All That Is Bitter and Sweet by Ashley Judd Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t leave it there!”
    “Just go get it.”
    Finally I gave in and fetched the piece of paper. When I looked at it closely, my jaw dropped—it was a letter addressed to me from the fairies! Mom had made up a language for them, along with a hieroglyphic alphabet, which I had to translate. In my room alone, I read how they told me how hard it was to write, because the pen was so big and they had to stand on one another’s shoulders to hold it upright. I was enthralled. All I wanted to do for the rest of the school year was commune with the fairies. They helped me through some very rough and lonely days. I have no memories of friends from school, except playing one cold winter afternoon on an empty playground with a girl I didn’t know, discovering she was still there, too, because her parents were divorced and there was no one to pick her up on time. Fairies helped distract me from such painful disappointments and feelings of insecurity.
    When Mom was home from school, she would sometimes give me a dime or quarter to rub her feet while she worked on her nursing studies. I am sure we did some other things together, but those aren’t the memories that stuck. I learned to cook my own breakfast, and that expanded into another dimension of my autonomy in the household. I guess she needed me to be able to look after myself to a large degree.
    My mother and sister were beginning to fool around with singing, learning old mountain songs and discovering their uncanny harmonies. Berea is a mecca for traditional craftspeople, artists, writers, and musicians and home to an American treasure of a college whose mission is to educate Appalachians. My sister, who was by then in the sixth grade, flourished in the environment. Dad had given her his Gibson Classic guitar, and he had already taught her a few chords while we were at Camp Wig. Now she practiced on it constantly (as well as our baby grand piano), and Mom definitely recognized her incredible potential. But they were also starting to go at each other, and I found myself cringing on the sidelines of increasingly bitter fights that began to characterize life in our household.
    My sister would be banished to her room, which was above mine, and we would pass each other notes in a basket we rigged on a pulley system outside between our windows. Once she included a toenail that had fallen off in one of our basket emissaries, just to gross me out. It bothered me that Mom was so hard on her. It still seemed I was the only one who realized she was just a kid.
    While Mom was at school and Sister was off playing music or hustling games at the billiard parlor (she had become an accomplished little pool player), a hippie couple who lived down the hill used to let me hang out with them. One evening, they took me to town with them. While they were helping a friend do some remodeling on a storefront, they let me wander around, alone. An old man everyone knew beckoned me into a dark, empty corner of the business and offered me a quarter for the pinball machine at the pizza place if I’d sit on his lap. He opened his arms, I climbed up, and I was shocked when he suddenly cinched his arms around me, squeezing me and smothering my mouth with his, jabbing his tongue deep into my mouth. Somehow I twisted out of his grip and ran away.
    When I told the couple what he did, they didn’t believe me. “Oh, that’s not what happened, Ashley,” I was told. “He’s a nice man, and that’s not what he meant.”
    It never occurred to me to tell my mother, but I tried to tell Uncle Mark, my mother’s younger brother, who was visiting us from college. I adore Uncle Mark and always felt safe with him. He would hold a hand mirror for me after I bathed, so I could see myself to comb my hair, and he read to me every evening we spent together. When I returned home that night, Uncle Mark was sitting on the floor next to the stereo, listening to a record through headphones. I sat down slightly behind him,