Raising Girls in Bohemia by Richard Katrovas

Author:Richard Katrovas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Three Rooms Press

Adjacent Room

WHEN I WAS TEN, I HAD a lucid dream in which Jesus ate my face. He walked out of the bathroom of the motel room; everything was exactly as it had been when I fell asleep; my parents lay in one bed, my youngest brother between them; my sister and two other brothers slept in the parallel twin bed, and I lay on a fold-up cot perpendicular to the two. Jesus strode from the bathroom, white robed, smiling beatifically, and loomed over me, smiling. Then he lowered, but as his face approached mine, the smile changed to a grimace and his mouth opened and he growled as I awoke, screaming.

I was inconsolable, and unable to explain why I was sobbing, shaking. My mother was terrified by my behavior; my father, just weeks out of prison, pumped up from lifting weights and much meaner than when he was caught three years previously, was angry, threatened to beat me if I didn’t calm down. I didn’t know that swaggering, violent, muscular man who threatened me; he seemed nothing like the svelte, nervous, often funny young father I remembered. Just before we’d hit the road again, just a few weeks after he’d returned from prison to our hovel in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, he’d caught me working on a hole in the backyard; I’d started digging, with a battered shovel I’d found by the tracks, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis a few weeks previously, and figured it would be a good idea to finish the project so the family would be safe if the missiles ever did start flying, but that man, that new, muscled-up, mean father halted my work, flailing me with his belt.

Obviously, I connected Jesus with my father, who, after his first prison term, often got religious when he drank. In Elizabeth City, I was carted off some Sundays to Baptist churches by great-aunts, and each summer attended Bible camps primarily because they fed us. I prayed, but always warily; it just didn’t seem natural. My mother was a lapsed Catholic and spoke often of angels, but was otherwise sardonic on the subject of religion.

My oldest daughter Ema is scared of space aliens; sometimes, after watching something on TV—in the Czech Republic or the United States—that seems to take seriously the idea of flying saucers and extraterrestrials, she’ll not be able to sleep. I’ll try to comfort her, explain that they don’t exist, that those phony documentaries are fun to watch but are not to be taken seriously. She says she understands, that she knows there are no such things as space aliens, but she just can’t get the image of those big-headed, huge-eyed white creatures out of her mind. Nothing else, neither war news nor apocalyptic chatter, affects her similarly.

Religious faith comes in handy, and I fear I’ve denied my daughters the succor of believing in a higher power, a higher order, even though I myself believe in a power, an order. I just don’t know how to name it, what to make of it.

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