Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You

by Sue William Silverman

  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 d
on’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.