Writer
(1942– )
I was a very shy girl and pretty much of a loner. My sister was six years older than I, so my pal was my cousin, who was a year and a half younger. She was more social than I was, so naturally she wanted to have other friends too. Whenever that happened, I would tell her that the other person was no good. I just didn’t want her to have other friends. I knew other kids, but I never really hung around with them or played with them. I was also very frightened of people. I think a lot of it had to do with my father, although it’s unclear how early things started with him. I think it may have started when I was about five years old and lasted until I was seventeen. I don’t know if I’ve told you. There was incest in my family between my father and me.
He would say that it was all about what he did for me, so that I could have a house and, you know, how hard he worked. Basically, he said, I owed him. If I got a gift or an ice cream cone or a bicycle, there was a payment to be made. That colored my whole life. My sense of reality was never really developed because he also told me that whatever was happening to me was not happening to me. I was told there’s nothing wrong with what he was doing, but yet don’t tell anyone because then they’ll think that I was crazy and then he would have to institutionalize me. You know, he was really demented. As you can imagine, I haven’t even talked about this in years, but it sure did color my trust of people and of being around people. I was afraid that someone would find out. I had this terrible secret that if I told I would be put away in an insane asylum. And that it would also kill my mother. I think that my mother knew, but she couldn’t deal with it.
So that was why I couldn’t be around other kids. And on some level, I didn’t know. Didn’t this happen in everybody’s house? I just didn’t know.
I didn’t even confide in my sister because my sister was, until the day she died, one of the meanest people on Earth. I actually didn’t tell anyone until I was nineteen. Now don’t laugh. I told my charm school teacher, after I had moved from the Bronx.
I was most happy in my imagination. I was happy on Saturdays when I went to the movies or when I was playing. You know, when I was in a whole other world. I can still picture the playground where there were these big concrete tunnels that you could climb into. God, I’m really remembering things I haven’t thought about. I used to run away a lot. I used to run into the playground and hide in the trees, or I’d hide in the tunnels, or I’d hide wherever I could. I would come home from school, change into my play clothes, and then not come home. They’d be calling for me all over the neighborhood, but I would be hiding. Sometimes I’d go to a neighbor’s apartment and nobody would know I was there. And the neighbor wouldn’t know that anyone was looking for me. I would kind of disappear. I think that I was just hiding from life.
My father died in 1974 of a rare disease at the age of fifty-eight. It seemed fitting that this was his fate. There was this big funeral for him in Paramus, New Jersey. He was well liked by mostly everyone, never having revealed his dark side. To them, he was a kind, friendly, benevolent person when, in truth—well, we know the truth.
At the graveside, the rabbi gave me something to read and I gave it back to him. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t grieve or cry or feel anything but relief.