The Perks of Being a Wallflower

memory, which I guess is the first time I was aware that I was alive. My mom and my Aunt Helen took me to the zoo. I think I was three. I don’t remember that part. Anyway, we were watching these two cows. A mother cow and its baby calf. And they didn’t have a lot of room to walk around. Anyway, the baby calf was standing right underneath its mother, just kind of walking around, and the mother cow took a “dump” on the baby calf’s head. I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen in the whole world, and I laughed about it for three hours. At first, my mom and Aunt Helen kind of laughed, too, because they were happy that I was laughing. Supposedly, I didn’t talk hardly at all when I was a little kid, and whenever I seemed normal, they were happy. But into the third hour, they were trying to make me stop laughing, but it only made me laugh harder. I don’t think it was really three hours, but it seemed like a long time. I still think about it every now and then. It seems like a rather “auspicious” beginning.
    After hugs and handshakes, we went into my grandma’s house, and the whole dad-side-of-the-family was there. Great Uncle Phil with his fake teeth and my aunt Rebecca, who is my dad’s sister. Mom told us that Aunt Rebecca just got divorced again, so we shouldn’t mention anything. All I could think about was the cookies, but Grandma didn’t make them this year because of her bad hip.
    We all sat down and watched television instead, and my cousins and my brother talked about football. And my Great Uncle Phil drank. And we ate dinner. And I had to sit at the little kids’ table because there are more cousins on my dad’s side of the family.
    Little kids talk about the strangest things. They really do.
    After dinner is when we watched It’s a Wonderful Life, and I started feeling more and more sad. As I was walking up the stairs to my dad’s old room, and I was looking at the old photographs, I started thinking that there was a time when these weren’t memories. That someone actually took that photograph, and the people in the photograph had just eaten lunch or something.
    My grandma’s first husband died in Korea. My dad and my aunt Rebecca were very young. And my grandma moved with her two kids to live with her brother, my great uncle Phil.
    Finally, after a few years, my grandma was feeling very sad because she had these two little kids, and she was tired from waitressing all the time. So, one day, she was working at this diner where she worked, and this truck driver asked her on a date. My grandma was very very pretty in that old photograph kind of way. They dated for a while. And finally they got married. He turned out to be a terrible person. He hit my dad all the time. And he hit my aunt Rebecca all the time. And he really hit my grandma. All the time. And my grandma really couldn’t do anything about it, I guess, because it went on for seven years.
    It ended finally when my great uncle Phil saw bruises on my aunt Rebecca and finally got the truth out of my grandma. Then, he got a few of his friends together from the factory. And they found my grandma’s second husband in a bar. And they beat him up really bad. My great uncle Phil loves to tell the story when my grandma isn’t around. The story keeps changing, but the main point is still the same. The guy died four days later in the hospital.
    I still don’t know how my great uncle Phil missed going to jail for doing what he did. I asked my dad once, and he said that the people that lived around his neighborhood understood that some things had nothing to do with the police. He said that if someone touched your sister or your mother, they paid the price, and everyone looked the other way.
    It’s just too bad that it went on for seven years because my aunt Rebecca went through the same kind of husbands. My aunt Rebecca had it different, though, because neighborhoods change. My great uncle Phil was too old, and my dad left his hometown. She had to get restraining orders instead.
    I think about what my three cousins, who are Aunt Rebecca’s children, will turn out like. One girl and two boys. I get sad, too, because I think that the one girl will probably end up like my aunt Rebecca, and the one boy will probably end up like his dad. The other boy might end up like my dad because he can really play sports, and he had a different dad than his brother or sister. My dad talks to him a lot and teaches him how to throw and hit a