chair at the dinner table. He whacked me. And that was the beginning.
------------------------- -----------------
…I stopped eating meat towards the end of third grade. I might have done it to save the chickens or cows, or the rain forests, or the starving people in Africa… but I didn’t care about things like that back then. I was only nine and the clock to save the world wasn’t yet ticking for me. I had other things on my mind… like Mary.
Yes, I became a vegetarian because, well, Mary was a vegetarian.
Dad didn’t seem to mind. “It’s good to believe in something… anything,” he said. Mom wasn’t so happy though. “Big Daddy won’t go for it,” she said. (Chad had recently instructed the family to call him Big Daddy. We thought it was a bad joke at first, but he didn’t.)
“It’s for the environment,” I told her. “Cow farts are melting the ice caps.”
She laughed. “I can appreciate that but….” I frowned. “Okay,” she said. “I won’t pack bologna sandwiches in your lunch anymore. But you have to promise not to tell him.”
We kept the secret for five weeks. It wasn’t difficult because spent most of the time with his anorexic and bulimic clients anyway—“the tinniest of the tiny,” he’d boast. When he did arrive home, always long past dinner, he’d want quality time away from David and I. “Scram,” he’d say. So we’d go to our rooms, hold our bladders through the night, and make a beeline to the bathroom after he had left for work the next morning. We saw just as little of him during the weekends. He spent most of his free time in the garden with his “real kids” and he refused to eat with us because we were “slobs” and our eating habits made him lose his appetite. With his schedule, I imagined I could be a vegetarian forever. Then my grandparents decided to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary at a steakhouse.
It was a festive occasion. Three generations of Lewis’ gathered to honor an increasingly obsolete and thoroughly remarkable achievement: fifty years with the same…fucking… person. But I wasn’t thinking about prolific marriages or even sex between old people. I had more important things on my mind.
Chad had ordered a steak for me. He sneered when I tried to refuse it. “I won’t have little anorexic boys running around my house,” he said. I looked at Mom. She shrugged her shoulders and looked towards the ground. She looked helpless. And I felt hopeless. But I smiled and tried to pretend. I talked to my cousin Rachel who sat next to me. She had ordered pasta.
The food eventually came. I ate the potatoes and the vegetables. He watched. “Your cow isn’t getting any deader,” he said. I didn’t reply. Eventually the waitress returned and took the plates away. As the family fretted over dessert choices, he stood up and asked me to take a walk with him.
Once out of the dining room, he dragged me by the shirt collar to the coatroom When inside, he shoved the coats aside, pushed me into the wall and whispered expletives into my ear. But I didn’t listen. I was thinking about my family. They knew what he was doing yet they hadn’t tried to stop it. Nobody cared, I realized.
I tell myself now that that wasn’t the case. They did care. But they knew also that’d I’d be okay. “Greg’s too strong,” they probably said to themselves. “No one can break him. Not even Chad.”
He was still whispering in my ear. “Are you listening to me?” he asked.
“I’m a vegetarian,” I said.
“No you’re not,” he replied.
A skinny man entered the coatroom. “Yes I am,” I said.
Chad pointed at the skinny man. “Leave,” he said. The man left.
Then he punched me in the stomach. I sunk to the ground. He pulled me up. “Someone’s going to kill you one of these days,” he said. I laughed because I was sure it’d be him. He hit me again. I didn’t care. He pulled me up again. I was ready. But he opened the door and pushed me outside. “I didn’t touch you,” he said as we walked back to the table. “So don’t go crying to your mother.”
“I’m still a vegetarian,” I replied.
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