Wagist

I Cannot Tell a Lie

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Colleen Newport

Lila ruined sitcoms for me forever.  Lila ruined chick flicks for me forever.  Lila ruined teen books about vacationing bloomers for me forever.  Hell, Lila ruined me forever.

We met in church when we were both eight, when her family moved to our town after the sudden death of her sister.  I had borrowed my mother’s pocket calculator and entered in 1 + 1 then hit the equals button as many times in a row as I could, watching the number grow and grow.  This had become a Sunday tradition that my mother never seemed to mind as it kept me from squirming non-stop the entire sermon.  After the last prayer, I had made it to almost five-thousand.  Not my best work.  I blamed the low number on the stupid dress my mother made me wear; I was too busy fidgeting with the scratchy hem to focus on my task.

“Pfft… five-thousand?  I get to sixty-thousand no problem.”

I didn’t know who that little girl was, but I sure as hell wanted to kick her.

“Nobody likes a bragger,” I said out of instinct, my mother having just told me that three times the day before.

For the next five Sundays, I couldn’t focus on my calculator.  All I could focus on was finding where she was sitting in the sanctuary to see if she was as fast a button puncher as she claimed.  Every time I’d stand up to look around, my mother would tug on my arm until I thumped back down.  At last, her family sat in front of us a few pews.  I couldn’t tell what she was doing during the sermon, but I definitely saw her bow her head during the prayers.  Amateur.  Liar.  Bragger.

My mother looked down at me and smiled, I smiled back.  I’d assumed she was just proud to see that her daughter was still the pocket calculator champion of Calvary Baptist.  Like everything else I’d assumed at eight years old, I was wrong.  At the end of the service she took my hand, still smiling at me, and we walked up to the black-haired family.  That’s when I officially met Lila.  You could smell the mathematical lies coming out of her pores.

After a few minutes of introductions, small talk about the church, small-minded talk about some of the parishioners and empty compliments, our parents set up a play date for Saturday afternoon.  I clenched my mother’s hand hard and she assumed I was so excited that I couldn’t help but tense up my hand.  Like everything else she’d assumed at thirty-six years old, she was wrong.

That Saturday Lila came over.   There was no apologizing over her lie, I never even called her out on it.  She’d come over and told me about kissing and rubbing and how boys called girls’ privates “peaches”.  Lila was the coolest and smartest girl I’d ever met and she really seemed to like me.  Honestly like me.  Not even close to how I pretended to like the home-schooled girl next door that ate bugs and talked to Jesus at our tea parties.  If I yelled at her for her little white lie, well, she might not have wanted to come over again.  The next morning she sat next to me in church – our parents said it was okay if we even sat by ourselves one pew in front of them.  We were inseparable for the next few years.

Had I ended our friendship when we were twelve years old, I could be a famous feel-good Chick Lit author by now.  I’d have a movie based on one of my novels starring some up-and-coming starlet before she discovered cocaine.  I’d own a closet full of mom-jeans and appliqué sweaters.  Instead, I’m living in a two bedroom apartment with my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend.  I would have never thought mom-jeans would sound so appealing.

A month after my thirteenth birthday, my father left us.  He decided sleeping with the red-headed pharmacist down the road was a far better life than living with his wife and three kids.  In interest of full disclosure, it didn’t bother me.  I never cared for him anyway but I knew I could milk this situation for sympathy – especially sympathy in the form of presents.  Being a child of divorce was an absolute cash cow and all it took was a quiver of the lip and a pool of tears barely contained in my eyes.  Of course Lila knew the truth.  She knew everything about me.  She’d parade me around town and elbow me in the ribs to get my eyes to well up with tears and, of course, help me share in the wealth of free ice cream, candy and other small trinkets.

It wasn’t long before the sympathy dried up.  The Dillons got a divorce a month later, the O’Doyles a few weeks after that.  I was no longer a poor little girl, I’d become just one of a handful of fatherless kids in our town.  No more ice cream, no more candy, no more trinkets.  Though I was fine with this attention finally waning, as I’d grown tired of being elbowed in the ribs, Lila was anything but fine with it.  She got bored with me.  She told me I wasn’t fun anymore and that she’d rather be hanging out with the Sophomore boys that hung out down the street.

Life without Lila was lonely.  I sat in my room at night trying to figure out a way I could be more fun.  Unfortunately, I really was a boring kid and couldn’t think of anything. Desperate to win back her attention, all I could do was default to the only way I’d ever gotten attention in my life:  I ran to her house, lifted up my arm, slammed my ribs into the porch rail and rang the doorbell, tears in my eyes.

Her father answered, squatted down and grabbed me in his arms, “What’s the matter Angela?”

His breath smelled a little like beer and a lot like his pipe.  His arms were comforting and I could feel his heart beating against me.  I’d never felt my dad’s heart beat.  I don’t think I’d ever even been close enough to him to know what his breath smelled like.  As Mr. Connor’s smells faded, his heart beat slowed down.  He led me into the living room, sat me on the couch and called for Lila.  As she came skipping down the stairs past him, he grabbed her and kissed her on the forehead.  She pushed him away and lectured him for scratching her nose with his stubble.  My hand went to my nose; it had never been scratched with stubble and if I ever had the chance I couldn’t imagine pushing it away.  The rib tears turned into real tears.

Lila rushed toward me and threw her arms around me, “What’s wrong?  What happened?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?  You can’t be crying for nothing.”

She looked up at her father, scowled at him, grabbed me by the hand and pulled me upstairs to her bedroom.   Her older brother was asleep on her bed.  Lila stood on her bed, kicked him in the side and yelled at him to get out.  After mumbling a few words at her, he sat up a little, looked at me and rolled out of the room, slamming the door after him.

“Okay.  What’s wrong?”

I hadn’t thought that far.  I hadn’t come up with a reason for why I showed up at her door crying.  Wasn’t a very good liar either as I’d never had time to practice – Lila always did all the lying for me.

“If you don’t tell me, I can’t help fix it.  Tell me…please.”

So I answered honestly.  It wasn’t the reason I came over in the first place, but it was the reason for my real tears, “My dad…”

Those two words were all I could get out before I started sobbing like an asthmatic donkey.  I was mortified.  This was not how you look fun and cool.  This was not how you get a friend back who thinks you’re nothing but a boring, little kid.  Lila took a few guesses as to why I was upset about my dad: he died, he got back together with my mom, he’s marrying the pharmacist, he’s not my real dad because my mom fucked the kinda-cute mailman.  I just shook my head after each one.  How could I tell her I was so jealous of the dad she disliked so much?  How could I admit that although I thought I didn’t miss my dad’s presence, I missed what he could have been?  She’d laugh at me, or even worse, go laugh with her new older friends about what a baby I was.

No good explanations were coming to mind so I simply nodded my head at the next thing she said.  I didn’t even hear what it was, I just decided to nod so that she wouldn’t figure out how pathetic I was.  What had she said?  Her face wasn’t giving up anything, she was blank, numb.  After letting out a deep breath that she must have been holding for minutes, she threw her arms around me again and began to bawl herself.

“I told you nobody would ever understand you like I do,” she whispered so softly I could barely hear her, “We need to go tell your mom.  He’s not living in your house with you, he can’t hurt you for telling.”

I couldn’t respond.  I didn’t know what we were telling my mother about, all I knew is that I was so happy to have her so close again.  Lila hopped off the bed, pulled a piece of paneling off the side of her dresser and pulled out a box.  Inside was what looked to be about twenty dollars and a silver heart pendant.

“This is enough money right now to get us on a bus to the city if we have to, if they don’t believe us.  I’ve been saving up for a year now and was going to go myself but I haven’t been able to work up the courage to go alone.  If they won’t fix this, we’ll go fix ourselves. Okay?”

She pulled out the pendant and fastened it around my neck, “It was my sister’s.  She said it was good luck.  I know it’s good luck cuz the day she took it off to give to me was the day before she died.  It’ll protect you.  You wear it now and everything will be fine.  I’ll take it back when you don’t need it anymore.”

The box was placed back in the side of the dresser and within seconds we were downstairs.  I stood there, dizzy and sick to my stomach as  Lila hugged her father and told him she loved him.  He asked if everything was okay, but we were out the door and heading back to my house before either of us could answer.

She held my hand the entire way home – smiling at me and telling me how everything was going to be okay.  I believed her.  I still didn’t know what was wrong but I knew everything was going to be okay.  When we got to my house and found my mother in the kitchen, Lila started the conversation.  She told my mother that we had something very important we needed to talk to her about and that I couldn’t do it on my own, that I was too scared to tell her.

“I don’t know how else to say this, but to blurt it out.  Angela was raped.  By her father.”

I sat there unable to speak as I watched my mother age twenty years in ten minutes.  My mouth opened, my lips moved, but the only thing that came out was a deafening silence.  Lila reached over and grabbed my hand again.  Her touch settled my nerves enough for me to speak.

“Mom, please don’t cry.  It isn’t true…I don’t know why…I just…”

But nobody was listening to me.  Nobody ever really listened to me so I never spoke up about it again.  My mother kept crying and Lila kept feeding her all these details.  Details that I had obviously never given her – about how it started out with him just kissing me, then how there was a storm one night and he slid into my bed to keep me safe but ended up touching me in places he shouldn’t have been touching me.  About how he’d told me it was perfectly normal but that everyone would be jealous of how much he loved me so I needed to keep it a secret.  About how he’d shoved his cock in my peach and kept thrusting until I bled so I had to make up the fact that I’d gotten my period in order to have an excuse for the blood clots in my panties.  About how I prayed at church so hard but God wouldn’t answer my prayers.

My mother called the police, the police came and interviewed me though I didn’t say one word.  I could only sit and cry as my mother told them what Lila had told her. My father was arrested and tried.  I didn’t take the stand because my mother thought it would be too hard on me.  In my place, Lila gave her testimony of all the things I had “told” her.  Lila always did the lying for me.  Lila’s parents and brother were at court to support her and make sure it wasn’t too much for her.  Nothing was ever too much for her.

The trial ended in a series of convictions including incest and sexual abuse of a minor.  They sentenced him to fifteen years but he only served two weeks.  Child molesters, especially those that are parents of the victim, are not well received by other prisoners.  Though my mother wouldn’t tell us the details, my father died at the hands of another prisoner.  I should have felt guilty about never fully speaking up, never explaining that Lila was mistaken and none of this ever happened.  I should have cleared his name but I was too angry at him to feel guilty.  If he’d just been more like Lila’s dad, if he’d just shown us he actually loved us now and then I wouldn’t have been crying so hard that day.  I wouldn’t have told her that he was the reason I was crying.  I wouldn’t have lost Lila a few days later when her family moved away.

The day after my father’s trial ended, Lila’s brother hung himself.  Mr. Connor decided I was a bad kid, a bad influence.  He believed I brought all this pain on their family that they had worked so hard to escape when they moved here.  After much begging and pleading on Lila’s part, her family stopped by for a few minutes on the way out of town.  Her mother and father stayed in the car.  She gave me a hug goodbye and told me to keep the necklace, that she wouldn’t be needing it after all.  She told me when we turned eighteen, she’d be back for me and we’d go move to the city together.

I’ve not seen Lila in fifteen years.  I’ve never tried to find her.  But I think about her every time I see Monica yelling at Rachel for making a mess, every time Izzy and Addison swoon over some new doctor, every time Alexis Bledel is in a new movie.  Watching things so sweetly contrived makes me physically ill.  I can’t watch them anymore.  The anger I felt as a child didn’t take long to give way to guilt that eats up that saccharine bullshit like fertilizer.

There are nights I can’t sleep, wondering what hell is going to be like when I die.  But God has already gotten his revenge on me by making me have a passion for writing in an time where publishers only want women that write Chick Lit.  They don’t want memoirs like mine.  They don’t want stories of what childhood is really like.  They want more stories of one-dimensional women that grow together, overcome menial situations and stay OMG besties 4ever!

I don’t know those kinds of stories.  I can only write what I know because I suck at lying.  Lila always did the lying for me.