It’s spring, 1959, I begin. Glenn Murmelstein has a large worm in a Dixie cup. I stand near him at the “middle entrance”—a chained-off circle of grass in a sea of parking lot asphalt. We’re in front of the cooperative apartment complex where I lived for the first six-and-a-half years of my life—and as Glenn removes his hand, I see a pale, pink earthworm, its thick body squirming. Frightened, my heart races; I gasp, then run from the grassy circle across the parking lot. Upstairs, hanging out the second-floor window, the crazy lady is laughing again. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”—loud slapping sounds that smack the air as I run to the fort at the other end of the complex. My heart hurts. I find my place behind the boulder, the part of the fort my friends and I have dubbed “Freedom Rock.” Only when my back is against its cold stone face can I relax. No worm. No Glenn. Branches above shake in light wind; the ground is soft, damp. I fight back tears. I am Rachel, I tell myself, digging my fingers into the soil. I am a girl; soon I will be six years old, and “six” sounds like “sick.”
k
I stop writing, lift my head from the computer and realize that this early memory is connected to Dennis and that memories of him began to haunt me about ten years ago—the same time that my niece Hannah was hospitalized for anal bleeding, and my mom and I had a big fight.
At first, the memories were wordless, shadow-like specters that followed me both day and night. When the specters became most threatening, I’d often be upstairs, making love to Nick, husband of thirty-something years by then. He’d touched my mouth, outlining the shape of it with his hand. Round and round his finger circled. My eyes would be closed. I’d feel the suggestion of how he wanted me and turn away from him, his large hand resting on my naked hip. He’d move his face to my neck, his warm breath, a whisper. I’d turn toward him; we’d kiss, our arms around each other. I am not me, I’d think. And only then could I relax, feel desire open me.
How can I tell this story? Complicated by gaps of memory, half-remembered images, years of denial, secrets, regrets, I can’t piece it together, stitch across the holes.
I minimize the screen, opening another file, one with the notes for my pre-plotted novel. I read them over and try to engage. Do I really want to write this novel? I get up from my desk, decide to take a shower, dress, see what the day brings.
By noon, though, I still haven’t left the house. Dressed and ready, I’ve had nowhere to go. I decide to have some coffee and try to work again. I walk to the kitchen, rinse a cup, and pour the last coffee from the Chemex, our glass, low-tech pot, purchased last year. I wash the pot and turn it upside down in the drainboard.
But instead of going upstairs to my computer, I sit down with my coffee at the kitchen table to gather my thoughts.
Grocery shopping—yes, I could go to Food Lion. We need milk and bread. No, not we, I. But maybe I should go to the campus gym. Or to my school office to answer emails and fill book orders for Cape Fear Editions, the small literary press Nick and I run.
Or I could check in with Amanda, my assistant director at the university Writing Center—where I serve as director—and although I don’t officially work during the summer, I often check in, see how the center is doing. But then I remember it’s Saturday. Amanda won’t be in, and the Writing Center is closed. Maybe I’ll just do some press stuff and clean my office, purging it of the year’s accumulations.
But for now, I sip the coffee, cold and bitter but satisfying. Then a wave of something washes over me—sadness, vulnerability, and I feel six again. No, younger—three or four.
This feeling connects now—as it always does—to a specific scene: the bedroom I shared with my brother in Dunhurst, Queens. I stand up from the kitchen table, refuse the memory. “No, thank you,” I say, but then sit back down. The memory insists.
I’m there again. In Queens. In my apartment, in bed. I pull my pink winter quilt with its fresh white duvet cover up to my chin, then over my head, where it’s dark and warm. The quilt smells of mothballs, and the duvet cover smells of lemon-scented detergent. The smells mingle as I breathe now, inhaling the odors in my Fayetteville kitchen.
My bed is in one corner of the room, and my brother’s bed is in the other so that they’re parallel. Parallel. It’s a word I’d just learned. I like it. I understand how two lines could travel near each other but never touch. When I’d asked my mother to spell it for me, I was thrilled to learn that the word all is hidden inside.
I hear my brother toss and turn. This is his signal to me that he’s awake. When I lift my face from beneath the covers, the room is dark, but I can see shadows. My face is cool in the air and unprotected.
Dennis, I can feel, is looking at me, seeing what’s available, and calculating. He’s seven, smart, a sophisticated planner. I’m a dreamer; I take what comes. Dennis is swift; I’m slow. He schemes; I contemplate. Dennis has motives; I trust. He’s complicated; I’m naïve.
When Dennis stands over my bed, he cradles my face with his hands. “Sleep,” he whispers.
k
Back from memory now, I’m still in the kitchen, sitting on one of the two padded swivel office chairs that flank the table. We bought them so that Nick and I could correct papers at the large table. Jake, who has come to keep me company, naps on the cool floor tiles as I remember an adolescent poem I wrote during the year I had mono. My fever had spiked, and I’d awakened around 3:00 in the morning. I walked from my bedroom—we had moved from our Queens apartment to our suburban home in South Shelburne, Long Island—to the kitchen, where the bay window overlooked Meadowbrook Pond, a small man-made lake that served to drain the area swampland. Wetlands, it’s now called, and the creation of a lake like this one would not be permitted.
Looking into the pond, I felt ashamed. I remember how the waters reflected a bright half-moon, how some of the houses had outdoor lights on, how they formed a necklace of star-points rimming the shoreline.
Shame. Why? I’d felt my shame as a piercing needle, a sharp singular stab, making me wince. Sometimes I feel this now, when I make small mistakes in class, misplace my cell phone, or lose door keys. A piercing, self-inflicted stab.
Shame. When I had gotten sick after leading the junior high school walkout, I wasn’t there to see that the reforms we’d insisted on were implemented. “Demands,” we called them. After the walkout, Eugene and I were invited to the principal’s office every day for lunch and a discussion. Eugene wanted Martin Luther King’s portrait hung in the library, on the wall above the checkout desk. I wanted girls to be allowed to wear pants to school. We were required to wear skirts, and in the New York winters, we froze in our stylish mini-skirts and knee socks. Also, I wanted students to be permitted to talk as they made their way down the hallways between classes. No more silence in the halls or cafeteria.
But after I became sick, I fell out of the loop, and felt guilty for not being there. And it wasn’t until I returned to school for those last few weeks that I learned that the principal had met all our demands. Girls I’d never known—now wearing their jeans and bellbottoms—would stop me in the cafeteria or between classes to thank me. I’d become a hero.
But during my time at home, sick with mono, I’d felt ashamed. I berated myself for falling ill, for trying to lead, for having the audacity to think that I could accomplish something. I’d felt like my body had found me out, betrayed me.
That morning, in darkness, when I’d been looking out across Meadowbrook Pond, a poem had come—words tumbling forward, insistent. Back then, I didn’t revise. Poems, words, ideas came to me like gifts, and I thought they should be written as they had arrived.
I repeat the poem to myself now, at the kitchen table:
Hating the ways of me,
breeding disease in the seas of sorrow,
I turn and lines of destruction
appear on my face—
a place of hate,
a place of hate.
Not really a poem, I think. More a mantra of self-loathing. Yet as I speak it aloud, it surprises me. The words feel so good and right that I repeat them again and again.