How can I help you? Randy had asked.
Change me, I think. Is that the answer? Stop me. Or teach me new words, I think. Maybe that’s the answer. Teach me to speak. Help me find a soul. Help me find my body. Teach me to cry.
When I first see Randy, when he first asks this question, it is the mid-1980s. Over the years I have sought help from ten therapists. Randy is the eleventh. He must be the one who will finally be able to help me.
Twenty years have passed since I first noticed the word—noticed the word “incest,” yet still I can’t say it, even to Randy. I saw the word almost by chance, in conjunction with the movie Phaedra. When I saw the word my gaze hesitated. It stopped. Couldn’t flow along the line of words preceding and succeeding it. My breath stopped. My heart stopped. My throat was cold and my mouth rigid. But why—since I had never seen the word before, never read the word before, never heard the word uttered? I didn’t know what the word meant, yet it stopped me like a slap.
I looked it up in the dictionary. At first I read and reread the definition, but I didn’t allow myself to understand any of the words used to explain it. I didn’t know what I was reading. I had to look up each word in the definition. As soon as I looked up each word I forgot its definition and had to look it up again. I had to write each word, and the definition of each word, on a sheet of paper. “(I) Sexual. Union. Between. Persons. Who. Are. So. Closely. Related. That. Their. Marriage. Is. Illegal. Or. Forbidden. By. Custom. (2) The. Statutory. Crime. Committed. By. Such. Closely. Related. Persons. Who. Marry. Cohabit. Or. Copulate. Illegally. [Middle English, from Latin incestus, unchaste, impure.]”
Copulate. “To engage in coitus. [Latin copulare, to fasten together, link.]”
My father and I are fastened together. We are linked.
I feel a revulsion I don’t understand when I see the word “copulate.” The three short, hard syllables slam against my teeth as I whisper the word over and over. I feel a fear I think I understand too well when I see the words “illegal,” “crime,” “forbidden.” A crime has been committed. I know I’m responsible. I’ve committed unpardonable sins. But I don’t understand what the sins are. I have these words written on a piece of paper. I will be punished for these words. But I don’t know why.
I see the movie. I watch a mother and a son in bed together. That night, all night, I feel my father in bed with me. Yet he is not with me. My body only feels as if he is. I feel as if he’s exploding through my body, my throat, and into the roof of my mouth. Then I am in the bed with Phaedra and her son. They hold me down while my mother slices off my nipples and staples every part of me shut. My father comes to me, stabs them, sews my nipples back on, and rips out the staples. My mother is dead. And he, my father, and I live “in a sexual union between persons who are so closely related that their marriage is illegal or forbidden …”
“We are forbidden,” I whisper to my father. And he laughs.
Days later I can pretend the word and the movie don’t exist. Or dictionaries and movies lie. With equal ability I can also pretend the word and the movie have nothing to do with me, nothing to do with what happened to me with my father. This movie, this word—more—my childhood—my memories—sometimes, yes, they are like snapshots, glimpsed images. Memories are also like the ocean, like tides in the sea. Memories roll close to me, curled in the scroll of a wave, suddenly revealed when the wave crashes ashore. Then the memory ebbs, flowing out to sea. Memories tugged back and forth by the moon, memories of what happened at night with my father.
But never does the ocean evaporate. So never can I forget. What I most lack is understanding. I don’t understand what happened to me because I don’t understand the darkness of the deep, mysterious sea.
I don’t understand this darkness, this mystery, because I know no words to decipher it. To ensure I never do, there are moments of time when I don’t allow myself to see words, when I can’t see any word, for any word might reveal a truth I don’t want to know. So for days after seeing the movie, I’m unable to read even one word with ease. None. I can’t read magazines. I can’t look at bill-boards or street signs. If I fill the car with gas I can’t read the name of the station or how much the gas costs. When I write out a check I am filled with anxiety at the words on the printed check. I can’t glance at the mail. I can’t look up a number in the phone book, but, then, there is no one to call. I can’t read the words on a package of food. As long as I am wordless I will not know the truth of the sin I have committed.
Randy, how can you help me? Before I can whisper that word “incest,” I must whisper the name of a man who just exploded through my life and left me speechless, a man who, although he’s not a child molester, reminds me of my father. Over the years since I left home there’ve been too many men, so many names I could whisper to Randy.
But Tom is the name of the man now.
The moment I see Tom I understand him. He is married, I am married—to Mack, a sweet, shy man who scares me, scares me because he might actually love me, not just my body. With Tom, who can destroy me, I feel no fear, for he is familiar. He is the archetype of the dangerous man, the original myth of the man who destroys women’s hearts and bodies. He is the fury and rage of every man I have fucked, the mentor of every man who causes danger and grief. Only my father commands more rage. But, Tom, don’t you know? This is why I select you: Because you are no longer human—because you have lost your own soul, surely you are the only one capable of loving the soulless body my father created.
But he doesn’t love me. In a fury of lies he betrays me. Now, now—knowledge is only a glimmer—I begin to see, I begin to know, that mute sex isn’t love. It has never, ever been love. The rage I feel shatters the protective glass walls in which I live. It shatters me. Without this glass scaffold, rage implodes and I am immobilized, terrified, exhausted.
June. July. My husband is away for the summer, and I am alone. Week after week, after being with Tom, I want to be alone—I must be. For I don’t want anyone to see. Me. When the last chip of glass falls to my feet, I don’t want anyone to see this soulless girl, stripped and exposed. If my husband knows who I am—if anyone sees who I really am …
It is August, and hot. I lie in bed in the upstairs bedroom. Sweat drips down my body. I can’t take a shower. I can’t clean myself. For fifteen years I’ve had a cat, and this cat is now dying of feline leukemia. My cat is too sick to climb the stairs, even though he needs comfort. Below me, through the floor, I feel my cat dying and I can’t save him. I can’t give him comfort, even though I’ve loved him longer than I’ve been able to love any human. Once a day, at dusk, I edge down the stairs and manage to put a few chips in his bowl and give him a little water. He is too sick to eat, and for a long moment I sit on the kitchen floor beside him. I want to save him, I want to cure him, I want to comfort him. I can’t. I stroke his chin and hear the thinnest of purrs—at least, yes, he’s still purring. I don’t want him to stop. It is this purr. And her. The girl I left behind on the beach in the West Indies. Her. I can’t see her, that girl, but there is something. A piece of a fingernail. One strand of hair. One heartbeat of hers that keeps beating. But then the kitchen, the linoleum floor, the downstairs of the house, scare me, and I must go back upstairs to bed.
The first month after I have sex with Tom my period is unmanageable. I dream a penis is a knife disconnected from a body, stabbing me. When I wake, the sheet is bloody. At first I don’t recognize the blood as menstrual. No, it’s the evil that lives inside me. What I did with Tom is evil. Sex is evil. And Tom is sex. I feel the blood beneath my torso, staining my skin like a tattoo. I run my palm across it and know I am drowning in blood. I feel it bubble from my mouth and nostrils. With Tom, his danger is as dark as the stain on the sheet, and my body feels this danger for the first time. Or, I allow myself to feel danger for the first time… because long ago I abandoned all feelings and never allow myself to feel anything.
But wait, no, I am wrong: It’s not the first time I feel danger. Truly, the sight of blood on sheets—this feeling of terror it causes-—is familiar, because this is really the second time I have felt it. It’s only now that I recognise it, begin to understand for the first time that terror and danger are not synonyms for love. Terror is not the definition of love. Tom’s sexual rage is the conduit to the past, the nightmare to reawaken me to my long incestuous sleep. Because of Tom I’m able to decipher the nightmare, a nightmare that could never be named “love.” Because Tom is terror, I remember him as well as my father. I remember both of them.
But I don’t want to remember terror. I want to forget. One evening I think I must eat and eat and eat in order to help me forget it. I must eat until I’m too stuffed to think, too dense to remember. I rush from my bed, my body moving faster than I am able to, and I almost trip going down the stairs to the kitchen. I have trouble grasping pans, flour, cinnamon, sugar, the round carton of oatmeal—my hands moving quickly, my heart slamming—yet knowing, yes, I must eat oatmeal cookies. My eyes move too quickly to read ingredients, and I’m tossing stuff in the bowl that may or may not belong, in proportions that may or may not be accurate. It doesn’t matter. I must eat and eat, gorge myself on oatmeal cookies. I mix the ingredients with my hands and drop gobs of batter onto a greased cookie sheet. I slam the pan into the oven and wait. I can’t wait. I don’t want to wait. I feel as if I’m caught in a tornado that can’t stop, and I want to eat the cookies now. I have brought my supply of razors with me and to comfort me while I wait I sit on the floor and cut my legs, my thighs, cut myself in that nameless part of my body until I bleed onto the tan linoleum floor. My cat pads over to me while I wait for the cookies to bake.
I place the pan of cookies on the floor. In order to forget I must eat them all, so before they are even cool I stuff them in my mouth. I must fill myself now. There is no time to chew. I swallow clumps of dough barely cooked. It had not occurred to me to time them. There was not enough time to time them. I put a few small pieces in front of my cat. Maybe the cookies will help him, too, but he doesn’t eat them. And when I’ve finished all the cookies in the pan, I pick up those crumbs and eat them, too.
When I finish I lie back on the floor. My heart begins to slow. I’m moving slower now. I press my hand to the linoleum. It is still. The oatmeal cookies, heavy in my stomach, root me to the floor. My cat curls up beside me, his head against my arm, and I want to stroke him. But then, then, I’m unable to lift my hand or even move it. He purrs anyway, and I’m lulled by the sound. I don’t want him to stop. I want to drift away on his purr, purring. And I do.
The phone startles me awake—my father calling … his voice tracking the scent of blood here to the kitchen floor. How can he speak words to ears that aren’t human? How can he penetrate a mind that’s now numb? How can I respond to him with a mute mouth, that mouth he taped shut? He plans to write a book, he is saying, this man who’s now retired and is anxious by time he now believes to be empty. Except, he tells me, in a voice he believes I could never refuse, he really thinks I should be the one to write the book, a book about his career with the Trust Territories. “Of course we’ll work on it together,” he says. “Our special project.”
“I don’t know anything about the Trust Territories,” I barely whisper.
“I’ve been telling you about them for years.”
I never listened.
“Just come up here. I have notes. I need you to do this.” Besides, he says, he and my mother have a free trip to Venice, but my mother’s too sick to go. Will I care for her while he goes? This would be a good opportunity to begin the book.
“No,” I whisper.
No.
This is all I can whisper, just this one thin syllable. No. Finally, no. I can’t do what you ask, Father. No. I can’t. I can’t care for my mother, I can’t write your book, Father. No. Yet I am weeping, and the more I cry the angrier he becomes because I’m unable to comfort him, because I refuse to write his book. He yells at me to stop crying. “I want you to be like always,” he screams at me. “Can’t we just be the way we’ve always been?”
No, Father, I can’t. No.
My mother gets on the phone, her voice feeble, asking me to come, just a few days. By now I can no longer say the word “no.” Surely her feverish senses would prevent her from hearing me anyway. Surely she’s too sick to notice me here on the linoleum floor, thin as a Gillette single-edged razor. Surely she’s too ill, has always been too ill, to protect me from his anger, shield me from his rage. Surely the disease she suffers is loyalty to her husband. So, Mother, I want to say to her, if you’re so loyal to your husband, why don’t you write his book?
Then I must I must I must slam down the phone.
But, Daddy, don’t you know? I am the way I’ve always been, believing dangerous men like you truly love me, that they show me how much they love me with sex. I pause on the threshold of my father’s house, never truly leaving him, never leaving home, in a perverse way remaining faithful to him, faithful to the lessons he taught me. Faithfully, I repeated all the lessons, duplicated all the patterns I learned growing up, always seeking a shy man like Christopher, like my husband—while Celeste always craved a predator lover like Tom. And like you, Father.
At the last minute, when she realizes I’m not coming home, my mother’s illness disappears and she goes to Venice.
No one writes my father’s book.
It is autumn. My husband, a college professor, returns from California where he’s been doing research. He is tall, tan, healthy. I’m awed by the expansiveness of his health, while he is awed by my containment of such illness and filth. He must be horrified by this woman. Who is this woman he has married?
My cat has lost almost all muscle tone. No longer can he jump on his favorite chair to watch birds, so I pick him up and place him by the window. For hours I sit beside him and stroke him. I feed him milk and shrimp dinners. He eats little. His fur that once smelled warm now smells sickly. My cat has been with me longer than any man, and I don’t want to lose him.
But the vet says it’s time to say good-bye. He asks if I want to stay with my cat while he injects him. Yes, yes. I must be with him. I hold his paw and stroke him, telling him I love him. I tell him how bad I feel that I offered him no comfort over the summer. Perhaps he understands. He lies so still, his eyes staring—what does he see? Does he know? I want him back. I want to be able to tell him again and again what he’s meant to me. I sit on the floor in the corner, weeping. I believe I will never stop missing my cat.
The vet puts my cat in a box and I bring him home. My husband digs a hole in the garden, and we bury him with his bowls and his blanket. I sit beside the grave for hours, the October dusk cool on my face. In November I plant tulip bulbs around his grave. In the spring they bloom, red and yellow. I know my cat sees them. I believe my cat loved me, too.
I hope I was a good mother to my cat, too. Except I fear I was overprotective, never allowing him outside. So why do I never have children? Surely the same reason. I see children on the street, or my sister’s children, friends’ children, and what I first envision is not the joy of children but rather all that can harm them. Mayhem. Devastation. I would never be able to let a child—my child—out of my sight either. Someone might harm her. I am overwhelmed by fear, by all that can happen to a small child. Even though I never associate these fears with what happened with my father, maybe I never have a child because I would always fear her grandfather.
To Randy, I bring small offerings of who I am. Tuesday after Tuesday, month after month, I reveal to him the shambles of my childhood, the shambles of my life. Entering his office I enter a holy temple of pure, rarefied air, and I feel as if I have been blessed to be allowed to breathe it.
Yet at first the offerings I bring are small, poor. Because with as much vehemence as I believe his office is a safe place, the place I should be, the place I must return to week after week in order to heal, with equal vehemence I doubt what I know to be true: I don’t trust this man who is the most trustworthy man I have ever known. So with as much determination as I arrive at his office, over an hour from my home, with equal determination I want to flee, want never to come back. But every week I am back.
When I first enter his office, I close the shades to block the light. I don’t want him to see me. I’m afraid I’ll scare him. I’m afraid to let him know who I really am. For if I truly let him know me, I believe he will leave me. I’m also afraid my body smells and that it shouldn’t even be allowed to sit in his office, contaminate the rarefied air. Once he realizes how disgusting I am, how disgusting my body is, I believe he won’t allow me back. Still, every Tuesday I bring to him another tiny memento of my life, and every Tuesday he makes another appointment for me to come back.
Sometimes, during a session, I’m afraid to speak because truth can sound too scary. Instead, I write him a note on a small scrap of paper: I don’t know how to tell you what’s wrong.
He writes back: You’ll talk when you’re ready. No one ever taught you to speak, when everything in the world was wrong.
I take the pencil and the scrap of paper: Help me.
I’ll always be here, he writes. Let me help you.
I study the scrap of paper. I’ll always be here. He will always be here. His patience is infinite as he waits for the snapshots—those snapshots—to surface from my secret mind. Quietly he looks at them, every Tuesday, takes them from me one at a time, replacing them with new snapshots—no, with long-lasting photographs of a woman healing. And every Tuesday I try to paste these new photographs in my mind and believe this healing woman is me.
“I’m ashamed,” I finally whisper, revealing these two words as if they’re gifts of string, a piece of biscuit, a stub of candle, or a wilted flower carried over a vast arid distance before finally being placed at a shrine. At the shrine even poor offerings are blessed, the bearer healed.
“It’s not your shame,” Randy says. “It’s your father’s. Give it back to him, where it belongs.”
“But it’s my body. My body is disgusting.”
“No,” he says. “What your father did to you was disgusting. You’re not. Your father raped you.”
“But I must have seduced him. That’s all I know how to do.”
“Incest isn’t about sex,” he says. “It’s about power and control. You had none. All you were was a child.”
“But what about now? Who am I now?” I feel as if my body is tattooed in men’s fingerprints. These skin-deep marks are all that I am. Nothing has penetrated the surface. I feel empty. I don’t think anyone lives inside me. “I don’t believe I’m human,” I whisper.
“You are,” he says. “You’re very human.”
I look at this man to determine whether he might be lying. Even in his darkened office his face is the color of a copper penny. The hair on his arms glistens. I see him full of sun, full of light.
“Your father raped you.” At first I struggle to understand Randy’s words. What does he mean when he says the word “rape”? What does he mean when he says the words “pedophile” and “child molester”? He says these words but I can’t understand them. Let me help you, he’d written on that scrap of paper. Yes, this is why I’m here. I must let Randy teach me.
But I must do much more than merely show him those snapshots, just as he does much more than merely see them. Randy helps me because he teaches me the words that decipher what those snapshots, those images, mean. I must now learn true definitions for words such as “rape” because I’ve known no words, no symbols, no definitions, to explicate the images of what happened with my father. Growing up, I didn’t want to know those words, because if words for acts didn’t exist, the acts themselves didn’t exist. So I had no context in which to view the images: I never understood what I saw; I didn’t want to understand what I saw.
Now, I must learn to substitute one reality for another, one vocabulary for another. For “seduction,” Randy teaches me I must hear the word “rape.” For “My father really loved me,” I must hear “Your father was a pedophile and a child molester.” I stop breathing when he says these words, so maybe I do understand them. Or she does. Randy says there’s a small, wounded child who lives inside me. Months pass before I realize he is talking about the girl on the beach, the girl I thought I left behind.
“She’s the keeper of your feelings,” he tells me. “All those unfelt feelings are still inside you. To heal, you must feel them now. The pain of what happened.”
Pain.
To me, the word “pain” means razor blades and rape, pain that my father taught me was pleasure. I don’t tell Randy. I would feel shame if he knew what I’m thinking, for this can’t be his definition. Randy means emotional pain, of course. But these words are hollow. The words “emotion” and “feelings” are hollow. I could look them up in the dictionary, but still I wouldn’t know what they mean. I can’t attach them to a tangible entity that has anything to do with me.
I look at Randy but say nothing. The intensity of his blue-blue eyes is softened by the tender skin beneath them. It crinkles when he smiles, but I don’t want him to smile at me. I don’t want him to like me. I don’t want to like him. I’m terrified I’ll love him—because love means only one thing to me. I don’t want to have any feelings toward him at all. So I’m scared to think of him as a man, or even human. I feel safest when I think of him as a sprite or a spirit, awaiting the long line of grown-battered children. We silently slip inside his door, palms out, handing him our own small bits of string and wilted flowers from our tattered lives, these offerings, to be blessed or exorcised. Randy will help us.
I have an eating disorder and a sexual addiction. With food, I’m mostly anorectic, addicted to starvation in order not to feel, to numb-out. I watch my body grow thinner than light. No one can touch it or see it. It’s a gray wisp, barely visible, refracting particles of light. I have no limbs, no torso, no heart, no stomach, no mouth. I can sleep inside a leaf or between petals of a flower. My body becomes a curl of wind. Yet if I am the wind, I command the leaves and flowers, direct their course. By starving, I believe I am strong, not weak. I am the only one who can control what I will eat. I am the only one who will control the fate of my body.
“You sexualize food,” Randy tells me. “It’s not uncommon with incest survivors.”
Incest survivors. Those words don’t apply to me. I don’t mind having an eating disorder or a sexual addiction—that sounds all right. In fact, I’m grateful for the label. The label allows me a definition—this is who I am. I have a disease I can work to control, not so different from being an alcoholic. My drug of choice is food; my drug of choice is sex. But I hate the word “incest.” The word sounds like “nest of snakes.” And I don’t know what it is I’ve survived. Incest/Celeste. I wonder if she and Dina will survive.
“If you stop eating, if you don’t have a body, you can’t have sex,” Randy says.
“I love sex,” I say, lying. I glance at him to see if he believes me. He’s watching me, never fails to watch me, his eyes always forgiving, even when I say something that could never be true.
“Most sex addicts I work with hate it,” he says. “The addiction has nothing even to do with sex. It has to do with fear of getting close. Or intimate.”
Yes, I’m terrified of intimacy. To keep men from truly seeing me, from truly knowing me, all I speak are words of seduction, words my father taught me, words of emotional isolation. These words keep men at a distance, as far away from who I really am as possible. I never learned how to be intimate with anyone; I never learned how to be intimate with myself.
“How do you feel after?” he asks.
After. I know he means after sex. After I was with Tom I felt bereft. I think of the word “inanition,” but I’m not sure exactly what it means. Later, when I get home, I look it up in the dictionary: “Exhaustion, as from lack of nourishment. The condition or quality of being empty.” After I was with Tom I felt soulless, spiritually empty.
“Sex for a sex addict is a temporary high,” Randy says, “like getting drunk.”
Yes, in the addiction I spiral in inverted gyres, from the temporary, escalated high of sex to the downward spiral after. To inanition. The plunge is steep. For after I have sex I feel hungover. “After—” I say, “after, I feel as if someone has died.” And so need to feel high again quickly. Again and again.
“She’s the one who feels as if she’s died,” he says. This little girl who lives inside me, who Randy calls my “inner child.” “That kind of sex—with that kind of man—will kill her.”
I nod. I know this is true. I’m addicted to these men, addicted to danger, addicted to destruction, addicted to the death these men offer. What I’ve never been addicted to is life.
“Every time you have sex with one of those men, you’re having sex with your father. Let him go,” Randy says.
I’m scared. I know who I am with these men; I don’t know who I am without them. I believe I am nothing without them.
“You’re okay now,” Randy says. “You’ll be okay. You’re safe. Your father can’t hurt you anymore. You’re strong enough to say ‘no.’”
I watch him, wondering who he sees when he sees me.
“You know how to stop,” Randy adds. “Let yourself feel the pain. Stop running from it. Feelings can’t kill you. It’s these men. They’re the ones who’ll kill you.”
“I want them to,” I say. I believe I mean this.
“But you must save her,” he says. “You must.”
Her. That girl.
“She needs you to heal her. She needs for you to care for her, even if you can’t care for yourself.”
I nod at him. I feel tears, but they’re not my tears—not mine—hers? The girl’s. Yes, I begin to see her, although she’s not yet distinct. At first all I clearly see is her arm and one thin shoulder. As I look more closely, I notice a small bruise on the shoulder. I realize I am the one who must care for this arm and this shoulder. But I’m not ready. She scares me. I’m afraid once she starts crying she won’t be able to stop.
I glance away from Randy, toward the black and white Ansel Adams photograph on the far wall. It is of water, of a lake, of mountains. In the motionless, always present tense of the photo, nature is still. In this stillness I believe I inhale pure air of vast distances. I am a silent crust of snow, never melting; I am the surface of water on the lake, forever unrippled; I am a boulder on the mountain, still as stone, removed from a scary world of movement and feeling and noise beyond the photograph’s boundary, beyond its frame. I am isolated. Cool. Alone. I want to believe I am only safe when I am alone. I glance back at Randy. But I can’t be alone.
His eyes tell me this as if he can read my thoughts, even as he says nothing. I can’t be alone. Not if I want to get better.
Yet still I believe I don’t know how to get better. For with no warning I can crash outside the frame of that photograph, destroy the peace of that scene, the peace of Randy’s office, the peace of my home. With no warning or comprehension, I rage at Randy, or at my husband, determined to frighten each of these gentle men far away. I do this until my husband tells me he barely knows who he is anymore: he feels he’s losing himself, because I am like an out-of-control storm destroying everything.
Before I destroy him, I must make my husband leave me. I yell at him to rape me. I yell at him to kill me—in my craziness believing these are the words I must say in order to scare him away. I hear myself say these awful words believing the words will save him, save me, and I don’t know how to stop myself from saying them.
One morning when I am screaming at him and crazy he slams his fist into a mirror. I wish he had slammed his fist into me, but this man, my husband, would never do that. I tell him he has to leave me—now—or I will end up killing us both. I fill a bathtub with water and sit in it, pounding my fists and crying. With a Gillette single-edged razor, I cut the only place on my body that doesn’t exist, that I can neither name nor know. I don’t think I have a choice. I must bleed. I am mesmerized by blood, as addicted to blood as is my father. I cut myself because I believe I’m evil. I have always believed I must punish myself by bleeding. I believe my blood is this evil and he, he is the one who owns the blood. I must drain it from my body. I never feel pain as I cut my body. My body is nothing. I don’t even live inside it. Why must I lug it around, this burden of a body, always too heavy, even when it’s skinny? I know this body deserves to die. Soon it will be leached a pure transparent white. It is only then I’ll be able to love it.
Finally, I am calm—calmer. Thin swirls of blood waft through the water. It is my belief that blood calms, that after I cut myself, after I drain evil from my body, I am better. Simply, I exhaust myself and am depleted. Now the house is silent. My husband has gone to the hospital for his injured hand, and I force myself to breathe deeply, to concentrate, be calm. I focus on an image I know will calm me. My usual fantasy, my usual image: isolation. Escape. To get in an old rusty car and drive till it breaks down, drive anywhere. I will live in a room in a rooming house with a plastic lace doily from Woolworth’s on the coffee table. I will sleep in a bed where only strangers have slept. I think of a greasy indentation on a graying pillow and know this is where my own head must be. I want to lean my elbows on a windowsill and feel all the strangers’ elbows that have leaned there before. This is all I want to feel. This is the closest to anyone I want, ever, to be. To be totally alone, cool and distant, is the only way to be.
But Randy … in my head I hear Randy whispering. Finally someone remembers my true name and calls to me: Sue, come home. It’s time to live with safe people. There are people who care for you now.
Randy cares for me now. And I know, I know, I care for him also. His blue eyes. His copper-colored skin. He usually wears blue. The two couches in his office, as well as the walls, are also blue. So it is these colors—copper and blue—that must mean warmth and safety. It is these colors, rather than the frost of isolation, I must remember.
Randy is frightened when I tell him I cut myself. This surprises me, because I feel no fear at all. When he says I must go into the hospital if I even think about cutting myself again, I tell him I had to do it because I’m evil.
“What your parents did to you was evil,” he says. “That doesn’t make you evil.”
“My blood is,” I say.
“No,” he says, “your blood isn’t evil. Your fear of it is your shame. It’s a symbol. To you, the blood is how you both feel and see your shame.”
Shame. The long syllable of the word slowly sluices through my veins. The word stains me, irrevocably. He is right. The strength of my shame stains me with the irreducibility of blood. Yet the moment he says it I feel it, and then, for that moment, it is no longer blood. It is sad. I am sad.
“You cut yourself so you don’t feel your feelings,” he says.
“They feel too big.”
He nods. He understands. He understands everything I tell him.
“If you take care of me I won’t have to do this stuff again,” I say.
He tells me I must learn to take care of myself. That I must be an adult and accept responsibility for myself and for her, the little girl—that she needs an adult to care for her.
I tell Randy I’m ashamed I’m an adult who acts like a child, that I can’t seem to learn skills other adults possess. “I just want… I want you to teach me.”
“I am.”
But this isn’t what I mean. I want him to accept full responsibility for me. I want to be a child again. I want him to raise me, adopt me, hold a little girl hand and take me to the zoo. “Maybe if I could just live on your front stoop,” I say. I am serious. I don’t smile saying this.
I see this, yes. If I could live on his front stoop, close to him, then maybe I would be safe.
He smiles at me—but kindly. I won’t smile back. That my anger is unreasonable doesn’t matter to me, because my desire for him to adopt me is too great.
By chance I say the word “pedophile” in Randy’s office. I have never called my father this before. I accept that the word and the condition exist, but not within my father. After the three awkward syllables have been spoken, I forget the rest of the sentence to which the word is attached. I say nothing. I wait. I wait for something to hurt my body. For something will hurt it, I’m positive.
Randy is in his usual position, leaning back on his couch, his notebook on his lap. “How does it feel to say that word?” he asks.
How does it feel, how does it feel? “I don’t know how it feels,” I say. “Why does everything have to feel?”
“You sound angry,” he says.
“Fine, then,” I say. “Angry.”
Always, he asks how I feel. How does everything feel? His goal is for me to attach feelings to events, to words, to thoughts, to conversations. Everything must have a feeling. Randy has a list: Mad, sad, glad, scared. As on a multiple-choice test, I must select a word from his list and connect it to a feeling that is connected to me, now connected to a specific word I have uttered. I’m sick of feelings. I’m sick of trying to figure them out. I want to sing the song “Feelings” to him, somehow wonderful in its thinness, its absolute lack of feeling. But I won’t let myself joke with him. For me, joking, kidding is more intimate even than telling him how I feel.
Am I angry at the word I have spoken? No, no, no, I am scared. Driving home from his office I develop a sore throat. By the time I reach home I have laryngitis. The word hadn’t left my mouth, after all. Rather, it lodged in my throat. By the next day I no longer remember the word at all. All I remember is that there’s a word beginning with the letter P that scares me. I can’t remember the letters that follow.
A raging summer storm uproots scores of trees near my house. For days, work crews cut branches and trunks in order to cart off debris. Chain saws rip bark until I believe I feel the wet, heavy pulp on my skin. Sap sticks to my thighs. If I follow the scent of this pulp I will follow its trail back to my father. To our first house in Washington. To the sound of his saw. To the smell of sawdust and cut wood. I once felt the blade of the saw drawing closer and closer to wood. I felt the first nick in the wood, the pierce of steel, the unrelenting slice, the sap oozing from the wound, while my shoulders remained clamped in the vise. I think I feel this now, the blade cutting my body, and I call Randy. No, no, he tells me, it was then. This can’t happen now. It was back then.
But it doesn’t feel as if it’s back then. By next Tuesday, when I see Randy, I imagine the little girl is emaciated and naked. I imagine I carry her in my arms while her head lolls listlessly against my shoulder. I tell him she is dying. I can’t save her. She is too sick to be healed. Her skin is bruised and bleeding, the surface of her eyes already dead.
I curl up on the couch in his office and place her on the floor by his feet. “You take care of her,” I tell him. “I can’t.”
He tells me to close my eyes and he will help me imagine her back to health. He tells me she must be bathed, fed, clothed. I don’t want to do this. How much easier to abandon the responsibility to him. In fact, I tell him, she doesn’t even exist. After all, I say, I can’t see her.
“You can feel her,” he tells me.
And with a slight jarring of my heart, I know this is true. It’s just—I’m afraid to feel her. I’m afraid to feel what she knows. I’m afraid to feel what happened to her years ago.
Still, I close my eyes. I try to imagine. A bathroom. It is clean and white. I sit with her while I run bathwater. But she is scared to take a bath, I tell Randy. He says this time will be different. So I pour honeysuckle bubblebath in warm water. I believe she will like this scent, and we sit on the edge of the porcelain tub and watch the water foam white. I scoop up a dab of bubbles and dot her nose and her chin. It tickles, she whispers. I blow it away. We watch the slow foam curl through the air before alighting on the mound of bubbles. I smile at her. She smiles back and I think I am crying.
When the tub is full she slides beneath the bubbles. Yes, she feels safer this way, her body hidden. The room is silent. We are alone—she and I alone together—for we hear no footsteps outside the door, no hand gripping the knob, no whisper of air through the window. She holds up her arms and I wash them, smoothing a bar of soap from shoulders to wrists. She raises her legs until just her kneecaps poke above water. I rub the soap around them until they glisten. I say she has the cleanest kneecaps ever. She giggles, and the sound pops like tiny bubbles. When I try to give her the soap in order for her to wash the rest of herself, Randy stops me.
I open my eyes. What’s wrong?
“She’s just a little girl,” he says. “You have to teach her.”
“I’m not going to touch her—there,” I say. “That’s disgusting. She would hate it. I’ll tell her how to do it. She can do it for herself.”
“It was only disgusting the way your parents did it,” he says. “Safe parents teach their children how to wash themselves. It’s okay for you to do it. You won’t hurt her.”
“This is crazy,” I say. “She’s not even real. We’re acting as if she actually exists. No one can touch her. She’s just in my mind.”
“I’m not going to play this out with you,” he says. His voice is firm. I know he won’t—nor do I want him to—although I test him endlessly. “I don’t blame you for being angry,” he says. “But get angry at him. He’s the one who touched you in the bathtub.”
Yes, I know. I know I must learn to get angry at him. How much safer, though, to get angry at Randy, because I know he will never hurt me or leave me.
But I’ve lost the little girl for today. I can no longer imagine her, and I’m scared I’ve lost her forever.
“She’s not really gone,” Randy assures me. “Just tell her you’ll never do anything to hurt her.”
Driving home from Randy’s office I think of her, of children, of my sister’s children. My first January in Boston I’m at the hospital when my nephew is born, and I see him moments after his arrival. A nurse brings him into a waiting room where I sit with his father. But when I see Todd, my nephew, the waiting room fades. The nurse fades. The baby’s father fades. Todd is all I see. I am in awe of the small treasure of this baby. Gently, I want to touch his fingers and toes. I want to cradle his head, smooth his wispy hair, watch over him. An unfamiliar feeling, one I don’t recognize, one I’ve never felt before, engulfs me. It is warm, it is deep, it is true. I don’t have a word for it. Yet it is so strong I feel it overpowering all else that I am. It is protective, savage and primitive, ancient in its strength, as if I have suddenly grown claws of a bear and fangs of a cat. It is so primal I believe I would be able to shred any person, stop any harm, that might ever befall this baby.
My parents visit me and my husband. One evening, one moment really, my father sits on the bed in the guest room removing his shoes. I lean against the doorjamb, barely in the room, while we talk. During a pause in the conversation he pats the bed next to him, his gesture asking me to come to him, to sit beside him. For a moment I can’t move. Nor can I say the word “no,” would never be able to utter it. Finally I create an excuse—I must do something. I turn and walk away.
The next morning, again when we are alone, he comes up to me in the kitchen and puts his arms around me. He tries to kiss me on my mouth. At the last moment I turn my head, barely, almost imperceptibly, but enough so he kisses my cheek instead.
Randy is ecstatic when I tell him, Randy, who discovers success in the most minute achievement.
But after their visit, perhaps scared by their visit, or scared to have refused my father, I have what Randy calls body memories. Without warning, my legs feel paralyzed. I wake up in the middle of the night and feel that my hair is being pulled, pulling my head back and back until I can barely swallow. My head feels as if it’s severed from my throat.
I don’t want body memories. I don’t want a body. So for weeks I eat nothing but cream cheese and potato chips. I believe I will be healthy with an emaciated body. I will be strong and powerful chalk white, drained of blood. For hours I lovingly caress a Gillette single-edged razor with a fingertip, feeling the seduction of cool sharp metal. I refuse to throw away the razors. I refuse to eat. Randy says I must go into the hospital for treatment.
The first three days in the unit, all I feel is rage. The therapists say I’m in withdrawal. Here, forced to eat three meals a day, I’m withdrawing from starvation. With no blood flowing out of my body, I’m also withdrawing from death. I don’t want to live; my addiction doesn’t want me to. This unit will attempt to get rid of my addiction, while my addiction wants to rage back in control, getting rid of me instead. In the hospital its power weakens, even though it feels like a coiled monster slumbering, waiting to strike. I must spend this month learning to dissipate its power.
One morning in the shower, the only place to be alone in the unit, I stand in the tiled stall, not wanting to leave, even though I usually hate water. I wish to live in a small, silent room like this with no windows. Outside it is summer; inside this shower it could be any season, any place, any time. Here in this shower no one can hear me or see me. In this isolation, as the water drenches me, I begin to cry.
But it’s not me crying. The deep, deep sound is different. Never have I heard this before, and I know it is her crying. I am awed by the sound. I don’t want these tears to stop. I know this is the first time she’s cried, and all she needs is for me to be gentle. And I tell her, yes, I will try.
It’s here in the hospital I finally learn how I inherited what my father did to me, understand why my father did it. It’s now I learn the legacy, as Randy calls it. I have long, slightly out-of-control conversations with my parents on the telephone. I have an eating disorder, I tell them. This isn’t too difficult to say. The other is: I tell them I have a sexual addiction, too. I do not mention the word “incest.” I do not say to my father, You, Father, molested me. I say only that I was taught sex is love and that I have confused everything in my life. I do not say who taught me. I do not say where I learned this.
But does my father understand? Does he know what I’m really saying? He must. For my father—my father tells me a secret. Oh, his voice is small and frightened. Now he is a young boy—he is the one scared. Not so much scared to tell me, I suspect, but scared because he still believes he will be punished by his mother. He will be punished for telling the secret, punished because he believes it’s his fault it happened. In a small, young voice he tells me his childhood secret: that his mother and two aunts sexually molested him.
Suddenly, I feel that my own life must now be revised, my own feelings, because not only do I hear his voice whispering his secret, I also imagine fleeting details of how it happened, and when. I imagine my father, that small boy in Russia, after his father left the family to move to America. My father is alone with his mother. His mother is frightened she ’11 never see her husband again, and so she turns, of course, to her son for comfort. And he will comfort her. He will do whatever is asked to stop his mother’s weeping, to sponge up his mother’s fear. And his mother? What had happened to her, what began the cycle, the long downward spiral, to me? They are Russian peasants. They live in long, dark Russian winters where a Czar’s army stages pogroms to kill Jews. They live in an icy white wind that coalesces into a single brutal force. What comfort might my father’s mother’s father also have needed? My great-grandfather.
I imagine cold winter dust on the floor beneath the bed. I imagine mattresses, all of them stuffed with straw. I feel this mattress, yes, as if spears of straw are stuck in my own back. For they are. These are my roots. This is my inheritance. My legacy. My hope chest is filled with dry stalks of straw and tattered sheets. It is filled with pillows stuffed with fear. These hard, brittle mattresses are handed down from one generation to the next. Rage is handed down. Rage that we must sleep on straw mattresses during frigid Russian winters. So I imagine that my grandmother, my father, his grandfather must look for warmth and comfort elsewhere. And it is found. Found in the soft, scared body of a most malleable child.
I want to comfort my father now. I want to save him from the isolation of a Russian winter in a tiny shtetl outside Kiev. I want to save him from those nights. I see his arm thrust out from his body, reaching for air to hold onto, to pull him away from his mother. The air—cold, thin—won’t support him. His gesture is futile. His mother’s mouth will devour him. She is a creature with no soul. I imagine she suckles him for nourishment and sustenance, draining his soul from his body. And when she is finished, his aunts begin: one, then the other. I see him on a bed, his back speared by straw, pressed deeper and deeper into the mattress. The skin on his back bleeds. I imagine blood dripping onto frigid Russian soil.
My progress at the hospital stops. I can’t get better. I can’t get better as long as I want to save my father.
And I do.
Randy is angry my father has told me his secret. “He told you that to manipulate you,” Randy says. “He told you so you won’t blame him. He told you so you’d still love him. So you could excuse him for what he did to you.”
“He told me because it’s true,” I say.
“But he shouldn’t have told you. Not now. He doesn’t want you to get better. He’s scared about your getting better. He’s scared you won’t take care of his needs anymore. He’s scared you’re telling the family secret.”
I know Randy is right. I suspect this is why my father told me. But the image of that boy in Russia lingers. It will linger forever. I imagine he’s a boy who first lost his soul by the time he was three and could never reclaim it, because, with all the rage I know that lives in his body, I suspect his mother must have stolen his soul again and again, even as he grew older. But, Daddy, I want to ask you, I want to know, did you think you’d reclaim your own soul by secretly stealing another?
“Don’t you see?” I say to Randy. “It had to happen. He had to do what he did to me because of his mother. He didn’t have a choice. If that’s what she taught him, that’s the only thing he could have done to me.”
Randy tells me my father was an adult when he molested me, adults have choices. He could have chosen to seek help. He could have committed himself to a hospital. He could have sent me to a place where I’d be safe. “You never molested anyone,” he says to me. “Not everyone who’s molested passes it on. What you do is keep hurting yourself.”
Sunday is visiting day at the hospital. My husband won’t arrive until afternoon, so I sit in the lounge in the unit where lamps are lit, warming the gray, rainy day, warming the room, as if this is a family living room and a small gathering of friends. I watch a woman named Macon, new in the unit, although she arrived here from the locked unit at Kennestone. This morning I sat next to her at breakfast where she showed me a round gash in her tongue resembling a cigarette burn. In fact, she’d convulsed on a drug overdose while trying to commit suicide and a tooth had sliced her tongue. Now, she silently stares at her hands folded in her lap, saying nothing to her family, looking down.
Her husband looks angry, his face thick with rage. Sweat spikes the dark hair on the nape of his neck and the hair looks as if it’s bristling. I can’t hear his words, but his gestures strike the air as he speaks. Their daughter—she must be in the third or fourth grade—sits on the floor with crayons and coloring book, her head bowed. Her hair is yanked into a messy off-center ponytail with clumps of hair spilling loose over her shoulders. Macon doesn’t say a word; she remains silent, studying her hands.
Then I see it. My only surprise is that I didn’t notice immediately. The daughter. Not just her hair is unkempt… For a moment I feel light-headed. I can’t swallow. I feel as if I’m spiraling back in space, and can see back then—but also I am here. Now. The daughter wears her dress inside out. I lean closer to make sure. Yes, her back is to me and the label hangs outside the neck. Seams circle the shoulders, the waist, the sides, the hem. I know that either her father dressed her wrong in a hurry because he’d undressed her in a hurry or else she does this deliberately, wears her dress this way to send a message, a signal, telling her mother, in this most accurate language, she is having an emergency. But Macon refuses to see. Macon doesn’t see what she sees, even took pills to ensure she’d never notice. She was willing to kill herself rather than know what she knows. But by sacrificing herself, she most truly was willing to sacrifice her daughter.
Without plan, I stand to move toward them. Even from here I feel the tight knot of their family, the bewildering combinations of relationships and roles of these three people, impossible to unravel. Macon’s husband’s gaze is a blank rage as he turns to me, drawing closer, as if he can’t imagine how I could intrude on the rigid perimeter of his family—his, because I know that’s how he sees it—that he’s created. I can’t enter this knot. I back away. All I can do is tell the therapists about Macon’s daughter and hope they can save her if she needs it.
But what had I seen when I looked at Macon’s daughter? I see a girl who is small, a girl who could never have seduced her father.
I see her. I also see another little girl, one who, in her own accurately mute language, showed her underpants at school, stopped going to school, broke her collarbone at daycamp when she, too, wanted someone to see she was having an emergency.
My husband sits on a vinyl chair in my hospital room while I’m propped on the bed, my knees up. He is tall, tan; he looks healthy and calm, which he must be to balance me, balance the fulcrum of our teetering marriage. He is telling me about teaching his classes, having dinner with friends, painting the guest bathroom. He urges me to get a job teaching when I leave the hospital. “If you spend more time with people, you’ll feel better,” he says. “Please, just don’t go back to sitting alone in the house.”
I nod my head and try to listen as he speaks of the exotic ordinary. I almost believe my husband throws me these sentences as a lifeline, hoping to reel me in away from my parents, reel me into our marriage, reel me into that which is blessedly ordinary: life. I believe I’ve failed at everything defined as “life,” have disappointed him in every way. I’m a terrible cook. I barely clean the house. I’m scared to teach or to work. I’m scared to have sex with him. I won’t have children with him, am terrified just at the thought of a baby growing inside my evil stomach. Even though I fail him, he doesn’t leave me. Instead he encourages me, again and again, to absorb the ordinary. As much as I want to, sometimes I fear it’s too late. I’m too far away to reach him.
The curtains in the room are open. Raindrops splatter the glass. Earlier I’d watched Macon’s husband leave the hospital with their daughter. He’d walked quickly across the parking lot while his daughter, wearing a thin jacket, not a slicker, stumbled behind. And right now I’m not at all sure if I ever even want to be out there again, outside the hospital. Why would I want to live out there, when there are too many Macons and their husbands out there, too many childhood emergencies? Too many unsafe daughters.
“Quizzle misses you,” my husband says.
Quizzle. Our new cat. Mack is smiling at me. Maybe his smile is slightly forced, but the fact he tries so hard to reach me is what devastates, is what makes me want to cry.
He tells me she howls more than usual when he gets home from work because she’s lonely.
Quizzle. Before she crosses the Oriental rug in our living room, she pauses at its fringed border. She lowers her head and her eyes dart back and forth, inspecting the terrain. What scary figure lurks in the rug’s design? Does Quizzle see a scorpion with raised tail or a coiled snake that she must sneak past? Slowly, her paws stepping gingerly, her head still low to the ground, investigating, she crosses the potentially dangerous expanse of carpet. I wonder if she’ll ever trust the design in the rug not to harm her.
“Quizzle really wants you back.”
I walk to Mack’s chair. I kneel beside it. His hand is on the armrest and I place my forehead on it. For a moment his hand seems to stiffen, as if he’s not sure what to do. We touch each other so rarely. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, I whisper, too softly, I know, for him to hear. I don’t know how to tell him this aloud. I’m scared of my feelings, scared I might truly love this man who loves me back. He, too, is silent. For different reasons we don’t know this language of intimacy, don’t know how to form or create the words of love. I know the language of seduction, the language of my father, the language of sex. The language of night. I want to say something different to Mack. But still I don’t trust him, don’t trust myself, don’t trust feelings. Right now I am too sad to try.
One day in the hospital we’re taken to a swimming pool. At first I refuse to go in the water. My body doesn’t want to feel water; it doesn’t want to feel anything. The staff encourages me to try, and I believe if I don’t appear to get better they won’t let me leave the unit. When I’m most sick, when my addiction is most strong, I can swim, go to parties, smile, socialize, be what appears to be normal. Now, when the addiction is receding, I feel like an invalid unable to function. You are only feeling—I hear Randy’s voice in my head. So while in the pool I begin to cry. The water reminds me of bathwater, reminds me of the tub in Maryland, reminds me of my father touching me, reminds me of the rubber duck that watched us.
I swim to the side of the pool and press my forehead against the tiles. I’m angry at how much the world scares me, that I’m an adult who isn’t capable of behaving as an adult. All I can do at the pool is cry because—I know—Randy’s voice is always with me, telling me what I need to know—and I need to cry now because I couldn’t cry the first time my father’s hand touched me. But I don’t think I’ll ever get better. I don’t think I have the will to feel every place on my body, every place he touched me. Or every time.
I believe this, even though years have passed since I left home, years have passed since he touched me. Whenever I returned to visit, didn’t we act like a normal family? On many trips I brought a boyfriend. To protect myself? But no longer did I need protection.And my boyfriends only saw the image presented—the myth—what we wanted them to see. I always tell my friends what great parents they are: During the sixties they supported college students who demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. My parents were involved in the civil rights movement from the beginning. They were liberal Democrats, while most of my friends’ parents were conservatives. My friends envied me my parents, and so I treated my parents like parents, overwhelmingly pleased by my friends’ envy. Sometimes, yes, my father held me, stroked me, hugged me too tight. But we didn’t have sex again. It’s as if we decided to remain friends after the affair had ended.
But why did he stop? Perhaps he’s afraid I’ll say “no” if he tries, or that I might tell someone, now that I’m older and no longer dependent on them. Perhaps he’s no longer interested because I’m not a little girl. Perhaps he’s outgrown the rage that drove his desire to rape. Or perhaps he’s found another little girl to molest. Another little girl to rape.
All these years I have clung to my parents, clung to these people who stole my body from me, as if waiting for them to relinquish it. I want them to, not only for me, but for them. I must believe they are tormented by the discrepancy between what they surely wanted for their lives and the life they actually created—what they actually have. I want all of us to recover from the past. That my parents will die without having lived scares me. My sister scares me. She runs more than two hours a day, and I want her to stop. She still will not let herself get close to me. I still love her and want her to love me back. I want to know from what it is she’s running. Is she, too, an Egyptian princess, fleeing? From what? While growing up I never considered the possibility that what my father did to me he did to her, too. I believed I was the only one, the chosen one. I had to believe he loved me more than he loved her. I had to believe that what he did to me was love, because it was the only love I had. Now—now I wonder. Did he try to molest her? Did my tough, brave sister know how to refuse?
In another phone conversation my father tells me he has seen a therapist and asks if I’ll visit him when I get out of the hospital. “I want to talk to you,” he says. He says he feels bad because he doesn’t know me—and there isn’t much time. Always, he wants me to visit; this is not new. Never has he said he feels bad because he doesn’t know me; this is new. For a moment I feel the rage, and I almost say what I feel, but I can’t. I can’t say: You don’t know me because all you did was rape me. But I say this: I tell him we don’t know each other because we don’t know how to talk to each other, and that even if I visit we still won’t know how. I also tell him I’m afraid to visit. He doesn’t ask why.
And I say this: I tell him that because his mother sexually molested him, that’s how he interprets love.
This man, my father, does not slam down the phone in a rage. In his small, scared boy’s voice he asks what I mean. I say he sexualizes love—that he doesn’t know how to feel or give love unless it’s sexual. It means he’s scared of intimacy. “It means you’re scared to let anyone know who you really are.”
I was always scared to let anyone know who I really was, just as I was scared to know myself, scared to understand what happened to me. To protect me from this knowledge, I created Dina and Celeste. “They were part of your life-support system,” Randy says. As a child I needed their protection.
I’m grateful they helped me survive, even as now it is time to say good-bye, to understand they’re not truly real, that I’m the one in control, that I control them. The threads of their tenuous existence are interconnected with the addiction that dwells in a land of lies. If I can say the words “My father raped me,” if I can say the words “My mother let him,” then I no longer need to disperse my self into other beings. I don’t need to comfort myself with euphemisms; I don’t need to comfort myself with Dina’s silence; I don’t need to comfort myself with Celeste’s words of seduction; I don’t need to comfort myself with lies.
To Celeste and Dina these lies of course were truth, were their truths. But no longer can they be mine. In the hospital, as the addiction fades, Celeste and Dina fade—lies fade—as I learn the language of life. The longer I’m sober, the stronger I become, the weaker are Dina and Celeste. They seem to flow one into the other, becoming one before becoming nothing. Then my own glance is only mine. And I am finally me.
In the hospital I say to my mother, on the phone: “I was sexually molested when I was a child.”
“Your father.”
This is not a question, and I am unable to acknowledge or answer it.
“Oh, well,” she says, “I had a terrible childhood, too. People talk about things like this now, but back then, no one knew.”
“You knew,” I say. She doesn’t see what she sees.
“But I didn’t understand,” she says. “No one knew what it meant back then. How could I have left? How could I have supported two small girls?”
“Money?” I say.
“It’s not like now, with women working. I asked my brother for five thousand dollars and he turned me down. What could I do? Patsy, Esey—everyone wanted me to stay with him. Everyone thought he was a wonderful husband.”
“He would have had to pay you child support and alimony.”
“When I was a child we were so poor. My father was an awful person. Cold. My mother was a saint, always singing, never complaining—with all us children to raise. I don’t know how she did it.”
I hang up the phone. I lie in bed enraged. Who are you, this person called mother, a mother who listened to her radio at night so she could pretend not to hear her husband rape her daughter? I don’t know this mother who desired the status of wife and family more than she desired the safety of her daughters, more than she cared for our lives.
Later, Randy urges me to beat a pillow with my fists, pretending the pillow is my mother. I must do this, learn finally to turn rage outward, in a safe way, not inward on myself. I pretend, yes, this pillow is my mother—a mother who never guided me through childhood, never guided me into adulthood, into life. Later, I imagine the pillow is my father… he’s walking toward me, at night, entering my bedroom, lifting the sheet, entering my bed… No. You. Stop. I raise my arm to stop him. My arm is strong, distinct, full of purpose and muscle and power. He will stop. If my mother won’t protect me, I will protect myself. I beat the pillow harder. I do and I do and I do.
“What does your writing mean to you?” Randy asks. I’m leaving the unit in a few days and he’s worried. No longer will I have constant care. He wants me to learn to structure time in a way to keep myself safe. He wants me to continue writing as part of my recovery. “How did you start?”
“I began to write in 1976,” I say. “It’s like I had to.” I was married to my first husband, a lawyer involved with politics, who, like my father, leaves Washington with the Republicans in power, taking me with him. We move to a small coastal community he plans to develop—not by opening a bank—but through architectural preservation. Even though my first husband is kind, generous, decent, he’s emotionally distant. I don’t know how to love him any more than he knows how to love me. During the time we are together he never tells me he loves me. I tell him I love him, but I don’t know that word’s definition. I don’t understand marriage. I don’t understand how to be a wife. I am lost from the start because all I know is how to play a role, how to look right —what I learned from my parents. From them I learned the importance of appearances, not bothering with the inconvenience of a true inner life. So now I re-create the appearance of a normal middle-class family—while being unfaithful to my husband, while once again leading a double life.
After several years of this incomprehensible marriage, I begin to see a psychiatrist. Month after month I dutifully come to his office, yet I won’t/can’t /don’t talk about my parents, explaining there’s nothing to say about them. Nor do I talk much about my marriage and even less about my true self. Instead, I talk about sex; I talk about men. Men are sex. They’re nothing more, nothing less. The clothes I wear to his office are short, low-cut. In these clothes, I tell this man about all the men with whom I’ve had sex. I want to impress him. Yet the more I talk about sex and engage in sex, the more I have a vague sense that something is very wrong. But I don’t know how to tell this psychiatrist, or myself, what is wrong. I’m afraid to speak, afraid that all the words that matter, all the words I should be saying to this man, are the words I never learned, are the words my father never allowed. If I speak, I also believe I will be hurt—like the time my father taped my mouth shut when my sister left for college, when I wanted to tell him I was scared. My mouth doesn’t know how to say what is true. It feels inanimate, exhausted with all my father’s lies.
One day when he, too, perhaps is frustrated by my lack of progress, the psychiatrist asks me how I see myself. I almost open my mouth to speak. But then I don’t, I can’t, for I have nothing to say. How do I see myself? I see myself in these too-short shorts. I see myself in this too-revealing blouse. But surely this man seeks different information. I shrug and slouch in the chair. Since I don’t know how I see myself, I have nothing to say.
He asks if I might like to try drawing a picture of myself and hands me a pad of paper and a pencil. I take them, even knowing I can’t draw anything more complicated than a stick figure. I am unable to draw. I am unable to speak. Maybe I must begin at some ancient origin of language and draw petroglyphs. Maybe I must learn the hieroglyphics of the Egyptian princess. I feel as if I am primitive or mute. As a child I believed I was primitive and mute. I believed I understood the sounds and the scents of nature more clearly than the words of my family. I also created my own unspoken words—like those of my secret alphabet. I memorized languages of camouflage, the language of survival. If I speak the language of the tropics, I am the tropics. If I speak the language of New Jersey suburbs, I am everygirl of the New Jersey suburbs. Therefore, I am not me. As a child I wasn’t taught the language of me. So I couldn’t learn the language of me. I didn’t even want to know I existed.
But now—how do I tell this psychiatrist, or myself, how I see myself? If I can’t draw. If I can’t speak.
Well, maybe I could try to write, I think. I’ve done a little writing. I’ve written college papers and articles on architectural preservation. Besides, I’ve always loved to read words, words other people have written. Certainly writing is easier than speaking. If I write, no one will hear me. If I write, I won’t have to open my mouth. I wouldn’t even have to show the psychiatrist or anyone else what I write, especially if it’s no good. And besides, besides—even my father thought I was good enough to write his book.
On the way home I stop at a stationery store for paper. I set up a card table in the bedroom and place a portable Smith-Corona typewriter on top of it. I open up the ream of pale yellow paper, less expensive than white paper, since I’m not sure whether my words have any value. I roll a sheet of paper into the feeder and stare at it. I rest my fingertips on the keyboard. But how do I start? My fingers remain rigid, unable to type, as I realize, of course, that writing articles isn’t exactly the same as writing about myself. It’s as if I lack the secret key to unlock the rigid formation of the alphabet. I must rearrange the letters, shuffle them like a deck of cards. Gently, uncertainly, I press down the letterI. Slowly I begin to type, even though I’m not sure what I’m writing.
In fact I discover I know how to write only in that I don’t know how to stop writing. I use the first ream of paper, then buy a second. I buy a third ream, have written over a thousand pages, before I even consider stopping—not at a true ending, but rather I finally allow words to drift into the margin and off the page. The book is not so much about me, though, as about a shadow of me. It’s certainly not about me and my father. Even though I fill up more than a thousand pages, I try words tentatively, constructing a pathway of words I hope will lead me to me. Over the years, later, I discover it will take many more thousands of words, many more thousands of pieces of paper.
During this time my husband and I separate, are reunited. Separate again.
It is with this initial bundle of more than a thousand pages of paper, carefully placed in two stationery boxes, that I meet the man who will eventually become my second husband, a graduate student who teaches writing at a continuing education center at a local university. I decide I must know the worth of all these pages—whether I should bother retyping what I have written onto white bond paper. So I sign up for the class, even though I will have to ask a man I’ve never met before to read my more than a thousand pages of yellow paper. I’m scared he’ll say no; I’m scared he’ll say yes. Since I don’t trust that my words themselves will be enough to convince him to read them, I slip into my short cut-off jeans and halter top for the first class. I carefully apply makeup and arrange my hair. I watch for him to take his seat in front of the class before I stroll past, wanting him to notice me, remember me, desire me—believing in the power of my body to be noticed, desired, remembered. More than I would ever trust my words or any sentence.
In class that first night I sit in the front row, my legs slightly parted, watching him, wanting him to watch me. Mack—his name is Mack—talks about irony, a word I’ve heard, but not a word I truly understand. He says irony is when the reader knows more than the protagonist, has a clearer understanding of events than the protagonist. He says irony is also when the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. He says irony is when you say one thing but mean another. Irony is when things are not what they seem. I am about to stop listening. I am about to let this word “irony” drift into oblivion where it might take years before I discover it again.
But then I don’t. I raise my hand and tell him, this instructor named Mack, I don’t quite understand what he means. Will he explain it again? With patience, he does. I hear the definition again. I make a connection. I see our pretty houses and our pretty clothes, see our Fleetwood Cadillac, see all the people who admire my parents, see all the smiling family photographs—see this—almost connecting it with a vision of what is seen when the walls of the pretty houses implode, when the pretty clothes are stripped off bodies, when the images on the photographs are ripped off the paper.
Mack’s smile is shy, not insistent. He agrees to read my unwieldly manuscript, carefully reaching for the two boxes, holding the boxes with hands that are gentle. His hands—they are as gentle, yes, as the hands of my Uncle Esey, a man who also loved words, who knew you must hold words carefully so as not to break or misuse them.
Yet I believe that Mack agrees to read my book only because of the way I dress, for surely he knows what I offer. Perhaps I think I must “pay” him with more than money.
But this isn’t what he wants. He’s not like the others. And although he has a patched-together definition of love himself at this time, still, months later, he says he loves me and wants to marry me. And maybe I marry Mack just because he does read my words—he is the first person to read them. It will be years, though, before I understand that what he really wants is to hear a stronger voice—not the shadowy, stuttered words, a mere scaffold of an uncompleted path of sentences that, even with the thousand pages, leads me forward with only the most tentative step.
I’m never able to tell the psychiatrist how I see myself. I’m never able to tell him about my parents.
It’s only now, with Randy, I practice all the words I need to speak. I especially practice saying words that have always scared me. Over and over I chant the word “no,” what I must learn to say to dangerous men. He has me repeat the phrase “thank you,” what I want to say when complimented—a phrase I struggle with—since I’ve never believed I deserve praise or attention. I learn to ask for what I want. I learn to express what I need.
I think of other skills I have learned. I remember the time in seventh grade when a teacher commented that I had sloppy handwriting. Devastated by this criticism, I spent months practicing penmanship, copying pages out of books, until the teacher smiled approval. All I cared about then was the beauty of the handwriting, the perfection of the page, for I had nothing of my own to write, nothing of my own to say. But now, with Randy, I learn to speak, learn to write, the words of my own vocabulary.
On the hospital unit we meet for Spirituality Group. Today, with paper, crayons, ribbons, yarn, we are to give tangible form to our higher power, visualize it, create it. We must try to believe in a power greater than ourselves—a power, therefore, greater than our addictions. The way to recover from destructive behavior, addictive lives, is to discover spirituality.
Always, I’d thought I had none. But when the therapists say a higher power needn’t be a god—can be anything, even nature—I think of my heart safely beating in stone, or of my body protected by hibiscus petals. Yes, by hiding in nature—in its language as well as in its strength and its beauty—I felt as if it guarded me, so that even if my father found my body I could pretend he didn’t find me. A higher power. I think of my Christmas tree, of that night in New Jersey when I was protected by Christmas spirits. So now I reach for a pine-green piece of construction paper and a pair of scissors. Yes, that tree must have been spiritual. It was full of power far greater than my own.
Today, for my session with Randy, I have brought a photograph of myself to show him. It is the one taken in second grade, when I was ordered to hold the crayon in my right hand. Even with this misrepresentation, it is the photo, the image, I think of when I imagine the little girl.
The photo is in a cardboard cover. I open it and hand it to Randy, telling him the story of the crayon. He holds it carefully, softly exclaiming over the little girl like a proud parent.
Listening to Randy, I also begin to feel like a proud parent, and all I can do is beam.
“Why don’t we ‘re-do’ the photo,” he says. “Hold a ‘crayon’ in your left hand. See how it feels.” He places a pencil on the small coffee table in front of the couch where I’m sitting. “Let’s pretend it’s a crayon,” he says. “What was your favorite color?”
“That dress was lime-green,” I say. “I really loved that dress.” I look at the pencil. “Okay. It’s green.”
“Would you like to pick it up?”
I reach for it with my left hand and hold it.
“How does it feel?” he asks.
Quickly, in my mind, I run through the list of feelings Randy has taught me: mad, sad, glad, scared. “Glad?” I say.
He nods. “Anything else?”
I run the pencil across my fingers. I hold it as if about to write, then grip it tight in my fist. For a moment the pencil almost feels as strong as a magic wand. I glance back at Randy and say, “Powerful.”
Now it is his turn to beam.
He puts the photograph on the coffee table, face up. We both look at her. She smiles straight into the camera. Yes, she—I—would never have let anyone know I was angry that the crayon had been taken from my left hand. Nor would I have let anyone know I was angry that my mother and father weren’t with me to ensure I be allowed to hold the crayon properly. Later, when I’d explained to my mother what had happened, she’d told me not to worry about it, it was only a photograph. It doesn’t mean anything, she’d said. It doesn’t matter.
I reach over and lightly touch the face in the photo. I look at her eyes. I want to reach her. I want to touch her. I want to hold her hand. I want to wash her, dress her, feed her, love her. I want to whisper to her… I want to say to her, I do say: It does matter. You matter.
“But who loved her?” I whisper to Randy. “Loved me? Didn’t my parents? My father always told me he loved me.”
“They did love you,” Randy says. He straightens and leans toward me as if hoping I’ll feel his words, feel the power of his words, more strongly if they travel a shorter distance. “But their kind of love was hurtful and destructive. Little girls shouldn’t have to be scared of their parents’ love.”
We are silent. Randy has tears in his eyes, yet he doesn’t turn from me or wipe them away. I am confused. I don’t understand who this man is or what this means. But—no—this time I will not be confused. This time I will let myself see him, will not turn away from him either. I allow myself to understand that their kind of love is not his kind of love, his, which isn’t hurtful or destructive. I want to understand the foreignness of this man, a man who knows how to love well. His generosity, his love, his safety, his wisdom, his patience are almost too much. Yet this moment I allow his steadfast heart to warm my own once-dead heart. It is this, allowing myself to accept Randy, that will heal me.
“But suppose I never learn how to love the way you know how to love,” I say.
“You do know how.”
“But I don’t feel like I do.”
“Look at how you’ve cared for friends,” he says. “Look at the men you’ve most cared about.”
Christopher. Mack. “You,” I say. “I care about you.”
“I know that,” he says, smiling. “Otherwise you wouldn’t keep coming back here week after week.” He pauses and nods toward the photo. “And, most important, you care about her.”
It is time to leave the hospital. I go home with my Christmas tree cutout. I go home with the pencil gripped tight in my left hand. I go home understanding that the girl’s smile in the photo is not a smile that seduced my father. It is just a little-girl smile—both special and ordinary—a little girl, who I always wanted to be.