My House of Pain: The Helen That Only I Knew

Outside that sacred kitchen, Helen's life moved with the same determined grace. Her house became a sanctuary where I could breathe when my mother's shadow loomed too dark and heavy. As a Hairdresser, she ran in an in-town shop—where all the magic happened—was where I'd watch, mesmerized, as she helped other women to highlight their features, to see beauty or make it more visible. "Beauty isn't about hiding yourself," she'd tell her clients, those women with tired eyes and hopeful smiles. "It's about revealing who you truly are." And I'd sit in the corner, pretending to read but actually drinking in every word, every technique, storing them away like precious fucking treasures I wasn't supposed to want.

Sometimes, when her clients had left and it was just us, she'd pat the chair in front of her. "Come here, William," she'd say, her voice soft as smoke. "Let me show you something." And she'd brush my hair back from my face with those slightly trembling fingers. "There," she'd whisper, meeting my eyes in the mirror. "Sometimes we need help seeing ourselves clearly." My heart would pound so hard I swore she must hear it, fear and recognition crashing together like storm waves, but her eyes never judged, never questioned. She just saw me—really saw me—when everyone else was looking at a child they thought they understood.

The day I helped her reorganize her bookshelf—those worn paperbacks with spines cracked from love—she handed me a volume of poetry. Her reading area had a high-backed corduroy chair worn with age. When I sat in it, I felt mighty and strong, and like nothing could hurt me. She would go to the shelf along the wall and pick off a handful of books so that I could go through them and put them back into proper order. Lasky's "JFK: The Man the Myth," Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," Capote's "In Cold Blood."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

She slammed "The New Joy of Words" into my shaking palms, the binding worn raw like an old wound. The fucking weight of it—solid as grief. When I pried it open, the spine cracked with resistance, releasing that intoxicating paper-and-glue perfume that crawled straight up my nostrils and nestled in my brain. "This one speaks to the spaces between things," she whispered, her voice thick with meaning that slithered just beyond my grasp, raising goosebumps down my arms. "For when you feel caught in-between."

The pages were scarred with her presence—coffee rings, dog-eared corners, and tear-warped margins that felt intimate as hell to touch. Later, alone in my dim-lit room, I discovered passages underlined in her delicate hand, feverishly marking definitions of words like "liminality," "chrysalis," and "threshold." Her pencil had pressed so hard in places it tore tiny valleys into the paper. These weren't just goddamn dictionary entries—they were brutal poetry about transformation and becoming that made my chest cavity throb with painful recognition. Each definition burned through me, igniting something primal and terrifying. My fingertips came away smudged with graphite and understanding, the taste of her revelation metallic on my tongue.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Her garden was another classroom where we'd kneel together in soil rich as devil's food cake, her hands showing mine how to nurture seedlings into strength. "Plants don't give a damn about expectations," she'd say, wiping sweat from her brow, leaving a streak of earth like warpaint. "They just grow toward what feeds them." She'd look at me sideways then, adding quietly, "People could learn a thing or two from that wisdom."

When my mother—that narcissistic abuser of my constant torment—would rage about my "sensitivity," my "strangeness," Helen would find me later, tucked into some corner of the house, shaking like a beaten dog. She'd sit beside me, not touching, just being there. "Some people are born with eyes that can't see certain colors," she'd say mysteriously. "Doesn't mean those colors aren't real."

The insulin that kept her alive became a normal part of our landscape, like the grandfather clock in the hallway or the faded afghan on the couch. She never hid it, never acted ashamed of this mechanical requirement. Every morning she would inject herself with it, and I’d sit in dismay. "Body needs what it needs," she'd shrug when I asked about it. "No sense in pretending otherwise." A lesson that would echo through my own life decades later when I finally stopped pretending too.

One sweltering summer afternoon, caught in the grip of a despair I couldn't name, I smashed a teacup against the wall, my rage and confusion spilling out like the tea splattered across her wallpaper. Instead of punishing me, Helen simply handed me a rag. "Clean it up," she said, not unkindly. "Then we'll talk." I was a very angry teenager. I was unable to control my feelings and emotions. I stayed constantly angry then, even more than I do now, but over things I didn't understand or grasp. When the mess was gone, she made fresh tea and said, "Now tell me what's really broken." And somehow I found words for feelings I was having, but I couldn't voice them right. She kissed me on the forehead and said, "You'll figure it out one day, then it'll be okay."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

When my mother caught me trying on Helen's scarves, draping them around my shoulders and swaying before the mirror, her disgust cut like a serrated knife. But Helen intervened, her voice mild as milk but unyielding as stone: "Let the child play, for the Mother’s sake. Imagination is how we try on different lives." Later, she slipped the scarf into my backpack with a wink. "Sometimes we keep our treasures hidden until the world is ready to see them."