The Burned Girl

Mar 27, 2026

*My January submission for a quarterly arts ‘zine published regionally. Will they use it? Only time will tell. It will come out in April, or May? Fingers x’ed.

As a kid, I spent five consecutive summer fortnights at a sleepover camp called Skanatati outside Sherburne, N.Y. During two of those years, there was, in another unit, a girl who was badly burned, missing parts of several fingers on her right and left hands, as well as being heavily scarred up her left arm and on that side of her face and neck; her left ear lobe was gone; her left leg, visible in shorts, was also marked. 

It was hard not to stare, even when we’d been asked and told not to; we were kids, 6 to 12-year-olds, grade and middle-schoolers. She was used to the scrutiny, you could tell, steadily staring anyone down who looked for too long, closely surrounded at all times by other girls her age from their mutual home town. They knew her story, which I never learned. 

Once, however, we were each standing on two separate lines facing one another. A game? An outing? I can’t recall. We looked at one another long and hard; I couldn’t look away, wondering what had happened to her, as all of us did, I suppose. But neither could she stop looking at me; we were trapped by one another’s gaze. Her steady scrutiny didn’t embarrass or shame me; it mostly served to show her strength, or so I thought and felt at the time. I don’t know what she saw, staring at me. Someone without scars, I suppose. 

Her eyes were brown, and, looking at her in that moment, I saw a house engulfed in flame, a bedroom on fire. I heard her screams, and those of her family, heard too the windows shatter, humans trying to escape, felt the rush of air, wondering when help would arrive, wondering too would she, would they, survive this, and these terrible burns? Does overwhelming physical pain block out and override normal thought? It must.   

I also remember thinking that she had evidence, real visual evidence of what had happened to her, in the myriad scars covering so much of her body. I thought, then and now, that in a way she was lucky; I wondered, then and now, what it must be like to have proof, proof of fire or anything else that might leave a mark.  

I can’t remember the first time my mother told me I had ruined her life by being born, but we were living in the Church St. house, which means that it was when I was 6 or 7 years-old, a year or two before I was sent off to camp. We moved away the summer I turned 8. But I already knew that my mother didn’t like me; it was the bedeviling puzzle of my daily existence. But anyway, she was wrong; I didn’t ruin her life, I merely came along at a time when she had other plans, plans that included returning to work, to life, to having her own money – not bottle-feeding a newborn while recovering from yet another surgery. 

My arrival destroyed her hope, which is a kind of ruination, because a new baby and 3rd C-section in 4 years knocked her out of the future she’d envisioned literally, logistically, and figuratively. Figuratively? Yes, because during her pregnancy and after my birth she saw no future life for herself as she had imagined it. That dream was dead, buried amidst an endless cycle of mind-numbing household chores and a body that had, time and again, betrayed her. 

Her doctors instructed her not to have another child, or at least to not risk it for 3-years at the very least, but she fell pregnant again the following March, when I was 8-months old. She was 32, a good, obedient Catholic; practicing or using any form of birth control was out of the question whatever her personal desires might have been. Tracking her cycle? Cold-shouldering my dad? Don’t make me laugh.   

Her much-adored husband worked 7 days a week, volunteering at the local hospital several nights as well, filling prescriptions; they were both ‘life members’ of the small rural hospital in town; this sacrifice on both their parts was a way to pitch in, do good, be upstanding. Left alone with their children for hours at a time, she was exhausted, played-out, bored, and terribly lonely. She began to bake and eat entire layer cakes between the time we were put to bed and my father’s arrival home. She looked around, seeking a target for her rage and grief. She found one close at hand.

A scapegoat is a person who is blamed for the wrong-doings, mistakes or faults of others, especially for reasons of expediency. But what does it require, the effort of passing blame and burden while trying to break another human being? Physical harm is good, but she wasn’t a physical person, not really, and bruises give the game away. Her husband was also tenderhearted, very much so. 

Typical of my ability to enrage her, the last time she swatted me as a young child I refused to cry, ‘What is wrong with you? Why are you not crying?’ I told her that I had decided never to cry again when she hit me. Her face turned a deeper shade of red. She was sweating in the tiny bedroom I shared with my younger sister. Defiant children – especially defiant girls – get locked away; the last time she threatened to institutionalize me I was 16. That day it was because I simply would not stop behaving like an unruly, willful adolescent, which is exactly what I was, along with many other qualities, good and bad.  

My refusal to bend or break throughout my childhood, or at the very least to conform to her outdated 19th century expectations, was yet another reason for her to rail against ‘your child’, as she named me to my father, ‘not mine’. Making me his was another piece of the puzzle that was our relationship and the complicated, brilliant, deeply neurotic woman that was my mother. 

She could be quick, like a black bear, her heavy hand lashing out ‘whap!’ But mostly it was her words that scarred me; language was her calling and chosen art form, and with well-aimed words she tried to twist, intimidate, and scare me; she tried to make me small. I was her cross to bear, sharper than a serpent’s tooth, the ruination of her life, the greatest mistake she’d ever made, and her biggest regret. 

About the same age she first began to tell me that I had ruined her life, she said that one day I would replace her, marrying my father, becoming his 2nd wife. She knew that, like her mother, she would die young. My father already, she insisted, loved me more than he did her, me and my perfect nose, my blue eyes, my sense of humor just like his. Finally, when I was thirteen, I said to her in response to this bat-shit crazy nonsense, ‘Mom, I don’t think that’s legal in New York. Maybe Alabama?’ Speaking of fire, I could practically see the hot air streaming out of her ears at that one. She stormed out of the room. How dare I interrupt whatever the hell that was, her fugue state of looney. 

My father told me to ignore her, to spend more time in my room. He could joke her out of it; I could not. Don’t poke the bear. But how could I not? I love poking bears. On his death bed, he apologized for not doing more to protect me from my mother. Too little, too late. But not nothing. She’d been dead 3 years by then. Dead but not missed, not by me at any rate. Putting her into an institution – a nursing home – at the end of her life was a deliciously painful and perfect irony for which I am thankful, even if the entire process almost killed me. The universe has such a strange sense of timing, and humor, don’t you think? For me, at least. 

When I was in my twenties, my mother called me in NYC one morning from her hairdresser’s. They were discussing the book Mommy Dearest, which had just come out in trade paperback form, and of course her hairdresser ate it up, reporting out to my mother. She wanted my assurances that I would never write about her, betray her and our family, revealing a level of self-awareness I had not thought she possessed. 

I don’t even own a typewriter, mom, but I won’t promise not to write about you. Leave me alone.

I hung up, returning to my day. 

My mother gave me language, a love of words and literature – gifts for which I am eternally grateful. I also inherited her love of reading, and learning. But I survived her largely because I inherited my father’s sense of humor, which has saved me more than once. It helped me make light of the invisible, palpable scars she burned into me.