I can’t remember where I was when Father got home that day. Probably, I was somewhere inside the house; maybe I was in the living room. Maybe sitting cross-legged on the dingy, frayed oriental rug that had tufts of cat and dog and probably human hair tangled in its tassels at either end; the rug that, like many of our possessions, was a relic rescued from my great-grandmother’s house when she died, and which had become gruesome, having been relegated from her elegant home that was filled with her art, and her piano, and whatever is the stench of the civilized class – to this ranch-style 3-bedroom set a little too far back from the road in a Suffolk County town that didn’t even have sidewalks. Maybe I was hunched over the old, beat-up chest that was our makeshift coffee table, haplessly engaged and playing with my toy horses and their little dolls, in their little horsey outfits – and just lost in play, constructing little horsey personalities to each doll according to their plastic expressions, making the horses pretend-gallop and race each other and even talk, sometimes.
But I do remember what I was wearing – a yellow t-shirt with a logo on it: it said “Pulaski”-something, a mechanic’s logo, or maybe for a tire shop? My maternal grandfather, the one who liked to rub my temples and murmur with affection when I had a headache, had given it to me for my birthday, and even though I wasn’t sure why he gave it to me, I loved it because we had a bunny with that name, “Pulaski.”
I was about 12 or so – not older than that, or I think, or hope, I would have seen it coming. By then, I was always attuned to what was going on when Father got home; on some level, I understood that things could change very suddenly, though I still couldn’t put my finger on the specific danger at hand. I was a slow learner, basically a sheltered child, and had only just recently started to perceive something strange in my parents’ exchanges: the raising of voices, the half-weak protests and inevitable escalation, the cajoling, and the desperate and importunate whimpering that failed to placate Father’s foul and erratic temperament as it began to boil. But, even though I was still too young to know words like these or to understand the nature of these disturbances, the exchanges always made me tense and had already started to set off my internal alarms.
We never used the front door, the one that opened into the living room. Half the time, it was blockaded by firewood that Father had chopped up in the yard, and any number of various broken or dismembered household items or old toys or whatever white-trash refuse that didn’t quite make it to the curb. The driveway led up from the road, turned and ran along the front of the house, and turned again and curled around the side. It went all the way back to the woods, to the garage and the shed Father had built to keep his collection of old rusty Mustang parts out of the rain. This part of the driveway was four cars deep, at least, with broken-down once-classics, so that’s where you parked – behind them, by the side patio.
That was the door we used – the one on the side with the big patio that led into the kitchen. When Father came in Mother must have greeted him because I already heard them talking. I detected no anger in the timbre of his voice, no viciousness in his inflection. I relaxed a little and turned my focus back to my dolls; I assumed my parents were canoodling. This, too, was a source of distress for me and made my blood curdle in a way that was not altogether unpleasant but still very, very bad, but it was still preferable to the stress of imminent violence, verbal assault, and the anxiety of simply not knowing.
But on this day, there was something different about Mother’s absurdly girlish fawning. She was especially excitable like she had a juicy secret, something heinous to confide. I heard Father bellow with smug, unhinged delight and felt my hair raise at his crazed and sinister laughter as it echoed throughout the rooms.
Then, the squealing began.
Sound waves tumbled over each other like the roaring of the ocean perturbed, and my parents’ conspiratorial cooing was festering and getting closer. I stopped what I was doing and looked up.
I saw them in the doorway of the living room. They had almost tripped over each other in their adolescent giddiness. She was sidled up into him, aroused by their shared mirth, her body remembering intimacy in a way that erases decades of pain; she’s so starved for approval, she beams with glee as she sacrifices her first-born child:
“Daddy, Daddy!! Did you see it? Did you see what Dannie got?”
“I know, I can’t believe it!”
I couldn’t think straight, and I had no idea what was going on. But they were staring at me and laughing, gesturing wildly. I must have been standing on a trap door because the moment I knew they were talking about me, it opened and I fell through, and I just kept falling.
I felt deeply ashamed without knowing why, but I knew I done something wrong.
I bolted out of the room and brushed past them, rounded the corner into the kitchen, and headed for the door.
But they followed me, glued at the hip, basically glued at the crotch, and moved in on me. I couldn’t get away fast enough; I was incapacitated by panic, and I didn’t even know where I was going.
I burst out onto the patio, but they followed me, Father cackling like a hyena and Mother giggling into the crook of his arm, and they peered at me with their evil secret and pointed at me.
I catapulted across the patio, but I wasn’t fast enough. Father caught my arm and twisted me around. The sensation of being restrained was brand-new to me and caught me off guard. I squirmed and struggled to break free with everything I had, striking out at him with a diluted fear of physical admonishment. I just needed to get away. But I was anything but calculated, driven by sheer instinct, and ultimately no match for his strength. And it only made them laugh harder.
My arm still in his grasp, he pulled it upwards roughly and, with his other hand, yanked down my shirtsleeve, exposing my armpit.
They both gasped and sneered and leaned in closer – I couldn’t even hear them anymore. The sound was deafening, and the tears were starting to spring. I began to struggle again. I still didn’t know what was going on but I knew I needed to get away. I shrieked and hollered.
What the FUCK? What are you doing you idiot?
Father must have been satisfied with his inspection; he had his proof, and I got away. I barreled down the stairs of the patio; in my periphery, I saw him gesture in my direction, I saw him almost fall backward as he pointed his hairy face upward toward the sky and bellowed with unhinged and vicious delight.
On instinct, I dove behind Father’s car – the ’69 Mustang, the one with the drips of gold from the bad paint job he had done himself. It was close enough to make an escape, but still a safe enough distance from the menacing duo.
I remember that’s where I ended up – outside in the driveway, sitting up against the car tire and crying and crying, on the other side of the old gold Mustang where they couldn’t see me.
I didn’t even feel the gravel beneath me or under my hands. I felt nothing except what would later register as profound guilt, soul-piercing self-disgust, and a new and harrowing, ever-escalating fear.
Let it pierce my skin. Let it make me bleed. I’m safe for now as I weep and plead.
I couldn’t help myself. I had to look. I hunched over and peered, my movements hindered by dread like I was slowly drowning in molasses; besides, I didn’t think I wanted to know anyway but needed to understand – and was horrified at what I saw: a single long, black armpit hair, threatening to curl its way out of my shirtsleeve.
And then I saw it.
The ground fell out from under me again, and my weeping halted. How had I let this happen? I played with toy horses and Brenda Breyer dolls and had dirt under my fingernails, and I moved through life without regard for the space my body occupied, and I roughhoused with boys. I never considered that being a girl made me different, or made me bad, or that my body would ever evolve into one that was in some way different from those boys’ bodies – until I saw that single, long black underarm hair coming out of my body, and heard the mocking howls and conspiratorial murmurs from the patio.
And I didn’t know until I saw it – that there was something wrong with me. And from somewhere deep, too deep within, I intuited that things would never be the same.
Photo by Max Ilienerwise on Unsplash
