All the Silent Spaces

by Christine Ristaino

  I go to Lara’s house for lunch.

  “I got an email from my cousin after she read something I wrote about her family. She’s misunderstood. I’ve hurt her.”

  “Which story is it?” Lara asks. “I don’t remember reading it.”

  “I took it out of the book. It actually isn’t a good fit, but I wanted her to read it anyway. I thought it might bring us closer.”

  Lara sits with me on the couch.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I say. “I can’t write these pieces.”

  “What does the email say?” Lara asks.

  I read it out loud.

  “Look, Christine. I’m not saying this email is good. It’s not. But she’s communicating here. She’s telling you how she feels. Your story accomplished what you wanted. Write her back. Keep talking.”

  “Maybe I should be honest with her about why I am writing this book. Perhaps I need to tell her about the man,” I say.

  “Yes, if you want to really know her and understand her, she needs to understand you.”

  “But I can’t tell her his name. I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “What if my parents and brothers learn who this man really is? It would hurt them,” I say.

  “But it’s hurt you all these years. They’ll be okay.”

  “I know, but why cause unnecessary pain?”

  Lara doesn’t say a word. Neither do I. But for the first time, I hate the man who molested me—not for what he did to me physically, but for putting me in the position of having to tell the people I love something that will hurt them.

  “But maybe they want to talk about it. Maybe it will be good for all of you to get this out.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “So why not?”

  I take in a deep breath. “Because nobody will believe me.”

  I begin to cry.

  “Nobody will believe me.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Because I barely believe it myself.”

  Lara looks at me and I can tell she’s trying to understand.

  “This man was a wonderful man. There was nothing not to like about this man. He stood for so many things I love about this world. He made people happy.”

  “But he hurt you,” she says. “He’s not so wonderful after all.”

  We pause and I run through the exchange with my cousin in my head. The story about my cousin described how I had allowed a falling-out in junior high to affect the way I interacted with her even today. I was still afraid of being rejected by her, I had admitted to her in an email. But the more I think about it, the more I realize I’m afraid of being rejected by my entire family, not just this one cousin.

  “Lara,” I say. “If I tell my family about this and they don’t believe me, they will reject me. That’s what I’ve been afraid of all these years.”

  Later that evening, I change the man’s name in my book to his real name. Maybe knowing the man’s identity is key to my family understanding me today. Admitting to people I was molested had already made my life feel completely out of control. By keeping the story locked up and away from anybody else’s consciousness, I had actually contained it. Yet, it had gained momentum behind that locked door.

  After I change the name in my manuscript, my world is chaotic. I am Dorothy blowing through the skies in a house that has suddenly lost its foundation. For the next week, I wake in the middle of the night in a panic. After every meal I think I’m going to throw up. I can’t take in enough air.

  At work we have a visitor from Australia who is writing an article about our program. One afternoon Lara and I take him out for coffee. Andrew is young, light, fun, and I find myself forgetting my life’s dramas, laughing out loud. At a certain point, Lara grabs a newspaper and begins to read our horoscopes. She reads Andrew’s and it’s all about reaching out to people, making new ties, allowing others to help him accomplish his goals. Then she reads mine. It has words like vacuum and vortex in it. It uses the word “swirling.”

  I’m in the car when it hits me. I’m thinking about a recent conversation I had with my father on the phone, one where I revealed I had been sexually abused, although I hadn’t told him by whom.

  “I want to tell you something so you will understand me better,” I had said.

  “But . . .” he had responded. “I love you. You don’t need to explain anything to me.”

  I told him anyway.

  But now I am considering moving beyond what I have told him, telling him the actual identity of the man, imagining he could never guess, even though he has been telling me all along he really doesn’t want to hear. This time I replay his words to me, and I listen to them as they float through my car. You don’t need to explain anything. I understand. I love you. You don’t have to explain.

  I relax my shoulders for the first time in over a week. Suddenly it’s clear as day. My father already knows.

  I go back to my manuscript and make a decision, one that ends the whirlwind that began a few weeks or perhaps even years before, and I change the man’s name back to be just a man. I have one more note to write. I type my brothers’ names: To George, Ernie, Milo, Zach. “I’m ready to send you a copy of my book,” my email begins and I wait as one by one they email back saying they will read it.

  Retrogression 51:

  Sometime in the late seventies.

  It’s summertime and I’m visiting them. The man’s wife is asleep in the next room. He’s scratching my back and I’m sitting on his lap. I smell alcohol and there’s a glass of yellow liquid with ice on the table next to his chair. Soon he’s tickling me, first on the sides of my body and then in other places, closer and closer to my underwear, then in my underwear, underneath the material touching my rear end, then brushing over my breasts, although I know I didn’t have breasts then. I keep laughing and pushing his hands away and he starts breathing heavy and moving my butt and crotch over a lump in his pants. He keeps moving me back and forth, back and forth. I have shorts on and a summer tank, but I still feel the lump and I’m sure this is something I shouldn’t be feeling.

  Chapter 51:

  All the Silent Spaces

  The thing I regret the most about our encounter is not what I did when you were there, but that I didn’t hug my daughter right after you ran off. She was crying and saying “Mom” over and over again. But I was covered in blood and didn’t want to scare her, so I turned away. Hadn’t you already scared her enough? I wonder what message she took from this. That I didn’t love her anymore? That I was ashamed of what had happened to us? A friend of mine told me this is my fault—that I’m too open to the world, too trusting, and she wasn’t surprised this happened. This is not my fault. Do you know what it means that I can’t trust you anymore? Everything.

  I have been at Eliza’s house since 7:00 p.m. reading passages of my book and now it’s after midnight. For Eliza, something isn’t adding up about the attack and it’s showing itself in one piece, a letter I wrote to the attacker at the beginning of the book, my original preface. We have been looking at this piece for over an hour, and Eliza is convinced I need to change it. It’s winter and as we talk, we drink Eliza’s favorite tea from steamy mugs. I hold on to the sides, absorb the heat into my hands, and my whole body feels warm.

  “There’s something about this paragraph that’s not working for me,” Eliza says.

  “I like it,” I say. “And it’s the only point in the first piece where I explore Ada’s reaction to the crime. I want her there.”

  “But it doesn’t ring true as far as what a little girl would think,” Eliza says.

  She looks at her dog, smiles, and then looks back at me, her expression again serious.

  “Well, I’m imagining what she might have been thinking at the time,” I say.

  “But it’s not written in a little girl’s sensibility. I think you’re putting some of your own feelings into Ada’s reaction in this part. Ada wouldn’t take these messages from you. That you don’t
love her anymore? Maybe she’s more afraid and reacting to her fear. Maybe she’s just trying to be comforted.”

  “I took the paragraph out months ago, but then I put it back,” I acknowledge.

  “See, that says it all. You don’t feel it belongs there either,” Eliza says, lifting her tea.

  “Well, I took it out because you and Felix thought it didn’t belong. But I really feel it’s necessary—vital even. I can’t explain why,” I say.

  “What bothers me is little girls don’t analyze like you do here. That’s not Ada’s voice at all. Maybe it’s yours, but if it is, it doesn’t belong here. And this isn’t written for your reader, either. It’s for you.”

  “I think it belongs,” I say.

  Eliza leans forward, looks at the text with me, and points to the words “ashamed” and “fault.”

  “See, here it is. You’re projecting some of your feelings onto Ada. She doesn’t feel this way. You do.”

  I pause for a moment because what Eliza says causes a chain reaction. Bells ring, whistles go off everywhere in my head. I can hardly contain it.

  Eliza puts down her mug and looks at me. “Christine, this little girl isn’t Ada. This little girl is you.”

  I can feel my face flush.

  I touch the page in front of us as if to make sure it’s the same piece of paper we had been reading a moment before.

  “I’m the little girl,” I say and suddenly I feel, perhaps for the first time, the full weight of the violence I have experienced. Months earlier I had been looking for a support group for assault but could only find groups for domestic violence and rape. Why hadn’t I seen it? Both these groups could have helped me.

  “Christine, this was the first piece you ever wrote for this book. This has been here the whole time.”

  Eliza picks up a cracker and then puts it down again. She lifts the page of my book and holds it in front of her. She reads the paragraph again, silently, slowly. Then she looks at me.

  “In bold letters you have, ‘This is not my fault.’ This is the only place in the book where you have something in bold.”

  The spell of this discovery lingers. There’s something powerful in the air I have never felt before, something I can almost touch. That night I tell Eliza everything and for her something clicks, something she had perhaps already known, but couldn’t put into words—the event in the parking lot was a catalyst for something else, something deeper; it was the start of an unpeeling of sorts.

  That night something shifts for me, too. It occurs to me the world is filled with little girls. They are everywhere, in all the silent spaces. They’re peeking into the doors of a million support groups nobody will go into. They’re in parking lots, cellars, forests, cities, boardrooms, houses—those quiet places where they were molested, raped, attacked, hit, shut down, turned away, diminished, chastised, ignored. They are everywhere. Long before “Me Too” was a movement, they were saying these two words in silent exclamations. If only we had looked up from what we were doing, we would have seen their resounding presence.

  Epilogue:

  Running Unafraid

  When we arrive in Maine this year, something is different. It’s July 2011, and a small bird is sitting on its eggs over the entrance to my parents’ home. My mother opens the door when she sees our car and the bird shoots away from her eggs, fluttering above until long after the door has closed behind us. We watch from windows as she finally floats back to the nest and settles in. We spend hours watching the bird. She circles nearby when we’re outside. We wonder if her babies will ever hatch. Can they survive these summer afternoons while their mother flutters above them?

  Within forty-eight hours, my legs ache for a run. In Atlanta I have two running partners, Betty and Georgia. Betty and I talk about everything—her parents, her recovery from cancer, my children, our inevitable ups and downs. Georgia has long runner’s legs and I struggle to keep up. During the three-mile trek through town, I never think I’ll make it, but somehow I do. Before my trip, Georgia asks if I will run alone in Maine.

  “I don’t run alone,” I admit. “I stick close to my parents’ house and usually Sam comes with me. He bolts ahead but then gets tired. I have to carry him home.”

  “Has this been since the attack?” Georgia asks.

  “No, I’ve always been afraid to run alone. The attack just made it worse.”

  But the idea of running alone has been growing in me since our conversation and I decide to try it. The paths I take on dirt roads are beautiful—long, winding, deserted. During the first twenty minutes, I spend most of my time imagining escape routes—what will I do if a man grabs me by the shoulders? I will run toward the water and swim away. I’ll try to remember an aikido move or one of the karate maneuvers my son recently taught me. I’ll rip off pieces of clothing to leave as clues for the police. This third idea distracts me for a moment. I think of Elie Wiesel’s Night and the description of his ghetto after everyone had been shot to death or put on trains during the Holocaust; traces of families and lives strewn over empty streets—evidence.

  I’ve been listening to books on tape about the Holocaust—Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, a number of other nonfiction writers who chronicle life during the Second World War. I’ve learned about rebel fighters, the underground movements to save Jews, ghettos, death marches, concentration camp survival stories. I want answers from these books. What separates the living from the dead, the survivors from those who perished? Do they hold on to some secret? And how did camp survivors go on, live sanely, without fear?

  As I run, I replay a memory I have of Livio Valentini, an Italian artist from Orvieto. In 2001, during the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, he displayed his work for thousands of people to view. I was in my early thirties, teaching at a local college. During the weekend of the festival, I was his interpreter. The organizers sent us on a horse and carriage ride. Valentini had survived Buchenwald, and his art was filled with haunting caged birds. During our carriage ride, Valentini drew people pulling a carriage with horses standing on top of it. “What a beautiful horse ride,” he said to me and showed me the picture.

  All weekend my conversation with Valentini was light and fun. We shared secret jokes in Italian. In receiving lines, Valentini turned to me and fabricated stories about each person. “He’s the Archduke of Salami. She just found out her husband smokes lima beans. This man recently joined the circus.”

  One evening we walked through the center of Charleston with a group of people. The air was fragrant and warm. As we walked, Valentini kept slowing his pace. I slowed mine too, content to be outside and in the moment of a conversation. It would take a few minutes for the rest of the group to notice.

  “Stay here with me,” he said as they receded from view one time. “You make me feel younger. I don’t want to talk about the serious things they discuss. I’d prefer to play this game of hide-and-seek with them.”

  At my parents’ house, my father and I have the same discussions we do every year about locking doors at night, making sure the chicken is cooked through, fire hazards. He still gestures and throws his arms into the air, telling me how safe Maine is and threatening to give me burnt chicken for dinner, but something has changed. I’m no longer embarrassed or ashamed to speak up.

  By the end of our first week in Maine, the bird sits uninterrupted on her nest in the midst of our traffic. She looks down, daring us to bother her, and then one day, we hear tiny chirps.

  I run up and down hills at a comfortable stride. I look at the water, the trees, and I realize I’m running at my own pace, without pain. The lake stretches away from the dirt road, and when I turn the corner, all I can smell is an earthly peace, a calm quiet. The anxieties I have been playing hide-and-seek with all year seem far away.

  I pick up my pace and soon I am running faster than I have ever run before, and I can’t think of anything but my lungs as they fill with air, running unafraid through the forest.

  Afterword:

&
nbsp; Atrophy

  Eleven years after I was attacked in front of my children in a parking lot, thirty years after I had been raped in college, and forty-two years after I had been molested, I attended a four-person gathering at my Italian colleague’s new house. I had just been to see my gynecologist and she had told me as a result of menopause, my vagina had atrophied. “Atrophied?” Lara asked. “Yes,” I said. “It happens to all women after menopause.” Two of my colleagues began to talk about Kegels, how I should do them. I disagreed. “This is a result of hormonal changes,” I reminded them. “Besides, my doctor told me it was nothing to be concerned about. It happens to all women,” I relayed. “The funniest part of the conversation, though, was what my doctor said afterward. She told me, ‘Atrophy’s a terrible word choice. I’m sure it was named that by a man.’”

  My colleagues were surprised by my open discussion about atrophy, but I felt such relief at sharing news that didn’t involve my daughter, who, at sixteen, was out of school suffering from anxiety and depression. Unfortunately, we already had experience in this field. Sam had developed anxiety-induced seizures resulting in a lost year of doctors’ appointments and missed school. My children had grown up to be deep thinkers, activists, caring out-of-the-box problem solvers, sensitive, beautiful, loving teens, but often they were without skin, completely open to the pain of the world.

  When we brought Ada to a counselor, one of the first things she mentioned was the attack that had happened to us when she was five. “Thinking about that man makes me so angry. I wish I could go back in time and harm him just enough to stop him from hurting anyone.” The counselor responded, “What you experienced, Ada, was trauma. Real trauma. It lives in your body now. We have to find a way to release some of the stress it has caused you.” I wondered about Ada’s depression and Sam’s seizures. Was the memory of our trauma the root of their anxiety?