The first small town that we lived in was called, Small Minded (names and places in this article have been changed). It was a place that had zero tolerance for children who were gay, overweight, slow, abused or poor. All of which my brothers, sisters and myself were. My older brother, James, was a special education student. He was what was called a, “slow learner”. He was singled out on a daily basis, by the older “more intelligent” kids. They christened him, Retard, Dumby, or simply, Hey Stupid. What they never noticed was how many medals he won for the school. He was a champion swimmer, winning or placing in every swimming competition that he participated in. They never saw, either, how he struggled with his reading and writing in order to keep up with them. They never saw the pride in his face when he finished reading an entire book or writing a letter. But, because the book was only Dick and Jane or some other lower level book and his spelling almost indecipherable, they saw it as an opportunity to diminish his accomplishments by insulting or ridiculing him. Embarrassed, James quickly gave up on reading or even trying to improve his spelling. My second oldest brother, Lance, was a homosexual. He didn’t realize it, though, until he was in junior high. He always knew that he was different, but he couldn’t understand why. He tried going out with girls, but something, just wasn’t right for him. When he finally realized what he was and admitted it to himself, he sought out and found like - minded individuals. At age eleven, I was ignorant of what homosexuality was or that my brother was even a one. To me, he was just Lance, my brother and I loved him. But when his peers began pelting him with rocks and calling him a faggot, queer, or jerk off. I had no idea what the names meant, but I was mad that they were picking on him and my defending him, to the other kids, caused me to eventually become an object of ridicule, as well. My less than svelte figure earned me the names of, thunder thighs, lardo and fatso. Names that, forever, changed my self image. To this day, no matter what size I am, all I see in the mirror is a fat, overweight person. Battles with anorexia, diet pills, alcohol and compulsive exercise have been fought over and over in these last forty years. Some of those battles have been defeated, others, I’m still fighting. My younger sister, Kim, at age ten, became a victim of cruelty, as well. Simply because she was our sister, she was teased, tormented, beat up and constantly pushed around. But, Kim was a scrapper. She used her scrawny fists with deadly accuracy. One of those bony knuckles in her opponent’s eye, would immediately cause a shiner to appear. She fought dirty, too. She bit, she scratched, she pulled hair and kicked. She pummeled kids that outweighed her or towered over her. She never backed down or walked away from a fight. Unlike me, she loved a good fight. I avoided them and did everything I could to stay away from my torturers. I walked on opposite sides of the hallways, eyes riveted to floor and hugging the walls so tightly you would’ve sworn I’d become a part of them. I spent my recesses chatting up the recess monitor, knowing that his/her presence would protect me from my bullies. I even hid in the bathroom stalls until everyone else was gone and on their way to class. But, because the bathroom was generally the most likely place for a confrontation with my tormenters, I tended to avoid these, as well. Some days, it was a race to get home, before I exploded. The four of us were bonded by being branded freaks and united we learned to stand together. We had no friends, only each other. Being poor, brought us closer still. There was never enough money for the right clothes, the right shoes or even a proper haircut. Our mother shopped church bazaars, looking for donated clothing and footwear that was either given away or priced at only nickels and dimes. The dollar a bag sale was her favorite. My mother would fill bag after bag of cast off clothing. It didn’t matter to her that most of the clothing was hopelessly outdated or too big or that the shoes were too small. Her philosophy was, it covered our butts, didn’t it? The last nail in our coffin was the fact that our home was filled with abuse. My father was a pedophile. He preyed on each and every one of his children, on a daily basis. Physical violence, threats of death, mental manipulation, aggressive verbal assaults and beatings kept our mouths shut to the house of horrors we lived in. Because our mother, was a victim of our father, as well, she was unable to protect us from him. Though, none of our classmates could possibly know of this aspect of our lives, I’m sure an air of desperation and depression shrouded us, as well as hostility and a lack of trust. These things made us even more vulnerable to attacks. Our anger was quickly triggered and made us even easier targets. When my parents bought a house in the next town over, we were relieved to leave Small Minded, hoping that it would be better in a new town and that we would be able to, finally, have some friends. I was thirteen when we moved to Busybody. A town where everybody was into everybody else’s business. There were no secrets. If something was said to someone in strict confidence, you could be sure that it would be all over town, by the end of that day. Our house was a part of a low income housing project that had just gone up. All the houses looked the same. Split levels or small ranches. The only difference in the houses was their exterior paint. Ours stood out like a sore thumb. Mom had opted to paint it a bright turquoise. Even before we moved in, we had already been branded as different. We didn’t fit in and all hopes that we might, had already been brushed away by a few coats of paint. But, because we were a part of the neighborhood, our closest neighbors made the effort to include my parents in their cliques. The neighborhood ladies reached out to my mother, inviting her to their houses for coffee (which was only more fodder for her being different, because she didn’t drink coffee). The neighborhood men invited my father to help work on their cars, drink beer or play cards. But, because my father didn’t drink beer or play cards he found himself slowly excluded from these rituals. My mother was also being slowly excluded from the neighborhood coffee clutches. She wasn’t socially adept. She was nervous, didn’t contribute to the gossip and was uncomfortable talking about herself. Too many secrets, I suppose. We were left to our own devices, once again. Branded antisocial, strange, and difficult. Soon, enough, though, we found ourselves becoming the actual subject of these gossip mongers. It began with my brother, James. Now in his teens, he was full of hatred and anger, because of our father and his inability to keep up with his peers. He found solace and peace in a rolled joint. Marijuana helped him forget our family and brought him to a place where we didn’t exist. He could pretend to be someone else. Someone who laughed and had a normal life. The problem with this, though, was soon, James couldn’t get through the day without his pot. He lived to light up. Money, though, was an issue, for him. He couldn’t get a job, because of his lack of skills or his inability to read or write well. So, he stole. Stole money from our parents, stole stuff from stores and resold it to other people or broke into the neighbor’s houses and stole from their homes. He eventually got caught and was sent to a correctional institute for boys. But, I believe that spending time there, with other criminals, only taught him how to better his skills. Because once he was released, he continued with his old ways, but rarely got caught. It was pot that was eventually his downfall. Finding a plant growing in the woods, behind our house, James thought he’d hit the jackpot. He stole the plant and used it for his own personal stash. He knew, just like all of us knew, who the plant belonged to, but he stole it anyway. It belonged to our neighborhood druggie and dealer, Sam Twitchell. Sam soon discovered who stole his plant and began threatening my brother, by telling him he was going to kill him. Sam made several attempts to run my brother over, with his car, as he walked, and he harassed James constantly. James became increasingly paranoid and was continually looking over his shoulder. Then one night, as James walked up the street, towards home, Sam appeared in front of him. My brother, fresh from an all nighter, with his girlfriend, was so stoned on pot and acid, that he thought Sam was there to kill him. James had been slicing through the tall grass, on the side of the road, with the knife he always carried with him, and before he realized what he was doing, he’d buried his knife inside of Sam’s body. Sam died later that night and my brother was sentenced to ten years at the state prison for involuntary manslaughter. All this, Lance, Kim and I learned from the kids at school. My parents never told us what had happened. We got up the next morning and were sent off to school. Once on the bus, though, we immediately knew something was wrong. All the other kids on the bus were pointing at us and talking about us behind their hands or whispering in each other’s ears. It was during smoke break (this was before the eighteen only law of smoking and my school had a smoking area for kids who smoked) that we were confronted with what my brother had done. “Did your brother kill Sam Twitchell last night?” one of the kids asked. We were blown away and because we didn’t know any better, denied the rumor. But, they wouldn’t let it go and hammered away at us, with it. Finally, we took off from school by cutting through the woods and walked the five miles towards home. My mother confirmed the gossip and informed us that James was in jail, but then cussed out the kids who didn’t know how to keep their mouths shut. Lance was the next to find his way into the rumor mill. His homosexuality, though not quite confirmed, but an object of suspicion, was to my neighbors an endless source of interest. He was often seen in the company of men, whose sexual preferences were in doubt. When Lance was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of sexual misconduct in a public place with another man, well that pretty much told us where his preferences lie. Lance’s promiscuity and recklessness continued until he died of AIDS at age twenty - five, while living in Florida. Because AIDS was a relatively unknown disease, in the eighties, it was considered to be even more dangerous and deadly to people ignorant of how it’s transmitted. My parents never talked about Lance’s death. They kept it to themselves, a dirty little secret, ashamed and embarrassed at what their son’s lifestyle had been and how he had contracted the disease. The last thing they needed, my parents said, was to let people have one more thing to gossip about. It was our business and nobody else’s. My own spotlight came when after years of being raped and beat by my father, I finally confessed to a social worker, from the Department of Human Services, the stuff that was going on in our house. My anger festered and the circle of violence, that had been created in my home, repeated itself and was played out at school. Once in high school, I found myself keeping company with the tough girls in school. I find it ironic, now, that the chubby little girl in elementary school, who would do anything to avoid a fight, actually went looking for them now. We were the toughies, enforcing our rage on our enemies. The well off girls. The girls with the right clothes, the right hair, the right boyfriends, the normal life. The life we all secretly wished we had. When detention and expulsion failed to work on us, outside forces were brought into the school. The Department of Human Services had been contacted by “concerned” school personnel because my friends and I displayed typical traits associated with abusive homes. We were unaware of this and at first took on the attitude of being too tough to spill our guts to this loser from the outside. But, being the leader of this group, I was singled out with two other girls and systematically worn down with sympathy and compassion until I broke down and confessed to him what was going on. To me, the DHS counselor he was a lifesaver. Offering me the rope to haul myself out of the cesspool that I lived in. But, his steps were drastic and changed us all, forever. My father had begun going after my youngest sister, Cindy and the DHS worker needed her testimony in court, as well as my own to get my father out of the house and behind bars. When my father was led away in handcuffs by a policeman, necks were literally hanging out of windows and people were standing in their driveways, wondering what was going on. But, gossip somehow, somewhere and by someone always leaks out. It was all over town in less than a day, why my father had been arrested. Going to the grocery store was a horror show. People pointed and stared, whispered and gossiped even more. My mother rarely spoke to anyone and we were ashamed. It was as if, somehow, we were the ones to blame for what my father had done to us. We were further ostracized. But, this is the way of small towns. Because they didn’t know how to react to our situation, they chose to disassociate themselves with the persons who shook up your comfort zones. My father was sentenced to five years in prison. When my father was released he tried to worm his way back into my mother’s heart, but she had become stronger while he was in prison and had no use for him. She divorced him, while he was away and sold the house as well. She bought a small two bedroom trailer, with the money left over from the sale and set herself up in a quiet trailer park, on the outskirts of town. Getting out of that neighborhood lifted all of her past burdens, off her shoulders and Mom was truly happy for the first time in over thirty years. Kim married a man, totally wrong for her in order to escape our household. She didn’t love him, never had, but their union lasted five years and produced my nephew. Their divorce was bitter and the animosity they held for one another still exists today. Gossip never left us, even after we were all grown and living our own lives. It was as though everything we did, in Busybody, was scrutinized by everybody. When my first husband, Tim and I opened our own store, things changed, slightly, for me and my family. The store was an immediate success. We carried high quality gifts, tools, toys, and home furnishings, for extremely low prices. Suddenly, I was a good person, which in turn made my family good people. Tim and I were servicing our community. Providing them with low priced trinkets and necessities, which meant my mother must have done something right in raising me. People who had always scorned me now wanted to be my friend. It was never more evident to me then when I attended my five year high school reunion. I wasn’t going to attend, but my very best friend, Lisa, convinced me it would be a riot. And it was. Girls that had looked down on me, in school, branding me as inferior or a freak, were now asking me how I was, how great I looked and how much they loved my store. It was all so surreal. The hypocrisy of it all struck me as hysterical. Lisa and I found the bar and proceeded to drink ourselves silly, having our turn at whispering and gossiping about them. Our business soared. We operated it for ten years, my daughter was born and to the townspeople we seemed to be a solid family, as well as community minded neighbors. It was all such a lie. I was a living hypocrite. I was so full of my own accomplishments and beauty. By ingesting several varieties of diet pills daily, eating only yogurt and dry toast with a chaser of rum and coke, and exercising obsessively, I had worked my fat self down to a hundred and twenty five pounds. Soon, I found myself sucked into all my neighbors’ fantasy world. A world in which Tim and I were a happily married couple. Myself, a devoted mother, as well as, a supportive business partner. It was all a big joke. Tim and I rarely talked and when we did, it was all about him. What he wanted, where he wanted to go, what he wanted to do. All decisions concerning the business and the household had to be O.K.’d through him, because according to him, my decisions or choices were either wrong or stupid. He required little input from me. I let him do this, naively believing that because he was ten years older than me and the man of the household, that he had to be right. This, I was taught by my parents and for ten years I let this go on. I had little control over any part of my life, except my body and this I obsessively controlled. Whittling it down drastically, by taking unhealthy risks in order to prove to myself that I didn’t have to have his permission for everything. Because I had grown up in a manipulative and mentally abusive environment, Tim’s behavior was familiar to me and I never saw it as unusual. But, when I eventually did see it, with the help of Lisa’s observations, my eyes finally opened and I made the decision to end our marriage. Though, Tim wanted to continue with our marriage, begging me to go to marriage counseling with him, I refused. I knew that we were way past marriage counseling. I was no longer in love with Tim. I couldn’t imagine living the rest of my life with him. I had to move on. I took my daughter, Sally and we moved into a small apartment across town. The townspeople had a field day with this one. I talked to no one. When I was rudely asked, by so-called friends, “What happened? We thought you two were so happy. You were so perfect together.” My response to their rudeness was, “Not so perfect and not so happy.” Perfection takes too much time and energy. These days mediocre is what I strive for. My so-called friends dropped me with a crash and opened their arms wide to my ex. He liked to talk and tell them of his misery. They were suddenly his best friends. I was the outcast, the wicked woman and he was the victim. After all, it was me who had wanted out of the marriage. Me, who had destroyed his perfect world, as well as their own visions, of the way things are supposed to be. Again, my name was crossed off the acceptable list. Oh well, life goes on. I’ve remarried, my daughter is almost eighteen, my son turned five over the summer and I inherited another daughter when I remarried. My first book has just been published, my husband loves me unconditionally and we all live in another small town, called, A Happy Place. By Debra Conklin©