Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You

by Sue William Silverman

  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 aft
er 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.