through my life.
My memory, on the other hand, was strong.
“Was this when Morris was living in New York?”
But she had nothing else to give me. She’d told me all she knew.
“Would you mind folding the rest of these?” I asked her. “I want to go lie down.”
MY MOTHER’S PRETTY HOUSE was also small and somewhat flimsy. The railing on the open stairway wobbled slightly. The hollow-core doors had no heft, so opening the one to the guest room was like moving a slab of felt. The room was almost entirely taken up by the pull-out bed on which Anthony and the baby lay sleeping. I didn’t want to touch or talk to Anthony, or any adult. I wanted to wrap my body around my son, who lay on his belly with his knees tucked under him, his back hunched. I perched on the edge of the bed so as not to disturb him and waited for him to wake.
The sight of his sleep-flushed cheeks and pursed little lips soothed my heart for a moment, but even this joy was painful. My skin hurt from loving him. My breasts ached and pulled toward him; it’d been almost three hours since he’d nursed. Through the rest of my body ran a pulsating siren of panic, some mix of abandonment and rage and grief and guilt and utter confusion that I could hardly bear. The stuffy room, the silent house, and all this roar of emotion.
Oh my baby. Oh my baby. Wake up. Wake up.
And then his tiny face scrunched, his arm shot out and his butt lifted. He gave one mewing cry, and I gathered him to me and lifted my shirt. His body softened into mine and my milk came down with a narcotic rush. I felt almost histrionically sanctimonious. I was a mother. I was feeding my child. He was safe in my arms.
And then:
If I had told I could have saved that girl.
I did tell.
It wasn’t soon enough. It wasn’t loud enough.
I was a child, too. It’s not my fault.
No one said it was.
I conjured an image of Toshi as a befuddled, stick-limbed boy being hustled out of a basement apartment in the dead of a warm autumn night. His mother! He’s going to need his mother! Was I more worried for that boy or for the girl or for myself or for the baby in my arms who embodied the vulnerability of us all?
Abandonment stunned me again, and the rootedness of nursing began to feel like a burden. I was trapped on the bed when I wanted to twitch away, to run, walk for miles, to leave this family behind and lick my wounds in private, make of them something else. But I couldn’t.
The baby’s sucking slowed to a nibble. He dozed; I sat, stuck, roiling. Four months into parenting, and already the contrast between physical constraint and a churning mind had become characteristic of the venture for me, but I’d not yet felt it to this extent. I sat within a tent of love and agony and impatience, the small space filling with my hot breath, the arrhythmic pulse of our two hearts. And then he roused again. He arched his back and twisted his face and gave a bleating cry. He dove to my breast for comfort and rooted furiously. I felt the letdown, but he was beyond the help of milk. In fact, it made it worse. He pulled away. He was full-bellied and in pain. I elevated him and patted his back to soothe him, but it was no use.
There was acid in his belly. There was acid rising up our throats. It stings. It burns. Where do we turn for succor? Here? There? Nothing works. The sleeping house filled with screams.
The first time I told anyone I had been sexually abused was in 1980, when I was twelve. I told Heather Moosier, while we were standing in a tight vestibule at the college in Western Pennsylvania where both our parents worked. Every Wednesday, Heather and I walked up the hill from our Gothic junior high school to campus, where I took violin lessons and she studied flute. After the half hour, we’d walk together to the administration building where both our mothers were secretaries. Our fathers were professors. This was enough to bond us in our small rust belt town, where professional jobs were rare, but we hadn’t really known each other. Neither had our parents—or not well. But hers had used the faculty directory to find our phone number and call one night to discuss the possibility of Heather taking lessons on the same day as I did so that we could walk together.
I can still hear the ring of the phone, a portent harmonizing with the notes from the opening bars of All Things Considered and cutting through the steam rising from spaghetti just poured into a colander. The window above the sink looked out onto a rural route and some woods, shadowy in the twilight. I’d been roaming the woods since kindergarten, just about; I’d been allowed far afield in every direction for years. Previously, I’d walked to violin lessons alone, and my family thought it a little odd that Heather needed accompaniment, especially since she was a grade ahead of me. But being requested as a chaperone for an older girl puffed me up, gave the walk the weight and gravity of a milestone.
“Yeah, sure,” I shrugged. The indifference was put on.
I HAD LONG FRIZZY HAIR, braces, and elbows wider than my biceps. I was part of, if not a clique, a boisterous group of girls just learning to use eyeliner and curling irons. Heather was taller than any of us, with a cap of feathered auburn hair and heavy breasts, and she was quieter. Instead of a group, she had one best friend, Carrie. But Heather and I got along. She immediately took me into her confidence, and I learned what she and Carrie had in common: they were both having sex with their boyfriends.
Each week, the two of us would leave school and stop at the corner gas station for a snack, and then we would begin our trudge to the college, Heather informing me in her lispy, whispery voice of the dramas and logistics involved in early adolescent fucking. There were trysts in the walk-in cellar, broken rubbers, passed joints. There was the acknowledgement of which couple had done it most: Raymond and Carrie. Carrie lived, like Raymond and Heather’s beau, in the decaying heart of our town, where houses were closer and neighborhoods had sidewalks. Heather had to get dropped off at Carrie’s on the weekends from her home in an outlying development and hope that Tommy would come by. They were all four in the cellar the time Carrie got Raymond riled up and then withheld the rubber once his pants were off, teasing him.
“Carrie, you give it here!” Heather mimicked his deep-voiced, tight-lipped delivery and then broke into a helium giggle that doubled her over.
I tried to join in but could not find the humor, could not even fake it. I was agog. Raymond was short but explosively muscular, with shoulders like a steel beam. His sprint times had attracted attention from the high school football coaches, and this, along with his unsmiling intensity and the fold of skin above his brow, gave him the air of a man. I’d never spoken to him. That slight little Carrie would tease him in the face of his anger, that she felt safe enough to, that she was so far from his urgency herself even as she flitted in her underwear in front of two boys moments away from letting one stick it in her . . . My synapses were firing like rockets. I might have looked like a scrawny child, but my interest was keen.
I’d been introduced to the pleasures of salacious reading material via the underlined V.C. Andrews novels passed through my sixth-grade classroom.
