House of Secrets by Lowell Cauffiel

she’d gone to her counselor and left home had little to do with her father hitting her. That morning, she said, she’d watched her father kiss her sisters Kimberly and Lana on the lips, saying goodbye before school.
    “I didn’t want to see the same thing happen to them that had happened to me,” she said. It became clear to Anne very little was normal in the Sexton household. Machelle often revealed anomalies in the middle of otherwise banal conversations, seemingly unaware of their impact.
    They seemed routine to Machelle, but sometimes made Anne’s heart pound.
     
    Conversations that went something like, “That’s a nice dress, Anne.”
     
    “I got it at Belden Village.”
     
    “I’ve never been there.”
     
    “You’ve never been to the mall?”
     
    “I’ve never been shopping. My mother bought my clothes.
     
    I told you, I never went anywhere.” The only time she was out of the house for any extended period was in the summer when her father took them on short camping trips. Or, “So, Machelle, what were your neighbors like?”
     
    “You don’t talk to neighbors. You get whupped for that.” The whuppin’s seemed to have a ritualistic quality, Anne learned. The children were required to go to her parents’ bedroom, remove their pants, and expose their naked bottoms. Her father would hit their thighs or buttocks. Her mother was usually there, watching.
     
    “Sometimes you got to pick out your own stick in the yard,” she said.
     
    The thick ones left bruises, she said, while the thin ones stung. She didn’t want bruises. Bruises kept you home from school “I loved school,” she said. “School meant I wasn’t at home.”
     
    “When did the whuppin’s stop?”
     
    “They didn’t.”
     
    “How often?”
     
    “Every day, more or less. Me, especially. I was the rebel of the family.” Or, “Machelle, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
     
    “Normal.” She apparently spent her teenage years researching exactly what normal entailed. It came slowly by reading and watching and listening, Machelle said. She read about “normal” people in romance paperbacks and novels in high school literature class. Restricted to the house, she took advantage of her only luxury at home, a 52-inch Mitsubishi TV. She could watch TV in the living room after school and after dinner if her chores were done. Normal families functioned in TV
    sitcoms like Fun House. Normal adults had fun in shows like Cheers.
    She regularly watched a program on Channel 4 called After School Specials. The show covered school and family life, relationships, friendships, sex and conflict. What behavior was appropriate, and what behavior was not. “A lot of people say TV is no good for kids,”
    Machelle would later say. “But the way I figure, television probably saved my life.” Anne wondered, didn’t other students suspect something was very wrong in her life? “I learned to fake it,” she said. She studied her classmates, she explained. She listened to what they said about friends and parents. She listened to them talk about the activities they did after school. She tracked the movies they saw and learned the names of stores inside Belden Village, what hits were selling in record stores. Then, in school chatter, she mimicked them, as if she’d done that, been there. The only dances Machelle attended were the ones held by her father. On Friday nights, he would gather all the boys and girls in the living room, turn on a rock station, and order them to dance, sometimes for hours. “He’d sit in his chair, just smoking a cigarette and watch,” she said. Or, he’d move the girls around, putting them up front where he would dictate the way they moved their torsos and their hips. There seemed to be two sets of rules.
    Some of the girls were restricted constantly, others allowed to have restaurant jobs. Boys had more leeway. They got to go places with their father and leave the house alone. Some participated