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CHAPTER 3

Secret

I’m seven years old, talking to myself, because I’m scared, and because I’m the only person who listens to me.

—Andre Agassi, Open

On July 15, 1976, the rural farm town of Chowchilla, California, made national news. It was the next-to-last day of summer school and a school bus was ferrying children home from school when its driver slowed for a white van stopped in the street. Two masked gunmen jumped out of the van, boarded the bus, and then drove away with twenty-six children between the ages of five and fourteen, along with their bus driver, a man named Ed Ray. Guns trained on the children, the masked men drove the bus down into a nearby gully where the confused hostages were transferred to two windowless pitch-black vans. The children were driven around and around, with no explanation, for eleven hours. There was no food or water, and no bathrooms, yet no one panicked or became inconsolable. The children sat calmly—many in their own urine—and passed the time by singing, “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands.”

Deep into the night, the vans came to a stop. The masked gunmen ordered the children off the bus and down into a “hole,” which later only a few recognized to be an opening in the top of a moving truck that had been partially buried underground. Once inside, the children heard a heavy metal plate being dragged over the opening above, sealing the twenty-seven hostages within. Then came the sound of shoveling, and of dirt and stones raining down on the roof above. One hundred miles away, parents had long since noticed that the school bus had disappeared, and as the FBI and the media descended on Chowchilla, the twenty-six children and their bus driver were being buried alive.

A few kids cried and screamed, and the bus driver pleaded for the men to stop, but before long, all went mostly silent both inside and outside the truck. As it had been all along, the children’s behavior remained quiet and directed. The students and their bus driver made use of the mattresses, the few flashlights, and the bit of food left for them in the van. The older students looked after the younger ones, as the children mostly slept and sat in the dark and waited until far into the next day for what would come next. What came next was that, heavy with dirt, the roof of the moving truck began to collapse. Spurred into action by this immediate, life-threatening emergency, the driver and some older kids stacked the mattresses high, and they found a way to move the metal plate and dig their way out. The children expected to be shot when they emerged from the truck, but instead they stumbled into nothingness in the middle of nowhere.

After finding help, the children were taken to a nearby prison where they were given hamburgers, apple pie, and brief physical examinations. None of the students were shaking or screaming or falling apart, so the doctors declared that they were “all right.” Only two kids connected the word kidnapping to the experience they had just lived through. According to Lenore Terr, a psychiatrist who later worked closely with the families, “Nobody else in the group had known what to call it.”

***

That same summer on the East Coast, a six-year-old girl named Emily and her thirteen-year-old babysitter were spending a Sunday playing board games. Emily’s neighborhood was an orderly grid of tree-lined streets, where large, old homes were set back tastefully from the sidewalks, and sidewalks were set back tastefully from the street. It was a neighborhood where no one said no to anyone; that was not neighborly. And certainly no child said no to an adult; that was not polite. So when the red-faced man from down the block pounded on Emily’s front door while Emily’s parents and her twin brothers were at a baseball game, the babysitter flung the door wide. And when the man pushed past both girls and charged into the kitchen looking first for Emily’s father and then for something in the kitchen, both of them did their best to help.

Slurring his words, the man rifled through the cabinets demanding to know where the liquor was, yet Emily thought he was saying pickles. “Where are the pickles? I know your father has pickles! Where does your father keep his goddamn pickles?” the angry man yelled, more into the cabinets than at the uneasy girls shifting around nearby.

This was confusing. Pickles were kept in the refrigerator, not the cabinets. And it was Emily’s mom who pulled out the pickles for sandwiches, not her dad. Emily looked in the refrigerator but there were no pickles that day. She told the man this—over and over—but he went on searching for pickles in all the wrong places, knocking boxes of macaroni and crackers on the floor.

This did not make sense.

When the angry man left, Emily and her babysitter went back to their board game. They acted as if nothing had happened because nothing had happened that they could explain.

When Emily’s parents and the twins returned, the babysitter reported what she could, and now it was Emily’s mom who looked angry. Emily’s parents whispered forcefully to each other in the next room, using some words Emily did not understand. Her mom hissed the word “alcoholic.” Her dad said “fucking New Jersey blue laws.” The conversation ended with her mom saying in a strange tone: “Of course you’re his first stop when he runs out on a Sunday . . .”

All Emily could piece together was this: There was something wrong with Emily’s father, and some people—like their neighbor—might know about it.

***

Watching a man ransack your kitchen is surely not as terrifying as being snatched off your school bus at gunpoint. Yet as different as these two stories seem, both tell us something important about what many children—and even many adults—do when they are afraid: They tend to go on behaving as usual. This comes partly from a wish that life would go on behaving as usual, a wish that if we just keep acting normal then everything and everyone around us will go back to being normal, too. But this is also what our brains tell us to do.

Remember that when the amygdala detects a threat in the environment, it fires up a state of preparedness or a “readiness to behave.” What it means to behave, however, depends on the situation. Maybe we get ready for a fight, or maybe we get ready for flight. Yet because children are often outmatched by bigger, stronger, faster adults, fight and flight can feel like options they do not have. This leaves children feeling helpless and vulnerable and, in that case, the best thing may be to take it easy, to make no sudden moves. Go along to get along. Be quiet in every way.

If the amygdala is the “hub in the wheel of fear,” then the part of the brain called Broca’s area is the hub in the wheel of speech. It takes what we are seeing and hearing and feeling and puts it into words; then it signals the motor cortex to produce those words. Research on the brain shows that, for some people, when there is greater activity in the amygdala there is less activity in Broca’s area. In the face of terror, as the amygdala fires up, Broca’s area quiets down and so does the individual. This is likely the neurological basis for being scared speechless, and there is clearly adaptive value in not drawing attention to yourself—say, by shrieking and letting a nearby lion know you are hiding terrified in the bushes. This is probably why one boy who was on the school bus that day in Chowchilla reported later that he had simply been “too scared to cry.”

When the brain is overwhelmed with fright, the words do not come and cannot come, and this is especially true for experiences that are unusual or without familiar labels. From both Emily’s story and the children of Chowchilla, it seems clear that often children are not only too scared to cry; they are too confused to cry as well. Even when Broca’s area is active and ready to do its job, we cannot put experiences into words if we do not have the words to work with. Much of life is pattern recognition, as what we see links up with what we know. We call a banana a banana—and we know it is a fruit—because we learned that in preschool. A round orange object could be a different piece of fruit such as a tangerine, or it could be a basketball, depending on its size and on how it feels and smells. All day, every day, our ordinary moments link up with words and categories we already know. This is how we talk about what we see.

Sometimes, though, things happen and we do not have the words or categories to match them. We have experiences we cannot name, and naming can be especially difficult for children who have lived less of life and who have fewer labels at their disposal. In moments like these, children need others to help them articulate their reality. Otherwise, they are left with a sort of alexithymia, or the inability to put feelings and experiences into words. We are all alexithymic as infants—the root in fans means “not speaking”—and as we grow, we label our inner and outer world with help from those around. People in our lives say, “That’s a car!” or “You’re tired!” or “That hurt!” and we say, “Yes!” When complicated grown-up problems do not fit with the words that children have—when no one says, “That’s an alcoholic!”—they are left with the silent awareness that something important and frightening, yet unspeakable, has gone on.

In her graphic memoir, Fun Home, Alison Bechdel details a camping trip she went on when she was ten years old, a weekend that was part of her origin story. While her mother stayed home, Bechdel was accompanied by her brothers, her father, and a young man who was one of her father’s secret gay lovers. Also on this trip, Bechdel stumbled across pornography for the first time, held a gun for the first time, and saw a giant snake in a riverbed. Years later, she would find this diary entry from the trip: “Saw a snake. Had lunch.” The rest of it went unsaid for more than a decade. “My feeble language skills simply could not bear the weight of such a laden experience,” she rightly concluded about her ten-year-old self.

Just as the children of Chowchilla could not begin to understand where they were going when they were driving around in those vans, neither could Emily make sense of why a man would angrily search her kitchen for pickles. No one ever explained that the slurring man was saying “liquor”; nor did anyone know that Emily was so upset by the events of that day. The supernormal child may act as if she hardly notices anything wrong—and besides, she seems “all right.” Yet when we cannot connect what we see or hear to something we have seen or heard before, or when words simply will not do an experience justice—“Trauma mocks language,” says feminist scholar Leigh Gilmore, “and confronts it with its insufficiency”—we literally do not know how to think about it. The unlinkable is unthinkable, and all we can say to ourselves is, “There are no words. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know where to put that.” Where we put moments like these is off in a separate part of the mind. It is the part of the mind where the unformulated is kept apart until it, eventually, begins to feel like a secret.

***

Weekends at Emily’s house began normal enough. On Saturday mornings, she and her brothers lay on the carpet in front of cartoons and ate bowls of Cheerios as long as they could get away with it. Emily’s mother headed out on errands and Emily’s father cracked open a beer and headed out to the yard. A few hours and beer cans later, he would retreat inside and start pouring brown drinks out of a big glass jug. He stirred these drinks with his finger and then sucked his finger clean, as if he did not want to miss a drop.

When the glass jug came out, Emily’s father put on music in the living room and looked around for a dance partner. As the youngest and the only girl, Emily was always chosen. It made her feel special, the way her dad picked her up and spun her around, at least until he squeezed her wrists too hard or swung her dangerously close to the furniture. When Emily’s father started to draw the curtains and turn out the lights in the middle of the day, Emily’s brothers got squirmy and difficult, almost like they meant to pick fights with their father. This would result in shouting at best, or spanking at worst, so Emily took another approach: She scurried to the piano and played her father’s favorite song, “King of the Road.” Emily could not understand why her brothers never learned to play along.

If the glass jug went empty, the King of the Road took Emily with him when he drove to the store with the big red circles on its sign. Emily hated these trips because this was the only time she was ever left in a car by herself.

“Don’t leave me here, Daddy!” Emily pleaded as her father got out of the car in the parking lot. “I’m scared!”

Then a car door slam.

Emily crouched down on the plastic mat on the floorboard and kept herself busy, searching under the seats for stray pennies or half-eaten rolls of breath mints. Every so often, she looked up and out of the window, glancing anxiously at the door of the store. Like a dog spotting its owner, she perked up with relief and anticipation when she saw her dad walking her way, clutching a brown paper bag with a glass bottle peeking out. Sometimes Emily’s mother got her alone and asked if her father had stopped by the store with the red circles. Emily knew she was supposed to tell her mother the truth but she also knew she was not supposed to tell her father’s secrets. The red-circle store must be a secret because no one ever talked about what it was or explained why she was left alone in the car outside.

When Emily’s father brought home a brand-new bottle of the brown stuff, Emily and her brothers were in a bind. If they stayed inside, they risked doing something wrong and being within reach. If they went outside, they risked doing something wrong and being out of reach. Like the time they told their dad they were going to play at the cul-de-sac. On that day, as Emily and her brothers played with the other kids, they forgot all about their dad, and maybe they forgot all about the time, too, until in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek that stretched across several backyards, there was commotion. Some older kids from the neighborhood pedaled frantically toward the game and called out to Emily and her brothers:

“Your dad is looking for you!”

“He’s mad!”

“You’d better go home!”

“He’s got his belt off!”

At first, Emily stayed crouched behind the boxwoods where she was hiding, hoping this was either a horribly on-target joke or a ploy to get her out of her hiding spot. Then she crept out from behind the shrubs and saw the fear in the other kids’ eyes, and she and her brothers jumped on their bikes and pedaled standing up toward their house. As Emily strained against the hill up to her house, she heard one of the kids yell, “Your dad’s an alcoholic!”

That word again.

When they made it home, Emily and her brothers jumped off their bikes, abandoning them on their sides, wheels spinning, as they ran toward the front door. They were not supposed to leave their bikes out like that but the longer they delayed the worse it would be. When they rushed to their father, he pushed Emily and her brothers up the stairs into their parents’ bedroom. Then they were lying on the bed side by side, screaming as the leather belt cracked down on them hard. Emily had been whipped enough times to be very, very good at avoiding it, but as careful as she tried to be, sometimes she would make a mistake and get the belt anyway. Still, she had not made a mistake that day; her father had. She had told him she was going to the cul-de-sac and he did not remember, and that is what stung the worst. As psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, “At such a moment, it is not the physical pain which hurts the most, and this applies to adults as much as to punish children; it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”

Emily and her brothers spent the rest of the afternoon lying on the twin beds in the boys’ room, moping about their backsides and about the unreasonableness of it all. They would have liked to have gone back outside with the other kids they heard shrieking in fun, but they were too afraid to anger their father again, and too embarrassed to show their tearstained faces.

“Is Daddy an alcoholic?” asked Emily.

“That’s a bad word,” one of her brothers shot back. “You shouldn’t say that.”

It would be two decades before Emily would piece together in therapy that, yes, her father had been an alcoholic all along. Until that time, she had no real way of understanding why her family was the way it was, or why her shoulders came up around her ears at the sight of a man taking off his belt. Well into adulthood, that jingling, snapping sound made her shiver. So did the sound of liquid pouring, the way it went glub, glub, glub out of a bottle made of glass.

***

One in four children lives with an alcoholic. Alcoholism is the most common illness a child is likely to see a parent suffer from, though most of these children do not know quite what it is they are seeing. Part of the trouble is that it is difficult to recognize an illness if you do not know what the symptoms are. So here is the list, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition—commonly known as the DSM-5. An “alcohol use disorder”—the current medical term for alcoholism—is a pattern of use that meets two or more of the following criteria: often drinking more than was intended; unsuccessful efforts to cut down or quit drinking; spending a great deal of time obtaining, consuming, or recovering from alcohol; a strong desire or urge to drink; drinking that interferes with responsibilities at work or at home; interpersonal problems caused by drinking; giving up other activities to drink; using alcohol in dangerous situations such as driving; drinking continues despite health, occupational, or social problems caused by alcohol; tolerance to alcohol, or a need to drink more and more; withdrawal from alcohol, or physical discomfort when abstaining for long periods. To meet two or three of these criteria is to have a “mild” alcohol use disorder. Having four to five symptoms qualifies as a “moderate” case, and six or more symptoms suggests the disorder is “severe.”

Drinking and even problem drinking can seem too commonplace to have serious consequences, yet when considering the years of life lost to ill health, disability, or early death, alcoholism is the second most burdensome mental disorder in the developed world, topped only by depression. Problem drinkers are likely to suffer from an array of related health problems, to lose their jobs and their relationships, and even to die an early death. But make no mistake: Those hurt most by alcoholism are not the problem drinkers, they are the children of problem drinkers. While alcoholism can cut an adult’s life short, problem drinking in the home undermines child development from the start.

Children of alcoholics lead different lives than their friends, and they are likely to face multiple adversities at once. Mothers or fathers, or both, can be alcoholics, but because men are twice as likely to be problem drinkers as women, the most typical stressor children live with is violence, particularly directed toward the mother. An estimated 60 percent of domestic violence cases occur when a parent has been drinking, and 30 percent of child abuse cases involve a parent who is under the influence of alcohol. Even children who are never struck by a parent are still likely to be “hurt on the inside” in myriad ways. Compared with their peers, children of alcoholics are doubly at risk for verbal abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, mental illness in the home, parental separation or divorce, economic hardship, and having a family member in jail. Because mothers tend to be the primary caretakers of children in both intact and divorced families, some research suggests that life at home may be especially difficult if the mother is an alcoholic. When mothers drink, children are less likely to be fed and cared for in even the most basic ways. When fathers drink, some mothers attempt to buffer their children by protecting them from the consequences or simply by limiting their exposure.

Ironically, one of the ways families try to limit their children’s exposure to alcoholism is by not talking about it. When life feels very scary, parents, like their children, often go silent, too. They try to keep on behaving as usual as they hide their problems from friends and relatives, and even from themselves. In his memoir, Not My Father’s Son, actor Alan Cumming writes about how his family responded to his alcoholic father: “We never actually addressed what was really going on: that we were living with a tyrant, someone who, I believe now, was mentally ill. As our silence grew, so did our denial.” This is not unusual. According to educational materials from the Hazelden Foundation written especially for children, having a parent who is an alcoholic can be like having “an elephant in the living room”: “People have to go through the living room many times a day and you watch as they walk through it very . . . carefully . . . around . . . the . . . ELEPHANT. No one ever says anything about the ELEPHANT. They avoid the swinging trunk and just walk around it. Since no one ever talks about the ELEPHANT, you know that you’re not supposed to talk about it either. And you don’t.”

Lots of children, not just children of alcoholics, grow up with elephants in their lives: physical abuse, mental illness, neglect, poverty, sexual abuse, abandonment, divorce, domestic violence. Whatever it is, most children are too scared and too confused to talk about it—and besides, they notice that others would prefer they didn’t. Left alone with complicated grown-up problems, young minds draw their own conclusions about the world.

***

When the elephant came home from work in the evenings, he sat down in the living room and drank brown drink after brown drink. Emily liked to sit on the edges of the room, watching television from behind some drapes like a little mouse. The more Emily’s father drank, the more her brothers wrestled on the floor during commercials. “Pipe down!” yelled Emily’s father. “Go to bed!” he shouted when the family programming ended. “We’re hungry!” the twins demanded. “It’s not a school night! It’s summer!” they stalled. When the elephant got out of his chair and charged the boys, this was Emily’s cue to scurry off to bed.

From her room, Emily heard four-way shouting as bedtime came and went. Her brothers hurled refusals and challenges. Her mother pleaded for her father to let her handle the boys, or maybe even for him to stop drinking and go to bed himself. Many times, this worked. Sometimes, it did not. On this particular night, Emily heard the noises of a fight turning physical. Grunts and slaps. Boys crying. Her mother shrieking. As annoyed as she was afraid, Emily got out of bed and walked toward the noise, ready to perform. Upon entering the living room, she saw one brother standing on a chair with her mother blocking the way to him, fending off her husband by sticking out both arms and a leg. Her father leaned in toward mother and son, leading with his elbow, the back of his hand ready to follow with a good smack. From her father’s other hand, the other twin was hanging heavy, dangling by his arm held hard and fast in his father’s too-tight grip. Emily could see red finger marks where the brother had twisted and struggled and gained an inch or two.

When parents lose control, some children try to be heroes by taking charge themselves. Older children may try to reason with their parents, while the younger ones shift the focus to their own silly or bad behavior, as Emily’s brothers did; or, like Emily, they distract their parents with seemingly innocent misdirection. Pretending to be half asleep and much confused, Emily asked for some juice and the action stopped. Her father dropped one brother and backed away from the other, and then he stomped upstairs and slammed his bedroom door. Emily’s mom sent the brothers to bed. She poured Emily something to drink and sent her back to bed, too. When Emily heard her mother turn off the television, Emily turned toward the task of falling asleep. Asking for juice was an old trick.

The next morning, the twins had bruises and marks on their arms, so Emily was sent to swim team practice without them. She pedaled her bike down to the neighborhood pool and thought about what to say to her coach, wondering if he already knew her brothers were not coming, if maybe he knew about the night before. She disliked the idea that people might be whispering about her family but she also imagined—or perhaps wished—that the adults talked about her more than they did. The way the grown-ups always had details worked out in advance about car pools and swim schedules and block parties, Emily pictured organized community meetings, ones where the adults got together and sat in rows of chairs and talked thoughtfully about the kids. If not that, maybe at least there was a phone tree.

This was all but proven that summer day. Emily swam laps, same as always, but her team must have been moving slowly because the coach gave them all a loud talking-to. Emily hung on to the concrete lip at the end of the swim lane and pressed the balls of her feet into the smooth tile wall as she listened to her coach yell to the group, “Stop thinking about everything and your brother and get your head in the pool!” Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott suggests that, as children try to make sense of the world, one way this process goes wrong is through coincidences, as coincidences “lead to muddle.” The coach’s words that morning were one of those unlucky coincidences that fed a false worldview. To Emily, his words were meant just for her, and they felt like code. We all know what goes on at your house. No one is going to talk about it. No one is going to do anything about it. Shut up and swim, he was saying. This is your lot.

***

Emily did shut up and swim. In the years that followed, she swam her way to out-of-town swim meets on the weekend and then to a college far away from New Jersey. When faced with the college application prompt, “Describe a challenge you have overcome,” seventeen-year-old Emily had trouble thinking of one. She felt blank. Finally, she wrote about a state swim meet when she won a blue ribbon despite being quite ill. Not for a moment did Emily consider writing about her father’s alcoholism, probably because she still did not have a word for what had been wrong with her father; nor did she know that what she had lived through was a bona fide adversity. In retrospect, though, Emily doubts she would have written about her father’s drinking had she been able to. Alcoholism seemed a seedier challenge than what colleges were really looking for, she thought, and it was one for which, in her family, there had been no uplifting blue-ribbon triumph, the kind that everyone seemed to want.

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung said in his autobiography about his own secrets around growing up depressed and with a depressed mother, “It would never have occurred to me to speak of my experience openly,” and so it was for Emily. Never once did Emily talk about her father’s drinking with her friends at school, and not a single time did she mention it to her boyfriends, or even to a man she lived with for more than two years in her twenties. This was more automatic than it was intentional, as she almost never thought about her father’s drinking, either. Her early experiences were there in her mind somewhere, though, and they influenced her. Such as when she noticed that one of the men she had dated smelled like her father—or more accurately, like whiskey; Emily did not date him for long. And when she opted to spend holidays at other people’s houses, rather than return to her own. Once, when Emily brought her partner to meet her family, she reflexively found reasons for the two to stay with a friend across town, only once joining up with Emily’s father, and for breakfast at that. Emily does not remember consciously deciding to stay away from her father, or plotting to meet him early in the morning before he would have started drinking. She had tiptoed around the elephant both in her living room and in her own mind for so long that, by adulthood, so much about Emily’s life and about her decision making still simply, and literally, went without saying. Talking about her father’s drinking just “never crossed my mind,” Emily said.

This is how secrets—and those who keep them—can be quite misunderstood. Skeletons in the closet. The dirt swept under the rug. Where the bodies are buried. We think of skeletons and dirt and bodies as information we willfully, tactically hide from others, when sometimes, and maybe even usually, secrets are automatic and multidetermined. Fear leaves us speechless. The lack of labels and categories leaves us without words. Those around us hint, or insist, that some things are better left unsaid. Supernormals rarely set out to fool others, and in retrospect they often realize there was a great deal that they kept not only from other people but even from themselves. Dostoevsky makes this distinction when he says, “Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.” The problem is that having many such things stored away in your mind may not feel all that decent, and it can produce a vague, unshakable sense not just that one has secrets but that one is living a lie.

Journalist Charles Blow recalls this feeling of lying in his memoir, when he reveals how he managed to go on behaving as usual in his home after he was sexually abused by a relative: “I had to resort to the most useful and dangerous lesson a damaged child ever learns—how to lie to himself . . . There is nowhere to hide in a small house. I had to make room within the rooms, a safe place midway in the mind, behind seeing and before knowing . . . That’s what people in this town and in our family did with secrets. No matter what it was—not a word. No good could come from giving voice to vice.” Blow could not be safe in his house, so he survived by finding a place in his mind where he was safe from the knowledge of what had happened to him. He says he learned to “lie to himself” but really what he articulates so beautifully is the muddle that exists, for children and for adults, as secrets and lies and not knowing become all jumbled up.

***

Back in California in 1976, the children from the bus kidnapping returned to school that autumn, and the majority showed not a dent in their academic performance. Unbeknownst to others, however, many began to fantasize about being heroes or, to be more exact, about being better heroes next time. They imagined scenarios of revenge or escape should they ever be confronted by kidnappers again. Some secretly prepared themselves, with exercise or even weaponry, to be more decisively triumphant in the future—that is, to summon the fight or flight they had not been able to muster right away on that summer day. Although inwardly, many of the children would view the kidnapping as the origin story of their lives, outwardly they preferred not to be reminded of or known for the incident. Later that year, one of the boys was recognized at Disneyland, and some curious parkgoers asked if he was a student from the bus. His reply?

“No, I don’t live in Chowchilla.”