I wanted to be good. So I never told lies, and I did, or tried to do, what I was asked. I even tried to keep order for my parents, tattling on my twin sister whenever I heard her telling a story or I noticed she was omitting key pieces of information I knew my parents would need to bring a situation to justice. Because of my own inability to lie or to let a known untruth live, my parents came to trust me. It is perhaps for that reason my father never said, "Let's keep this between us," the morning he told me what he'd done during the night while I slept beside him in his bed.
Put together my abhorrence for untruths and my pride in being a good daughter, and my predicament should be immediately apparent: if I told on my father, I could uphold truth, but I would no longer be a good girl in his eyes; if I did not tell on him, his secret would have to live inside me, and my life would be tainted by this thing I could not share, but I could still be his favorite.
In many ways, this difficult decision--to tell or not to tell--bothered me more than what my father did in that bed. When I look back now, I see the real travesty of my father's actions: he put me in a position in which I could not win, in which I would have to make a sacrifice because of him. He had committed a great injustice against me, and we would both pay for it. This was beyond unfair, but I was helpless to change it.
That morning, I told my sister, who put me on the phone with our mother who was staying with a boyfriend somewhere in town while my brother, sister, and I spent the Christmas holiday at Dad's. For those of you who think the worst part of incest is the trespass, I will tell you that for me, this was not so. Here is the real crime of incest: as I told my mother what had happened, I felt the weight of my father's betrayal in my heart, and I matched it with my own, word for word, tear for tear; I betrayed my own father. I was sorry every second I was on that phone.
What happened after I told: my mother called the police and came to meet us at my father's apartment. The cops talked to all of us in separate quadrants of the apartment complex's parking lot, and a woman with a yellow legal pad stood before me as red and blue lights swirled alarmingly quick beneath a patient California sky. She asked me if I wanted to press charges. I was eight years old. I will repeat this: I was eight years old. I didn't know what she meant. She asked me if I wanted my father to go to jail for what he'd done. I could see him wildly gesticulating in front of a couple of officers across the lot. His brow was furrowed the way it got when things weren't going according to plan. I cried. I had told the truth, and now I would be punished no matter what I did. If I said no, he might not learn his lesson. If I said yes, I'd surely lose what little left I had of my father, whom my mother had divorced earlier that year.
I told the officer I did not want my father to go to jail. So I got to have the truth, and he got to have his freedom, but despite all of it, I was no longer a good girl.
I didn't fully recognize my situation at the time, but now I see that my father not only put me in a position where I was set to lose, but he showed me an ugly truth most children wouldn't have to suffer for at least a few more years: adults broke the rules just like kids did. This fact devastated my worldview. What my father did put me in a situation where I had to relinquish my childhood, where I had to be my own parent. You may have heard other incest survivors say this before, but it's true: that was the end of my innocence. After that, I never trusted adults to take care of me. I saw that they couldn't even take care of themselves.
This post isn't really supposed to be about what happened with my dad. That's just a part of the picture. The deal is it's been twenty years since I told on my dad, and I'm still not comfortable breaking the rules. To this day, I try to be good--not because I believe it will earn me a ticket to Heaven or out of Hell or even because it will make life easier or more pleasant, but because I like to believe that rules give the world some sense and order, that they keep people from doing things they will regret or that will cause others pain--that they will keep me from being punished.
But no matter how good I am, I fall prey to the injustice of this world just as everyone else does.
One day when I was six or seven years old, I awoke with a high fever. Our live-in sitter was still sleeping as it wasn't yet time for us kids to be up for school, my dad was either asleep or at work, and my mom was in a hurry to go to work, but she managed to move me to the couch in the living room, pulling a blanket over me and setting the oversized, pink-and-white dappled bowl reserved for vomit beside the couch before kissing my cheek and rushing out the door. But she didn't leave a note for our sitter, who was a severe woman with a sturdy hand and a strong work ethic.
I was awakened by a gruff shouting that I sensed had been going on for a while. With great effort, I lifted my heavy lids to see the fierce, red face hovering over me. Through grainy eyes, I watched her lips open and close rapidly, like my goldfish's mouth when I'd pour flakes into its bowl. She said something, but I didn't know what. I was delirious with fever and fatigue and began to fall asleep again even as she raised her voice. Suddenly, a cold rush of air hit my legs as she yanked the blankets off me. "Get up!" she yelled, the words muffled by the cotton ball of my head. I tried to tell her I was sick, but my throat hurt, and I could hardly get the words out, and she was not a patient woman. The next thing I knew, my long, blond hair was in her fist, and my scalp was screaming as my body hit the floor. Her thin, yellow teeth nearly poked me in the eyes as her smokey breath engulfed me. I raised my hands up to protect myself as she began swatting my body and through the tears now spilling down my cheeks managed to croak, "I'm sick!" at which point she thrust a cool palm atop my forehead before drawing it back quickly with a sharp gasp. She picked me up gingerly, then, setting me back on the couch and covering me with the blankets. Exhausted, I quickly fell asleep.
When I was nine years old, I attended a public school in a poor neighborhood in Florida. The administrators had their hands full just trying to keep us all under control, let alone teach us. The classrooms were packed with hungry, love-starved kids and racial tension, and fights broke out so frequently that teachers didn't move to stop them but instead would put their hands out in front of the rest of us like a parent might do in a car during a sudden stop and say something like, "Kids, this is an example of what you should not do." Lunch time was particularly painful because it often served as a school-wide detention period. When it got too loud, for instance, or when a fight broke out, we were all instructed to put our hands and heads on the tables. Anyone caught talking during this time would have to go stand on the stage in front of everyone else for the remainder of the period.
Often the young daughter of one of the administrators was asked to walk around the tables and patrol. I was always dead quiet during this time, but as the minutes ticked by, I'd grow more and more agitated, as most of the kids did, because I'd been drinking chocolate milk and eating tater tots and was full of fuel. To keep myself calm, I'd read my milk carton. One day, I was silently mouthing the ingredients when the administrator's daughter pushed her pointy finger into my shoulder blade and said loudly, "You, get up!"
I remember how my heart jumped from my chest. "But I wasn't doing anything!" I whispered, afraid even now to speak. "You were talking!" she shouted in my face. She was my size but maybe a year younger, and I could tell by the dark glare in her eyes she hated me. At this point, the adult administrator on the stage, another woman who was not this girl's mother, shouted down that I'd "better get a move on." Tearfully, I grabbed my tray and slowly walked across the large cafeteria to the stage, where I stood amongst the other kids who had actually earned their way to the stage of shame, and cried because I was outraged but also because I wanted to show my outrage, while simultaneously feeling like I shouldn't give that little bitch the satisfaction of my tears. I hated her, and I hated that this had happened to me, one of the only students in the school who cared about her education (the way I saw it, anyway). After five minutes or so, my teacher walked in and noticed me crying on the stage. She demanded that the administrator let me down immediately, claiming I was a good student and did not deserve to be up there. I was grateful, but the damage had been done. I would never be good enough to escape punishment.
One day when I was in eighth or ninth grade and had just braved the bathroom after finishing my lunch, I was washing my hands at the sink when one of the popular girls in my class walked in, looked straight at me, and declared with a menacing snarl, "Bitch," like it was a fact. We'd never even said two words to each other before that day, though we'd had classes together. I was baffled, and I wish I could say I laughed, but I didn't. I took her words and held them in my chest like smoke, crying myself to sleep later that night, knowing I had failed to be good enough.
When I was in college, I wrote a paper about the Thematic Apperception Test for a psychology class. I had spent a lot of time and effort on the informative essay, and I knew it was good. Which is why when my professor accused me of plagiarizing it, I fell apart in his office. Here I was, nineteen or twenty years old, unable to escape that telephone call with my mom, that feverish struggle with my babysitter, that elementary school stage. I swore to him I hadn't stolen a single thing, had never, in fact, stolen anything in my life. He just leaned back in his seat and told me the writing was too good to be mine and that nothing was cited. I stared at him, slack-jawed, and showed him on his computer screen where I'd cited, using the required APA format, everything in-text. And he said, "Where's your References page?" And I said, "It's attached to the email I sent you!" And he saw then that he had neglected to open that file. He opened it, and there they all were. I told him I was a creative writing major, that writing is what I did, that I was in the Honors Program, that I was a Dean's List student, that I was, in short, a good girl. He handed me a tissue and gave me a hardly audible apology and told me I'd earned an A on the paper.
The summer between my junior and senior years of college, I took a road trip from my school in Rhode Island to California where I would spend the summer. On my way back across the country, I was driving through Las Vegas when a cop stopped me. It was the first time I'd ever been pulled over, and I wasn't sure what I'd done to deserve it. When the cop came to my window, the first thing he said was, "I just want you to know you didn't do anything wrong." I was no law student, but this seemed off to me, possibly even illegal. He told me he'd just noticed I had out-of-state plates and that when he'd run them, they hadn't come up, but he admitted the computer system might have been slow. In any case, he wanted to see my license and registration. We did the whole dance, and he let me go...because I hadn't stolen the Kia I was driving.
This is all coming up for me now because I've been studying Step Two in my 12-step program, which states that we "came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." And I'm realizing that after all these years, after all these incidents that prove that being good has nothing to do with the world and its order, I'm still trying to be good. At some level, I still worry that the rules are the only thing keeping my world from falling into complete pandemonium. I worry about this even though I know it's a lie, even though I know there are necessary betrayals and situations ensnared in gray communications and accidents and feelings that defy logic. There is so much in this world that does not make sense and that cannot be controlled, and if I want to stop feeling like a victim every time I open my mouth or don't open my mouth or drive or simply just exist, I have to put my faith not in rules, but in a Higher Power, who doesn't play by the rules--at least not the ones we make--because if he/she/it did, there would be no sanity! I'm not saying that rules are made to be broken (although some are!) but that I understand now that rules won't keep me safe or enable me to trust; in a world full of imperfection, only God can do that.
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