Deliver Me From Evil by Mary Monroe Page B

assumed he didn’t hear me. But Mama heard me all the way from the kitchen. She flew into the living room and batted my head with a spatula. For the next two days, she reminded me about the long labor she’d survived on account of me and how ugly she thought I was when I was born.
    Just before I turned nine, Daddy got a job driving for some shady-looking white man who owned a restaurant with a bar that a lot of rich people went to. I thought that he was shady because every time I saw him, he had on dark glasses, even at night, and a black hat and dark clothes, which made him look more like a bandit than a businessman. Mr. Bloom lived in a big beige mansion in the Berkeley Hills. Up until then, the only work that Daddy and Mama had ever done in the States was farm or janitorial work.
    Right after Daddy started driving for the shady businessman, he talked him into hiring Mama as a nanny for his three children. Like gypsies, we moved from one miserable old building after another. Moving around so much was the only way we could eventually get rid of all our “roommates.” Each time we relocated to another apartment, it was always one that was smaller than the one before, so Daddy had a good excuse not to drag all of his rootless countrymen along with us. By the time we found a one-room studio apartment that was so small, it looked and felt like a doll-house, it was just Mama, Daddy, and me.
    With the long hours that my parents worked, I pretty much had to raise myself. During that time, I felt that I didn’t belong anywhere. The days that my parents would leave the house before I got up and would come home after I’d gone to bed, I felt like an orphan. I roamed the streets like a stray dog. I started smoking when I was ten and drinking a year later. When I couldn’t steal any of Daddy’s cigars and when there was no alcohol in the house, I stole what I wanted from convenience stores. Sometimes I stole from the parents of some of the unsupervised kids I ran amok with. Nobody ever told me not to do it or that it was wrong. So I kept doing it.
    About a year later, the restaurant owner bought up a bunch of old apartment buildings throughout the Bay Area. He made Daddy the manager and maintenance man of one in Berkeley. The neighborhood was fairly rough, but Daddy didn’t have to pay rent as long as he managed the building. My folks didn’t like to spend money, so I knew that as long as we could live rent free, we would be in this place. And I was glad.
    It didn’t take long for me to make some new friends. Across the street from us lived a Mexican family with nine kids. The only girl, Maria Cortez, was my age. We hit it off right away and before I knew it I was hanging out with Maria and some of her friends. Like me, they were not really bad kids. But I was glad to see that they were not as confused and impulsive as I was. Our conversations almost always included sex. I was the only virgin in the crowd so I tried to absorb as much information as I could. I couldn’t wait to have my first sexual experience so that I could see what all the fuss was about.
    Maria had to look after her younger siblings so she didn’t have too much free time on her hands. “Christine, be glad you are an only child. You can do whatever you want and not have to worry about changing diapers, cleaning toilets, helping cook dinner, doing laundry and all the rest of the bullshit I have to do,” Maria told me. “You can have all your time to yourself. You a lucky girl.” Compared to Maria I guess I was. I had time to spare.
    After school I would go home and watch television and eat whatever I wanted to eat. It was a good thing I enjoyed healthy things, like fruits and vegetables, as much as I did candy and soda pop. I was as healthy as I was supposed to be. But there were other things around me that were not healthy. The lack of guidance was one. Because there was nobody around too much to tell