Читать книгу The Telling - Zoe Zolbrod - Страница 10

THE FIRST TIME

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. I’d graduated in junior high to slipping books out of the public library—The Mating Dance, The Joy of Sex, Love Machine—and hiding them in my pillows to pore over at night. I felt lucky to have found a firsthand source of information in Heather, to peep in on real lives that matched the drama on the pages I was queasily drunk on. Carrie was performing the tease, just as Cathy Dollanganger had done to her mother’s second husband in Petals on the Wind. Just like the big-breasted actress had done to the famous nightclub singer in Valley of the Dolls. But the plot arcs of the novels left no question about what these characters had wanted in exchange for the sex they advertised and then withheld. I wasn’t sure of Carrie’s aim. She had from Raymond all she could get from him; she’d given what she had. And there she stood dangling a rubber. Laughing in her underwear. In front of two boys. One with his dick out. The scene Heather had drawn hovered before me, more vivid than the sagging asbestos-sided homes that lined the sidewalk beneath our feet, but just out of reach.

As we walked on those afternoons, our instruments would bump against our knees, the oft-gray sky would darken further. Most weeks Heather could offer a new installment of her sex life. After Raymond broke the rubber two times, he started doubling up. One week Tommy decided that instead of letting her toke from the joint herself, Heather could only inhale what he delivered shotgun style. Listening, I would consciously savor the cream dollop in the center of my second Ding Dong. At home, sweets were counted out parsimoniously—five M&Ms at a time, one half of an off-brand pastry snack—and having a twin pack of Hostess to myself was decadent.

Heather, doing most of the talking, didn’t have time to eat. She would begin to pant softly about halfway up the steep incline. She regularly voiced a worry that her parents would smell the cum on her.

“You can smell it?” I asked. “What’s it smell like?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “It just does.”

MY VIOLIN TEACHER was a man with a dramatic forelock and intense brown eyes who seemed to loathe accepting my check—we paid fifteen dollars for thirty minutes. It was three dollars more than the last instructor charged before he escaped to greener pastures, and my mother complained about the increase, hesitated each week with furrowed brow over her signature. I was working on the theme from Ravel’s Bolero that winter, and the instructor and I were twinned in our humiliation: mine over having my parents pay someone to listen to me struggle with the notes; his, presumably, over the paltry price for which he sold his trained and refined ear to an unexceptional school girl. One day, he grabbed my violin from me and brought it alive, leaning into the mounting tune, filling the room with its demands.

“That,” he said, swooping my revered instrument back to me as if it were nothing but a stick, “is how it should sound. Feel what you’re playing.”

I felt it. Oh, I felt it. I glared at him before tucking the violin back under my chin. I scraped the bow across the strings and fought back tears of shame and anger.

I HAD BEEN DRAWN TO MUSIC even before I had been drawn to whispers of masturbation, menstruation, and brassieres. There was the overheard, the glittery confetti of “Dancing Queen” at the ice rink, the slicked-up wail of Styx on a school bus eight-track. And there was my parents’ record collection, folk and folk pop, and the corner nook between the couch and the love seat where the stereo lived and the albums were stacked and I could just fit, crouched or cross legged, flipping through the covers—the lady with whipped cream for a dress; Peter, Paul and Mary against a brick wall—while listening, listening. Airborne particles from the disintegrating cardboard sleeves singed like incense and made my nostrils burn. When in fifth grade a fiddle teacher had come to my school and played a tune, my chest creaked and billowed with the same majestic thwang as it did to the opening bars of my favorite Gordon Lightfoot song. I took up violin immediately, practiced assiduously, and made the all-city orchestra in short order.

But this passion of mine didn’t last long. I had three teachers in four years, and something about the making of music was altered for me with that last one, squashed under his withering condescension, suffocated by the gendered gloomy sex vibe. Was the sex projected onto me or did I project it, clunking down the long music department hallway to his door each week with my hormones raging, my ears full of Heather’s stories of dick and cum?

The question unfolds for me now: projected onto or projected by me? In its wake is the quiet as the needle pulls back from the record, lifts, retreats. Another album drops down. The skid of vinyl on vinyl. Judy Collins plays. Hers was among my favorites of my parents’ LPs, and the song that most captured my imagination was her cover of “Suzanne.” I loved it when the switch occurred, when finally she touched his perfect body with her mind.

I didn’t share my parents’ music with my friends. At school, it was Michael Jackson and AC/DC. I introduced Heather to the girls I knew. Her social circle expanded. Still, after many weeks of only listening, I felt like I had to contribute something to our conversations. Or maybe I felt I had to prove something, prove I was older than I looked, more mature than my behavior at my first make-out party suggested, where I’d opted to run races with the boys instead of neck in the woods with the one I’d been assigned. One evening, while Heather and I stood in the vestibule waiting for one of our mothers to drive us home, she was whispering on about penises and maybe I just grew tired of the dirty talk, of my nose being pressed to its glass, and I wanted to shut her up. Or maybe the dirty talk is what dredged up the memory, sunken in my mind, its features still muddy but suddenly recognizable. Suddenly nameable.

“The only hard penis I’ve ever seen is my cousin’s, when he molested me,” I said. “He used to come into my room at night when I was little.”

Maybe I just wanted to see what would happen if I said it.

My eyes slid off Heather as I spoke. I looked out the safety glass of the vestibule door, which was crisscrossed with thin wire. Soft clumps of lamp-lit snow were falling from the black sky. There was a beat of silence. Then Heather asked in a low, solemn voice whether I’d told my parents.

I hadn’t, and I flinched at the implication that I was a child, that I needed guidance and protection. Whatever I’d wanted to accomplish with my disclosure, it wasn’t that. What did my parents have to do with anything? Had she told her parents that she whiled away her Saturday afternoons fucking? Had Cathy Dollanganger told her mother that her brother had raped her (but only because he loved her so much)?

Of course, the difference was that I’d been so young. I’d said so explicitly. What I hadn’t said was that in some ways the teenage encounters I was now reading and hearing about didn’t seem all that different from what had happened to me. My sixteen-year-old cousin had started out wheedling and whispering, silently fumbling, asking awkward questions about what felt good—like any teenage boy might, in the basement with a girl. Then he abandoned persuasion and courtship on the day—I’d recently turned five—he finally took his penis out. Except for my very young age, that part of the story seemed common, too—an overpowering male, a female’s will ignored. The memory of it was like breath under covers, too close. Heat was blasting from the vestibule’s vent and inside my coat my armpits were sweating, but my feet were still cold. A gulf opened between Heather and me; while her confessions had brought us intimacy, now the boat on which I sat was moving farther from her shore.

It seemed to me then that the onset of womanhood—or more to the point, of sexy teenaged girlhood, of thrill—was all about externalization: boobs popping, menstrual blood flowing. None of this had happened to me yet, but something had. It had. It had. These other things were taking forever, but I’d been carrying this for so long, wondering what it was, waiting for it become clear. Now, finally, someone was talking about penises! Didn’t offering one up make me a teenager? Perhaps not, said Heather’s pause.

I stole a look at her. She resembled her mother—same auburn hair, full bust, round face, and ruddy cheeks—and never more so than now. She’d squared her jaw at my admission, her underbite becoming more pronounced above the ruffle of her plaid blouse. Her stern remove bit my skin. Shame oozed into my veins, something I’d only felt an inkling of before. It was creeping curiosity, mostly, or dumbfoundedness, that had previously slicked my memories of the bedside visits, when they arose at all. Still, I anticipated some sort of momentous alteration after sharing my news, believing I had been changed by the telling of a sex story, by using the word molestation in relation to myself.

BECAUSE IT’S A BIG DEAL, right? The happening of it? The naming it? Or is it not? For many years after that first telling I was unsure, confused by cultural messages and my own shifting responses, the different ways my memories could be made to fit with the identities I was trying to form. I don’t recall telling anyone else about what my cousin did to me until I had moved out of our family home. It took me even longer to realize that Heather’s instinct to connect my parents to what took place in my childhood bedroom was not entirely misplaced, however much I didn’t want that to be true.