Make believe
by Amy Suzanne Parker
The dust flies from the furniture, stirred up by a cloth in my hand as Michael Jackson’s Bad blasts in my parents’ bedroom. I breathe in too much lemon Pledge and cough. The cassette player is on high volume, and Mom, my brother, and I sing and clean to the beat of “The Way You Make Me Feel.” I try to moonwalk on the bathroom tile, my socks helping my feet slide a little.
I am disappointed. The tile isn't slippery enough. I'm not nimble enough.
I am seven years old when he is accused of child molestation by Jordan Chandler. I don’t understand it; I just know bad people do it. Strangers. Never go off with someone you don’t know. Fairy tales, school assemblies, and my parents drill this into me.
I don’t remember any stranger trying to take me away. My childhood is happy, filled with an out-of-tune ukulele I drive my parents insane with, a pink bedroom complete with a canopy bed, and a stuffed animal leopard named Goldie. She is my companion, and when I am sad, she soaks up my tears well.
Goldie is special. My grandpa donated to the World Wildlife Organization, sponsoring a leopard, just so I could have her. My brother, Tim, has one of those Disney stuffed animals of a Dalmatian. His name is Lucky. Goldie and Lucky are our favorite toys, and we bring them on sleepovers at our grandparents’ house.
Grandpa makes peanut butter fudge and popcorn balls. My grandparents sit in their recliners, Tim sits on the floor, and I sit on the couch. Fresh from Blockbuster, we watch The Nightmare Before Christmas. The snot-filled burlap blob character freaks me out, but not nearly as much as E.T.
I don’t remember when I first saw E.T., The Extraterrestrial, but I am so terrified, my dad keeps the VHS hidden in the bottom drawer of a nightstand in my parents’ bedroom. When I am feeling bold, I pull out the tape and gaze at the creepy cover—the moon with a shadow of a boy and an alien on a bicycle.
E.T.’s long neck (remember when it stretches upon seeing Drew Barrymore?) and long fingers are what mostly bother me. His huge eyes and the little stump of him don’t help. He is wrinkly and brown and secretly evil.
June 2015: I am in La Grande attending Eastern Oregon University for my Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. My goal in life is to outlive Sylvia Plath, and at 29, I’m almost there.
During one cloudy afternoon, Trevor Dodge comes to visit. He asks us if we remember the Atari E.T. video game. Gamers contend that it’s the worst video game ever, and there’s a mound in New Mexico where the copies that didn’t sell are buried.
He reads an essay about playing the video game before, after, and while his cousin raped him. He calls it the “Worst Fucking Game Ever.”
In August that same year, I have a nightmare containing explicit details of sexual abuse I wake up suicidal. I hold an orange bottle of Klonopin in front of the mirror and tilt it but stop before any pills come out. Instead, I plug “Tampa General Hospital” into Google Maps on my phone. I drive in the dark, the sunshine before sunrise lighting up the sky, tears blurring my vision.
In the examination room, I think about the man who bought me a Barbie car I could drive around the block in but only forwards. He would walk beside me, and when the sidewalk ran out, he’d lift up the car and turn it around so I could drive back.
This was the man who walked up to the grocery store and got me raspberries and kiwis, my favorite fuzzy fruits, when I’d been extra good.
This was the man who spent weeks on end trying to find me a teddy bear that looked exactly like Snuggles from the fabric softener commercials.
This was a man who endured the Great Depression in West Virginia, one of the hardest hit states, and who was drafted into the Army during World War II, part of Brokaw’s Greatest Generation.
This was a man who likely suffered from severe depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder who only knew alcohol as a means to medicate.
This was a man who taught hundreds of schoolchildren, including one of my psychiatrists.
He was the one who lifted me up and carried me on his shoulders when I got too tired of walking and complained that I couldn’t go on because I had “a bone in my leg.”
He was the one who took my brother and me to Taylor Park where he’d watch us get dizzy on the merry-go-rounds, burn our thighs on summer slides, and fantasize about swinging to the moon, while behind us, pushing us on the swing set.
He was my grandpa.
I shiver, not knowing if it’s from the chilly hospital room or last night’s nightmare. I tell the nurses and the social worker he was the one who sexually abused me.
The social worker asks me to describe the trauma. I do, teary-eyed and heaving. With each breath, I feel as if I’m exhaling myself out of my body until I am a balloon drifting away.
“It’s about forgiveness,” she says.
I nod and look down at the linoleum.
“It’s not about forgiving him, though—it’s about forgiving yourself. Do you blame yourself because you think you let it happen?”
Another nod.
“You were a child. It wasn’t your fault.”
Her face and words float through my head after she leaves.
During Trevor’s reading, I realize something—yes, epiphanies are corny, but they happen. My grandpa had wrinkly, brown skin, a long neck, and gnarled, arthritic fingers.
In the 2019 documentary, Leaving Neverland, Wade Robson and James Safechuck recount the sexual abuse they (allegedly) endured at the hands of Michael Jackson. At 50:25 the camera shows a poster with various figures, including Jackson, Einstein, Lincoln, and E.T. with sunglasses on in a bedroom at Neverland Ranch while James Safechuck describes the different places in Jackson’s house where they had sex.
In his New York Times review of the documentary, Wesley Morris writes:
[Jackson] tells the Safechucks how lonely he is. And so, in an alarming throwaway detail, the family starts disguising Jackson in order to sneak him out of Hayvenhurst, his pre-Neverland estate, and into their normal, suburban house. It’s like he actually was E.T.
When Michael Jackson appears with E.T. on television, it frightens me. He narrated the audiobook for the film, and the NYT article links to an Ebony article in which Jackson explains his attachment to the alien.
He's in a strange place and wants to be accepted—which is a situation that I have found myself in many times when travelling from city to city all over the world. He's most comfortable with children, and I have a great love for kids. He gives love and wants love in return, which is me. And he has that super power which lets him lift off and fly whenever he wants to get away from things on Earth, and I can identify with that. He and I are alike in many ways.
When I told my mom why I was hospitalized, she says she put the idea in my head when she told me that she found Grandpa lying on top of me one day. I don’t recall her ever saying anything to me about this—this is after the flashbacks and nightmares. I take this as evidence.
Days after, when I talk to her again, she admits it might’ve happened. It might’ve happened to her, too.
I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know whom to believe—myself or my mother. My own memory is highly fallible, I admit, after years of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and electroconvulsive therapy. The SSRIs and atypical antipsychotics mess with my recall, and depression itself fucks up my memory. The main side effect of ECT is short-term memory loss, but after having it throughout my 20s, this effect has staying power. However, the memory loss only affects the immediate time period around the procedure, not memories before or after.
I don’t remember having flashbacks, nightmares, or memories of any abuse until I am 28, after my last round of ECT for my fifth major depressive episode.
And so, I doubt myself.
On the website for the British magazine Spiked!, Joanna Williams writes in an article titled, “The Make-Believe World of Child Abuse Campaigners”: “Children of [5 years old] want answers to everything, but they also want to make-believe.” After discussing “vastly inflated data” of “sordid fantasy” and mocking schools who teach students about age-appropriate relationships, she continues, “Today it seems that five-year-olds are not allowed the luxury of make-believe and must instead have ‘lessons in life.’”
I was an imaginative girl, acting out plots from Days of Our Lives with my Barbies on the brown carpet next to the small table where Tim and I used to sit in the TV room at my grandparents’ house. One day I got frustrated and cut off my Cinderella Barbie’s hair. I dressed her in mismatched, skimpy clothing and pretended she was a whore.
In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch writes, “The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with.”
The nightgown with cornflowers on it has tiny fuzz balls—I feel them rub against my skin. I must be a toddler. Two? Almost? The sleeves have elastic bands. They snap. My skin stings.
I’m wearing a diaper. Latebloomer. Hard to train, eager to please.
Like a damn dog.
The poodle, Cocoa, snaps at and bites me. We compete for my grandfather’s attention.
He gives the dog flavored sticks it can chew up.
He gives me Dum Dums I can lick and chew up.
Little succulent spheres with an elevated equator that I crunch and smash between baby teeth. It’s okay if I break one on candy. They’re not permanent. It won’t leave a scar. My mother still discourages it.
There’s a twin bed in the living room, more like the sitting room, the TV room where my grandparents watch Golden Girls, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy! while Mom attends nursing school and leaves me and my brother with them.
Two? Tim would have been barely alive. I must be older. Maybe I’m wearing panties instead of a diaper and have confused the stretchy elastic bands on my underwear with my nightgown. There’s a laugh track for sitcoms I hear in the background.
One dark, blinds-closed afternoon, my grandmother and Tim are off somewhere else. Maybe this was before Tim was born? Anyway, he’s not there. Maybe my grandma is giving him a bath. Maybe they’re walking up to the Publix, Tim in stroller. The point is, they are absent, and I am left alone in my nightgown and diaper or panties in the oddly placed twin bed with my grandpa.
In my head, I see this little girl and him. The girl looks like me.
It’s 2019, and over the phone, my mother, newly 67, tells me that she has just been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, and I immediately think of my grandpa.
When I was born, Grandpa was in the hospital for cirrhosis. Someone, I presume my father, brought me to his bedside. Story goes, my newborn fingers touched his, and in that very moment, he decided to quit drinking—a kind of E.T. moment.
Now I imagine him jaundiced, barely alive though younger, 67, in fact, his eyes yellow, his sallow skin in the fluorescent light, him dying of cirrhosis. Did he see me, who I would be? Did he read the same dependence and decide to take advantage even then? The little girl in my head asks, is forever asking.
But now that I’m older, I think he did see our meeting as a sign, a moment of truth. He could reform, remake his image, be an amazing grandfather, had all the hope in the world for a rebirth, a resurrection.
The liver can handle a lot.
Maybe he fucked up, couldn’t keep his promise, just like the rest of us. Maybe he didn’t know if he would live.
On the phone, my mom’s voice brings me back to the present, and she deadpans, “We get all the bad genes from Daddy Dearest’s side of our family. We got ‘em all.”
In many other comments on Leaving Neverland on Google Reviews, people bring up that both Robson and Safechuck denied Jackson molested them in a 2005 trial. Why would they lie then? That means they are lying now.
In their 1998 article “From Memories of Abuse to the Abuse of Memories” in the anthology, Truth in Memory, Jean-Roch Laurence, Duncan Day, and Louise Gaston argue against Freud’s theory of memory repression. They conclude, “[A]mnesia is a rare consequence of childhood abuse in children” (331). Repression is a fiction, they argue.
Memory is malleable, fallible, inconsistent. Our imagination can skew it to fit our purpose, like I made my Cinderella Barbie ugly to make myself feel better about my own body. Having no recollection of certain events in my 20s when friends or family members reminisce feels like there are holes in my life I can’t ever fill on my own, but even before that, I created a narrative in which I only inherited my severe depression from the genes on my grandpa’s side and nothing else.
It’s 2016, and I’m telling my psychiatrist about the abuse—she is the first of my psychiatrists I tell. She asks what Grandpa did for a living.
“He was a teacher and administrator at elementary and middle schools.”
“What was his name?”
“Samuel Smith.”
A pause.
“Did he teach at Oak Grove?”
“I don’t know. He taught in Pinellas County.”
“Did he teach science?”
“Maybe. I think so. Physics and chemistry.”
“I had a science teacher named Mr. Smith in junior high. He was sallow—his eyes were yellow. You could tell he was an alcoholic.”
“He was an alcoholic.”
“He acted strangely.”
Then I tell her his history, why my mother’s family moved to Florida.
“He was a teacher at an elementary school in West Virginia, where the family is from. This was in the ‘50s, so corporal punishment happened. He supposedly paddled two girls so hard and so much that they could not sit down. He was forced to resign.”
My psychiatrist believes me.
The last time my mom and I talk about it—over the phone in late 2016—she says, “I don’t remember anything ever happening.” It was just that one time he was on top of me.
I am going through therapy for the trauma and take medications daily as I have for the last eighteen and a half years. My previous therapist said, “It doesn’t matter if it happened or not. What matters is that you believe it happened, and that has affected you and continues to affect you now.”
I believe Safechuck and Robson.
In November 2018, I watch E.T. When he’s sick and white and the sunflowers are dying, I picture my grandpa in his hospital bed when he was dying in 2013. I remember him wrapped up in sheets and blankets, swaddled just like the alien in Elliott’s bike basket, before he died. That’s the last image I have of him while he was alive. Shrouded, straining.
In 2013, my mother does not attend the funeral. My dad, brother, and I do. I don’t cry, though I feel I should, so I conjure some fake tears. I was his favorite grandchild. To my knowledge, I am the only grandchild he abused. I wonder, though, especially after we found out my cousin Jodi shot herself a few years ago; due to the estrangement between my mom and my aunt, we found out via a Google search for my cousin’s name.
My mom and my aunt have not spoken to each other since Grandpa died. My aunt was the favorite daughter, my mother, the “stupid” black sheep. Grandpa was always calling her “stupid.” My aunt and her surviving daughter, my cousin, have said nothing but good things about him. My mother has never stepped foot in Pinellas County since. We remain estranged.
Some joke that the reason ECT is so effective is because you forget why you’re depressed.
I remember lying down in my twin bed in my apartment in college. I sit for days watching the roaches gather and scatter, old pizza boxes stacked up in the kitchen, and Jimmy John’s sandwich wrappers spread out in the bedroom. Throwing away anything feels like I’m throwing part of myself away. I need garbage to be complete. Sometimes I turn on the TV to watch Wimbledon despite my lack of interest in tennis, there’s something about momentum that breaks my heart.
Thoughts of suicide aren’t far away. At 20, I overdosed on Klonopin in attempt to kill myself. I woke up devastated. There’s a little spirit that whispers in my ear to take pills and sleep into death.
I am on medication. I have great health insurance and good doctors. I have ECT, which works quickly to relieve my hollowness. The country is on the verge of the Great Recession (it’s 2008), but it does not affect me until I try to get a job after college. My parents have money, and they let me live at home rent-free.
I recognize my privilege. .
Now, I try to imagine the whole country depressed—financially and psychologically. My grandpa, the oldest of four children, would have been 10 years old. Going off research and history classes, I try to imagine life during the Great Depression, as much as I can.
He is a child, around eleven. Hunger devours him. He sees his siblings and parents go without. The hunger twists people’s faces into mean-mouthed stares, tiny wrinkles wear in around the mouth. I think of the famous photograph of the Migrant Mother and her kids burying their faces in her shoulders. Her lips are mostly straight, except for a tug at the sides, making it a frown. She wonders where the food will come from, how she can support her kids. Did Grandpa ever dream of California, like she did? Did he ever dream of Florida? When things seemed impossible, did he dream of death?
I am a child, around ten. Grandpa keeps a secret stash of Carlo Rossi sangria in the closet. He asks me to put two ice cubes in his drink. The number of ice cubes seems important, and I do it, then lift the heavy glass jug and fill his cup up to the top, like he likes it.
Mom is a child, around twelve. Her parents fight. Her dad is having an affair with the Spanish teacher, and Grandpa asks if she wants a new mommy. She starts salting all food to avoid anything bad from happening.
Michael Jackson is a child in the Jackson 5, and his father is whipping him, telling him he has a fat nose, ready and willing with a belt as punishment for rehearsal mistakes not yet made by Michael and his brothers.
At 21, I sit in an apartment I share with two other girls in Tallahassee and watch E.T. in its entirety for the first time. I cry at the end, out of love. That I’m out of the dream of the movie, in the present again.
At 22, my grandpa was drafted into the US Army during World War II. I am not sure, but if memory serves me right, he was a mechanic. Did he readjust screws and machines—I know so little—endlessly until he felt right—just the right number, even? What was his magic number? Mine’s eight.
At 22, I had my second major depressive episode and a second round of ECT treatments. I wonder if Grandpa felt the same whirlwind of hopelessness, the black edges tugging at him. I imagine him going back and straightening things and tightening bolts an even number of times. Turning engines on and off repeatedly until things felt right, until he felt that nothing bad would happen. I wonder if this is when he starts drinking.
At 22, Michael Jackson earned the highest royalty rate in music: 37%, at the peak of his success. But he wanted to be a kid, the kid he never got to be. Now, I think of my own childhood, how happy it was, or most of it, from what I can remember.
I wonder if Grandpa was molested as a child. I wonder if he ever attempted suicide. I wonder if OCD came down upon him like a cloud or seeped in slowly, counting touches so many times like it was for me. His sister had ECT, but it was unsuccessful and unmodified, so no muscle relaxants or anesthesia were used during the procedure. She used to wail, “I’m so blue!” I don’t remember this, but Mom tells me.
What was my grandpa afraid of? Did he have the same fears as me?
Michael Jackson feared growing up and was determined not to. He surrounded himself with children and make believe. Imagining is the human thing to do, and I’m trying to see my grandpa as a human himself. Did the memories of paddling those two girls haunt him? Did drowning his memories in alcohol help him cope with the images of bruised, bloody girl asses, the poverty he knew as a child, what he did as a father and grandfather?
I don’t think Grandpa ever forgave himself.
I think of E.T. and home, how I never want to go back there, to Largo, to the house that belonged to my grandparents. There are photos in my parents’ house in Gainesville of him walking beside me, Minnie Mouse ears with a pink bow on my head. The sunlight shines on me, and it’s hard to make him out in the shadow. But he is there, holding my hand.
When I visit my parents’ house after writing this, I examine the photo. He is not holding my hand; only half of his body is in the frame. He’s facing the camera, but he’s walking away from me. The picture is real, I am certain, but what else was?
I’ll never know which ghostly flashes really occurred. The little girl knows, the adult asks, is forever asking.
Amy Suzanne Parker is a PhD student in Binghamton University's English and Creative Writing program. Her work is forthcoming in DIAGRAM and has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Hobart, Entropy, Witch Craft Magazine, Burrow Press Review, and elsewhere. Originally from the Tampa Bay Area, she loves a good storm.