The Axeman's Jazz

kids. Beating wasn’t all either. They treated you like dirt. If you were a kid, you were nothing. They’d say, ‘Wash the dishes,’ and you had to—for twenty-five people—or they’d beat you again. You had to do anything they told you.”
    She sobbed, getting more and more into herself as a kid out of Dickens, while Skip mentally compared her story with her mother’s. They were different, but not wildly different, about what you might expect from a mom who needed to believe she’d done the best for her kid and a kid who felt abused. It was curious, though, that Di hadn’t mentioned the sister. Surely her suicide must have been one of the traumatic events of Di’s life. Why was she leaving it out?
    “So that was my first experience with betrayal; there was my dad’s first, then my mother’s. I had to accept the loss of my parents, realize that neither of them really loved me. Maybe they thought they did, but they didn’t. They were always telling me to be a big girl, to act like a big girl, not to cry because big girls didn’t cry. They never let me be myself and never asked who I really was. They just wanted me to be what they wanted, a big girl who didn’t cry even when she got deserted by her parents and beaten by strangers. That’s why I’m so grateful for this group and so glad to be able to cry now.”
    Skip wrote down “grateful” and put a one beside it. She’d decided to count how many people expressed their gratitude before the meeting was over; she also wrote “stuffing feelings,” “inner rhythms,” and “higher power.” There was an art to sharing, she was beginning to see, and it had to do with using the correct terms.
    “I’ve read that true adults can’t be betrayed. That they pay attention to their feelings rather than stuffing them.” Here Skip gave the proper term a one. “That they can catch on to what’s happening early, that they protect themselves, take care of themselves, don’t let people take advantage of them.”
    Was she ever going to shut her face? Even one or two of the regulars began restlessly to cross and uncross their legs.
    “But maybe in some ways we never grow up. I was betrayed recently—lost my innocence a second time. And it was as if my kid was in control—the adult me didn’t know what to do, couldn’t stop it.”
    Skip perked up. Undoubtedly this would be a story of a love affair gone wrong, possibly with someone in the room. And then if they were lucky, maybe that person would “share” his side. She didn’t know how much closer this got them to catching a murderer, but it was a diversion.
    “I had breast cancer,” said Di, “and I came through it just fine. The irony of it was that my real ordeal started after my recovery. For the next six months I kept finding fibroid lumps in my other breast, and it scared me to death every time.”
    Some of the men in the room paled.
    “Finally it came time for my reconstruction, and the doctors all agreed that with my history the best thing was this operation in which they amputate the other breast and start from scratch.”
    Skip heard several gasps.
    “They build you two whole new breasts out of tissue from your abdomen. My plastic surgeon said it was really great because you got a tummy tuck along with your reconstruction. But he didn’t tell me I was going to have a hideous scar. That was the first thing.
    “The second thing was, I noticed I couldn’t get out of bed without drawing my knees all the way up to my chin. The first time I went to the doctor, he looked at my breasts and said, ‘Those are the prettiest ones I’ve ever done.’ I said I didn’t seem to have any muscle tone in my stomach anymore, and he said, ‘Well, of course not, dear. You don’t have any muscles.’ And then he picked up one of my breasts, almost fondling it, and said to his nurse, ‘Didn’t I do a beautiful job?’
    “I said, ‘What do you mean, I don’t have any muscles?’ and he said, ‘Well, I cut your muscles when I did the surgery. Now you’ve got a flat tummy and you’ll never have to do sit-ups again.’ Then he laughed. And he said, ‘You can’t do sit-ups again. But you’ve got one of the prettiest pairs of tits in the parish.’ “ She stopped and sobbed into a tissue. Then she said, just to make sure everyone got it, “He treated my body like a piece of sculpture he was working on!”
    “Then great big ugly lumps popped out on my stomach. Fist-sized lumps. Several of