In any game of moral relativity it’s the children who demand our greatest sympathies. They’re always entirely guiltless, absolutely vulnerable—at what age is this no longer true? But Chiyo’s loss taps into some of my most anxious fears as a mother—that I will make the wrong decision, that my character will be found wanting, that some consequences are irrevocable, and the life-long well-being of my child is constantly on the line.
My heart goes out. To the mothers. To the fathers. To the children. To that mother. To that child. It’s a complicated knot.
AND SO TOSHI CAME TO US, the threads entwining us, and we were knotted, too. But first came some cash. My uncle and aunt forked something over so we could make the necessary accommodations, and perhaps this money was as much of a factor in my parent’s acceptance as was familial generosity, filial loyalty, and avuncular concern. Despite my dad’s steady academic job and our modest lifestyle, finances were always tight. My parents hired workers to build a room in the basement, laid orange indoor-outdoor carpeting, and bought a dehumidifier. When Toshi came, my mom took him shopping and let him pick out his own sheets, wild ones that lived in our family for years—rain slicker yellow with a pattern of sketched-on black octagons. My mother disapproved of the choice. She disapproved of him almost immediately.
“He acts like the kids aren’t even here,” she told my father repeatedly.
I remember arranging army men on a playroom battlefield with a boy from the neighborhood when Toshi walked past in a whoosh, a wash of black hair, a big belt buckle.
“He acts like we’re just not here,” I parroted to my friend.
BUT I KNEW he knew I was there. I shared a small bedroom with my younger brother on one end of the narrow, slant-ceilinged second floor. My parents’ room was at the other end of the hall. The enclosed staircase—separated from the first-floor hallway by a door—ran up the middle of the house and let out right in front of my threshold. Soon after he moved in, Toshi began slipping into my room and getting into bed with me at night, asking in a whisper if I wanted to play a game. “It’s a secret game I play with Haruna. Don’t tell your mom and dad.” I had never met Haruna, but I’d seen pictures. She was a big girl. She was beautiful.
I’ve always been a poor sleeper. I find it difficult to fall asleep; when I do, the smallest thing can wake me up, and letting go of consciousness again is hard. My father complains of this, too, but if I play the game of clear-cut causality, I wonder if my fight with sleep stems from being awoken so often at four and five years old. A pattern revealed itself. Recognizing it was my first conscious acquaintance with my own intelligence.
I grew to expect Toshi’s entry if my parents were out. He’d slip in shortly after my brother and I went to bed. If my parents were home, as they usually were, he might come or he might not, and if he did it’d be later, his increased furtiveness obvious to me even back then, the door cracking open just far enough for a body to fit through sideways, the almost inaudible click as he slowly released the knob. Most nights I waited to see what would happen, silent and vigilant, grimly pleased with my forecasting abilities if the door opened when I thought it might. But if he didn’t visit soon enough, nervousness or anticipation would eventually give way to sleep, and then there’d be the almost physical pain of having it disturbed when he came in.
“Are you sleeping? Are you sleepy?” His hands would already be on or in my underwear. I wanted to push the intrusion away, but my limbs felt tied at my side, they wouldn’t obey my groggy brain. “Are you sleeping?”
“Mmmph.”
“Are you sleepy?”
“Yes.” During these first months, his insistent questions and his dismissal of my affirmative answer felt as assaulting as the touching itself.
“Are you still sleeping?”
I’d reply yes, but it would be a lie. Toshi would know it.
“Do you want to play our game?” The crux of the game at this point was which I liked better: to have him stroke my vulva with his hand over my underpants or beneath. I always replied that I liked it better over my underpants. The alternative made me squirm, felt sharp and prickly, like the sting from unwiped pee.
“Are you sure?” he would say. “Let me try it again a different way. What feels better, like this? Or like this?” There were many variations that had to be assessed.
If he entered the room before I fell asleep, the game elicited a combination of curiosity and stoicism from me. What was it that was happening? I usually tried to say as little as possible, to keep my answers monosyllabic, to take in more than I gave out so that I could gain some understanding and perhaps an upper hand. I recall this feeling vividly.
But at least one time I caved: “What did Haruna like better?” I remember asking. Even then my spoken words sounded pathetic and plaintive to my ears, but I was looking for a guide, wanting to bring her back into the room to release some of the lonely intensity, to make it more like a real game, to illuminate the mystery.
If he came in during the dead of the night, I had no curiosity. The doggedness of his fingers against my heavy body could be almost intolerable. Better not to be dragged from slumber if I could help it. Better to fight sleep off.
The second person I remember telling that I had been molested was a man I took up with when I was twenty. It’s possible that I told other friends before then, but if I did, it was the same version I told Heather, it was a story of sexual activity passed like a V.C. Andrews novel. With Carl, it was a little different.
We had met in West Philadelphia in 1988, where I had moved for the summer to stay with Reba, my best friend from high school, who’d been renting out the attic in a group house. The decrepit Victorian was filled with anarchist kids and counter culture types, and was a gathering place for neighborhood squatters and itinerant punk rockers, with one or two hippies living in the school bus parked out front. I was as titillated in the presence of these colorful ragamuffins as I had been at twelve hearing about sex from someone who’d had it. I’d been attracted to alternative cultures even before I knew there were such things—since Suzanne in her rags and feathers, since the Clash appeared on Saturday Night Live and raised every hair on my body while the girl at whose house I was sleeping guffawed and mocked. I’d picked my college based on a belief that punk and bohemian types congregated there, and I’d made my plans for the summer between sophomore and junior year on a similar basis.
I had only been sort of right about the college. When I arrived at Oberlin, I was surprised to see so many copies of On the Road by bedsides and on bookshelves; hitherto I had felt the book to be my own personal bible, handed down to me by my special father and unknown to anyone else my age. But it took me less than a semester to realize that my fellow students were more likely to have bought their crushed velvet and cracked leather at Agnes B. than at Salvation Army counters, and to have slept off their CBGB’s hangovers in homes on the Upper West Side rather than in an Alphabet City tenement, as I presumed real punks did. These differences mattered.
Meanwhile, plenty of my new acquaintances were surprised to learn that not everyone paid for SAT prep classes, and they were confused by rural experiences that weren’t covered by Outward Bound tuition or had at a summer home, amused by the low prices in the town diner that was still too expensive for me to visit more than once a week, despite my food service job. Some of the big-city transplants were less incredulous about rust belt realities than wearied by them. Used to being among the financial and cultural elite, they were outspoken in their annoyance at the high number of fellow
