Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You

by Sue William Silverman

  At dinnertime my mother checks on me. I show her the progress—really there is none—and I’m told I will wear these underpants to dinner, that we don’t have money to be buying new underpants. Throughout dinner I sit in cold wet pants. I don’t know if she has told my father or my sister, but I am too ashamed to eat. Too exhausted. My father is the only one who ever talks at dinner, telling us about his day, his work, his career. No one listens. Surely, we all are too tired. We are all, in our different ways, all of us, worn to a nub.

  Soon afterward my back begins to hurt. It feels like a weight, as if my lower back is too swollen to move. I believe it is permanently chilled from the wet underpants.

  In fourth grade a new teacher comes to the school, an Englishman, Mr. Gerrard. Since St. Thomas was owned by Denmark before being bought by the United States, there are no British accents, and we are not tolerant of his differentness. Besides, his body smells sour, and he is, in the opinion of my class, quite homely. We tease him mercilessly. We disrupt class. We hold our noses when he walks by. We laugh at him. We ignore his authority as a teacher. Surely it is upon this man, this lonely stranger, that I act out the rage my family deserves. I sense the vulnerability of a newcomer, sense his timidity. I have learned the art of being a predator from my parents. Surely he receives the wrath that is nightly implanted into my body. I scorn his weakness—not wanting to see my own in him. My classmates and I shame him from the island in less than a year. But I am the one who is truly, forever, shamed.

  One evening when my father is in the States on business, my mother spends hours helping me memorize the multiplication tables. 4 X 7? 8 X 3? 6 X 7? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. The hour grows later. I manage to remember a few correct answers, but I am far away from knowing them all. For a while I stand on my head, thinking the extra blood in my brain will help my memory. Then I climb a doorway, a trick I learned from my sister. By putting a foot on either side of the wide jambs, with palms also pressed to the jambs, I shinny up to the top, quite high, as the ceilings are high. Maybe I can think better from up here. I can’t. I slide halfway down, then jump, waking our dachshund, Oscar. He begins to bark and we put him out on the porch. 7 X 9? Sevens are the worst. My mother keeps drilling me, and it is close to midnight when we become hysterical. Soon we are laughing so hard we’re crying, she as hard as I. I will never learn these numbers; I will never be able to stop laughing; I will never be able to stop crying. Oscar continues to bark. No one in my family will ever be able to stop.

  My mother receives the following letter from my father, still in the States on business:

  Dear Precious,

  I have your long letter. I am very sorry you were hurt about my asking Morris to hold all the mail for me. I did tell him specifically only to hold the office mail—to give you all other mail. I told him to do so because heretofore I found on my return all the mail which had accumulated during my absence strewn all over my desk as well as in the box on my desk. I never know who in my absence is looking at the mail and there might be letters which arrived in my absence which I did not find. I therefore asked Morris to be sure to keep all the mail for me, that is official mail until I returned. I am sorry that was misunderstood and I am sorry that it added to your troubles. I have no secrets and you know that I do not have any. There is nothing that I need hide from you.

  I write a letter to my daddy:

  How are you? I am just beautiful, darling. I’d like you to bring me a string of blue popit beads, and I would like the smallest size bead there is and a long string of the beads. Is it cold up there? did it snow? We took our dancing lesson today, it was good. We got Oscar a new collar. Oscar sends his love.

  Maria looks pretty for her birthday party, wearing a white dress with crinolines. A white hibiscus is pinned in her short dark hair. I place my present on the table and sit beside her, waiting for the others to arrive. Sandwiches, crusts trimmed from the sides, are on china platters surrounding a birthday cake with white icing and pink roses. Coke and 7-Up bubble in crystal glasses. The maid has prepared this food and set the table before going home. Maria’s mother will be in her room, drinking. Her father? Maria shakes her head. Mike, her brother, has eaten one of the pink roses off the cake and her father is punishing him. Her brother has been taken to his room.

  Even after the kids arrive I sit beside the table. I notice the spot where her eight-year-old brother plucked the pink rose neatly from its nest of white icing. But since I believe he surely hasn’t eaten enough, I decide I must bring him another piece of cake. I cut a huge slice from another corner, where there are two roses, and wrap it in a napkin.

  I slip away, carrying the cake in both hands. Inside the house, my buffalo-hide sandals slap across the vertivert rugs on the wood floor of the living room. Slowly I climb the stairs to the second story. All the doors off the hall are shut. Behind the door of her parents’ bedroom, her mother sits with closed hurricane shutters. I wonder if she knows there’s a party; I wonder if she knows it’s her daughter’s birthday.

  I want to race down the hall, banging on doors and shouting. I want to wake up this house. But I creep silently. I will make no sound. I feel light, as thin as air, and I believe myself invisible. I must not get caught, because if I do, the cake will be taken away and I must feed Mike more cake. When I reach his shut door I’m afraid to set the cake on the floor, afraid to relinquish it for even a moment, so I hold it against my chest, even though it’s getting squashed. With my other hand I turn the glass knob. The door gives. I push it inch by inch, feeling warm air seep toward me over the threshold. The room is dim. A ceiling fan barely stirs sweaty air. Mike lies on his bed, on his stomach. His back has been cut by a tamarind switch that is now in the corner. I sit beside him. He doesn’t open his eyes.

  I break off a small piece of cake and press it to his mouth. Nothing happens. I don’t move, just wait, wait for him to smell it, wait for him to understand it is for him, and it is all right for him to eat it. When his lips finally part and my fingers nudge the cake inside, he waits a moment before chewing. As soon as he swallows, I break off another piece, then another. He chews faster now, not once opening his eyes. When he is finished, I let him lick my fingers to soothe him, because I’m worried he is still hungry. I want to feed him more and more, fill him, nourish him, nurture him with food.

  The Virgin Isle Hotel looks like a gigantic white bird nesting atop a volcanic mountain. The hotel is owned by Billy’s family, and on Sundays he and I swim in the turquoise pool until the skin on my fingers puckers. After, we lounge on the terrace sunning ourselves while waiters bring us hamburgers, chocolate milk shakes, and Cokes. No one monitors us or asks for money. Billy simply signs the check. We play Hide and Seek down corridors and along terraces, in the cool marble lobby, behind cabanas. Sometimes we enter the woods, breathless, sweaty, but young, safe with each other. In the distance a donkey brays. Mongooses scurry in the undergrowth. I hide behind mimosa and royal poinciana trees, waiting for him to find me. When he does, we laugh. His skin smells of limes and the sun. And I want … I never want to lose his smell of limes, I never want to lose it, and don’t understand the urgency to stay with him here in the woods, to make his smell, just by playing games with him, mine.

  But later, tired from the afternoon sun, we sit in the Foolish Virgin Bar. Fish nets, filled with green and blue glass floats, hang from the ceiling. We order ginger ale and bowls of maraschino cherries and peanuts. I alternate—cherries and peanuts, cherries and peanuts, sweet and salt—until my lips and fingers are stained red and dotted white with salt. I stay with Billy until dusk, when we lean against the wrought-iron rail surrounding the terrace and watch the sun, the color of a crimson hibiscus, stain the Caribbean red. Far below, ships in the harbor rock in currents. The mound of bauxite on the pier darkens. The massive volcanic mountains seem thicker, more opaque, in evening darkness. Soon Charlotte Amalie, below us, is sprinkled with lights. Stars spike the sky. Then Billy leaves for home. I watch him go.
It is time for me to meet my parents and my sister for dinner.

  For dinner, at the hotel, tables are set with white cloths and polished silver. Magenta and yellow tropical flowers scent the room. Men wear white linen jackets and women in elegant gowns smell of expensive French perfume. The wooden dance floor gleams. The steel-drum band, wearing calypso shirts, plays on a raised stage. There will be a show. Usually professionals teach tourists how to dance the calypso, the merengue, the limbo.

  Later, my father and I dance together. I am crisp and starched, my skirt bouyed with crinolines, my patent-leather shoes shining. Rarely does he dance with my mother, and never with my sister. We twirl around. He holds me tight and I smell his bay rum aftershave. Everyone smiles at us, dancing. I am a good dancer and everyone thinks I’m cute—this young girl dancing with her father. And later still, much later, this scent of bay rum will be on my skin, on Dina’s body. But while we dance I wonder what my mother thinks. Are you jealous, Mother? Are you hurt? Or maybe you’re relieved, relieved to have relinquished your duties as wife to your daughter.

  Always, my mother kisses me good-night, tucking the marquisette net under the mattress to protect me while I sleep. Then the shudder of net as my father opens the door leading from the porch, the quiver of net as he gently untucks it and slips onto my white sheets. I am always the lover he seeks on his nightly journey to my bed, too far away from his own. He kisses me and eases off my underpants and nightgown. He decorates my body with strand after strand of blue beads. He caresses my body, wanting me to love what he does as much as he loves it, wanting my body to desire his body—now, right now, when he can no longer delay, when he must enter me, when he can no longer wait. Except sometimes, these moments, he must notice my true-true body: cool as granite; rigid as rage. With incomprehension, lost in his own rage, desperately needing just one part of my body more than he needs sanity or love, he begins to hurt me … unless … quickly, quickly I metamorphose. Quickly silky black hair whispers across my shoulders and quickly I offer him Dina. Dina, whose body supplicates, whose body desires. Dina, who will be his childlover forever, his nightdaughter, whose body is never cool, never granite. I give my daddy the gift of Dina. Dina. Dina. Never, even once, will she refuse.

  At the outdoor market I buy a slice of sugarcane and examine crates of papaya, mango, pineapple, plantains. I sit on an old rum barrel and dig my teeth into yellow, pulpy cane and chew it until only the skin remains. In my red French madras playsuit and buffalo-hide sandals, I am an island girl wandering through town. At Katz’s Pharmacy I, along with other patrons, tap dimes on the counter until we are waited on. I buy a scoop of chocolate ice cream from Mr. Katz’s daughter, several years older than I. Her eyes are lined with black and she wears her long ponytail braided. She is beautiful. I decide to braid my ponytail as well. I explore shady, brick-lined alleys of Beretta Center, where duty-free shops sell jewelry, perfume, Sea Isle cotton, cashmere sweaters, Madeira linens, doeskin cloth, French madras dresses, carnation and lavender Morny soap, West Indian rum. I follow tourists and wonder what it would be like if they took me home. I linger in front of Mr. Beretta’s jewelry store, gazing at rows of amethysts, emeralds, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, pearls. I want to hold these cool, smooth jewels in my hands. My sister is inside with Mr. Beretta, sprawled on a wicker chair as if she’s been there for hours. My sister always spends more time with acquaintances than with anyone who might grow close to her. She knows the shopkeepers far better than I, and one day Mr. Beretta gives her a ruby ring, her birthstone. Then, perhaps as an afterthought, he gives me a diamond ring, my birthstone, in the shape of a flower.

  I visit Little Switzerland, next to my father’s bank. It is the only place on the island with air-conditioning, and I love the blast of cold as I enter. I wander aisles of Wedgwood, silverware, watches, cuckoo clocks. All the jewelry, all the bottles of rum and liquor, all the imported tablecloths, all the perfumes soothe me. I am soothed by the cool perfection of cut gems. I am soothed by perfect-ticking Swiss clocks. The merchandise in all these stores is ordered, arranged, controlled. Everything smells new and unused, which is how I feel here, the way I wish I could always be.

  One day in fifth grade I sit with my legs apart, showing my underpants. This act is willful, compulsive. I feel as if I have to do it, even as I know I don’t want to do it. I feel as if I have to show someone—anyone—what I know how to do, even as I don’t want to be noticed. In front of the class Miss DuVall tells me young ladies should never sit like that. I lower my eyes and don’t want to return to school.

  Besides, I don’t quite understand school. We are given books to read, lessons to memorize, and while I vaguely understand that I am supposed to read the books and learn the lessons, I do not believe they are important. How can this knowledge help me? How can teachers teach me anything? Doesn’t my father teach me all I need to know? Doesn’t he always tell me so?

  Why, then, do I lack words for what I know? At school we are taught French, but still, even in this language, I learn no words for what I know, for what I am taught at night. So if words don’t exist, if definitions don’t exist, if signs and symbols don’t exist, then maybe people and actions don’t exist either. None of us exists. Night doesn’t exist. Bodies don’t exist. I don’t exist, for surely I know no language that might prove otherwise.

  What is the definition of “father,” “mother,” “sister,” “daughter,” “soul,” “family,” “love”? Do I ever learn? Maybe all the definitions I learn are wrong.

  I do learn, however, one of the most important lessons of my life: Contradictions never startle or surprise me. I am capable of living with irreconcilable contradictions.

  I am a Brownie for one day, attend only one meeting, then refuse to return. Immediately I notice the badges the girls have sewn on their uniforms, badges proclaiming skills at which they excel, goals accomplished. I know the skills at which I excel. Even lacking words, I believe these are my only skills. But the badges worn by these girls don’t portray beds, sheets, bodies. Does this mean my skills are useless? How do I know, though, lacking words, symbols, definitions, that no girl wears these badges because no badges are even designed that portray beds, sheets, bodies? All I know is that I can’t return for the next Scout meeting. I couldn’t bear to be the only Brownie with no badge sewn on her brown uniform.

  One day at school we are served corn fritters for lunch. I know I cannot eat them. I know the moist, chunky pieces of corn embedded in a soggy white mass will make me sick. I stare at the plate, at the two fritters I am required to eat. Just from the smell my throat feels cold, my forehead sweaty. The headmistress says if I don’t eat both of them I will be taken to the bathroom and punished. I am afraid of her, afraid of her bony fingers. I imagine them punishing me, imagine them scrubbing my mouth with soap. Billy whispers he’ll eat mine if I slide them onto his plate, but the headmistress doesn’t take her eyes off me. I hold my breath and slowly begin to eat. I take tiny bites, drinking milk between bites to wash away the taste. I am determined not to be sick at school—not in front of everyone. The milk is gone long before the fritters, and as the others file back to class I am left alone on the veranda with the headmistress and my fritters. My sister passes and refuses to look at me; I embarrass her. I know I do and would eat them for her sake alone if I could. It takes the rest of the afternoon—through French and math and recess—before I eat the last bite of fritter.

  The school bus drives us down the mountain. Today I don’t stay in town but climb the 99 Steps up to Blackbeard’s Hill, up the hill to our house, to my bedroom. In the cool, silent house I lie on my bed, my skin sweating, my stomach freezing, waiting to throw up. I throw up for hours, on and off, unable to stop. My mother brings me ginger ale and presses damp washcloths to my forehead. I vomit every kernel of corn into the bucket she has placed on the floor next to my bed. I must get rid of it all. My mother disdains fried food and calls the headmistress in a rage: I am never to be forced to eat corn fritters again.
But her rage is deeper: Our family is insular. No one from the outside world is allowed to interfere. It is she, she and my father only, who control what enters my body.

  It is late at night before I finish being sick. I had fallen asleep and when I awake my father is sitting next to me. Through the windows the breeze feels cool and fresh. Fronds of coconut palms rustle. In the distance, a goat is bleating. When I move and my father realizes I am awake, he wipes my face with a wet cloth. This is all. He wipes my face and brushes hair from my forehead. I whisper to him I was sick. Gently, he squeezes my hand, then holds the glass of ginger ale to my lips. Slowly, I sip it. I want him to stay here, holding the glass, wiping my face. He has placed a small copper bell next to my bed and tells me to ring it if I wake up sick. He tucks the mosquito net under the mattress and I watch him leave. I want to say to him: Stop, Daddy. Come back. But I say nothing. He might ask why, and I’d have no answer. I will have to wait for years, until I am an adult, before I know what I would have said to him if I’d called him back. I would have said: This is all it takes, this is all I want, this is how easy it is to be a father.

  Summers, we spend in the States. My mother takes my sister and me to New York City to visit her sister, my Aunt Patsy, and Uncle Evan. My father will join us later. I am particularly fond of my Uncle Evan and call him Esey. They have no children, and he spends hours playing with me. For a living, Esey writes jokes and books about jokes. He makes up word games and teaches me to play. His office is in their small apartment and the room is crammed, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves. I lie on the cranberry-colored carpet and gaze up at the green, brown, tan, black spines of the books. I love the way the room smells of old dusty paper and ink. The solidity of the books, the thousands and thousands of well-ordered words creating sentences, creating paragraphs, imparting information and knowledge, is reassuring, even though I don’t yet have the desire to read the books, don’t believe I would understand them. For now, I simply love being in the company of these books because Esey loves them.