Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You

by Sue William Silverman

  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.