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Soup is good for the soul.
My mother said that so often that you could almost forget that she was only saying it because it was all we had.
Our home was a small, three-room structure, hot in the summer, cold in the winter. But it was shelter. It was home.
I learned to read in that house.
I learned to write.
To speak the broken English my mother had learned from having heard when she was younger, back when she lived in a nicer area with better schools, with people from other countries who would happen by, accidentally sharing their culture.
I also learned some of the Russian my father knew from some of the laborers he worked odd jobs with, the sounds hard and guttural even to my uncultured ears.
"Fiule," my mother would say when I would repeat something I had heard my father say. "Those are not good words."
Apparently, most of my Russian consisted of curse words that my father used liberally since no one else could understand him, and my mother hated.
Things never seemed off to me until my fifth year, when my father found it harder and harder to find odd jobs in town to make an income.
What few animals we had for milk, eggs, and meat were sold off for other basic necessities.
The winters got leaner.
My skin hung over my bones like clothes on hangers, no buffering to stop the grotesque outline of my skeleton.
Those long winters, that was when my father became mean.
To me, sure, but I was no stranger to a beating when I misbehaved, or simply didn't do something exactly the way he wanted. It wasn't uncommon or strange.
But this was the first time I saw him raise his hands - fists - against my mother.
"Are you going into town today?" she would ask innocently enough while serving his meager breakfast, barely enough to keep any meat on his bones either. We were all wasting away. It was a question she used to ask every morning, seeing as he often had work in town.
But now, apparently, it was not the right thing to ask.
My mother and I learned this when his arm flew up, knocking the plate she was holding - something of her mother's, something of her comfortable life before that never knew hunger or cold, before she chose to follow her heart across the country - to the ground. Her gasp whooshed out of her frail body, her hand going to her chest, covering her heart as though in breaking the plate, she broke a piece of her heart as well.
"Don't ask me about my business!" he'd roared, shooting upward, backhanding her across the face hard enough to send her much smaller body flying through the room, crashing hard into a cabinet in the kitchen with a cry.
My father?
He just walked out.
As soon as he did, I flew across the room to her, my little heart in overdrive at her tears as she cradled her cheek.
And because I was little, because I didn't understand the depth of wrong that was using your strength against a woman, my words were enough to send another rush of tears down her face.
"You have to be good so you don't get hit."
After the first time, I guess it got easier and easier for him to raise his hands to her.
Hardly a night went by when I wasn't woken up by a crash, by crying, by screaming, by the roars of my father about how she needed to stop questioning him, stop wasting his money, stop eating so much of the meager meals we had to share, that he needed more for work.
Work he didn't have.
They became less frequent in summer, when the garden bloomed and bellies filled more, when the cold didn't settle into the bones quite so fully, when a few jobs could be found.
It was possibly the only time of the year, spring and summer, when I didn't see bruises marking my beautiful mother's face or arms or neck.
But as the weather changed, so did my father.
Every fall without fail.
And it wasn't until I was ten, when I had seen another man raise a hand to a woman, and felt this churning awfulness in my stomach at witnessing it, that I finally understood how wrong it was, that it wasn't the 'discipline' that my father bestowed upon me. It was different. It was wrong.
That night was the first time I tried to get between them, ending up bleeding in a corner for my effort.
And my mother got beaten worse than ever before as my father screamed about turning his son against him.
For the next six weeks, she couldn't move her left arm, kept it cradled to her chest. When my father wasn't home, she would use one of the scarves she kept over her hair as a makeshift sling, allowing her to move around more fully.
