The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  “I don’t want to be that. ‘A survivor of childhood sexual abuse.’”

  “I understand. But you are.”

  “But I’m not, I don’t want to be, you know, known as that. I don’t want anyone to know. I wish you didn’t even know.”

  Margaret liked that Kimberly was midwestern, with a bit of that familiar nasal flatness to her vowels, as well as a warmth that Margaret associated with home. Everyone at Quincy-Hawthorn was so busy all the time, never even smiled at one another on the street. Margaret liked the way that Kimberly was a little disorganized, how she never seemed to be in a hurry, even when she told Margaret that their time was drawing to a close. Margaret believed the invitation to pick up the conversation again next week was eager, and genuine, imagined that Kimberly often thought of Margaret and her problems at home, that she truly cared.

  She could not say the same for Dr. Lowenstein, who she wasn’t entirely sure thought of her, or her problems, even during the time she was in his office. The idea that she might have stalled at a certain age was the first thing he’d said in the six weeks since she’d started that felt specific to her, not just an all-purpose prompt drawn from one of the big books of dreams and unhappy childhoods on his many shelves.

  “Perhaps we can speak a bit more about that time, Margaret. I’ve noticed you have been very reluctant to talk in any detail about the abuse.”

  Margaret didn’t like the way her name sounded in his mouth, like she was a child. It wasn’t an order, but it was the kind of request a mother made when she was making a big show of her patience. Didn’t he understand that to describe it was to go back to that room, her uncle at the foot of her bed, removing his belt and folding his clothes so slowly that she would not have believed it possible that he was doing something he should not have been, that the risk, if caught, was to him, and not to her, as he warned her. That her mother would send her away.

  Margaret told her mother when she was fourteen, by which time being sent away had begun to seem more like prize than punishment. She stayed in Missouri, in her mother’s house, for four more years. But there was a way in which her mother did send her away.

  When Margaret told her, her mother said, “Same thing happened to me, when I was your age.” This was the only time she acknowledged the truth of what her brother had done. “It happens to all girls,” she said, and ever after she denied that anything had happened at all.

  Margaret had asked her best friend at the time, Susie Sherman, if anyone in her family had ever touched her, touched her touched her, she said, when Susie first looked confused, and the second touched prompted a look of such horror and disgust that Margaret feared again that she might be in trouble, that she had done something beyond saving.

  After Margaret’s mother told her that what had happened to Margaret had also happened to her, she sent her daughter up to her room. Where did Margaret go then? Upstairs, yes, but also somewhere else. She arrived in another country, one in which she knew her mother also made her home. But across some impassable terrain—a desert or a glacier, an ocean or a universe, something so vast that neither could even make the other out, and it was no comfort to know that her mother was there, since she couldn’t see or wouldn’t acknowledge that Margaret lived there now, too.

  She didn’t want to give anyone pictures of that time. She didn’t want to see herself in that room, and she didn’t want anyone else imagining her there either, not even a doctor. She could believe that they cared, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were also eager, not to be entertained, not so coarse as that, but to be taken out of their lives by this horror from hers. From that first quick pivot that Susie Sherman made, disgust to concern to curiosity, to needing to know. The salacious details. Margaret told her nothing happened, but still, the way her friend looked at her changed. They started high school and drifted in different directions, Susie to the ordinary country of high school in a small town, and Margaret to her other country, watching herself in high school as though through a dirty car window.

  Salacious was another word Margaret learned from Kimberly. Her roommates had had no trouble believing the weekly meeting was another with Margaret’s writing tutor, and sometimes it felt as though it wasn’t a lie, she learned so much from Kimberly, took to writing in her own small notebook as Kimberly wrote in hers.

  Speak in detail, salacious details. She told Dr. Lowenstein no.

  “I don’t like to talk about it,” she said, and then, feeling guilty, “I’m not ready.”

  “That’s fine,” Dr. Lowenstein said, and she sensed his body shift. She’d thought it strange when she started that they didn’t face one another, that their positions were more like those assumed in her ob-gyn’s office, though even there she made more eye contact. But now she turned, to see where he was looking, to make sure he had understood what she said.

  “We should of course wait until you are comfortable. There is no rush,” he said. His shelves were all books, no knickknacks, but on his desk he had a ship in a bottle and three Ukrainian Easter eggs, deep, saturated hues and intricate designs. When she’d asked about them at her first appointment, he’d said his daughter, an artist, had made them, showed Margaret the hole where she had blown out the egg. He had looked so proud that Margaret felt in that moment both a desperation to trust him and a disdain for his daughter, her luck. “But it is something I believe quite strongly that we will need to explore, to tell your story.”

  Her story. Why? Why did her story have to start before she made her escape? She had fled that place that threatened to pull her under, left that family behind and forged a new one with the friends she met in a brick palace on a low hill.

  Kimberly told her that when a person breaks your trust so profoundly and so early, it can be difficult to trust others, to give over to the abandon that love requires. But Margaret had come to Quincy-Hawthorn desperate to fall in love, and she had done so right away, with Alice, Ji Sun, and Lainey. Then Mac. And they loved her, too. The thought that this love might be threatened by what she’d done in Connecticut, or what they thought she’d done, terrified her.

  It wasn’t, as Ji Sun had ventured, with a frightened look that made Margaret dizzy, an urge. Margaret considered it a precious mistake, an accident almost, and one that she maintained hadn’t truly involved her, not present-day her. She had, in that moment, time traveled, soul traveled, perched on the edge of Laurent’s bed a girl his exact same age, but in a parallel universe, where at that age she had not yet been kissed, let alone touched, touched touched, or made to touch.

  She knew how wacky it sounded, and it probably wasn’t helped by how her friends already thought she was woo-woo for believing that certain fragrances were healing, or that flowers had frequencies, even feelings. But it was a kind of openness, to believe those things, and she cherished it, knew to be openhearted in this world was not easy.

  “My story,” she said, and shifted on the couch. She thought to reach for the tin of sour lemon pastilles she’d put in her purse earlier in the week, so pretty that she’d already taken photographs for the entry she planned to write about morning sickness on her blog, when her news was safer to share.

  “Yes. Part of our work here is to reconcile that time of your life with your life now. That’s essential to the goal of seeing yourself as a whole person.”

  “A whole person?”

  Who was whole? She was more than whole, she was making whole new people. Right here, on his couch, she worked, did more without moving than he would accomplish in his whole life.

  She knew all mothers failed their daughters, but it would be different for Margaret. For one, she was having boys.

  She thought of the good and the bad inside her, the work she did, every day, to look first for the light. Keep your face to the sun and you’ll never see shadows. Before she left for college, her mother had given her a framed card with this encouragement, bright flower child font sup
erimposed over a photograph of a rainbow and an orange cat that looked like Shambean, Margaret’s childhood pet. Margaret had taken the card out of the frame, looked inside for what her mother wanted to tell her but had never been able to say. But there was nothing there, not even a signature.

  This office was filled with shadows. So much dark wood, heavy drapes, cavernous shelves. Dust and degrees. Hollow eggs. No plants. What could stay alive in a room like this, built for more shadow collecting? Her mother had let the world tear a hole with its teeth from her daughter’s body and said It couldn’t have happened and It happened to everybody and, Margaret knew, believed both.

  “I’m unwell, Dr. Lowenstein,” Margaret told him. What he wanted to hear. She swung her legs off the couch, got her bearings and sat up. She looked down at her leopard flats, adjusted the scarf she’d tied around her neck—her Upper East Side outfit, Mac called it, though the scarves reminded Margaret more of Ji Sun than of the rich widows who lived in Dr. Lowenstein’s building.

  She wouldn’t make it to the bathroom, but she would spare his lovely rug. She rushed to bend low beside his desk, down into his wastebasket, the closest she had been to his body since shaking his hand when they met. She vomited, then she thanked him, then she turned, and left, and never went back.

  Chapter 37

  Pepper spray didn’t feel at all like Lainey had imagined. It wasn’t righteous, or vindicating. It only stung and burned, and it went beyond her eyes, which she had not known it would. Lainey’s whole face felt tight and on fire, like her skin might peel from her skull. She knew she was crying, but it felt more like her head was leaking, something vital pouring forth from her eyes and her nostrils, her mouth. Her friend Santi took her picture, and when Lainey looked at it later, she glowed, lacquered in the flash, bright red and shellacked with her own fluids.

  Lainey could feel them handcuff her, hear them shouting at her, but she couldn’t make out who was doing it, just sensed dark shapes of uniforms, felt rough shoves of her body back and forth between these forms, less people and more amorphous forces, underworld weather patterns, tombstones circling, like Stonehenge come to life, closing in around her, burying her alive.

  Her inability to see the cops was due to blindness and disorientation, but it was complicated by another factor: how difficult it remained for her to reconcile that police officers were antagonists as much as protectors—one had famously joined Occupy the first day, moved like Lainey by the protestor’s righteousness, laid down his badge—and even as her vision returned, she found herself thinking that these couldn’t be the police, they must be some covert agents. Why would they arrest her, why would they shove her body like this, when she wasn’t resisting, she couldn’t even see?

  Santi was black, from Oakland, and had been among those arrested for protesting against the verdict in Oscar Grant’s case. Lainey hadn’t remembered who he was when Santi said his name, over dinner one of the first nights in the park.

  “Oscar Grant. Remind me?”

  “Remind you? Oscar Grant. Murdered by a goddamn Nazi BART police officer? Forced to lie facedown on the ground before he was shot in the back. That Oscar Grant. Remind you.”

  Lainey was still flooded with shame later that night as she hunched near a charging station with her iPhone, reading everything she could about Oscar Grant, horrified that she’d forgotten his name, that she could afford to, that her comfort and ignorance and privilege had sheltered her from having to keep a list of names like the one Santi knew by heart.

  Lainey looked to redistribute her guilt, found an easy rage for Walker, how he’d taught a whole class devoted to resistance against the state and had barely acknowledged ongoing police violence against black Americans, had somehow managed to make it seem as though Howard Zinn had invented Malcolm X. Of course Walker would focus on the heroes who looked like him; the whole class had been in service of his image. She’d fumed, thinking of the fires that had burned in Oakland while he tinkered across the Bay with some code in another glass box of light. Thinking of the fires that had burned in Oakland while, across the country, she touched the glass light of her holy phone, probably on some site that had Walker’s fingerprints secreted somewhere in its code. She wept at the charging station, insisted inwardly that her tears were not for Walker, nor for herself, at least not alone. She knew crying didn’t change anything, but she let herself feel shame and love and pain and sorrow, tried to remind herself that this was why she was here, in this park, trying to make a change in this corrupt country. Her self-pity did not matter, but her actions might.

  Santi had been arrested, too, and Adam and Ji Sun had bailed them both out. Santi went back to the church basement, and Lainey climbed into the backseat of a town car with Ji Sun and Adam. Later, she would often revisit this good-bye, the sort of moment that was loaded even as she experienced it, that didn’t need the embroidery of distance or time to feel significant. The sky was orange and purple, and Santi looked as big as a building from Lainey’s low seat in the car, bottled water pressed into her hands by Ji Sun, Adam’s arm around her. Lainey, exhausted near delirium, believed for a moment that Santi might sprout webs from her wrists, bound up into the sky to look for the signal that told her where to go from here. Instead, Santi adjusted her backpack and seemed to sink like the sun, dusk accelerating as she moved away from the car, headed underground, back into the fight, where she lived and where Lainey had been a visitor.

  * * *

  • • •

  The photos that Santi had been arrested for taking were all over the news the next day. Lainey had a hard time recognizing herself. She was so red she looked neon, a siren, a warning. Bright beacon of pain. A pain that she could remember feeling, could see that she must have felt, but could not call up in her nerves, could not adequately conjure or even describe now, wearing her softest, threadbare Quincy-Hawthorn sweat suit, wrapped in a white down blanket, sitting on Ji Sun’s enormous new couch. Everything felt clean and comfortable, but also strangely sterile. She’d been living outside for two months, and then sleeping mostly in a church basement for another month while they planned their aborted move to reoccupy. Now she knew she wasn’t going back, and it was disorienting to look at this photograph of herself, swollen and shining, crying out in pain, and know that that had been the end.

  Adam brought her a plate of runny scrambled eggs and a sesame bagel, its edges nearly burned, just the way she liked, and Ji Sun made her Earl Grey tea with milk and orgeat, their favorite comfort drink since college. They sat together and watched the news coverage, talking while Lainey texted. She felt removed from every conversation, though she was central to them all: the one in the room, the one on the news, and the one online.

  “They’re talking about it like it’s over,” she said, staring at the TV screen but not seeing it.

  “Well, that phase is over, right?” Adam said, and rubbed her back. They’d fought about how worried he was, how he believed every news report about sexual assaults and slum conditions over anything she told him about her actual experience of being there. He had been furious when she moved to the church instead of coming home after the eviction, and they’d had one of their biggest fights ever when she’d told him the plans for reoccupation. She’d met him in person, paranoid about being monitored by the police, even in the church basement.

  “Lainey, you can’t go back! There have to be ways to put forward this agenda that aren’t connected to the park. You’ve said yourself that this is just the groundwork! The park is not safe!”

  But she wanted to go back. The church basement felt like sleepaway camp, like a break from her life in the park rather than her life at home. She wanted to hear the birds, smell the mineral outdoor air each morning, fog and cement, before the skunk of weed and BO and damp wool comingled. She wanted to wake up creaky and exhilarated every morning, bone tired and ready to fight.

  “Adam, it is safe. There are like eleven drum circles.” She
was irritated at herself for making fun, but she wanted to get him to laugh, put him at ease.

  “I can’t stand to see you like this. You are so strung out. You’ve lost weight, and you’re looking around like the CIA is tracking you or something. It’s scary.”

  “Oh, sorry I didn’t do my face for you this morning, husband. I forgot that my first job as a woman is to look good.”

  “That isn’t fair. You know that’s not what I mean.”

  “You just want me to come home and be your little wife!” She shouted it but didn’t believe it. She had so much rage at the way the movement was petering out that she wanted to scream, feel some power, fight everyone.

  “I wouldn’t mind living with my wife, or talking to her, that part is true. If you see her, tell her I’m concerned,” he said, before he turned to leave without so much as a wave.

  She was stunned, riveted, aroused. She loved how angry she had made him, how he’d been the one to storm away—historically her move. She wanted to race after him, jump his bones, but seemed stuck to the bench, imagining the home-from-the-war movie kiss she’d liked to have given him there on the street, her face less gaunt even in her own fantasy of their embrace.

  She’d been glad to feel that desire for him, though she missed sex something fierce. Others took park partners, had grimy sex that Lainey understood as a way to stay sane. The release. But there was a certain utility to not expending energy in this way, to letting it fuel the pent-up rage that just kept building. Lainey wasn’t having sex with anyone, but there was an intensity to her relationship with some of the other activists that felt just as treacherous.

  Now, on Ji Sun’s couch, she observed that familiar energy in the banter between Adam and Ji Sun, one of comrades, partners, not necessarily lovers, but people connected in a way that went beyond friendship. How had she never seen this before? They were talking about her, and she sat between them, but there was an invisible cord that connected their two bodies, and she could feel its vibration.