The following is an excerpt of a work in progress.

Hammerhead
We were a camping family, something I find remarkable, considering my mother’s inner city upbringing in Washington DC. Maybe, in her girlhood, her family picnicked in the wilds of Lincoln Park or along the banks of the Potomac. Maybe she trailed away from the noisy hordes of her first generation family, searching for shiny pebbles, or good skipping stones to cast out over the muddy river. Shirley was a tomboy, a strong swimmer, as flexible as a yogi, and lithe and fit until cigarettes and everything else caught up with her. 
Ours was also a DC family, though suburban. On weekends we towed our foldout camper all over the Mid-Atlantic and near South, up into New England. We kids explored ravenously, running, jumping, climbing. Mom kept her eyes to the ground and moved slowly, picking up rocks and seashells, bits of petrified wood and cores of shale, arrowheads, sharks’ teeth, calcified bones and fool’s gold. Leaves and feathers just shriveled and turned to dust. She lined her pockets with rocks. Her best-ever find was a large, rose quartz Indian hammerhead. I loved to hold it, hewn smooth and solid in my palms. It weighed probably six pounds, multifaceted pink and shaped like a woman: full on either end and tapered down in the middle, for holding on to.             For hammering back, I like to think, at those who’d tried to hurt her.            When she was nine years old, her uncle Joe guided Shirley down the hall and into a bedroom closet, pushed her face into muffling sweaters, scratchy wool and mothball smell. Closed the door. She couldn’t breathe, but she never moved or screamed. He made his sounds and fumbled and thrust himself inside her, a shattering pain so dissociative as to erase her. He did it whenever an opportunity became available, until her body matured past girlhood and he was done with her, and she assigned his sorties to the same disbelieving place as nightmares.            Uncle Joe was beloved in the family, a kindly gentleman compared to the scrappy drinkers and brawlers. He and Aunt Katie were there for all the occasions and Sunday dinners. He worked as a foundry man and brought cast-offs of rejected items as gifts: a small bronze horse, a hammered copper bowl. The family considered him their artist, bringing such elegant artifacts into their row house and their narrow, crowded lives.             When we were kids, our mother spoke of him with reverence, and treasured that horse and bowl until her early death in 1990 at the age of 57. The horse lives on in my sister’s house, the bowl in mine. Why, I wonder now, imagining throwing it in a dumpster, maybe giving it a few good hard bangs first. But she loved these things. She made us love them, too, these pinpoints of light from her girlhood. Do we honor her or him by keeping them? If we throw them away, what do we trash, and whom?Mom’s amnesia to these assaults lasted until nearly the end, when the oxygen deprivation of emphysema triggered familiar feelings of being suffocated, and it all turned on like a switch, along with the adult understanding of what, exactly, he’d done. She had no tools for dealing with it—not the “it” of his crimes or the rage and terror finally released. “They say I have to learn how to be mad,” she told me when I visited her at a psych hospital on the outskirts of Denver, the wide, flat geography we’d emigrated to many years before. Tears wet her face; the pain in her voice was new and tragic. Even so, I couldn’t understand why feeling mad was such a problem. In my righteous twenties at the time, I had no problem jumping to anger; I was almost always pissed off at her at this point. We slowly traversed the hospital grounds on a too-bright winter day, frozen prairie grass cracking underfoot, white-capped Rockies in the distance. I carried her portable oxygen, which she turned off occasionally to have a smoke. Digging in her coat pocket for matches, she drew out instead a woven keychain she’d made in OT, pink and beige, a little embarrassed. It was ugly, and juvenile, and I was a little embarrassed, too, because this was how she spent her days at the hospital, not only struggling with psychosis and crippling manic depression, but with COPD choking off blood vessels and arteries, in addition to lungs, lengths of intestine, tips of toes.And trying to muster anger instead of self-destruction at so many betrayals.             In 1950, Shirley was eighteen and moved into an apartment with girlfriends, close to home but far enough to escape the family maelstrom. She had all she needed: nearly an eighth grade education, a factory job, and a gang of friends who liked to go out at night and drink and dance and forget the realities of trying to become adults. The nation had mostly recovered from the war; boys were no longer being sent to early deaths overseas. There was a feeling of optimism in the air—everything was going to get better from here on out—and newly minted adults thought mostly about the next Saturday night.Having been an awkward, skinny kid with broken teeth, Shirley had blossomed into a raven-haired stunner: an hourglass figure, her two front teeth capped now and sexy in her Cupid's Bow smile. She wanted to go out, to have some fun. She was ready to launch, and boys noticed.She had a male friend (let’s call him Dick), who never made advances, but was there when you needed him—an advisor about other boys, a shoulder to cry on. He was one of the good guys, but Shirley fell for the bad ones, volatile drinkers like at home. These kinds of men felt more familiar, and for once, she felt seenby them—admired, appreciated. Okay, lusted after. Why not? She was in control of her own destiny, finally. Now all she needed was love. She hadn’t considered the flip side: Boys who stole her heart often collected them like pennies in their pockets. She fell hard and deep with one such boy after three blissful weeks of dating, only to catch him out with a prettier girl one night. She walked up to the laughing couple, punched the girl in the mouth, and tried to drag him away by the jacket sleeve, but it was as if his eyes had sealed shut to her now. Weeping and shouting ensued, maybe a little pushing and slapping, and then he and his bloody-lipped new girl were gone. Dazed, Shirley ran the ten blocks to her apartment building, climbed the stairs and into bed. She turned her face to the wall and cocooned herself in sheets and blankets, pain too vast and raw to allow herself to move, even to eat or drink or bathe. She existed in an ether of half sleep, shame pooling in her stomach and bowels, in her chest and throat. She missed work. Her roommates couldn’t rouse her or convince her she’d be okay. At their urging, their good friend Dick dropped by one evening to try to talk some sense into her, while they went out to the bar to give them some space. Oh, sweet, kind, understanding Dick. He sat on the edge of her bed and spoke softly, saying the other boy wasn’t worth it. She deserved someone better. Her emotional dam leaked, and she buried her face in the mattress, embarrassed at her convulsive sobs, the ugly noises she made. He patted her arm, cooed how sorry he was. He tugged at her hand and she sat up and let him hold her, her cheeks and nose wetting his shirt. She let out a long, shuddering breath, sighed, “Oh.” To be held. He rubbed her back in slow circles. The circles widened.He rubbed her low back, too low to really even be considered her back.He rubbed her sides, sliding his hands up to the underside of her breasts, unrestrained in her nightgown.Shirley pulled away, untangled from him, wiping her eyes. “Thank you,” she said, hoping he didn’t catch the fear in her voice. She was feeling better now, she told him. “Thank you,” she said again, to convince him he’d saved her.But his face had changed—the jut of his jaw, the tension in his eyes. His hands still reached for her.She scooted back until she was pressed into the wall, pulling up her knees, wrapping her arms and blankets around them. “I’m okay, really,” she said. “How about I get dressed and we go meet the others.”He stood, and for a moment she thought he was going to leave the room, but then he grabbed her shoulders and pushed her down, leaned his full weight into her. He covered her face with hot saliva and yanked her gown up and underwear down. He jammed his hand between her legs. “You want this as much as me,” he said, his face gone febrile. She began to cry again.“No,” she said. “Please, no.” Stiffening and shivering, trying to clamp her legs closed and wrench free, but she was trapped. He unzipped his trousers and fumbled with himself. He raped her. When he was gone, she struggled to her feet, wrapped a coat over her nightgown, and took the bus back to her old neighborhood. She should never have left, never have believed she’d be safe on her own.
At home, her younger sisters hid from her. The men lowered their voices. The house grew quiet.She tunneled into her old bed and stayed. Her mother hovered over her, anxious and insistent, her voice a needle treadling in and out, stitching fear and worry into place, her grandmother right behind her. They told Shirley she was having a nervous breakdown rather than tell her she’d survived a brutal crime. And broken was the way she felt. She’d shattered, shards stabbing and ripping at her until she was pulp.It would be more than a year before she felt steady enough to work again, to go out with friends. To be nineteen.If only she’d had her pink hammer, and the resolve to hit back at someone who was hurting her. If only she could have reported him, but in 1950, who would charge a man, a “friend,” who’d been allowed into a young party girl’s bedroom? If only her mother had said, “Honey, I know this is hard, but you can heal from it, and I’ll be here to help you.” But all she could do was escalate Shirley’s fear and sorrow and rage, taking them on as her own, emotions she implied they were both powerless over. The next time Shirley moved away was when she married a handsome and safe North Dakota farm boy three years later, already pregnant with twins. She looks happy in the wedding photos in her slim white dress and silver pumps. Soon, she’d be living in glamorous Key West, Florida—beaches, palm trees, sunshine—where her new husband was stationed in the Navy. The post-war nation’s optimism was fuel; it was all in front of her. I like to imagine she had so much hope in that moment.
Deep in the middle of the night and the 1980s, my sisters and I converged in the yellow light of an emergency room and learned our mom didn't have long to live. Not only was late stage emphysema shutting her down, but her deterioration from addiction and mental illness were hastening the process. She needed 24 hour care. We mustered to clean out her house the following weekend, to sell what we could at a garage sale, and to save those things dearest to her for the nursing home.Where was the Indian hammerhead? I can’t see it in my memory of that sunny awful day, Mom in a rusty lawn chair, oxygen set on high and whistling. She argued and cried over the sale of each item, meaningful or not. And because she was as difficult a patient as she was a mother, she would be moved from nursing home to psych facility to nursing home in regular rotation, any remaining belongings disappearing. Stolen, sometimes, or lost or left behind. Shunned, perhaps. What good’s a hammer when you’re the nail?