A Word of Our Own Ch 7: Apprentice Victims
On mothers and sisters. "What did we have in common except for the same thick thighs sitting on the same wine-red cushion on the same church pew? Is that enough?"
Welcome to
A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017).
7. Apprentice Victims
And me, what gift did my mother give me? What did we have in common except for the same thick thighs sitting on the same wine-red cushion on the same church pew? Is that enough? Listening to Brother Storment preach about forgiveness, submitting to the will of God—which is so often that of men. What did I share, too, with my sisters who sneaked out after dark to meet boys, to dance? I’d become the brat, the squealer, the pest to whom they told nothing at all.
We hadn’t been close since we were just these three little, half-feral girls traipsing through backyards to get to the creek which was maybe just a drainage ditch but still had crawdads and tadpoles, and cool mud for your feet. Sometimes my mother would take us to Big Rock in Seneca Park and we’d play in the small pools created by a stream, and jump off the rock which really was Big, and feel so adventurous and brave—staring down at the water, taking a deep breath, and then leaping out as far as we could go. But that was before we became real girls, then young women. With tits and everything. Ovaries kicking out eggs that could turn into babies and ruin our lives. A mother who sometimes told us we could do anything we wanted in life, because she loved us in her way, and creating more rules each week about where we could go and when and how, imposing with growing fury what she sought to escape.
“You’re not going out of this house looking like a whore. What will the neighbors think?”
“Everybody’s doing it.”
“As long as you live under my roof…”
“I hate you. I didn’t ask to be born.”
Which always enraged Mom even more—that these children she’d carried, brought forth, that she fed and clothed, protected, sang to… She’d attack with anything handy, a wooden spoon, sometimes a flyswatter leaving our thighs with the imprint of the plastic grid.
We didn’t know why, never put it together, the eggs, the blood, fear of what that could mean. Not just pregnancy, but violence. Shame. Her own deferred dreams. My god, it was so red, the blood. I stopped menstruating a couple of years ago, not long after they yanked out that cyst growing in an ovary instead of eggs. I only remember how red and rich blood is that time I’m wrestling a new Ikea knife from its plastic and my finger starts pumping out this crimson stuff. I’m confused, run it under cold water like a burn, but then it really gushes. I wrap a paper towel around it, and that blooms red roses, too. I stare, shocked. Like I hadn’t seen it before. Finally pinch the two sides of the slit together and it stops. And the wound begins to ache deep in the finger’s meat, while I look weakly around at a dozen bloody paper towels, the crimson spatters of a crime scene.
And remember, yes, that was the battle every month for decades. Stained pants, stained beds. A blood trail to the bathroom. The sight of my fat horrible ass in the mirror as I scried to know, Could you see the lumpy Kotex? Was there a dark patch spreading? Did I smell? But is it possible I remember being so small, and hugging my mother’s knees as she sat on the toilet, and sometimes she gave off this rich metallic odor that smelled only of earth and of life and I wasn’t ashamed at all.
I never talked about this with anyone. We popped Midol for the pain. Huddled with heating pads. Forgot our feral, aqueous lives. My sisters put on makeup on the way to school, so my mother wouldn’t grab them and scrub it off. In the basement, they listened to Kiss, those heavy metal men in their own demonic face paint. My sisters were furious at the noose tightening around them. Mistakenly thought it was all her, all Mom, and not the world closing in. And they’d fight, lord how they’d fight, especially Vikki who was boy crazy and violent and would also get in girl fights at school, yanking hair and scratching over some pimply-faced boy.
I picked up the phone once and this girl shrieked, “Tell your sister I’m gonna kill her.”
Vikki laughed when I told her. “Let her try.”
She and I fought, too, and she’d rip at me with her sharp red nails. She had long, brown Farah Fawcett hair. Would spend hours in the bathroom with curling irons. I’d spend five minutes there. Was content with button downs and jeans of any kind, a uniform hiding me. For her it had to be Calvin Klein. Tight ones which put her body on display, gave her currency with boys. She wept with longing for them. Wept for the ones she was both pushed to and forbidden to desire. Hormones, and hope in extremis. Even in the Eighties, a wedding dress the only escape she could imagine from her mother and the rules. Males her only model for freedom.
Even I liked them, wanted a brother above all. Boys seemed so calm, so strong. Were not ridiculous. Did not scream and wail and weep. Never had curfews or consequences. Weren’t uptight and afraid. Some of the neighborhood boys pounded each other on the football field. Some carried switchblades and chains
Vikki was going to be free, like Dad. Still traveling for work, he only returned on weekends, far from screaming females he stayed in the basement watching golf and drinking gin in his little den just across the hall from the laundry room with its buckets of bloody water where we soaked our underwear. Mom would refuse Vikki some privilege, and she’d run to him. “Absolutely, sure, go ahead,” he’d say gleefully, sticking it to my mom. And besides, what’s the harm? he thought. Jean’s far too strict.
Vikki adored him. I’d sip his burning gin. She got blamed of course. I didn’t know. For years, she hated me. What was I but an awful goody-two-shoes, silent as a vulture or a crow who never got caught smoking, never sneaked off with boys, or screamed. Or like her even had those loud come-to-Jesus moments in church, weeping and wailing as she rededicated her life to God after a month or two of such small sins.
I was conveniently, disgustingly obedient, listening for the God that appeared with a still, small voice. I preached on it to the congregation one Sunday night when the youth group was put in charge. Yearned for it, for silence, peace, order. The freedom which didn’t require anybody’s permission. Tried to ignore the loud femaleness of my body, though no one else did, dieted constantly to shrink its growing curves, wore muted make-up or none as I studied, prayed, played field hockey. And on Saturdays went to Youth Orchestra with a violin tucked under my chin.
I would haunt the abandoned playing fields at school, jog for hours in the empty suburban streets. And when everyone was gone from the house, I would stay there and writhe in the silence, starving for something, eating and puking, choking down random pills from the medicine cabinet. Pray for your enemies, Jesus said. Pour out your heart. I did. Like wine onto the ground for Dionysius. I really wanted to be good. To do good. Dear Lord, take my thrashing furious heart, and calm it. Take it all.
Praying was soothing, like putting ointment on a burn. I taught myself to submit, be agreeable and compliant. Docile as a cow. Because nobody likes an angry one. They’re hard to breed, and it spoils the milk. It didn’t keep me safe. Wasn’t meant to. The summer before college, I went on a trip with a bunch of university students to Spain and was walking alone in a giant, sandy, sunny park, when a handsome young man came alongside me and began to chat. I was eager to practice my Spanish. Eager to be liked. He showed me where there was cool grass to sit on, shade. We talked more, he listened sometimes, despite his swagger and charm, then, still sitting there, he unzipped his pants. I was too polite to notice. Too polite to act, to pull away when he took my hand. Not my hand, somebody’s. It couldn’t have been mine that he casually took possession of and put on his dick, and tugged and squeezed while the ladies in their black dresses walked by and looked at me with disgust, me, with my pleading eyes and homemade skirt and homemade top that my mother stitched up in the basement.
For females, everything is an invitation. A glance, a grin. No means yes. Of course it does. Silence is acquiescence. A wish to practice my Spanish in a hot Madrid park an agreement for a handjob. Take it. Grab my hand and put it on your dick. Shocked, I won’t do anything. I will let you rub it up and down that pale hot spongy thing while the matrons in black recoil like they stepped in shit. How old was I? Eighteen. Paralyzed while you drug my hand up and down and up. Until you let go. Consent. Who can give it? A hand maid for a hand job.
He talked the whole time I think. Like you would to a horse or a dog to keep it calm. When he was done, he gave me a handkerchief to wipe my hand off, and I left, wandered around dumbly. Went back to the hostel with the others. Started talking idly about how Spanish men were pigs. Somebody asked me if something happened. I said, No, no, no. Ashamed. Also, not sure that it had. After all, boys grabbed my ass almost every day at school. When I was out jogging or walking, I was followed by men in cars. I wasn’t supposed to be there. Wasn’t supposed to exist, take up space. My mother was obsessed with my weight and commented and measured and poked at my flesh. I’d become obsessed, too. Measuring and dieting to be smaller. Puking my guts up. Staring in the mirror at a ghost. Even my father in his new bachelor’s apartment commented on pimples, touched them. I was touched all the time. Everyone owned my body but me.
A few years later, I’d write about it as a rape, but that wasn’t quite true, either, in the continuum of wounds. It meant something. I just couldn’t say what. Not as long as there was nothing in my life but the passive voice, I was touched, I was followed. I was mute despite my straight mother’s warnings about men taking advantage, her fury against my father who was now her ex-. I never mentioned all this to anyone. Why would I? Everything happened right there in public, the tracking cars, the catcalls and gropes, the… What word should I have used? Whom should I have told?
Even now, a friend gets tipsy, an absolutely charming man, and after brunch one Sunday tries to stick his tongue down my throat when we say good-bye. I don’t want to offend his wife whom I like, so I say nothing, just avoid them for a year or two, never get close enough again for a stealth attack. Then there’s the friend who declares all the time about how hard it is to be straight, gets drunk and pats my arm, plasters my head with sloppy affectionate kisses, keeps me in a death grip and I don’t knock her down the stairs. I’ve learned my lesson.
A woman’s body, a lesbian’s body, is never her own.
Stay tuned for…
Ch 8. Cris de coeur et de Kunt
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K