Baggage Claim: Other Girls Take It Just Fine

by Nikki Howard

You hear this voice? This is my mind’s voice; you can’t touch my body now. It has changed once, it has hardened, don’t ask it to respond again.

  From October, by Louise Gluck

The year died with her, but my sister retells a story told to her by our departed mother.

My mother is standing in a bar. Black turtle-neck sweater tucked in, and ripped jeans pulled up to her belly button.

I know the ones because she kept them well into her late 40s. When she became too sick to wear them—as denim is only comfortable in your twenties, despite how often we try to convince ourselves otherwise—I remember folding the pair and shoving them into a bag to be placed in the outdoor metal shed just outside our trailer.

A pool shark in a yellow perm, she is leaning over the pool table, one wrist resting on the verdant baize and the other aiming the cue. Her ass is sticking out, she had a nice one. Daughters can say that about their mothers.

A man—it’s always a man isn’t it—takes her dedication to precision as an invitation. I cannot begin to tell you what he looked like, my mother only remembered his hands as he pulls up behind her and reaches his hand into the ripped hole on her thigh. A small squeeze following his intrusion.

She recoils and slams the cue against the trespasser's temple. Her biker buddies applaud her, ask, “Do you want us to handle him?” She doesn’t. She says, “I’ve got it.” She feels she has done enough justice on her own.

She kept those jeans well into her late 40s. Would I do the same?

The year is lost to memory, but I recall my mother chasing a friend of my sister’s out of the house with a metal ball bat. She is yelling obscenities I am too young to define, but the threatening tone is universally understood. It is a music you dance to without knowing the lyrics. This will be one of many friends she will chase away. My mother is criticized for her tendency towards violence. They say she is “too quick to jump.” She continues this trend of swinging the ball bat at anyone she feels threatens the security of our home and the prosperity of her children. The men make comments like, “don’t fuck with her” and “she’s a mean one” and “that’s a woman you listen to.” When my father brings home a new girlfriend, typically one with an opioid addiction, she chases the girls away just the same. This is a good time to let you know that she is actually my grandmother. However, she serves as the Howard matriarch and is referred to as Mom by anyone and everyone visiting.

In my undeveloped and inexperienced mind, I associate mothers as the rulers of a family. They are the ones in charge. They are the ones keeping everyone alive. They are the ones with all of the power. Her submissive son, my subservient father, proves this whenever he sighs at her demands, but follows blindly regardless of his own desires.

I have never seen him fight for those she drives away.

The year is 2013. My mother is bedridden. She is dying of kidney failure. Sick as a dog, but she does not beg to be put down. She hopes to one day ride bikes with me and maybe become a preacher if God is willing to save her. He isn't.

She can no longer chase away those who threaten our family. She can no longer swing the metal ball bat. She is no longer feared.

The men she previously scared away fill the home. The men she previously scared away are braver now, bolder. They call her a bitch within hearing distance of her at-home hospital bed. They know she cannot fight back. Not even with words. I see her cry about it.

My father starts dating another addict who cannot be chased away. My father falls in love with her heroin addiction more so than her body. I cannot stand to look at her. I cannot stand to see her remain in this home when she deserves to be chased away. I cannot stand to see my mother cry about it.

My mother finds solace in shopping. Once, she spends her entire paycheck at the thrift store instead of helping my father with his bills. He has spent his income on heroin. She knows this and while she cannot fight, she can deny. A boycott of sorts.

Angry at her revolution, my father throws my mother’s empty debit card in her direction. It slaps against her cheek. He says he meant to throw it on the table, but I do not care about his intentions. I stand and tell him to go to Hell. I love my father, but my mother is someone you are willing to die for.

The year is 2014. The woman of my father’s affection steals my mother’s pain pills, and my mother dies hollering out for God to take away her pain. While screaming the hospice nurse calls 911 and my mother is whisked away to the hospital.

Technically, my mother dies in the hospital, but the screaming has tired her considerably. Her vocal cords run too dry for words, and her body is too limp to consider her living.

When we come home from the hospital following my mother’s death, the woman is strung out on the couch. High off the pills she stole.

I do not grieve. My mother is better off. She is as free as she deserves.

If I grieve, it is only for the security I have lost. The savior returned to God. The fists I will never clench again. The legs that no longer wish to stand.

The woman high on the couch wakes up and says, “I’m glad she waited to die until after my birthday. That was so nice of her.”

The year is 2016. I have just moved in with my high school sweetheart, a boy I started dating at just 13 years old. It is my first apartment. My first attempt at home. My first everything.

He is a punishment I never deserved. I am freshly 18, and I still believe women are in charge, but I do not wish to repeat my mother’s violence. I aim to rule with a gentler hand, one of compassion and understanding. The high school sweetheart does not deserve this compassion. He is angry, always revving the gas for too long. There were red flags, but I saw them only as opportunities for improvement.

I do not want to chase others away with the same ball bat. I want to lead them, raise them up through open conversation. I want to break cycles. I want to remind them of their potential. Work together, not apart.

But he hates the word no. Matriarchs do not exist here. My culture is shocked. When he sodomizes me until I bleed, I think, “Why can’t I stand anymore.”

The year is still 2016. All I can think about is how there is no one alive willing to die for me anymore.

I am not willing to die for anyone either.

I do not want to be home. I decide to spend Christmas with my uncle and his wife who are visiting my grandparents in Tennessee during the winter holidays. I am initially excited by the prospect of leaving Ohio, but there is residual guilt. I will not be spending the holidays with my immediate family comprised of my father and siblings. I fear this decision hurts my father most as his sister died just the year before.

I convey my concerns to my uncle, but he is resilient and carries an I-know-best demeanor. He snaps in that tone he often uses, a tone others will recognize even without a string of clarifying adjectives, and he convinces me to join him and his wife on their adventure through long sighs and frustrated head shakes. Truthfully, and in hindsight, I am not a necessity for their holiday. While they celebrate, I wander around the house in discomfort and bury a longing for the snowy Midwest I left behind.

Perhaps, my uncle just likes having the ability to pull a yes out of me. Perhaps, he likes the idea of me centering my life around his desires—to be a driving force in my decision making. Perhaps, he wants to show off everything the holidays can be when not planned by those below the poverty line, or rather the immediate family I left behind.

What he never considers is I have never felt uncomfortable in poverty the way I feel uncomfortable sitting under a chandelier eating Christmas dinner with an extended family who decided to only recently invest in me after I start meeting their standards of graduating high school and attending university. In poverty, I never had to prove myself to deserve warmth. It was without charge.

Of course, they will not say such things so plainly, but the snide remarks about my mother’s demeanor and my father’s drug use, the surprise hidden in the lilt of their voice whenever I reveal an accomplishment, and the constant prying into my personal life through a condescension I will never be able to properly articulate says everything for them. And maybe I do take things too personally, but maybe they mean them in a personal way. Even if their bias is pouring out subconsciously, I cannot ignore the apparent judgement.

I think, Maybe I’ve always deserved this.

The year is 2017. I am sitting in a laundromat with two baskets worth of dirty clothes shaking in multiple washers. I am here after my high school sweetheart tells me he wants to teach me the value of responsibility. I am here after dragging two baskets worth of dirty clothes one mile to the laundromat. I am four feet eleven. I am 83 pounds. My feet ache. My muscles, too. I am here while he is at home playing Fallout 4, his car sitting outside the apartment we continue to share.

At the laundromat, a small flatscreen TV is positioned high in the corner of the room. I am sitting in the middle seat of three chairs leaning against the concrete wall on the right side of the room. I am the only one here. I am thankful.

I squeeze my legs shut and I am thankful for closed doors. I sit on both hands, one under each thigh, and I am thankful for the weight. I see women marching on a screen, and I am thankful for the reminder.

I want to be with them. Tell them, me too. Scream it. I don’t, but I do unbutton my legs. I take up a little more space. My elbows now rest on my thighs, leaning forward to get a closer look. I unravel at their brilliance. I think of my mother.

And for the first time, I think about leaving.

The year is still 2017. My high school sweetheart proposes in June, but I leave him later the same month. I decide I will not chase him away, but I will not stay either. I start to like breathing again, but others, including those in my extended family, do not agree with my liberation.

Before I leave, I post videos of him berating me on my Facebook. I want to know I am not crazy. I want to know it is not all in my head. My phone has limited storage space and will only allow me to record in thirty second increments. My grandmother tells me I must have provoked him off camera. She implies I am a calculated manipulator. Someone who ruins the lives of others with intention. Someone who is always in control of the narrative.

All I can hear is provoked,

like he is a wild animal surviving on instinct. Like he is something without self-awareness. Like he is something without consciousness. Like he is something for women to tame.

Is that why it’s called domestic violence? Because it is just the result of training gone wrong?

I receive comments of support from women. I receive DM’s excited about my new availability from men. In between the adoration I am told the truth lies in the middle.

I am told he is probably stressed from my lack of financial stability.

I am told he is overworked.

I am told it is my responsibility to keep him in line.

I am told other girls take it just fine.

And I believe it. My sister calls him a bastard, my brother wants to kill him, my father tells me to never let a man treat me this way again, my mother is too dead to tell me anything, yet I know she would not stand for this. But I cannot hear them over the buzzing coming from the chandelier.

My blood is just evidence of personal failure. Nothing more than a red ‘F’ on a school paper.

I can’t believe the year is still 2017. Too much happens too fast. Following the breakup, I move in with my uncle. My sister has no room in her trailer and my father is homeless. The night I leave my high school sweetheart, I cry until morning in my uncle’s guest bedroom. Partly out of relief, partly for losing my home, partly because the anal fissures are itchy from healing and I can no longer brush away the memories. My uncle can hear me sobbing and assumes this means I miss my relationship. Assumes this means things must not have been that bad. I know because he has the audacity to say this out loud. I do not have the audacity to tell him he is wrong.

I no longer understand the power of the word no. It has faded from my vocabulary. I only know consequence, and I am tired of paying.

I don’t know why the year is still 2017. I am visiting with my grandparents again in the last week of June. I am once again with that aunt and uncle. On the drive home from the visit, I am sitting in the back with my uncle seated in front of me, his hands fumbling with his phone in the passenger seat. My aunt drives along the highway stationed between two steep cliffs as she bridges the gap between Kentucky and Ohio. Her eyes are so transfixed on the act of driving that she never notices the husband next to her texting a woman named Kendra on Kik, an instant messaging mobile app most familiar to teenage girls who often use the app to chat with men twice their age. My uncle is not using the app for such purposes, but the texts are certainly risqué. When the woman asks when they can meet again, my uncle lays the phone flat on his stomach and asks my oblivious aunt, “When are you going on that work trip? I want to plan out my month.” And she complies by giving an approximation and promising to give an exact date when they arrive home. All the while, my aunt’s eyes remain on the road ahead despite my unspoken desire for her to turn her head even for a moment. My desires fall flat and in an act of paying attention, she neglects to pay attention.

To make matters worse, the only way I am able to view this conversation is because my uncle bought me my first pair of glasses just six months earlier while visiting my grandparents over the winter holidays. It is a cosmic irony, a treacherous domino effect, and I feel mortified by the outcome of his generosity. I have seen something that was never meant for me because he was charitable enough to provide me with the right tools to do it. The rest of the car ride, I divert my attention to the window. There are no outcomes in the steep cliffs.

When we arrive at their home, I march to the guest room and swallow the experience. The woman on Kik is expecting to meet with him towards the end of the month. I wonder how this will work with me under their roof, if I will then see something else I’d rather not.

They are considerate and accommodating to my circumstance, providing me a house of comfort in the wake of leaving my fiancé. They buy me several boxes of Ensure as I am reluctant to eat full meals. They take me to restaurants I have never considered affordable possibilities. They buy me presentable clothing. However, as the end-of-month deadline approaches, I sense a shift. Conveniently, within this same month, the narrative surrounding my residency in his home is now one detailing my lack of real-world experience and the desire for my uncle to teach me responsibility. And I have to give credit where credit is due: It’s a damn good story.

He proceeds to get me an unpaid job doing back-of-the-house data entry for a local mental health and addiction resources organization he works for. Also conveniently, my start date is the same day as his proposed hook-up. After hearing about my new unpaid eight-hour position, the extended family I spent Christmas with showers my uncle with praise, exclaiming excitedly “how good this will be for me” and how grateful they are he is “putting me to work.” And even in my unmistakable rage at these deceptive and undeserving comments alluding to his great acts of charity, I don’t say anything.

Not for my aunt, and certainly not for myself.

What would my mother think?

Is the year really still 2017? I am sitting with my aunt and uncle in Bicentennial Park. The park is home to the largest firework event in Ohio—Red, White & BOOM—with its 400,000 visitors and absurd number of vendors for food and patriotic memorabilia ranging from light-up LED pacifiers to glow sticks snapped together into the shape of a necklace. Despite my ongoing separation from the festival, the sheer loudness of it all is not something easily forgotten. Time does not dilute the screams of a patriot. In fact, Americans have commemorated multiple holidays to celebrate these blaring affections. Or, maybe, we just wanted another day we could eat a hot dog without any residual shame. Regardless of our conflicting intentions, we love our country with the same sounds—a blast and a BOOM loud enough to send a veteran running.

A flicker of red shimmers across the night sky, its reflection vibrating on the surface of the Scioto River as my aunt, her brown hair pinned back using pink sunglasses, leans close to me attempting what sounds like a language. Her voice is lost in the crafted explosions. I respond with a nodding smile, pretending to hear her through the celebration, and she returns my gesture with a laugh that, try as it might, could never prevail over the eruptions above. She is unaware of my deception.

An hour before, she is staring at two children playing together, laughing, and tripping over their own feet in front of the Scioto River. Behind her sunglasses something boils, and a tear exposes itself when it trails down her cheek, falling and melting into the denim of her jeans. My uncle hears her sniffle and catches a glimpse of the tear when he jerks his head. He presses that tone of his again, “Stop. You’re being dramatic.” And I know why he says it. And I know why she cries.

I know because even earlier that day she mentions wanting children of her own and the terrible sadness she feels at such an impossibility. Even if she neglected to mention it today on the drive to the firework show, I would have connected the pieces together. Women are not enigmas. We do not cry at the sight of children playing for no good reason.

Being a mother is something she talks about often enough to know as a fact about her—not spoken every day, but enough. She jumps at every opportunity to watch nieces and nephews the same way she jolts after telling an anecdote, smiling like she’s desperate for the joke to land. I cannot remember, does he laugh at her jokes? How malleable is my memory?

My aunt cradles the children of extended family close to her and reads them stories. She offers comfort in any area they may need it. She is understanding, supportive, involved—a string of clarifying adjectives appearing next to the definition of a good mother in the dictionary and the Facebook comment sections.

She is someone who wants children. She is someone who could be a wonderful mother. But my aunt can never have children—at least, not with the man she chose. But I could tell her the truth. And she could leave. And she could find someone who is able to have children. I could give her that dream.

But I don’t.

I don’t say a word. Because saying words is hard and whatever other excuse paints me in a better light. Instead, I let her cry in front of the Scioto River, the stillness of its surface mirrored in my own stoic resignations. Is this her failing grade?

I think, When did I become the chandelier?

The year is 2018. I am wearing skinny jeans and my favorite gray tank top while I am asleep on a boy's bed after taking too much Benadryl. He is a writer. He says he likes experience. I admit I don’t know what the fuck that means.

When he lays on top of me, I cannot say no. The semi-unconscious do not have a voice. I miss when silence was a choice. I grow tired of inciting incidents.

After the assault, I am placed under psychiatric care and given a room in a nearby mental hospital. There is a gray tank top, skinny jeans, and no underwear folded neatly on the shelf next to my bed. The nurse at the mental hospital asks me if I would like to throw away the clothes I came in with. The clothes he touched me in.

“I can get rid of this memory for you.”

I have kept that tank top into my late twenties. It is shoved into a bag in my closet. 

I think, Will I make it to 40?

The year is 2019. I drink a lot. I do some drugs. I go to a lot of therapy. They tell me it is not my fault. I did not know blaming others was an option. I am a matriarch, after all.

I am convinced the word has little to do with motherhood and everything to do with performance.

The year is 2022. Roe V Wade is overturned. I remember best how no never worked out for me. I remember how easy it was to leave my ex-fiancé without any children to tie us together.

I have decided I never want to become a mother. They like it too much when I am sacrificial. I am tired of ruling. I crave violence. I crave my mother. I know I will be too gentle to prepare a daughter for the fight that lies ahead. I know that even if I am violent, it may cause her to crave softness. My worst fear:

What if she is like me?

The year is still 2025. I want to throw away the bag in my closet because I think it will make a really good ending to an essay. I can’t. Instead, I pull out the gray tank top and try it on, stopping first to see if it still smells like him. I never gave it a wash like I planned. It still fits, though I swear I am considerably larger than before.

I do not know if any of my choices have ever truly belonged to me. How long do reactions last? I hear the lawn care company outside of my apartment. It is divine timing.

Did you know that cut grass screams when you mow it down? It is a different kind of scream exclaimed outside of human convention. When the grass is freshly cut it releases a distress signal through a mixture of chemicals called green leaf volatiles. It is meant to alert the plants and insects nearby of the violence endured. It does not care if the plants cannot run or if the bugs cannot fly, the grass warns everyone all the same. You cannot hear the grass screaming when it is cut, but you can never forget the smell. I look out my upstairs window. It is divine timing to see a man at the helm of the mower.

Did you know, I am allergic to freshly mowed grass?

I retreat from the window, covering the sun beams with a cat-tattered curtain. I take off the gray tank top with some hesitation, shove it back into the bag.

I think, Will I ever outgrow it?

BIO: Nikki Howard is a MFA student at Antioch University. Writing from the upstairs den of her rented duplex in Springfield, Ohio, her work has appeared in Clark State College’s Voices of the Valley and Youmightneedtohearthis.com. She is active on Instagram @Nikkimaehoward and Tumblr @Sweetladdersofmisery