Pushing Upward

by Andrea Adler

  “Guess what?”

  I just stared at him, hoping he would interpret my expression, as this was not a game I wanted to play. He never caught on.

  Jumping up and down, as if he were in training, he shared his news: “I was just cast in a movie.” He didn’t stop for air. “Two days ago this Italian director saw me standing on Hollywood Boulevard. He came over and asked me if I wanted to play a wrestler in his film. Isn’t that the shit?” He smacked me on the shoulder again. “Just like that. The guy spots my muscular physique from across the street, comes over to get a closer look, and tells me I’m the wrestler he’s been looking for.”

  “Is he gay?” I couldn’t help myself.

  Larry stopped to think about it for a minute. “I don’t think so.” He shifted ground, transferred his weight from his right foot to his left. “Nope, he’s definitely not gay. Anyway, I leave in a week for Italy. And guess what else? I’ll be getting my SAG card. Ain’t that a pisser?”

  The wave of jealousy that rose up inside me nearly flung me to the floor. While he took a gulp from his wineglass, my face, I’m sure, turned fire-pepper red. And this was the man I used to love kissing? With great control I made myself reply matter-of-factly, “It’s a pisser, Larry.” Caught between not wanting to lie about how happy I was and wanting to throw my diet soda in his face, I listened to myself recommend that he do extensive research on wrestlers before leaving for Italy and to be sure to learn all the character’s lines before going on the set. Then, before I could rip the robe off this wrestler and wrap it around his throat, I said, “Congratulations, Larry. I wish you all the success you deserve. Sorry I can’t stay to hear more, but I must get going—big audition in the morning.”

  We said our farewells, and I walked straight toward the dessert table. My whole body was shaking with anger, envy, rage. It didn’t matter that Larry Santino had no acting ability whatsoever, that he couldn’t deliver a meaningful line to his mother, let alone to another actor. My feet were moving toward the colorful table resplendent with bright red strawberries and glistening yellow-custard tarts. I wanted to devour every treat on it. It was like an emotional wave riding me forward on its current. I could feel the desire rising up through my stomach and into my chest and lodging in my throat. I could hardly breathe, and I realized: This is what addicts go through when they can’t get their fix. Smokers, when they can’t get their cigarette.

  With the surge came a clarity I’d never experienced before: I became extremely conscious of how much power these emotions had over me. And yet I couldn’t move. I was stuck. Rooted to the spot I was standing on. I knew I couldn’t eat just because I was mad. But the desire was so intense, and the urge seemed to come from someplace so much deeper than surface desire or jealousy. I didn’t know how to stop the desire, or the jealousy. I just wanted to push it down.

  I reached for a tart, put it in my mouth, and started to reach for another one when all of a sudden I had a flash of how I’d felt after eating those croissants, how I’d fallen on my knees and prayed for this never to happen again. I pulled my hand back, forced myself to take a step away. Shaking, I noticed a couple, dressed as police officers, detaching themselves from the mass of dancers and heading my way. I managed to find my voice as they approached and asked, “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Back toward the kitchen, doll,” the female police officer said as she pinched my cheek. I beelined down the hall to the narrow door, with my shoulder bag flapping against my waist. Looking around to see if anyone was coming, I let myself in and quickly locked the door.

  Resting my back against the shiny blue door, I slid down to the floor. Help me, I silently called out. I closed my eyes and could feel myself not being able to breathe. Panic. On my knees, I began to rock back and forth, back and forth. The panic kept rising.

  All I wanted to do was to get up, go back to the dessert table, and eat everything on it, stuff down all the feelings that were surfacing.

  I didn’t know what stopped me. I’d never had the slightest willpower. It was a force that I hadn’t known was within me. From somewhere inside, I began to hear the words: Reclaim what you’ve lost … Reclaim what you’ve lost. The words kept coming up: Reclaim what you’ve lost.

  Reclaim what? I closed my eyes and knelt there on the floor.

  And then the recurring dream that had come to me, the one I couldn’t figure out—the shadow in the room with the two figures—was suddenly present. With my eyes closed, the vision, although shadowy, flashed before me:

  I’m ten years old. Mommy and Daddy are out … It’s nighttime, and I’m singing and dancing with my Ginny doll in the living room. Steven is in his bedroom with his friend Lenny. All of a sudden the door to his room opens, and Steven pops his head out and smiles.

  He asks me if I want to come into his room to play a game. “Sure,” I say, happy that Steven wants me to play with them.

  I shut off the TV and go into the open door.

  Steven slams the door shut. He still has a smile on his face, but it’s lost the friendly qualify. He walks over to me and takes my doll and throws it on the floor. He pushes me onto his bunk bed and tells me to lie down, that Lenny is going to pretend to be a doctor who does push-ups on top of me.

  “What?” Why would Lenny want to do push-ups on me?

  Steven says, “If you ask any questions, the game’s over.”

  “Okay, okay.” I wanted to play.

  Steven tells me that Lenny is going to show me something very cool. I’m just about to ask what he’s going to show me when Steven opens the door and leaves the room.

  The second the door slams, Lenny unzips his pants, pulls them down to his knees, and jumps on top of me. His “Thing” pops out. It’s right there, sticking straight out. It’s gross.

  He has me by the shoulders, holding me down. He pulls down my shorts and then my underwear. He jams my legs apart and sticks his ugly Thing inside me. I start yelling: “What are you doing? STOP IT!”

  He’s only got the tip of it in, but it still hurts.

  He starts shoving, pushing his Thing harder inside me. It hurts so much I think I’m going to die. “NO!” I yell at the top of my lungs. “STOP! STOP!” But he doesn’t stop no matter how loud I yell, and I yell a lot because I don’t know what he’s doing and I’ve never felt so much pain. I feel like I’m being ripped open. I scream louder. He covers my mouth with his wrist. Something inside of me is tearing.

  In the midst of the pain, I wonder why he is working so hard. Pushing and pulling! It’s then, right then, that everything stops hurting. I no longer feel anything. Everything has gone numb. I have a body, but I can’t feel it.

  Everything is in slow motion. I look up at Lenny, wondering what I am supposed to do, wondering how I am supposed to react, but he doesn’t say anything. He just keeps pushing down and pulling up.

  I notice the wooden slats above his head. I never realized how many pieces of wood it takes to hold up an upper bunk. I’ve never been on Steven’s bed before.

  Lenny doesn’t open his eyes. His forehead starts to perspire, and I notice how beautiful he is. How structured and symmetrical his face is. His strong, muscular arms pushing himself up and down. Why is he so mad? Drops of his sweat fall on my face.

  But I feel like I’m seeing it from a long way away, from the other end of the universe.

  From outside the door, Steven yells, “Lenny! They’re back! They’re comin’ in the front door!”

  Lenny pulls out his Thing and jumps off the bed. I lie there. I can’t move. Lenny pulls up my shorts and then yanks me off the bed, but I fall when he lets go of my arm. I can’t stand. There’s blood running down my legs. But I have no feeling there, no feeling from the waist down—like both my legs have fallen asleep. But they aren’t asleep. I just can’t feel them.

  He pushes me out the bedroom door. Steven is there, whispering fiercely: “If you tell anybody about our little game, I’ll deny it. No one’s gonna believe you anyway.”

  T
he next thing I know, I’m in the bathroom, crying, trying to wipe the blood from my leg. One of my pigtails has come undone, and I don’t have my doll.

  I sat slumped against the bathroom wall in Bert’s Hollywood mansion, ashamed, raw, stunned. My mind began to spin. For a few moments, I didn’t know where I was. Was this real? Were these memories true? And if they were, why were they surfacing now? What was I supposed to do with them?

  But it did happen. The memory of the incident flooded my senses. I remembered every detail. How had I forgotten? How could I have blocked it out for so many years? Not only the rape, but Lenny’s and Steven’s betrayal.

  Anger rose up like a volcano. My body was on fire. I wanted to call everyone I knew and tell them what had happened. Still seething, but fragile and vulnerable, I slowly hauled myself up to a standing position. I staggered over to the sink and began to wash off the black streaks of mascara smeared down my cheeks. I brought out the tube of toothpaste from my shoulder bag and squirted some paste onto my finger, rubbed it around my gums. I could taste the zesty peppermint flavor. It made my eyes water, but it brought me back to life.

  I rinsed my mouth with the water from the gold swan faucets, wiped my lips on the pretty pink towel, and washed my hands. They were shaking. They continued to shake as I put on my lipstick and straightened out the wrinkles in my sweater and skirt. I felt completely violated, embarrassed, and most of all, ashamed.

  Then I took a deep breath and, as if I’d simply come into the bathroom to empty my bladder and was now ready to enjoy the festivities like all of Bert’s invited guests, opened the bathroom door. Was I ready to walk out? Shaky, transparent, I made my way tentatively back up the hall. Nobody noticed me. I might have been one of the Halloween ghosts, invisible, as hollow as I felt.

  Unaware of how I got there, I found myself back at the dessert table, standing above a bowl of fresh strawberries. I picked one out and took a small bite and felt the prickles on the surface as it touched the tip of my tongue. The red strawberry, glistening, was refreshing. I popped the rest of the berry into my mouth.

  One was all I needed.

  I walked out into the heat of the party and scanned the room looking for Emma. I spotted her in the middle of the dance floor, grinning like a child in her blue chiffon dress. Besides being Glinda, the Good Witch, she was Cinderella at the ball, with Bert holding her close, her cheek resting on his chest. I was watching her flashback now: Emma and Josef vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, afloat on the strains of romantic music from their cottage, dancing on the cool damp sand at the beach. I’d never seen Emma look so youthful, so at peace.

  As I stood against the wall, still dazed, admiring Emma, watching other guests move to the music, I saw Zelda wave from across the room—to me, I thought. I wasn’t sure. Doing her best to walk in my direction. Sliding off her heels, trying to place one foot in front of the other, wobbling, champagne sloshing out of her glass.

  “Hi, Emma’s roomie!” she stated, only inches away from my face. She didn’t wait for a response. “Well, good for you. Good for you.” She socked me on the shoulder. “You must be very brave, ’cause I coulda never just moved in with anybody, like you and Emma. Not even with Emma, and me and Emma are very close, very close.” She took an unsteady gulp of her drink.

  “We knew each other in Germany. You know, our fathers were very good friends, and our mothers, too … before all hell started … before Emma and Josef and me and Max got out … Did you know her mother killed herself?” She hiccupped. “Her father … whoa … what a bastard he was! He was a fucking drill sergeant.” The word fucking was accompanied by a spray of saliva. “Thank God she met Josef and had a …” She stopped and then went on. “Emma’s very psychic … did you know? Did she tell you my husband is divorcing me for a cute young girl with big round tits? I got Morty, though … where is Morty?”

  Zelda wandered off looking for Morty. I stood there, watching her cling to the walls, trying to make progress around the room. And then I turned my attention back to Emma, dancing with Bert. This woman I was so upset with, this woman I thought was so insensitive—turned out to have more in common with me than I’d thought. I stood there trying to imagine what it must have been like for her to lose her mother and live with an obsessive father. It was pretty clear that the discipline she insisted I adopt came from her own childhood experience.

  On the ride home, I was not the same person who’d driven to the party a few hours ago. Something had shifted inside of me. I was different. It was as if all the molecules in my body had changed. I couldn’t be that person who just blurted out my experiences like a schoolgirl and expected Emma to process them for me. I couldn’t talk about my encounter with Zelda or ask about her childhood. I couldn’t whine about Jerry being short, or gripe about how jealous I was of Larry’s film role. I couldn’t even tell her about my memory of Steven and Lenny. Not tonight! Instead, I told Emma how beautiful she’d looked dancing under the disco ball, how generous it was of Bert to open his home for this party. I told her about meeting Jerry and the possibility of an audition—without the exaggerated enthusiasm. I mentioned that I’d seen Larry, and that he was offered a wonderful role.

  Still glowing, Emma listened attentively and said she noticed something quite different about my behavior. She said it was a pleasure not to hear me complain. I nodded, and thought: I must be pushing upward.

  Chapter 19

  Bites on dried gristly meat.

  Receives metal arrows.

  It furthers one to be mindful of difficulties …

  The next morning I sat up in bed wondering what to do. The memory of the rape kept looping over and over in my brain: the details of that night, the fact that I hadn’t remembered it, the invasion of my privacy, and my brother’s betrayal. I needed to tell someone, get the weight off my heart, but who? I couldn’t tell Emma, not yet anyway. And it was too early to call Rachel.

  Michigan! It was two hours later there. Someone would be home.

  I jumped out of bed, threw on my coat over my pajamas, laced up my gym shoes, and tiptoed past Emma’s door. As the images of the memory continued to well up, I jogged to the nearest pay phone on Sunset.

  The phone kept ringing. Finally, someone picked up.

  “Hello.” It was my mother.

  “Mom, it’s Sandra. I have to tell you something. Remember those nightmares I used to have? The ones with the scary shadows and … well, the whole thing came back to me in living color. The shadows were of Steven and his friend Lenny. Lenny raped me, Mom … and Steven set it up. It all came back.”

  “What? What are you talking about? Are you insane?”

  “I know it’s hard to believe. But that was what those dreams were about. Lenny got on top of me and he stuck his … but Steven was right there. He put him up to it. Steven was right outside the door, and—”

  “What the hell are you trying to do, kill me? Because that’s what you’re doing!”

  “It really happened, Mom. I saw the whole thing, clear as day. You have to believe me.”

  “You are a liar, Sandra Billings. All adolescents explore. But you have to take it to the extreme, don’t you? You have to be the drama queen, don’t you? Enough!”

  “Mom, this was not something I made up! It was real.”

  “Well, deal with it! Just don’t involve us with this … this filth. And, do us a favor. Forget about coming home. You’re not welcome here.”

  She hung up.

  I could hardly breathe. I sat there in the phone booth, numb, my hand still on the receiver. I wasn’t surprised she didn’t believe me. She’d responded true to style. Well … the hell with her. I don’t have a home. Home is where they believe you.

  I got up, hung up the phone, and opened the door. I had to walk. I needed to move, pull myself together. With no destination in mind, I started down Sunset. As the cars and trucks streamed by, and a light drizzle misted the air, I knew she wouldn’t believe me. Who was I kidding? Did I really think she’d symp
athize with me? She never had before. I kept walking and tried to unearth details about the event.

  Steven knew exactly what was going to happen behind that door. And I knew why he’d done it. Steven hated me from the day I was born. He hated the fact that Daddy gave me more love and attention than he gave him. He was jealous that I had so many friends, that I was popular. He always wanted to shut me down, turn out my light. He never liked me to shine. He’d been tormenting me my whole life—but he’d been biding his time for his ultimate revenge. What an ass! But why Lenny? Because he was the only friend Steven had, and he knew I had a crush on him.

  I was into a full sprint now, racing past supermarkets and clothing stores, flower shops and gas stations. The light rain kept on. I scanned over all the times my brother had sabotaged my efforts, humiliated me in front of my friends, and terrorized me. All the times I’d tried to ignore him, and wanted to kill him. All the times I had to hide my light—for fear it would be taken away.

  I passed Monroe’s Funeral Home, slowed my pace, and stopped. Looking into the window at my own reflection, I realized Steven and I had never, ever looked at each other with love … not once that I could remember—ever. Rachel would have said, “Past-life karma.” And she might have been right.

  A distant church bell struck nine. I had to see if Rachel was still here or if she’d left for South America again. I jogged back to the pay phone. Please be there. Please be there.

  It rang three times before she picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Rache! Thank God! I have to talk to you. Something very amazing just happened.”

  There was a lot of noise in the background.

  “Sandra?”

  “Yes, it’s me. Can we talk?”

  “It’s crazy here. I can hardly hear you.”

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “Armando’s sisters are here helping us with the wedding. They just flew in from San Francisco. We’re getting ready to leave for Buenos Aires tomorrow.”