The next morning my father rips the tape from my mouth. The rawness of the skin stays with me, is there for days, is there whenever I look at my face in the mirror. My mouth hurts the most when I smile, and so I must smile whenever my father enters the room and beckons.
He loves my smile. Long after the skin around my lips has healed, I continue smiling.
I am a teenager. I love to listen to my transistor radio. I love to dance. I attend all the school dances and dance and dance and dance. My body feels free while I dance. I control what it does. So when I hear music I must move. I love Pat Boone, Paul Anka, the Everly Brothers, Ricky Nelson, Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, Bobby Darrin, Bobby Vinton, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian. Well, Celeste loves Elvis. I especially love Pat Boone. I see a photograph of Pat Boone with his four daughters and am drawn by how clean they look. Their clothes are without wrinkles. Their hair is without snarls. Their teeth shine straight and white. I want to be one of his daughters. I believe if he sees me he will adopt me, so I nag my mother until she buys tickets for his television show. After the show I wait in line with a copy of his book ’Twixt Twelve and Twenty for him to autograph. When I reach him, I can’t move. I can’t raise my arm to hand him the book. I’m holding up the line. Finally he smiles and asks: “Is this for me?” I give it to him. He signs and returns it… except then I am back in the car, driving back across the bridge with my mother, heading toward home. Later, in my room, I trace my finger across his signature and dream about being with him, dream about being one of his daughters. And so, finally, I am one, asleep in his house, tucked into a clean white bed.
But when I wake the next morning I’m still in my own house. My own bed. I go to breakfast wearing red Lollipop underpants. Nothing else. My mother says nothing. My father says nothing. All day I don’t dress. When my father comes home from work I’m sitting in the living room in my red Lollipop underpants. When my mother calls us to dinner I walk into the kitchen still in the underpants. No bra, no slip. Even the soles of my feet are bare. We eat our dinner like this. I don’t remember whether we speak or not. Probably my father tells us about the successes of his glorious, glorious day.
But still I believe I’m a teenager like my friends. I learn to drive a car. I love the Beatles and watch them on The Ed Sullivan Show. I buy records. I dress like my friends. I talk like my friends. Because all I’ve ever wanted is to be a suburban New Jersey teenage girl like my friends. It is this girl, this teenage girl (yet, objectively, a pretense of a teenage girl, a facsimile) who finally graduates from high school, like her friends, and prepares to leave home for college.
So I am to leave home, after all. Over the summer, a summer that will be the last summer, the last time I ever live in the same house with my parents, my father knows he is losing me, losing his teenage girl. He does what he can to hold me, to make my body his forever, because he must know what will happen to me in college, must know I will have sex with other men. Maybe he knows I will truly become the girl he’s made me. So he hurts me and loves me and must hate the love—and love the hurt—until I don’t understand why so much had to happen to that part of my body.
By the end of summer I have bled into a red glass ornament on the miniature Christmas tree. I can’t get out. My mind turns to glass, too hard, too opaque, to shatter. No one can see in it; no one can see me inside it. No one knows me or has ever known me. Even if I pressed my body against the glass and pounded my fists, I would not be able to crack this strangely protective glass. For really, I’ve lived inside this glass for years; the glass has only grown stronger over the years. It will protect me until I’m ready to understand what happened, ready to feel what happened. Until I’m ready to let someone, anyone, see me. Until I’m ready to come out. It will be years before I’m ready.
So most truly, then, I am not the one who goes to college in Boston. All anyone will know is all anyone has ever known, a pretense of a girl, who does look, who can look, like all you other girls. It is this pretense of a girl who lives in that first dorm at 199 Marlborough Street, who sleeps in that dorm bed and in all the beds that will follow, beds I sleep in alone or with others, all the beds away from the ones I shared with my first lover, my father.
Now, finally, I am in this first bed in which I sleep away from my father. This first night. I am in a dorm. Far away from home. In a building full of girls. A girl shares my room, and this first night I can’t sleep, am too conscious of her, my roommate, conscious of all the girls on the hall and on the other floors, all these girls in one building, sleeping. There are no men in the building. I sense my roommate, this strange girl in my room, breathing, sleeping, dreaming. A stranger. Where is my father? He’s not here. He’s not here. He’s not here. I don’t feel sad. I don’t feel happy. I don’t feel. I don’t feel me. I don’t know who I am or what will become of me, here in this dorm of girls in Boston. I feel too light, even in this heavy brick building in Back Bay, even with the weight of all these other girls close around me. I am too light. Without my father’s weight on my body, I can float through the bricks and past the girls into the night. And I do. Because for years, before I discover sanity, this escape is most truly only a return journey back home to find him, to replace him, until I learn how to stop.
Tonight I wonder where you are, Father. Tonight I wonder what you are doing. Do you sit alone in my bedroom waiting for me, mourning me, missing me? Do you now grasp a discarded piece of my clothing, wishing you grasped me instead, wishing I were home instead? Do you sleep in my bedroom, sleep in my bed? Tell me, Father, how do you live without me? Tonight, do you think about me, too?
BLUE
Tuesdays
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 curl
s 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?”
Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You Page 17
