Cookie, a Memoir

After I was born on May 21^st of 1956, I was brought home to our small, one-story house located in the tiny subdivision of Inlet Oaks -- more commonly referred to as "The Inlet". The Inlet was a secluded, triangular swatch of land dotted with modest homes, bordered by Delavan lake on one side and one of its narrow, swampy tributary's on the other. It was within the sheltered confines of this wooded hamlet that my three sisters and I set about growing up.

My older sister, Candi, was not quite two years old when I was born and promptly nicknamed me "Cookie." But I would find out many years later that I would be the third baby in our household rather than the second. Shortly before I was born my mother would surrender for adoption her brother's 8-moth-old son, Wesley, whom she had taken in after his mother had a mental breakdown and ran off. I would not find out about Wesley until many years later when my cousin found the birth certificate and photos of Wesley and Candi playing together. My mother never spoke of him.

Most of my childhood days in The Inlet found me scurrying out of the house early on summer mornings, letting the screen door slam behind me, and venturing home only when I got hungry. The long days were filled with the type of unsupervised freedom and adventure that might have been the envy of Huckleberry Finn himself. My sisters and friends and I ran rampant down the quiet, one-lane streets and alleys and the wooded lots and open fields of our neighborhood, busying ourselves with building forts, climbing trees, playing tag and catching fireflies. School days found us trudging one block up the hill to catch the bus for school, which was located next to a dairy cow farm about a mile away. Recesses were often spent near the fence watching the cows and trying to lure them over to us with blades of freshly plucked grass.

The year I should have gone to kindergarten I spent being cared for by a mentally unstable woman by the name of Ann Hollister. My mother would drop me off with my younger sister, Julie, who was about three at the time, everyday before she went to work. Mrs. Hollister had 10 children of her own. Some mornings she would throw dishes against the kitchen wall in fits of rage. Most mornings I tried to stay outside, playing near the barn or on the woodpile on their small farmette for as long as I could. One morning, though, I stayed out a little too long and wound up wetting my pants before I could make it inside to the bathroom. Mrs. Hollister became angry when she saw I had wet my pants and sneered sarcastically in front of the rest of the children at the breakfast table that "Cookie must still be a baby -- she wet her pants!" My face burned with shame as the other children stared at me.

On another morning Mrs. Hollister became so infuriated at Julie for refusing to eat her breakfast as she sat in the high chair that she began to force food into her mouth with her hand. "You-are-going-to-eat-this-food!" Anne snarled, emphasizing each word while forcing a handful of food into Julie's tiny mouth, as I helplessly watched Julie gagging and crying and struggling to breathe.

Many afternoons before our mother would pick us up Ann would tell all of us kids to form a line in the living room so that we could receive our spanking with the hairbrush. One day, I recall, the brush broke in half while she was using it on one of the other children. I was standing at the end of the line so I got out of getting my spanking that day.

One day I watched as Ann dragged her oldest daughter, who was 18, on to the front porch house and threw her out of the house while the daughter cried and pleaded, "No, mom, no!"

I don't know how long Julie and I stayed in Ann's care -- it seemed like a long time. Then, one morning I heard my mother talking on the telephone -- she was telling someone that her babysitter had been killed in a car accident the previous night. They suspected she had swerved to hit a deer. The wave of pure joy that washed over me the moment it sank in that Mrs. Hollister was dead was like nothing I'd ever felt before.

After that, during the summers my mother hired a live-in baby-sitter to take care of us during the week while she worked at a nearby fabrics factory. Her name was Fran. She was 18 years old and was the daughter of a couple from nearby Allen's Grove that my parents were friends with. She was definitely better than any fate I would have suffered with Mrs. Hollister, but Fran favored my older sister, Candi, and when they were together, which was most of the time, they teased me relentlessly and called me "dog face." I never really took to Fran because of that.

Our house in the Inlet was located about one mile from the Delavan beach. Most summer days we would walk the mile-long hot stretch of highway to the beach and spend the day there. One day, when I was nine years old, I met a boy about my age named Bruce Anderson. Every day Bruce and I would swim together, chase gophers, and play the juke box near the snack area and dance the twist together. One day Bruce's mother came to pick him up from the beach and he introduced me to her. I had a sunburn and she smiled at me and said, "Well, you look to me like a burnt cookie to me!" and laughed loudly. She told me to ask my mother if I could come over to their house some time. I never did go to their house. But one day when I was 12, after moving to Williams Bay, I was reading the local daily paper that arrived at our house every afternoon, as I did everyday, and my eyes settled on a headline -- "Delavan Mother Kills Self And Children." As I read further, it began to gradually sink in that I knew the people the article was talking about -- the article was about the Anderson family -- my friend Bruce, and his little sister, Holly, and their mother.

Life in the Inlet was a study in extremes -- placid memories of running barefoot and chasing butterflies in the open fields behind our house, and early morning fishing trips with my father, are mingled with terrifying memories of waking up in the middle of the night and finding that my mother and father were gone -- having left us alone after we went to bed to go up the street to the local bar. From Sunday morning visits to my grandparents after church, to memories of begging my grandmother to ask our mother to stop hitting us in the head without any warning. From spending Saturday afternoons at the roller rink up the block, to standing for what seemed like hours next to my father's barstool at the Pirate's Cove bar across from the roller rink and pestering him to come home after my mother would send me there to get him for dinner. From dressing up in our frilly Easter dresses and bonnets on Easter Sunday to scrubbing the local bar owner's kitchen floors on my hands and knees whenever my mother wanted to extend her friend a kindness. Memories of the wide-eyed joy of finding a cluster of brand new robins eggs after climbing a tall tree are juxtaposed with vivid pictures in my mind of large, red welts on my and my sister's legs and buttocks from beatings with my father's belt, and my mother keeping us home from school until they healed.

"What goes on inside this house is nobody else's business," my mother would say, after warning us we were never to speak a word about "what went on" in our home.

My grandmother, who lived in neighboring Lake Como, was a gentle, soft-spoken woman, and dubbed me "the thoughtful one" when I was very young. She never learned to drive a car, but it was her steady, if somewhat distant, presence in our lives that helped ameliorate the volatile nature of our daily home life. But even she had her demons, for many years after her death I would conclude that my grandmother probably suffered from depression most of her life. My suspicions would be bolstered when one day, in a rare moment of candor, my grandfather confided to me that my grandmother had "always seemed sad."

Perhaps some of that sadness stemmed from the fact that her own mother had disowned her when she married my grandfather, a sailor. Her mother never spoke to her again after she married my grandfather, and my grandmother spent her life raising my mother and her two older brothers virtually alone with no extended family, while my grandfather spent eight years in the Navy, four of which he fought the Germans in WWII.

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It was January, 1971, when a tall, dark-haired boy a few months younger than me blew through the kitchen door of our duplex in Harris, Michigan. Bob's son that my mother and Bob had talked about coming to live with us had finally arrived.

Named Robert, Jr., after his father, we called him Bobby. He had a quick laugh, a prominent hook nose, and a cocky air of self-confidence.

Still suffering from the silent treatment from my mother and Bob over Candi and I running away, I saw Bobby's arrival as a welcome diversion, and perhaps even a potential kindred spirit to replace my sister who stayed behind in Wisconsin.

I would be woefully mistaken.

That night, after my parents went to bed, Bobby and I stayed up talking in the downstairs living room, getting to know each other. He told me that he'd live in Rockford, Illinois, for most of his life, and that during that time, his mother had been married seven times.

It wasn't long before Bobby turned the conversation to his numerous sexual experiences, and began to ask me about mine. He asked if I'd ever had sex with any one, and I said no. He then asked me if I wanted to try it. I said no, but he kept cajoling me, and kept asking me if I was sure. I said, yes, I was sure.

Bobby would persist in hinting at wanting to have sex with me right up until I moved out of the house several years later.

When spring arrived we packed up and moved from Harris to Gladstone, a town situated on the shore of Lake Michigan, about 20 miles north of Harris. My mother and Bob bought a two-story house a few blocks from Lake Michigan and within walking distance to school. The house had an extra room off the kitchen for my grandfather to stay in, and, after selling the house in Williams Bay, he came to live with us. During the winter Gramps drove down to Gulf Shores, Alabama, where he lived in a rental cabin situated on the ocean's shore.

The following fall Bobby and I both I started school as sophomores at Gladstone High School. Bobby became friends with a boy named Ed Benz who would frequently walk home with Bobby after school and sometimes stay for dinner. Ed was an easy-going, disheveled-looking boy who had developed a crush on me and, according to Bobby, was hoping I would ask him to the upcoming Sadie Hawkins dance. The week before the dance Ed walked home with Bobby two days in a row. The first night he stayed for dinner, but on the second night Bobby asked my mother and Bob if he could stay for dinner again, but they said no. As Ed was leaving, he asked if I would walk him out. I went with him out onto the back porch and asked him how he was going to get home. He gave me a sly smile and stuck out his thumb. He lived several miles away in a neighboring town. It was November, and already getting dark.

Before he turned to leave, he said, "By the way, do you want to go to the Sadie Hawkins dance with me?"

I shook my head and said, "No thanks."

He smiled and said O.K. and took off walking across the back yard in the dusk.

I was the last person to ever see Ed alive.

The next morning during gym class a girl was crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said that her ex-boyfriend had been hit by a car and killed while hitchhiking along the highway the night before. I asked her what his name was, and she told me his name was "Ed Benz."

Ed's death would be the first of three high school-age friends that would die within a six-month period. Two months later the boy who sat in front of me in English class, Bobby Anderson, died after his lungs froze while huffing Pam behind a gas station one night in sub-zero temperatures. English was my first hour class and for many weeks after Bobby's death I would start each day with the sharp sadness of sitting behind an empty desk where once a quiet, blond-headed boy would often turn and give me a shy smile.

Shortly after I started my sophomore year in Gladstone, I became best friends with a shy, soft-spoken a girl named Patti, who had a disarming smile. Patti had a steady boyfriend named Ted whom she'd been seeing for about a year. Ted was 16 years old and Patty was 15, but even at that young age they had begun talking about getting married someday. Ted lived in a nearby town and went to a different high school so they didn't get to see each other very often. Their favorite song was "Precious and Few" by Climax, which begins with the line, "Precious and few are the moments we two can share."

Patty lived just two blocks up from me on the same street, and we often walked to school together. After school let out for the summer, I took a ride back to Wisconsin with my grandfather to stay with my sister, Candi, for a few days. The day after I returned home I was outside in the car port when Patti came walking into the yard. Her usually cheerful face looked sullen and her eyes were red and swollen from crying.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Ted drowned yesterday," she said softly.

On a dare, Ted had attempted to swim across a small lake, and didn't make it.

Moving to Gladstone had given me a crash course in death, of which I'd had little experience except for the death of my grandmother.

During my junior year in high school, I met a boy who was a senior who would become my first love. Rob was tall, blond, and had a 100-watt grin and a disposition to match. It was Rob's friendship and affection that would help buoy me through the tug of depression that had begun to tow me under.

Many nights I would lie awake listening to my grandfather and Bob arguing downstairs at the kitchen table after Bob had had a few brandies and Gramps had put away a half bottle or so of blackberry brandy. Some mornings I would find Gramps slumped at the kitchen table, sound asleep with his face in his dinner plate and his pants soaked with urine. Often I would get half way to school and remember that I hadn't made coffee for my mother and Bob, which I was under strict orders to do before I left the house each morning so it would be ready for them when they woke up -- I would quickly turn around and run back home and make the coffee, but was frequently late for my first hour class.

By this time, Bobby had become heavily involved with drugs -- marijuana, LSD, speed -- and had hatched a plan to slip LSD into my girlfriend's and my drinks on prom night during my sophomore year. My date and I were planning on going to the prom with Bobby and his date and another couple. Luckily, an older friend of Bobby's that he often rode around with and smoked pot with overheard Bobby and his friend talking about the plan to spike our drinks and called me to warn me. He threatened Bobby that he would to go to the police if Bobby spoke of it again. I would later marry that man.

It was during this time that our dog, Shadow, started showing signs of old age and was getting unsteady on his legs and falling down a lot. He was barely able to walk anymore. He had been with us since a puppy when we had lived in Delavan. One day when I came home from school, Shadow was gone. My mother told me that Bob had taken him to the vet to be put down. Years later I would find out from my sister, Candi, that Bob had, in fact, taken Shadow out into the woods and dumped him off to die. I wept like a brother for Shadow even though it was 10 years later when I learned the truth.

At the end of my junior year, Rob decided to join the army. After boot camp he came home and brought with him an engagement ring which I accepted.

After Rob returned to his duties, I took a job at a local cafe, working during my school lunch hour and on the weekends. Bob Cannon, the kind man who had called me the previous spring to warn me about Bobby's plan to spike our drinks with on prom night, frequently came into the cafe and would sit four hours drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and reading books. He was 36 years old but appeared to only be in his late 20's, and always came into the coffee shop alone.

"How's my favorite couple?" Bob would say with a wide grin, looking up from his book, when Rob and I would slide into the booth at the Cozy Cafe to chat with him for a while. Bob didn't work, due to sustaining a leg injury in a car accident. He was always carrying with him the latest self-help book.

After Rob returned to the service, I was bereft with loneliness and started to sink further into depression. I would often walk the few blocks from our house down to the beach and sit on the weathered fence post smoking cigarettes and staring out at the white-capped waves on Lake Michigan. One day Bob drove up in his car and asked if I wanted to sit in the car and listen to the Bee Gees. I got in and we talked and smoked and listened to the Bee Gees on his 8-track tape player.

Although I didn't know it at the time, Bob had a lengthy history of inpatient admissions for mental illness, and had been arrested for domestic abuse against his ex-wife. He had been diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia, although it was more likely he suffered from bi-polar disorder. He also had four children, ranging in ages from six to 14 and had been divorced for several years.

Before long Bob began picking me up in the mornings and giving me a ride to school. He lived alone in the house he and his ex-wife had lived in, and sometimes Bobby and I would sneak out of the house during the night and hang around at Bob's house while the two of them smoked pot. One night while we were there, Bob took me into his bedroom and told me that he had fallen in love with me. He told me that he didn't want to pressure me into having sex with him -- that that would be up to me, when I was ready.

Bob had filled the father figure void in my life and softened the harsh loneliness of Rob's absence in one fell swoop. In May, just before my 17 ^th birthday, I became pregnant. When I finally told my mother and Bob LaBombard in August, Bob said, "You're damn lucky he's going to marry you." My mother told me there was no sense in waiting the two weeks till we were married before moving in with Bob. "You're already pregnant," she shrugged. I moved in with Bob the next day.

I found myself relieved to finally be away from all the arguing between Bob LaBombard and Gramps and my mother, and from Bobby. Bobby had taken up with a group of kids at school who were into the occult and one night while Bobby was high he had come into my bedroom with a handful of knives and asked me if I would keep them for him, because he was afraid of what he might do with them. I hid them under my bed, and after I came home from school one day my mother and Bob confronted me about the knives they'd found under my bed. I never admitted they were Bobby's because I didn't want him to get into trouble. Bobby had also begun stealing money and checks from my mother and Bob, which caused frequent arguments. Bob always wound up defending Bobby. The fights got so bad that my mother would sometimes disappear into the spare bedroom and not come out for days at a time.

It was liberating to no longer be under the critical scrutiny of Bob LaBombard, whose feelings for us girls hadn't changed one iota since our first night in Harris. We were allowed to open the refrigerator only a certain number of times a day and allowed to make phone calls only during certain hours of the day. If I made the slightest objection, he would remind me sternly, "You are a nobody in this house, do you understand that? A nobody!"

After we were married, Bob Cannon and I subsisted mainly on his monthly Social Security disability check. It had not yet become illegal to ask, or turn down, job applicants it they were pregnant, and that was usually one of the first questions on every job application I filled out. Consequently, I found myself temporarily unemployable.

The following January, shortly after my son was born, my mother and Bob LaBombard and my two younger sisters moved back to Wisconsin, and my mother and Bob eventually split up.

Not long after my son's birth my husband began showing signs of paranoia, accusing me of putting poison in in his eggs. He turned violent on a number of occasions, once grabbing me by my hair and beating my head against the foot board of the bed because he thought I had turned the baby over too fast while changing his diaper. Another time he took a pot of stew from the stove and threw it across the kitchen. Once he slapped me across my face for back-talking.

One day, when my son was 2 ½ and my daughter was 9 months old, Bob pushed me down and I landed near my son's toy box. I reached for the closest thing I could find and my hand landed on a large, metal toy truck. I heaved the truck into the air and hurled it toward Bob, who turned and ran out the front door.

In a twist of fate, the very next day my mother called me. Still extremely paranoid, Bob had taken to monitoring my phone calls, which were few because I no longer had many friends. It happened that my mother's new boyfriend had become curious about her one daughter that he'd never met. He urged her to call and check up on me. With Bob standing only a few feet away I answered my mother's questions with simple yes and no answers. Suddenly her boyfriend, who was a Sheriff's deputy, came on the phone. He could sense something was wrong.

"Honey, do you want us to come and get you?" he asked point blank.

"Yes," I said, nervously.

"We'll be there tomorrow," he said, and he hung up.

Suddenly I was a hostage about to be rescued.

After hanging up I quickly made up a story, telling Bob that I was going to visit my mother for a few days, and that she was coming to pick up me and the kids the next day. Although he didn't respond, I knew he didn't like the idea. He would spend hours at a time in the basement cleaning his rifle, and had told me on more than one occasion that he had read in the Bible that any man who had only one descended testicle instead of two, like Bob did, had, according to God, a "license to kill."

I wasn't sure if I would ever live through that night to see our escape the next day. Bob's thinking was so deranged by that point he exclaimed to me, "Don't you see?! I'm Jesus Christ in the flesh!"

As if he sensed that I was not going to come back if I left the next day, Bob raped me for seemingly endless hours that last night. I didn't resist. Every hour I would look at the clock and vowed to myself that I would do anything it took to stay alive until morning.

When morning came, I nervously packed a few items of clothing into a suitcase, mostly clothes for the kids, and waited. Around noon I saw a large 4-door car pull up on the street. A tall, barrel-chested man got out of the car and walked up the sidewalk. My heart was racing. My mother followed behind him.

"Hi, I'm Don," he grinned when I opened the door. Bob stood off to the side in the kitchen and mumbled a hello. He was suddenly no longer in charge.

"What would you like me to grab?" Don said as he burst his way into the house, walked past Bob, and into the living room. I pointed to the solitary suitcase. He then spotted the box of toys in the living room and said, "You're going to need these, too," and he picked up the box of toys while I gathered up the children. The three of us walked past Bob, who stood speechless in the kithcen, and we filed out the door and got into the car. Bob stood in the kitchen window and watched us drive away.

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The kids and I moved in with my mother and younger sisters who were still living at home. I immediately got to work checking the listings for apartments, but at that time there were no laws against discriminating against families who have children, and there were virtually no apartments advertised that did not specify "No Children."

My mother didn't seem concerned that I was not having any luck finding a place to live. Because her boyfriend was a married man, Don had rented an apartment that the two of them would use for their clandestine meetings. It was only a few miles from my mother's place. One day my mother mentioned that if I couldn't find a place to rent, she could move into Don's apartment. The only catch would be that my sisters would not be able to go with her. Then, after three weeks of apartment hunting with no luck, one day I came home and found a note on the dining room table from my mother infroming me that she had moved into Don's apartment. In the note she told me I could keep all of the furniture she had left behind.

My youngest sister, Jill, who was 13, cried when I showed her the note after she got home from school. Julie, who was 17, soon moved out and wound up bouncing between the families of a couple of her high school friends. Several months later I would listen, wide-eyed, to Candi's boyfriend, who happened to be Don's best friend, tell me that it was my mother's plan from the beginning to bring me back to Wisconsin to take care of my sisters so that she would be free to move into her and Don's secret apartment by herself.

"Boy are you a sucker!" he chuckled, and shook his head.

To be continued --