Ethel Gumb

Age ten. That was when it really started. She was, uh…She was different, certainly, before then. Different since she was born, really. She would, like, go without dinner seven days straight, or not say anything, like not a word, for as long as she could. One time, I remember she lasted from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve without saying a fuckin word. What kid goes through Christmas without speaking?

Anyway, ten. She was ten. That’s the first time she was arrested and (at least as far as I know) the first time she ever caused somebody else physical pain. It was still summer, still hot. Like heat-wave hot, but she wore jeans and an old ratty grey sweatshirt. Same one, same everyday. She wore that stuff so long that it would start to reek. She wouldn’t wash and she stunk too. I’d come home and have to open windows…

She’d been wearing that smelly uniform and it’d been in the high 90’s for two weeks. This was back when I had a real job, so I wasn’t around during the daylight hours most of the time. The week she did it, I’d been working doubles all weekend and it was Monday. Fuckin’ day off, right? I was needing it, I remember. We’d had problems with the air conditioning at the shop, and everything was soaked thru with humidity. I needed rest. I was tired. I usually sleep until seven, eight o’clock no problem. This time though, Sarah was working too and I had to get up and check in with the girl. Just to see she’s ok and what-not, right? Like I’m home, but I’m really not there cause I’m fast asleep. Gotta say, “hello.” So I did. And it was two o’clock when I did. The messenger came - they told me - at 3:30.

Ethel had a knife. She had found a bunch of them in the kitchen and had picked the sharpest from a group of seven. I know that because I found the other six knives before the police came. She’d taken her time, and in the end, the knife she chose - a Ginsu with Cedar grips - fit the job just fine. It was a four inch blade, sharp and stiff. She’d answered the door and the guy had presented her with a box of three Reader‘s Digests. Gave her the clipboard, and asked her to sign. Instead - he told the police - Ethel reamed the Ginsu into the man’s crotch, severing his femoral artery like an umbilicus. The messenger - Mr. Ted Means, his name was - nearly died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital of massive blood loss. Mr. Means was in a coma for three weeks. Even today he forgets things easily and sometimes has trouble spelling.

He’d crawled for a telephone, trailing blood through our living room. Ethel - according to his account - followed him the whole way asking: “Does it hurt ?, huh Mister ? Does it hurt ?”

After that she wasn’t welcomed at school anymore. I had to quit my job just to watch her during the day. When asked about the incident, Ethel would always say she felt “scared” and “threatened” by the guy, and that’s why she stabbed him.

***

For a few years I guess everything went OK. I don’t remember anything too dramatic. There was a time she got in trouble - suspended actually - from school for selling booze in film containers in the bathroom. I think that was eighth grade. In ninth grade she stole a car, but it was her grandmother’s car and she gave it back unharmed. So I guess everything went well, comparatively. It was after she turned 12, definitely. The puberty age, right? That’s when they really lose it. Preadolescent females are realms and levels of frustration and delusion. Then they “grow up,” and everything starts sucking even worse than it did before.

So on her twelfth birthday she asked for a pony. Her father was a used car salesman. Mom’s a secretary. Girl asks for a pony with a straight face. I remember she was counting off the days till her birthday on a big, desk blotter calendar. June 28. Every morning we’d see a new, giant red X on another day. Always marked off and dry before any of us had been up.

With a week left, the place was like a crypt for the silence and fear. All of us except Ethel. She yelled and sung all that week, skipping everywhere she went. She hadn’t talked to anybody about the pony basically since she’d had the idea. Her mother and I tried, more than once, to address it with her but any mention of it was always greeted with tantrum. The leg would stomp, the pouting would begin. After that it was useless. My daughter could shut herself down inside on demand, all the while lashing out with wild gesticulation, awful screams, and groaning. There’s no reasoning with that, and so we did not attempt reason. We just watched it all tick by, like people who’d been thrown off a cliff. Eyes closed, praying, waiting on the impact.

But then fate stepped in: For her eleventh birthday, Ethel had been given a miniature beauty queen set. Make up, fake make up, some false eyelashes. Like a toy make up kit for little ladies. She hated it. Didn’t so much as take it out of the box, I don’t think. Except for one piece…There was a tiny nail file in the kit. It had a soft, green handle too, so the person filing wouldn’t have to hold the metal. It was pointed at the end, but not sharp. I never saw it as dangerous until Ethel stabbed her classmate Lisa Simas with it, taking Lisa out of Moses Brown School for ALL of spring term and Ethel out forever. We never found out why. Whenever any of us tried to get at the truth, Ethel would wind up and loose it, sometimes for days and weeks at a time. She’d hold her breath and spin and smash into walls. She’d claw her face and arms until they bled. What can you do with that?

It happened at a school event they called "Field Day". Once a year everybody’s parents went and brought food, and coolers full of drinks, and watched their kids compete in track and field events. It was the kind of thing that's probably fun for folks with normal, even semi-well adjusted children. For my wife and I, It felt like execution day after a few ugly months ripening on death row.

Ethel had been rooting through our stuff looking for her favorite lemonade so she could show her friend Lisa the kind she liked. My wife had her purse with her, and for whatever reason, a small pouch from the birthday makeup kit was in there. I guess Ethel saw it, started showing it to her friend Lisa. Lisa examined the file for a few moments and handed it back with a dissapproving snort, telling our sweet girl her file was a fake. That’s what she said: “It’s just a fake Ethel Gumb! You are not old enough,” and then she was crowing to anybody around who’d give her a glance “EthEL canNOT wear makeUP. Too YOUNG Too YOUNG…:” On and on and on. I heard her behind me still crowing away during one race or another. The attention of the hundreds of parents and faculty was firmly on the race until a different noise shattered the normalcy. The blood-searing scream of a small child in pain. I was first over to the girls. I found the Green handle sticking out of the girls left eye, and her face coated with a slick, red-tinged fluid that reminded me of egg white. She was losing consciousness and fell into my arms. I cradled her, as my daughter hit me - over and over again - in the head and face, as hard as she could saying: “let go…Daddy LET GO, LET GO!”

So: expelled...Again. And by the grace of God, not locked up in a psycho-ward. Ethel spent the dreaded twelfth birthday home, locked in a room, reading Laughter: The Best Medicine and listening to my Cole Porter records. She was mad enough not to talk to ME for almost two whole months after the Lisa affair. Like I had shit to do with it. See how she was? Batshit crazy. Forever. What do you do?

***

That summer, she was in a car accident. A bad car accident. Ethel had asked to go drama camp. In fact, I think it was because of this camp we sent her too, that she actually ended up in showbiz. Most things she tried ended up shelved. As soon as she found out that there was actually work involved she quit. acting and singing though, she actually seemed to dig. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but I saw the camp as an important education for her. That was the lesson from a two week, two thousand dollar acting camp. Her singing was still just as shitty coming back after the camp, but at least she seemed to enjoy the experience.

She made friends fast in those years, nutty as she was. At the camp there was an eleven year old Korean girl named Kin. They hooked up fast and stayed tight throughout, although her mother and I only heard of this one by forcing impatient answers out of our daughter when we could catch her on the phone. Kin’s mom - she told us - wasn’t around and neither was her dad. Both her parents had been Korean, but Kin had been born and raised in China until her foster parent - A “tiger mom” of the very old school - moved to the US on a work visa. Kin had been here exactly fourteen days when the drama camp started.

Kin’s birthday was the Saturday after camp ended, but Ethel had asked to sleep over at her house that night and just stay right through the party. I met Kin’s foster mom at camp that afternoon and found her solid and sober, and when they pulled out of the driveway, I breathed a little sigh of relief. It had been a disastrous year, and next year loomed large and dark, with its new faces, new teacher, and harder class work. Meanwhile my precious daughter is getting more and more disconnected and surly. All of a sudden though, a taste of success. A new friend, and (we thought) enjoyable experience at a two-week, away from home, summer camp. Miraculous.

I got the call at 11:30pm that night and, I swear, I still think the police officer who called thought my daughter was dead. There had been an accident. An awful wreck between three cars. There were dead people: Ethel’s friend Kin, and her mother were gone. Ethel was at the hospital. I left the phone hanging there and broke speed limits for fourteen harrowing minutes. She greeted me at the ER entrance. Standing Up. Laughing.

There was rain that night, and they’d skidded into a sea wall. The little girl Kin had been thrown fifty-five feet and impaled on the rusty, decrepit post of an ancient chain-link. She was dead when the EMT’s arrived. Her mother had been halfway-decapitated by the impact, but she’d survived until they told her at the ER that her foster child was dead. After that she slipped away. “Blood loss,” they wrote on report. I remember that struck me as odd. Ethel had been belted in on the opposite side of the back seat from Jin. She said she was talking to Mrs. Yan after the crash before the rescue got there. She said Mrs. Yan kept asking about Kin. Ethel said she had seen Kin impaled on the pole:

I saw the pole…

She said later. Added:

It was inside her, Dad. I saw the fence inside my friend. And there was paint coming from her mouth, bright red. I know it was blood but it looked like paint. She went from the top of the pole all the way down. Her mom was asking me where she was. I kept saying “she’s there, right there, over there,” and when she hit the ground she was wiggling her feet. The pole was painted red, Daddy.

***

She didn’t go back to school on time. Officially because of “Traumatic episode effects,” but really, just because she knew she could stay home for as long as she pleased, and she pleased long. Before the accident, my daughter had “issues”. After the accident, the issues had her. The wreck was in August. School started in September. By the Thanksgiving break, she was already back home. It seemed the Catholic school that had agreed to take Ethel in had a case of what we in the used auto business like to call “buyer’s remorse.” Ethel had started school late in the term because of her “lingering traumatic stress.” She hadn’t been there three weeks before her “issues” struck again.

The victim was a sixth grader, an advanced placement student a full three weeks younger than my daughter. His name was Jesse. Jesse Smith. Jesse and my daughter had become fast friends in the days and weeks since she’d been at St. Mark’s. I’d always be a few minutes late for pick-up to avoid the rush at the carport, and invariably, I’d find Jesse and Ethel sitting alone in the little glass vestibule. She was always talking about how Jesse Smith was “the only one who really understands me.” The afternoon before their fight, I remember she’d told me that she’d probably marry Jesse one day, and that he‘d whisk her away from Grand Rapids. Lucky him.

They were lab partners. Three times a week they would get taught the laws, resolutions, and civic policies of our natural world. They would also - on occasion - be given assignments to perform experiments in the lab. The teacher - Terrance Leighton was his name - had picked this particular week to teach his sixth graders the nature and properties of H2 SO4, or - by its common name - Sulfuric Acid.

I’m not sure about the exact circumstances. For weeks following the accident I would meet, at the state police station in Providence, with the parents of the children who were there that day (and of course the children themselves). Needless to say, the accounts of the events of that day were as numerous and variegated as snowflakes. After twenty-five years though, it seems to me that the recollection of Jesse Smith himself was probably the most credible, even injured and incapacitated as he was in the aftermath. The story he told sounded more like Ethel than any of the rest.

Jesse said he’d been late to science class. That was the first problem Ethel had with him that day. He’d been in trouble with another teacher and had been sent to the office. By the time Science started he was still getting reamed out in there, and so he was ten minutes late for Leighton’s class. Ethel greeted him with what he described as a “punch even harder than my dad hits me.” Things went downhill from there.

The next day, When Jesse Smith arrived at Mr. Leighton’s 3rd period Science class (five minutes early) my daughter greeted him with a note:

Dear Jesse,

I hate you. My heart’s broken, and I never want to see you again. Even though I’m your lab partner. After today, I don’t ever want to see you again. I’m sorry.

Love,

Ethel Gumb

Jesse wasn’t amused, but he wasn’t afraid either. You see, he’d known Ethel long enough to realize that she was a bit extreme in her personality, and that the letter - ugly as it was - was probably just overreaction. He saw no threat (although looking back at the words, maybe he should have) in the letter. “If anything,” he’d admit later, “the note made me feel bad for her. After I read it I planned on being extra careful to try and make her happy. She seemed like she needed it”

Yes, I know. I found all this out during the police investigation. Since I was spending so much time at the cop shop, I was usually in the company of at least two officers, receiving the news at the same time they did. Jesse’s note was read by an investigator named Lu Bonham. He read loudly, and annunciated carefully. When he got to the part about my daughter needing happiness, the entire room’s attention shifted from him to me. I felt the weight of the stares wash over me like a giant black wave.

The kids ran their experiments and Ethel remained silent and cooperative for the entire thing. The task called for the donning of special gloves, and the portioning of the highly volatile acid into four separate beakers. After they’d finished that, Mr. Leighton cruised the room checking their work, smiling for some, and then shaking his head regrettably for others. Then it was time to burn. They took the acid in droppers and parceled out a few drips onto different material gauging the effects, and recording the results. First a section of two-by-four, then an apple, next was a pane of thin glass, and last - the grand finale - a thin square of tin. All of them, burned right through in short order. Only the glass was able to stand up for more than scant seconds. Ethel and Jesse finished before any of the other groups and Leighton dismissed them, provided the station was cleaned up and the acids disposed of.

Jesse had been the bookkeeper that day, and so he was absolved from the clean-up. He was almost out the door of the classroom when Ethel called to him: “Hey Jesse, hold on…Come back here.” He turned back, making for the table to help with the clean-up. Ethel - he must have seen - had all the acid back in the large beaker they had poured it from. As Jesse made his approach, Ethel grabbed the beaker casually in one hand. Jesse got to the table, and hung his backpack on the hook under the ceramic desk-top. He looked up at Ethel to ask what she wanted him to do. Ethel said:

Fuck you, Jesse Smith

And then she threw almost a pint of sulfuric acid into the boy’s face.

***

She was taken away from us for a while after that, and the Smiths had a lawyer. For weeks following the attack my world became strictly about damage control. I apologized, both written and spoken-word. I offered to have Ethel meet the Smiths in person; apologize to Jesse in the hospital (no interest - go figure). I called day and night to the house and the hospital room, offering platitudes and regrets and - underneath it all - begging for mercy for my hideous daughter. After three months Jesse Smith still couldn’t see. His face, basically erased by the acid bath, had to be reconstructed with tissue taken from his legs and ass. He lived in constant, searing pain and yet his body couldn’t so much as whisper a complaint. The acid had eaten through the maxillary bone and parietal plate, in effect removing the bottom half of his face. The doctors had to basically build him a new throat, again with his own tissue as the medium. He’d had a total of seventeen surgeries and he was looking at more. His blood pressure wouldn’t stabilize, and he’d had several major heart attacks.

The legal end of it was not pretty either. The threats and wrangling began quickly after the accident and lasted almost three years before the parties involved went their separate ways. Ethel was sentenced to twelve months in a psychiatric ward. “After which time,” the judge had pronounced, we will all meet back here and see what is what.”

We did, and we did. At least we thought we did. Ethel’s doctors reports were glowing right from the start. They seemed to know a girl I hadn’t spoken to in years. A girl who smiled and laughed a lot but, rarely at the expense of others. A helpful girl, with an amazing singing voice. An ARTIST. My visits reflected the same. After serving ten out of the twelve months, Ethel was released on a two month probation on the condition that if she fucked up again, she’d go away until she was fifty. Ethel praised the judges and thanked everybody involved, swearing up and down that she was reformed, and that she felt better, and was “herself” again. Her first act, upon leaving the Psychiatric wing at Wilshire Memorial and rejoining society was to change her name. Not legally, not at first, but she meant it. “JUDY now, Judy GARLAND” she’d instruct, and she’d keep reminding you until you complied.

***

Now she comes home for what will be the final three-month stretch. We do a sort of baby-proofing, getting rid of anything sharp and hiding - under lock and key - anything that could be made to produce fire. We put lock-guards on every free outlet, and took all shoelaces, twine, fishing line, and wire out of reach. Ethel / Judy comes with an instruction book this time, like a gold fish. Feed three times a day, no more no less…Stay in the bathroom with her while she goes…She must be in bed by such and such a time and get up exactly X hours later. Thorazine>Lithium>Valium>Temazapam. Lather, rinse, repeat…And for a while, it works. A month goes by, then another, and then - three weeks into a third episode-free month - bad luck leads to catharsis.

It was never my intention to have the paper delivered. Since - for the last few years -I’ve not been able to sit and read a newspaper for even a few minutes without courting certain disaster, I’ve taken to buying the thing while out on errands or even late at night. The wife, though, she’s on a different schedule. The promotion was this: The paper will deliver early am for three weeks, gratis. If, after this test-period, we feel we want to keep it up, then the paper will put us on the books and deliver forever more. The wife jumped at it.

Then she forgot it, and for two weeks the paper was delivered. The guy came, dropped it off, and left without saying a word. Fine. The third week, though, wasn’t fine. The third and last week of the newspaper promotion involved sending a man; in this case a gentleman named Arthur Quinn, out to interview the recipients of the paper and encourage continued patronage. Arthur Quinn came to our house at 8:30am ready to talk subscription. I was in the shower, Ethel / Judy answered the door.

When I think about this it always comes back to timing and coincidence. I shower every morning at the same time, just about 8:15. So that’s that. My daughter is usually in my room, watching Tom and Jerry during my shower. I stash her there to keep her from doing things like answering the phone, using appliances, or getting the door. To eliminate the door and phone risks, I usually just crank the volume on the cartoons to shut out any stimulus noise. Then I shower as fast as I can and blast out into the bedroom to make sure the kid hasn’t killed anything. All this was done as written on the morning of Arthur Quinn’s visit. The difference manifests exactly at the moment Arthur rang the bell to our house. At that very moment, the state of Michigan decided to test something called the Emergency Response System. In order to conduct the test, they interrupted all programming with a black screen, a series of ugly tones, and a period of silence exactly one minute in duration.

Mr. Quinn rang the door at about thirty seconds into the drill. Ethel / Judy bounded over to the door to get it.

We lived, in those days, in a tenement. Ours was the second floor, and accessed only by stairway. Tenements back then only featured the same type of stairway, which was very steep, and curved through an extreme angle to provide passage into the hallways on the floors. Judy opened the door to a man standing - for all intents and purposes - on a precipice of a seven foot drop into a steep staircase. He knocked, she opened, he asked if Mom or Dad was home, and Ethel doused him with Sterno (forgotten in the back of some kitchen drawer. Whoops! ). Quinn said “whaa?” and stared dumfounded, at his soaking clothes for seconds that seemed like minutes. Judy pulled out a Zippo lighter (hidden away - she told me later - since she was four years old for just such an occasion), flicked the top, and lit Arthur Quinn up like a roman candle. As he burned and screamed, she kicked him backwards down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, she came bounding down after, spraying more Sterno and laughing and crying. That’s how I found her. It took the firemen three hours to contain the blaze. Arthur Quinn was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, and the older couple - the Siravos - who’d lived above us for twenty-three years, were burned alive. They found their bones up there in the ashes, huddled together in a bathtub.

The next time I saw my daughter after that day was almost a decade later. She was staring in a MGM production called, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, with Mickey Rooney