Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You Read online

  But wait. I am wrong. I am taught a definition for the word “comfort.” I learn this from my father, learn this and many other things from him. I learn that I am able to comfort my father, console him when he is hurt, when he is sick.

  And I learn I will never hear my mother’s voice calling to me—Sue, Sue—my name as soft as a dove murmuring—Sue—the three small letters that mean me. But surely my name is too faint for me to hear my mother calling, wanting to save me—and I, the Egyptian princess, am too far away—as she whispers to me from the other side of the bedroom wall.

  Or maybe I don’t hear my mother because my name is no longer Sue. I am no longer Sue. Maybe I can’t hear her because I have a new name now, a treasured name, for a girl who’s a ruby, for a girl who’s a pearl. A girl my father surely believes is more beautiful than ordinary, everyday Sue. This must be why I never hear my mother call: Sue, Sue, Sue.

  When I am four, my mother begins to examine my Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday underpants. She opens my bureau and removes each pair, inspects them, then sticks them back in the drawer, not neatly folded as before. Once, she pulls down the Monday underpants I am wearing and touches the crotch of the pants as they lie bunched around my ankles. I don’t know why she does this. I’m afraid she’ll find what she’s looking for. And even though I don’t know what this is, I know it is bad.

  When I am older I study photographs in the family album. A Jamaican woman, Mrs. Robinson, a nurse or nanny, dressed in white, holds me. I am still an infant. She is smiling—proud of me? It would not be like our family to hire a nanny. My mother doesn’t work. We don’t have much money. Why do we need this woman? When I first begin to speak, I have a Jamaican accent. Where is my mother? Is she asleep in bed even now, years before the car crash?

  In another photograph I stand across the street from our house, holding the rail of a metal fence, the boundary of a cemetery. My eyes are closed as the wind blows my short curls about my face. I want to ask that child why her eyes are closed. But I can’t ask her: I don’t dare to know what she knows, see what she’s seen. Other photographs show young sisters in pinafores with white socks and black patent-leather shoes. Two sisters sit on the grass with their mother, picking clover to weave into a chain.

  There is one small photograph in the family album I stare at again and again. It is of me, from the waist up, black and white, but dark, with little contrast. A veil of light filters my face. I wear a white sweater. I lie on my back, my arms crossed up over my shoulders, cradling my head. It looks awkward, posed—a slightly adult pose. I am expressionless, staring straight into the lens, but I’m not sure if it’s my expression, or my face.

  For there is another little girl. She has my face, but not my face; she has my body, but not my body. She is Dina. She is the girl my father most loves. She is the one to stare into the lens of the camera held by my father as he leans closer and closer to her body.

  An excerpt from my father’s journal kept while he was Chief Counsel to the Interior Department. Entry dated August 5, 1947. Occasion, the signing, by President Truman, of the Philippine independence papers:

  Called Congressman Crawford and arranged to meet him at White House at noon. Matt Connelly and Charley Ross showed us in precisely at 12:15. We circled the President seated ready to sign the bill. Dozens of cameramen were around taking pictures of the signing. The president seemed disturbed. It was shortly after his mother’s death. He signed the bill with 4 different pens. He dated the Bill “Approved—July 5th.” We called it to his attention. He said: “I don’t know what’s happening to me these days.” We chatted a bit about the measure. We shook hands and left to have lunch with Oscar at Interior. Sat next to Crawford at lunch. He has a great interest in Puerto Rico. I am of the opinion he will do everything in his power to help the economy of the Island.

  An excerpt from a letter dated December 15, 1949, to my mother from my father. He is on a government trip to the Pacific islands and Japan, where he stays in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo:

  Another very curious sight is seeing so many of the Japanese wearing masks—the kind used for colds. They wear these masks out in the streets, to prevent the spreading of colds. Everything here is calculated in terms of spreading disease. They are terribly conscious of it. They do not shake hands. Those that do have gotten into the Stateside habit. They take their shoes off when they come into the house so as not to bring the street dirt into the house. We’re told they rarely kiss—even parents and children rub cheeks or noses, but no kissing. I don’t know what they would think of Suzie’s tongue kissing. It’s strictly non-Japanese.

  Heartbeats in Stone

  Bethesda, Maryland: 1951-1953

  In Washington, D.C., we lived in a two-family house on Southern Avenue. Now, when I am five, we move into a ranch house on Kingswood Road in the suburbs. How proud my parents are of their brand-new home, the first they’ve ever purchased. How beautiful are the hardwood floors with Oriental rugs from Israel. My father tells me what a lucky little girl I am, with my own private bedroom, the windows high, close to the ceiling, so no one can see inside. The secluded living room overlooks a dark forest. Now my father has a shed, detached from the house, for his electric saw. How lucky he is to be able to saw undisturbed for hours.

  My father brings us trinkets from business trips. Presents from Occupied Japan gleam like red lacquer. Philippine presents seem as green as the crown of a palm. Hawaiian presents are sweet-smelling leis and rustly grass skirts. Alaska is glittery snow and ice. Siam sparkles like silver and gold bangly jewelry. The Pacific Trust Territories and the West Indies smell like the azure and sapphire sea. I treasure fragile dolls from Bangkok, pink and black papier-mâché masks from Hong Kong, Eskimo totem poles, puppets, silk scarves scented with incense. I even save the wrapping paper, pressing it to my face and breathing deeply, imagining myself far away, although knowing I could never travel.

  I would be afraid to travel. Instead I lie in bed, safe in my highwindowed bedroom, daydreaming of foreign countries, of what’s outside, while my sister is the one to disappear into the world, escaping our house. I can’t leave the house, for it might disappear while I’m gone. I imagine bricks crumbling, the roof and eaves lifted by gusts of wind to tumble to the farthest corner of sky. Beams will splinter and crack. Windows shatter. This is my fear. Only the unrelenting strength of my watchful gaze can prevent this disaster.

  When my father returns home he is pleased to see me, the daughter who always waits for him, the daughter who knows how to make him happy. On Saturday he builds a dollhouse from construction paper. I cut out paper dolls to live inside. In the afternoon my mother cooks chicken and rice, fresh vegetables, an apple pie. The house smells right. But even though the day has been perfect, we grow silent around the dinner table. We—we three little girls, as my father always calls us, his three little girls—watch, without eating, watch while my father tests the food. The chicken must be crisp and dry, almost burned, or my father won’t eat it. I breathe slowly before he takes his first bite, waiting to see the outcome of the meal. If he doesn’t like the food, his rage will spew across the table to my mother and he will slam from the house to the shed, to his electric saw, sawing his rage through planks of plywood or pine.

  Tonight, for my father, the food is fine. I eat little of the dry chicken but as much apple pie as possible. My sister, too, eats little, while my mother comments on whether she thinks we’re eating the right amount, informing us of the nutritional value of each item of food and why our bodies need it. My mother worries so much about my body, always concerned it be sufficiently nourished. Vitamins. Minerals. Roughage. These are all it needs, surely she believes, in order to be healthy.

  Always, I wait for my sister to invite me to play. I wait for her to come home, wait for her to speak to me, wait for her to notice me, smile at me, love me. But there doesn’t seem to be enough of her to share herself with me. Her thin stick of a body barely stirs the air in the house. She has nothing to spare.
I don’t remember the sound of her voice; she is absent, even when here. Once, when her friend visits, I hide under the bed in her room to be close to her, as if I am part of them. Changing position, I bump my head. She screams at me, and I rush from the room in shame.

  My report card from kindergarten, handwritten in pen by my teacher, indicates that I play alone much of the time and that when other students, usually boys, want a toy I’m playing with I relinquish it immediately. The teacher thinks I’m too passive. Yet during the year I show two signs of rebellion. Once I am discovered in a corner hammering a toy mallet against the ground. I refuse to stop when asked. The teacher calls this a “useless motion.” Later in the year I am asked to open my mouth for a throat inspection by a visiting doctor. I refuse.

  By second grade I no longer refuse requests concerning my body. For a school photograph I hold a crayon in my left hand and smile into the camera. I wear my most beautiful lime-green dress with white ruffles on the shoulder cuffs. My teacher takes the crayon from my left hand and puts it in my right. I tell her I’m left-handed, but she refuses for the photo to be taken unless the crayon is in my right hand. I comply.

  I begin elementary school at the Alta Vista School in Montgomery County, Maryland. The long corridors, the endless doors and rooms, are large and scary. The cloakroom is moist with melting snow and mud. I sit on the floor in the corner to pull off my leggings. Other children laugh and push and shout, fighting over hooks upon which to hang parkas. Galoshes are kicked against the wall. The cloakroom darkens in this claustrophobic crush of children. In the small, warm room all the children seem to be melting. This crush, this dampness, is familiar, but I don’t remember where else I feel it or smell it. But I am also my own opposite: After the other children leave the cloakroom, I like being here by myself. Then I sit on the floor against the wall, hidden behind coats and scarves. No one can see me. Now the darkness is comforting. Since I believe that what my mother searches for on my underpants is a smell that means I’ve been bad, I believe here no one can smell me. So I sit here until I am told to come out.

  Always, I’m scared to come out. I’m scared to speak in school, scared to be noticed. All day I drink only small amounts of water, since I’m scared to ask for permission to use the bathroom. I’m scared to answer questions, even if I know the answers. Exhausted by fear, I’m unable to concentrate and fail to understand instructions on painting, on playing, on learning lessons. I feel almost foreign, as if I speak a different language. Always, I make mistakes. When reprimanded by a teacher I stare at my shoes, believing if I can’t see her, then soon, in just one moment, she will no longer see me either. All through elementary school, teachers say I’m afraid to try new things. I know about new things. But it would never occur to me to tell anyone about the new things I am taught by my father.

  The summer between first and second grade I am to attend daycamp. My fear of leaving my house deepens into fear of leaving my mother, deepens into numbing panic. I believe she is the only one on earth able to protect me—protect me from the image of the scared Egyptian princess. But I have no words for this image. I don’t understand why the princess hides, so I can’t explain what the image means. All I know is that if I don’t watch my mother she, along with my house, will disappear. Now I imagine feet and ankles sinking below ground. Hair will snag in beaks of low-flying birds. Severed arms and hands will drift to the farthest horizon of space. My unrelenting gaze is all that holds my mother onto the skin of the earth. And if I lose her, the Egyptian princess will be … I don’t know the word for what will happen.

  On the first day of camp my mother pushes me into the car. Driving there I beg her not to make me go and think of excuses why she must need me at home. I’ll help her cook and clean and iron. I’ll wash every dish after dinner. I plead, but she doesn’t understand the fear and I lack the appropriate vocabulary to explain it. When we arrive, the counselor and my mother both tug me from the car. Edged around the door is ropy trim, and I dig my fingers into it, holding on, kicking, screaming, crying. Boys watch while they pretend to play touch football, but my desperation not to stay outweighs any fear of being noticed. Finally I am pried loose, and my mother quickly drives away.

  Now I am quiet. I am exhausted, bereft, stubborn. Not even the death of my mother would make me feel more abandoned. I sit on the ground and watch the boys play football. The counselor asks if I want to join girls beading necklaces. I shake my head, no, looking down, afraid to see him, afraid for him to see me, wanting, yes, to be invisible. Do I want to go horseback riding? Again I shake my head. Swimming? All I want—doesn’t he know?—all I want to do is scream. I can’t, I can’t understand why he doesn’t know what’s wrong, why he can’t fix this, even though I don’t know what “this” is either. I am enraged he doesn’t see what’s invisible, enraged he can’t hear words I’m unable to speak, enraged he can’t smell the fear that evaporates on my skin by morning, every morning before I leave the house.

  I watch the boys throw the football, watch as one boy catches it, watch the others tackle him. Surely the boy is crushed, his bones splintered, under the mound of kicking boys. Even when the boys peel themselves away and the boy who’d caught the ball stands, grinning, I’m not convinced he hasn’t been hurt. I’m still not convinced, even as he breaks from the crowd, running. His hand rises high above his head, drifting back behind his shoulder before whipping forward, releasing the ball. It begins to arc, and without conscious will or plan I am off the ground and racing toward it. The ball soars across a green horizon, across the cool blue basin of sky. I run faster. Now I am the one to catch the ball. I grip the leather, holding on. The strong, noisy boys must hurry. They must. I will not relinquish it until I am on the very bottom of that crushing knot of boys.

  Finally they tackle me, as I knew they would. This is what I want. Instead of feeling the weight of boys piled on top of me, I am weightless, free, far lighter than my body. Now it is my body able to twine with sunbeams high across the sky. No longer will my body have to be here, be trapped here. For I hear something crack—or maybe I feel it, although the feeling is far from pain. The crack in my collarbone is soothing, as if the marrow of bone seeps from its skeletal structure, warming me, healing me. Now my mother must pick me up from the camp. Now I need never go back.

  I watch The Mickey Mouse Club on television and want to be Annette Funicello. To myself, I pretend my name is Annette and also name all five of my dolls Annette. But when I meet a girl named Anita I want her name, too. I have an urgent need for these names, to be these names, and spend days transforming myself into Annette or Anita, whispering these names to myself, chanting them like a mantra, trying to shed my own self, my own image.

  Around the corner lives my best friend. We watch animals at the National Zoo. We play in a sandbox and roller-skate around the neighborhood. But I’m not close to her, not really. No real person enters my consciousness. I collect names of people, not people themselves. I steal their names, wanting truly to be their names more than I want to be them, for I’m not sure I want to be anybody.

  I am in the bathtub, in this house on Kingswood Road. For hours, it seems, I stare at my yellow rubber duck with a blue sailor cap on its head. It bobs as my father moves his arm through the water. He holds a bar of white soap. He asks me to raise an arm. He washes my underarm, my neck, my chest. I smile up at him, the soapy water warm and slick across my skin. He moves the soap down my chest and across my stomach. He tickles my belly button and I giggle, before he moves the soap down farther, farther. It is between my legs. Gently, he edges my legs apart. The soap slips from his hand, and it is the soap I watch now, bobbing to the surface. He touches me there with a finger, in a place I can’t name. In a place I have no name for, for no word exists. I will never let myself know the word, except it is a place, simply “down there.” My giggle stops. His breath is so heavy it seems to ripple the water into the thinnest of waves. His fingers massage it. And it feels good, yes. I discover pleasure before I
discover its shame, discover that the definition for pleasure is the definition of the word “shame.”

  In second grade I stop attending school. I refuse. No one understands why, so the school arranges for a psychologist to see me. This cheerful woman sits in a schoolroom, gives me four plastic dolls, and asks me to explain who they are. Here, I say, is a daddy doll in a business suit who loves his daughters very much. Here, I say, holding up a doll with a bright pink blouse, is a mommy doll, who also loves her daughters. And here is a beautiful sister doll who loves her younger sister. The youngest doll is a happy doll, I say, smiling: See her here in her pretty yellow dress. We are a happy family, I say, with absolute conviction, knowing with certainty that happiness implies I will never be taken away from my family. Yet I don’t see my doll story as a lie. Surely I tell her what she wants to hear. But surely, living in our brand-new house and wearing our pretty clothes, we are happy. How can we not be? Since I am so happy, I’m not ordered to return to school. No authorities come to the house. No one investigates further.

  Day after day I stay in my house. On sunny days my mother urges me outside. I sit on the front stoop, raking a stick through grass. I sit on the back stoop, tapping the stick on the brick patio. I leave the door ajar to hear my mother in case she calls to me. I glance inside the window where she sits on the couch reading the paper. I know she will leave me, I know she will die the moment I glance away. Still, she urges me farther from home. “Ride your bicycle,” she tells me.

  My muscles strain as I pedal up the steepest hill in the neighborhood. At the top I pause, one foot on the ground, my arms resting on the handlebar. The streets are deserted. All the fathers are in the city, working. All the kids are in school. Mothers wash breakfast dishes and straighten beds. Drowsy infants and toddlers are napping.

  No birds call out to the sun. No leaves on trees rearrange the air. No squirrels dig holes in the ground to hide nuts for winter. No curtains flutter in windows. It is too warm for smoke to curl from chimneys. Clouds seem suspended in a flat, blue sky. There is no motion in any of the houses. Why are the houses so silent? Why can’t I hear any voices? Or are there no voices because there is no one to hear mine? Right now I want someone to hear it. Everyone to hear it. Right now I feel like running the length of the street, beating at all the doors with a stick, beating and screaming: Open up, open up—for me.