Bethesda, Maryland: 1951-1953
In Washington, D.C., we lived in a two-family house on Southern Avenue. Now, when I am five, we move into a ranch house on Kingswood Road in the suburbs. How proud my parents are of their brand-new home, the first they’ve ever purchased. How beautiful are the hardwood floors with Oriental rugs from Israel. My father tells me what a lucky little girl I am, with my own private bedroom, the windows high, close to the ceiling, so no one can see inside. The secluded living room overlooks a dark forest. Now my father has a shed, detached from the house, for his electric saw. How lucky he is to be able to saw undisturbed for hours.
My father brings us trinkets from business trips. Presents from Occupied Japan gleam like red lacquer. Philippine presents seem as green as the crown of a palm. Hawaiian presents are sweet-smelling leis and rustly grass skirts. Alaska is glittery snow and ice. Siam sparkles like silver and gold bangly jewelry. The Pacific Trust Territories and the West Indies smell like the azure and sapphire sea. I treasure fragile dolls from Bangkok, pink and black papier-mâché masks from Hong Kong, Eskimo totem poles, puppets, silk scarves scented with incense. I even save the wrapping paper, pressing it to my face and breathing deeply, imagining myself far away, although knowing I could never travel.
I would be afraid to travel. Instead I lie in bed, safe in my highwindowed bedroom, daydreaming of foreign countries, of what’s outside, while my sister is the one to disappear into the world, escaping our house. I can’t leave the house, for it might disappear while I’m gone. I imagine bricks crumbling, the roof and eaves lifted by gusts of wind to tumble to the farthest corner of sky. Beams will splinter and crack. Windows shatter. This is my fear. Only the unrelenting strength of my watchful gaze can prevent this disaster.
When my father returns home he is pleased to see me, the daughter who always waits for him, the daughter who knows how to make him happy. On Saturday he builds a dollhouse from construction paper. I cut out paper dolls to live inside. In the afternoon my mother cooks chicken and rice, fresh vegetables, an apple pie. The house smells right. But even though the day has been perfect, we grow silent around the dinner table. We—we three little girls, as my father always calls us, his three little girls—watch, without eating, watch while my father tests the food. The chicken must be crisp and dry, almost burned, or my father won’t eat it. I breathe slowly before he takes his first bite, waiting to see the outcome of the meal. If he doesn’t like the food, his rage will spew across the table to my mother and he will slam from the house to the shed, to his electric saw, sawing his rage through planks of plywood or pine.
Tonight, for my father, the food is fine. I eat little of the dry chicken but as much apple pie as possible. My sister, too, eats little, while my mother comments on whether she thinks we’re eating the right amount, informing us of the nutritional value of each item of food and why our bodies need it. My mother worries so much about my body, always concerned it be sufficiently nourished. Vitamins. Minerals. Roughage. These are all it needs, surely she believes, in order to be healthy.
Always, I wait for my sister to invite me to play. I wait for her to come home, wait for her to speak to me, wait for her to notice me, smile at me, love me. But there doesn’t seem to be enough of her to share herself with me. Her thin stick of a body barely stirs the air in the house. She has nothing to spare. I don’t remember the sound of her voice; she is absent, even when here. Once, when her friend visits, I hide under the bed in her room to be close to her, as if I am part of them. Changing position, I bump my head. She screams at me, and I rush from the room in shame.
My report card from kindergarten, handwritten in pen by my teacher, indicates that I play alone much of the time and that when other students, usually boys, want a toy I’m playing with I relinquish it immediately. The teacher thinks I’m too passive. Yet during the year I show two signs of rebellion. Once I am discovered in a corner hammering a toy mallet against the ground. I refuse to stop when asked. The teacher calls this a “useless motion.” Later in the year I am asked to open my mouth for a throat inspection by a visiting doctor. I refuse.
By second grade I no longer refuse requests concerning my body. For a school photograph I hold a crayon in my left hand and smile into the camera. I wear my most beautiful lime-green dress with white ruffles on the shoulder cuffs. My teacher takes the crayon from my left hand and puts it in my right. I tell her I’m left-handed, but she refuses for the photo to be taken unless the crayon is in my right hand. I comply.
I begin elementary school at the Alta Vista School in Montgomery County, Maryland. The long corridors, the endless doors and rooms, are large and scary. The cloakroom is moist with melting snow and mud. I sit on the floor in the corner to pull off my leggings. Other children laugh and push and shout, fighting over hooks upon which to hang parkas. Galoshes are kicked against the wall. The cloakroom darkens in this claustrophobic crush of children. In the small, warm room all the children seem to be melting. This crush, this dampness, is familiar, but I don’t remember where else I feel it or smell it. But I am also my own opposite: After the other children leave the cloakroom, I like being here by myself. Then I sit on the floor against the wall, hidden behind coats and scarves. No one can see me. Now the darkness is comforting. Since I believe that what my mother searches for on my underpants is a smell that means I’ve been bad, I believe here no one can smell me. So I sit here until I am told to come out.
Always, I’m scared to come out. I’m scared to speak in school, scared to be noticed. All day I drink only small amounts of water, since I’m scared to ask for permission to use the bathroom. I’m scared to answer questions, even if I know the answers. Exhausted by fear, I’m unable to concentrate and fail to understand instructions on painting, on playing, on learning lessons. I feel almost foreign, as if I speak a different language. Always, I make mistakes. When reprimanded by a teacher I stare at my shoes, believing if I can’t see her, then soon, in just one moment, she will no longer see me either. All through elementary school, teachers say I’m afraid to try new things. I know about new things. But it would never occur to me to tell anyone about the new things I am taught by my father.
The summer between first and second grade I am to attend daycamp. My fear of leaving my house deepens into fear of leaving my mother, deepens into numbing panic. I believe she is the only one on earth able to protect me—protect me from the image of the scared Egyptian princess. But I have no words for this image. I don’t understand why the princess hides, so I can’t explain what the image means. All I know is that if I don’t watch my mother she, along with my house, will disappear. Now I imagine feet and ankles sinking below ground. Hair will snag in beaks of low-flying birds. Severed arms and hands will drift to the farthest horizon of space. My unrelenting gaze is all that holds my mother onto the skin of the earth. And if I lose her, the Egyptian princess will be … I don’t know the word for what will happen.
On the first day of camp my mother pushes me into the car. Driving there I beg her not to make me go and think of excuses why she must need me at home. I’ll help her cook and clean and iron. I’ll wash every dish after dinner. I plead, but she doesn’t understand the fear and I lack the appropriate vocabulary to explain it. When we arrive, the counselor and my mother both tug me from the car. Edged around the door is ropy trim, and I dig my fingers into it, holding on, kicking, screaming, crying. Boys watch while they pretend to play touch football, but my desperation not to stay outweighs any fear of being noticed. Finally I am pried loose, and my mother quickly drives away.
Now I am quiet. I am exhausted, bereft, stubborn. Not even the death of my mother would make me feel more abandoned. I sit on the ground and watch the boys play football. The counselor asks if I want to join girls beading necklaces. I shake my head, no, looking down, afraid to see him, afraid for him to see me, wanting, yes, to be invisible. Do I want to go horseback riding? Again I shake my head. Swimming? All I want—doesn’t he know?—all I want to do is scream. I can’t, I can’t understand why he doesn’t know what’s wrong, why he can’t fix this, even though I don’t know what “this” is either. I am enraged he doesn’t see what’s invisible, enraged he can’t hear words I’m unable to speak, enraged he can’t smell the fear that evaporates on my skin by morning, every morning before I leave the house.
I watch the boys throw the football, watch as one boy catches it, watch the others tackle him. Surely the boy is crushed, his bones splintered, under the mound of kicking boys. Even when the boys peel themselves away and the boy who’d caught the ball stands, grinning, I’m not convinced he hasn’t been hurt. I’m still not convinced, even as he breaks from the crowd, running. His hand rises high above his head, drifting back behind his shoulder before whipping forward, releasing the ball. It begins to arc, and without conscious will or plan I am off the ground and racing toward it. The ball soars across a green horizon, across the cool blue basin of sky. I run faster. Now I am the one to catch the ball. I grip the leather, holding on. The strong, noisy boys must hurry. They must. I will not relinquish it until I am on the very bottom of that crushing knot of boys.
Finally they tackle me, as I knew they would. This is what I want. Instead of feeling the weight of boys piled on top of me, I am weightless, free, far lighter than my body. Now it is my body able to twine with sunbeams high across the sky. No longer will my body have to be here, be trapped here. For I hear something crack—or maybe I feel it, although the feeling is far from pain. The crack in my collarbone is soothing, as if the marrow of bone seeps from its skeletal structure, warming me, healing me. Now my mother must pick me up from the camp. Now I need never go back.
I watch The Mickey Mouse Club on television and want to be Annette Funicello. To myself, I pretend my name is Annette and also name all five of my dolls Annette. But when I meet a girl named Anita I want her name, too. I have an urgent need for these names, to be these names, and spend days transforming myself into Annette or Anita, whispering these names to myself, chanting them like a mantra, trying to shed my own self, my own image.
Around the corner lives my best friend. We watch animals at the National Zoo. We play in a sandbox and roller-skate around the neighborhood. But I’m not close to her, not really. No real person enters my consciousness. I collect names of people, not people themselves. I steal their names, wanting truly to be their names more than I want to be them, for I’m not sure I want to be anybody.
I am in the bathtub, in this house on Kingswood Road. For hours, it seems, I stare at my yellow rubber duck with a blue sailor cap on its head. It bobs as my father moves his arm through the water. He holds a bar of white soap. He asks me to raise an arm. He washes my underarm, my neck, my chest. I smile up at him, the soapy water warm and slick across my skin. He moves the soap down my chest and across my stomach. He tickles my belly button and I giggle, before he moves the soap down farther, farther. It is between my legs. Gently, he edges my legs apart. The soap slips from his hand, and it is the soap I watch now, bobbing to the surface. He touches me there with a finger, in a place I can’t name. In a place I have no name for, for no word exists. I will never let myself know the word, except it is a place, simply “down there.” My giggle stops. His breath is so heavy it seems to ripple the water into the thinnest of waves. His fingers massage it. And it feels good, yes. I discover pleasure before I discover its shame, discover that the definition for pleasure is the definition of the word “shame.”
In second grade I stop attending school. I refuse. No one understands why, so the school arranges for a psychologist to see me. This cheerful woman sits in a schoolroom, gives me four plastic dolls, and asks me to explain who they are. Here, I say, is a daddy doll in a business suit who loves his daughters very much. Here, I say, holding up a doll with a bright pink blouse, is a mommy doll, who also loves her daughters. And here is a beautiful sister doll who loves her younger sister. The youngest doll is a happy doll, I say, smiling: See her here in her pretty yellow dress. We are a happy family, I say, with absolute conviction, knowing with certainty that happiness implies I will never be taken away from my family. Yet I don’t see my doll story as a lie. Surely I tell her what she wants to hear. But surely, living in our brand-new house and wearing our pretty clothes, we are happy. How can we not be? Since I am so happy, I’m not ordered to return to school. No authorities come to the house. No one investigates further.
Day after day I stay in my house. On sunny days my mother urges me outside. I sit on the front stoop, raking a stick through grass. I sit on the back stoop, tapping the stick on the brick patio. I leave the door ajar to hear my mother in case she calls to me. I glance inside the window where she sits on the couch reading the paper. I know she will leave me, I know she will die the moment I glance away. Still, she urges me farther from home. “Ride your bicycle,” she tells me.
My muscles strain as I pedal up the steepest hill in the neighborhood. At the top I pause, one foot on the ground, my arms resting on the handlebar. The streets are deserted. All the fathers are in the city, working. All the kids are in school. Mothers wash breakfast dishes and straighten beds. Drowsy infants and toddlers are napping.
No birds call out to the sun. No leaves on trees rearrange the air. No squirrels dig holes in the ground to hide nuts for winter. No curtains flutter in windows. It is too warm for smoke to curl from chimneys. Clouds seem suspended in a flat, blue sky. There is no motion in any of the houses. Why are the houses so silent? Why can’t I hear any voices? Or are there no voices because there is no one to hear mine? Right now I want someone to hear it. Everyone to hear it. Right now I feel like running the length of the street, beating at all the doors with a stick, beating and screaming: Open up, open up—for me.
I don’t move. Still, the neighborhood is silent. In this absence of sound I think I hear a warning. Because of the utter stillness of this moment I can now hear. I glance around. What is the warning? Where is it? What does it want from me?
At the bottom of the hill, there, nestled beside the woods, is our pretty house, our neat yard, my father’s work shed. From the outside, the shed looks quiet and peaceful, too. Yet inside is my father’s electric saw. Sometimes when he uses it, even when I’m in the house, I think I feel the windows vibrate against my fingertips and the floorboards beneath my feet. And for this moment as I pause on top of the hill, in this stillness, I believe I hear, faintly at first, then louder, the whir of my father’s saw turning, the silver blade spinning. But it is my body there—not a plank or a piece of plywood but rather my body clamped in the vise, my shoulder blades pressed against metal. And I must speed to it, to my body, save it—this is the warning—and I am speeding, quickly, quickly, back down the hill. Wands of sunlight reflect off the handlebar, circles of light spin in spokes of bicycle wheels, as I rush toward the shed, rush toward my body. But before I reach it…
I see the parked car clearly. There is no distracting traffic. There are no dogs, no children, no sudden noises. Only circles and circles of silver light wheeling down the pavement. And I must crash. I must. I crash into a parked car, crumpling my bike, shredding skin off my face.
Light hurts my face. So now, while I’m healing, I’m allowed to stay in the house with curtains drawn. This is what I wanted: to hide inside, behind curtains, where no one can smell the leakage from my body; to be safe inside, behind curtains, where I can be close to my body clamped to my father’s electric saw. Besides, I am now able to weight the house with my constant presence. Otherwise, gravity would loosen its grip and the house would float away. I wouldn’t be able to bear losing my house and my family, for I believe I am overwhelmingly loved by this family. Camp is bad, school is bad, not my home or my family. After all, my father holds me on his lap, my face against his undershirt, and strokes my hair. My parents buy me pretty dresses. My mother cooks us dinner and wears beautiful red lipstick. My father shows me his love, over and over, when he teaches me new things.
I am addicted to these terrifying new things. Addicted to terror. For terror, feel love. With terror, my body feels loved. Terror is the definition of love, a synonym proving love’s existence. So I stubbornly sit in this house in order to enable my parents to love me. I need for my father to love me. And I believe that he does.
Night after night in the bathtub I watch my rubber duck. Its round rubber eyes watch me, too, for it is the first to see. Bits of scum float on the murky surface of water, and I believe it is pieces of skin scaled from my body. Perhaps I am losing bits of skin, parts of my body. Soon, perhaps, there will be nothing left. I don’t look down at my daddy’s hand. I don’t look down at my body. I don’t move. Not a finger. Not a toe. I’m not aware of breathing. But his breath—his—rushes. This is the only sound, this, I feel his breath as it rushes toward me across the water. There is no other sound in the house, none outside the white wood door of the bathroom. No one will enter; I know this. No one will knock on the door. Night after night my daddy bathes me and no one knocks. No one touches the knob. No one ever will. Even if someone did enter, what could she see in the steamy mirror, in the misty room that is underwater wet? Days. Weeks. Months. His rubbing grows more insistent. Soon small bubbles of panic rise in the water, and the duck jerks away in a fierce ripple of tides.
I close my eyes. I feel the skin of my eyes slip far far back in my skull. As his finger penetrates deep, deeper, I no longer have eyes. I no longer have my body. It is Dina, Dina, Dina. You do it, Dina, I say to her, in a voice only I can hear. You do it. You want this. You, Dina, with your straight black hair, olive-colored skin, and the blackest of eyes. It is her legs parted like that with his finger inside her … while I disappear in a bubble of water. Concentrate on the bubbles of water. They make soft explosions as they crash against the surface, but then another rise rise rises out the roof of my head. But the room is still, yes. I am. My legs are paralyzed. My arms are useless. I am bloated with hot, heavy water, yet weightless, too: here, not here. I am opposites at the same time. And from the distance of my bubble my hazel eyes watch my daddy stick his finger inside Dina, telling her, whispering to her how much he loves her—me—us, loves her—me—us, with a love that is everlasting and true.
I hide inside bubbles. I hide inside words, in my own invented words that soothe, in my own vocabulary, my own language, for surely my parents teach me no words that are useful. I soar on magical carpets woven with silken words and images that no one else understands. For example, when I learn the alphabet, it is not this endless string of anonymous letters that interests me. In particular, I never hear the individual letters L, M, N, O. Rather, to me these letters slur together to form the imaginary word “elimeno,” really more image than true language. It is this magically real image—landing smack in the middle of A through Z—that interrupts the droning litany of the one-after-another letters.
The image “elimeno” is a school of elementary minnows darting through cool pools of water, weaving around undulating grasses in the lap-lap of the sea. I believe the minnows swim to elementary school, swimming past coral reefs the color of fire and opals, their bodies glittering like sun shafts deep in the sea.
Then, like turning a kaleidoscope, as the beauty of this image fades, “elimeno” is magically transformed into a gorgeous yellow lemon. Now it is this taste in my mouth, this sunny summery taste of puckered lemonyellow, this taste, no other, as if “lemonyellow” is the only word I need ever know. The only word I want ever to taste. So when I’m in the bathtub—no—I’m not there: I’m in the sea with minnows; and when I taste something else in my mouth—no—it vanishes, replaced with a sunny lemon taste. And then I live—I am so lucky to live in the most beautiful place in the world.
There is one home I visit in the neighborhood. There is one person I want to see, although she’s barely a person yet, just the smallest of babies. For hours I sit next to Beth’s crib. Pale eyelashes of her sleeping eyes form half-moons on the lids. Sunlight burnishes her wispy, gold-red hair and sometimes I whisper my fingers through it like a comb, careful not to tug it. Saliva bubbles her tiny lips and baby powder clumps in creases of elbows and knees and toes. Sometimes I worry who will wipe the saliva and who will clean the creases. I worry her diapers need changing. I worry her body needs bathing. I worry about who will change them and who will bathe her. I want to be able to watch her endlessly, never take my eyes off her, although I don’t understand this need. She opens her eyes. I smile, my face pressed against the bars of the crib. She gurgles and coos. Do I wonder who you are? Do I wonder if I were ever a baby like you?
When officials from the Trust Territories are in town, they dine with us at the house: Governors Paul McNutt of the Philippines, Oren Long of Hawaii, Ernest Gruening of Alaska, Luis Muñoz-Marin of Puerto Rico, Phelps Phelps of Samoa, Morris de Castro of the Virgin Islands. My daddy and I greet our company at the door while my mother cooks in the kitchen. I wear frilly dresses with white socks and patent-leather shoes. I offer hors d’oeuvres arranged on monkeypod platters and carry drinks in white linen cocktail napkins. I smile. I sing songs. I love to show off my dolls. I am a beloved pet performing, showing what a happy child I am, what a happy family we are.
After everyone leaves, the house again is quiet. No, it is more than quiet. Where is my sister? I never know. I stand in the living room in my pretty dress staring out the picture window into the nighttime yard. But I see no yard. In the glass the living room is reflected, so there is no outside world at all: no yard, no trees, nothing beyond that window. And I—all of us—are trapped inside the glass, for even if my sister fled the house, her flight, her need for flight, is the trap itself. And inside the house, if I scream, no one will hear. If I could scream, I know that glass would shatter.
But my father is the only one with a voice, the only one who knows how to scream. If something went wrong during the party … if the food were not perfect… if some detail were overlooked, then, after everyone leaves, his rage is swift and solid. But the glass on the window will never shatter, for his wrath is turned on us, his three little girls. It is our brittle bones that will absorb the shock of his voice. We are the only ones who will ever hear him, for everyone outside the house believes my father is perfect. In the midst of his anger, my mother will cry. I will cry. My sister will be dry and vacant. I wait to be hit. If I am, then later, while my mother washes dishes, my father and I go down the hall to the bathroom, to the bathtub, where he loves to soothe me. Perhaps I am almost asleep by the time he undresses me and slips me into the water. His voice whispers that he adores me, that all he wants is to make me happy. “Suzie, my most precious daughter. You are more precious to me than life,” he tells me, while his finger, ever so gently, enters my drowsy body.
I wake in the middle of the night. It is quiet. I am alone—but not quiet. Earlier, my mother had told me stories about her war, a war that, even though she didn’t experience it directly, haunts her. That song about Hitler is not all she’s taught me. So I am restless, unable to sleep. I lie in bed gazing out the high windows in my room. But all I can see are the thousands of yellow stars once sewn on clothes of Jewish children, marking them, identifying them. I wonder why parents hadn’t ripped off the stars and transformed their children with costumes and masks.
When Eisenhower is elected President, my father loses his position with the government. He stays home, inside the house, unable to leave the house for weeks. Without a job he must be very frightened, although my mother claims—to friends, to neighbors, to her daughters—that he suffers from pneumonia. Since I am still home from school, I am assigned to care for him. We are truant together.
My father lies in bed day after day, week after week, in a dark bedroom, the curtains drawn. I also close the raw silk curtains in the living room, believing darkness is comforting and will heal my father back to health. I spoon-feed him soup for lunch. I nudge saltine crackers against his mouth. I hold a straw for him to drink liquids. His stillness scares me. I am scared he will die and that somehow, if he does, all three of his girls will die with him.
My mother drifts in and out of my consciousness, in and out of the house. She goes shopping. She visits neighbors. My sister bangs into the house after school, changes her clothes, bangs outside again to play with friends. But let her go, I think. I don’t care. My father will love me more because I’m the good girl who stays with him, even better than my mother. I will care for him until he is well. I am the only one who can cure him.
Evening wilts over the eaves of the house. I hear my mother in the kitchen fixing dinner. I sit in the bedroom with my father. No, I am not sitting in the bedroom with my father. I am lying in bed next to him. He holds up the sheet and motions me to get under the covers. He presses me close, and I believe my body itself can nurse him back to health. He takes my hand and slips it inside his boxer shorts and places it on this thing. I don’t know what it is; it must be swelling caused by pneumonia. It must be, but it is hard and scary and all I want is for him to be well soon, for the swelling to go down. As he guides my hand, I fall farther and farther into the darkness of the room, sheets lowering over us like banks of clouds descending. Until I am jolted back—when the sickness of this swelling erupts all over my hand. The suddenness of it on my hand—and I … I think it is blood and pus, that he is bleeding to death, that I have caused it to bleed, and I scream, once, for my mother, struggling with sheets, trying to run to the kitchen for my mother, before he slaps me across the mouth with such force my head cracks against the headboard. And I am stunned, forever, into silence.
My mother doesn’t come; she must not have heard me. But soon I am okay. His loving words return, so I know he’s not dying, that I haven’t done anything to kill him. He tells me I am his precious, his only precious, that I am healing my daddy, that my mommy doesn’t know how to do this, that I am the only one in the world who will make daddy better, and now I must lick my hand clean, lick him clean, that my beautiful, beautiful tongue can heal him—haven’t I seen cats lick their kittens?—and when I finish he kisses me on my mouth, but no, it is Dina who licks us clean, Dina who loves my father without question, Dina who opens her mouth, the way he teaches us, and Dina is the best pupil.
While he is sick we spend hours together. When my mother is home I’m in my clothes, sitting on a chair or on the edge of the bed. Only when she leaves can I truly begin to cure him. No, you, Dina, you heal him. In the movement of her head nodding, I become a glimmer of light on the darkest pane of glass. Watching Dina in bed with my father, I am a mote of dust or a ripple in the bedroom curtain. When he whispers he loves her, she whispers back. He caresses her body. He teaches her to let him put his mouth and tongue between her legs, teaches her how to put her mouth where he is sick, on the swelling. But why is it that after Dina finishes, why is it that after, it is my mouth that tastes this? Why is it that my jaw feels weary, and not Dina’s? I am angry at Dina for not doing a better job. You will do a better job, I rage at her. You will not leave me with this mess to clean up, it is your mess to clean up —it isn’t mine. I put gobs of toothpaste in my mouth. But every time I swallow, I taste it.
I have disappeared. No one knows where I am. I sit in a tiny cupboard, but even I don’t know where I am, which room I hide in. I’m not even sure whether I’m hiding or whether I’m merely lost. I don’t know how long I’ve been here or how I came to be here, why I’m here. The only connection I have to that which is outside the cupboard is a crack of light surrounding the cupboard door. I hear my mother’s voice calling, but I don’t know my name and there is no voice with which to answer. I feel nothing. There is no cramp in my legs, even though I am hunched tight. I don’t even feel as if I have legs. I don’t know whether I wear clothes or not. The smell of my body overpowers all other senses.
Finally the door is yanked open. I am yanked out. My legs buckle and I slide onto the floor—the bathroom floor—this is where I am, in blinding light. I wear only an undershirt and blood is smudged on my thighs. No, no, look more closely: The blood is between your thighs, you, Dina, between your disgusting, filthy thighs. No wonder your mother must slap you, slap you, scream at you, you, your mother must call you disgusting, you bad, bad girl, what did you do to yourself, you slutslutslut. But neither Dina nor I can answer her; we don’t understand the source of the blood. In our silence, she fills the tub with water and throws us in. No, you Dina, she throws you in, her hand rough, rough, scrubbing you between your legs, that disgusting place. She scrubs and scrubs and scrubs, first with her sharp fingers, then with a white terry washcloth until you burn, asking you what you did to yourself, telling you, screaming at you, you slut. No man will marry you. Men don’t marry sluts.
I watch slow swirls of blood tint the water. I am this blood. And I know I will drown.
She throws the washcloth in the garbage and empties the water. She tells me to put my feet on opposite sides of the tub, and she inserts a rubber nozzle attached to our enema bottle into that spot. She will clean this dirty, disgusting slut inside and out. She has mixed something in the bottle and I am relieved, for I know my body needs a potion stronger than water, perhaps an astringent, in order to clean it well. At first it stings. I feel a deep burn pulsing through me. Soon I become the burning itself; there is no difference.I want to be. My body needs to be cleansed with, as much as I need to become, white hot heat. And I am no longer a body.
Afterwards our house is rigid. I am rigid. Rigidly, we cook and clean, speak and eat. My legs are the most rigid of all. My breaths are short and shallow, my steps small. Every time I move I believe I rip out all the stitches that hold my body together.
The curtains in the house are open. My father gets out of bed. He is to open a bank in St. Thomas with Congressman Fred Crawford, and we will all move to the tropics. With this news I feel released. My father is no longer sick. He leaves the house. A siege has ended. That swelling on his body must have gone down.
I even go outside, wander in the woods behind our house. In the early winter a few gold and red leaves still cling to trees. I gather fallen leaves from the ground and press them to my face: They smell of woodsmoke, of deep burgundy, of last traces of sunlight as well as the first white scent of winter. The leaves feel fragile and smell as cool as the ground. These scents seem new; I don’t remember smelling them before. And now I won’t see autumn again for a long time. Yet while it’s peaceful here, and beautiful, I am not nostalgic. I want to move. I believe that who we are here, who I am here, will be left behind; we will be new people in the tropics. My father won’t catch pneumonia again in the warm, peaceful tropics.
A creek winds through the woods. Low bushes and branches drip. This is all—there are no voices, no calls from birds—only the sound of water rushing, this gray scent of riverwater. I hover on the bank, the warmth of sun-reflected water brushing my legs, and watch the current swirling around a large rock in the middle of the creek. What power, I think, that the rock can interrupt the flow of water of the fast-moving stream.
Then I know it isn’t water that draws me. For I’m afraid of water, afraid of what is hidden below the surface. Rather, I’m drawn to the rock. I want to sit on it. By leaping from stone to stone I near it, careful the water not touch me.
Above the water the rock is warm. I lie on it and feel this warmth slowly seep through my body. I press my ear to the surface, listening until I hear the sound of water throbbing rock. Except—I know what I must truly be hearing is the sound of the rock’s heartbeat, beating safely, beating strongly, protected deep inside solid layers of stone. I listen and listen, as if I can learn this secret language of rock, the only sound I want to be able to hear. I listen until, yes, I hear my own heartbeat throbbing, my own heart beat, safely hidden deep inside the rock.
A letter addressed to my mother on Kingswood Road in Bethesda, from my father, who is in St. Thomas. It is dated October 29, 1954—their anniversary:
Dear Precious Ketzie,
We’re separated again. I hope I can reach you by telephone tonight. I shall call you about 9:00.
It’s hard to believe that 21 years flew by so quickly. We’ve gone through so much together. There have been many heartaches and much grief, but each year we’re brought closer and closer together. I guess the full and true significance of married life is not realized until the years roll-by. The completeness and oneness and the mysteriousness is not fully understood until the trials and tribulations mixed with untold joy and happiness are experienced year after year.
I wish so much that we were here both together on this day. I miss you more than I can say. I know that you understand even though you are hundreds of miles away. I love you so very very much.
All day long, events of the past years have been going through my mind: the train trip to N. Y.; the week on the Georgic; our trip to Europe; our arrival in Haifa; the first night; Passover at Zichron; our week in Jerusalem; the Bar Examination; our trip back on the Polonia; our trip back through Europe; our return to N. Y. and to Chicago by Bus; the episode in the Cleaning Business; my first job in Washington; 2131 “O” St.; our walks to work in the morning; the purchase of our first car; our trip to Mexico; moving to 3920 Southern Ave.; the job at the Library; meeting you at the open window; coming home that evening when you met me, wearing your brown coat, telling me that you were pregnant; the Friday when Kiki was born; the exhileration driving home that night after having seen Kiki for the first time; the war; my induction; then your walking down the steps going to Doctor’s Hospital; Little Susie’s coming; the building of our house and now here. So much has happened: it’s hard to relive all the joy, the happiness and the bitterness and heartache as well.
Sweet precious. I wish so much you were here with me tonight. I feel so lonely and alone. I hope at least to be speaking with you in a few hours. Good night sweet precious. I love you and miss you so very very much.