Driving With Dead People

by Monica Holloway

  “Don’t tell your mother I said that,” he said. “It would only upset her.”

  “JoAnn needs your help,” I told him, trying to steady my trembling voice.

  “I won’t help her,” he said.

  “She’s suicidal,” I reminded him.

  “She’s weird and she always has been,” he said. Again, I put the phone in my lap, squeezing it between my knees. After I got the money out of him, I’d kill him with my bare hands.

  “She needs money.”

  “I’m not sending money.” He was mad now.

  “You should help her, Dad,” I told him. “She needs you, and you know why.”

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  “No shit,” I said.

  “Not a dime.” He hung up the phone.

  I slammed down the receiver and walked around the apartment half bent over, trying to catch a breath. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. I hadn’t expected it. I certainly hadn’t expected that. Oh my God, on his birthday. He’d brought it up on his own. My dad.

  It was over.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Sitting in a DuPont Circle coffee shop with JoAnn, I told her about my conversation with Dad. I explained how I told him about a suicide note and how he blurted out, “I never touched her.”

  “That’s pretty amazing,” she said.

  “There’s no way he could have known what I was talking about,” I said, picking up my brown Styrofoam cup of warm green tea. “If we called any father in the country and told him that his daughter was suicidal, not one of them would say, ‘I never touched her.’” I sipped my tea.

  JoAnn shook her head—not devastated, not relieved, and not entirely surprised.

  For JoAnn, my phone call with Dad brought closure; for me it was anything but. As JoAnn got better, I got steadily worse.

  Clearly, it was time for me to figure out where I fit into all of it—the sexual abuse, the neglect.

  When I returned to Brooklyn, my own overwhelming feelings (which I’d put aside while trying to stay strong for JoAnn) were screaming for my attention. I tried to ignore them. When I wasn’t working, I slept.

  One evening after work I was standing on the subway platform, and had the urge to step in front of the number six train. I remembered that feeling from when Dad had visited me in San Diego. I saw the light from the train coming through the tunnel, and knew it would take away the grief and confusion, so I moved closer to the rim of the platform. The hot, stale wind of the train blew my bangs across my forehead as I stepped closer to the edge. Suddenly, a tall man in a wrinkled blue suit clutched my arm.

  “Hey, watch where you’re goin’,” he said, pulling me backward. I forced a smile and gently pulled my arm away.

  The train was now stopped in front of me with the doors open. I stepped inside and gripped the silver pole near the door. I usually hated crowded subways, but was oddly comforted, standing in that packed car, buffered by all those bodies, purses, and backpacks. There was life all around me, and I wanted to be a part of it, if only I could feel something—anything.

  The train stopped at Union Square. I watched an elderly woman negotiate the platform with her walker. A young man helped her through the turnstiles. Just normal life. I couldn’t imagine it.

  The next morning, I found a therapist who took my insurance.

  In my first session, the calm dark-haired psychiatrist sat in her Upper East Side apartment with her brown-and-white shih tzu on her lap. After hearing almost forty minutes of my painful story, she said, “I’m not sure what to tell you, really. I’m at a complete loss. First off, your dad sounds like trailer trash; I think we’re in agreement there. And the other problem is that when I feel bad, I take myself to a nice dinner or a movie, but you can’t even afford that.” I wrote her a check and politely closed the door behind me.

  If I hadn’t felt so ashamed, I would have drop-kicked that spoiled dog out her twelfth-story window just to wake her up.

  The next therapist was on the Upper West Side. She wore brown leather clogs and no makeup. The session began well enough, until I heard police sirens screeching up the street. The therapist ignored them, but now they were parked close enough to her office that red flashing lights were whipping around her walls. The next thing I heard was a voice booming through a bullhorn, “Stay where you are. Someone’s coming up to get you. You don’t want to do this.” I stared at the therapist, who was now leaning closer to me, indicating that she wasn’t missing a single word I was saying.

  “Are you going to ignore what’s happening out there?” I asked.

  “If you want to get up and look out the window, go ahead. I don’t want you to be distracted,” she said.

  “Aren’t you distracted?” I asked, standing up.

  “Not really.” She shrugged.

  I looked out the window. A man was crouched high on a window ledge directly across the street.

  The policeman on the bullhorn said, “Sit down. SIT DOWN ON THE LEDGE. It will help you balance until we can get to you.”

  Three police cars were blocking the street and an ambulance was standing by—just in case.

  I looked back at the perfectly composed therapist. “A man’s jumping off a window ledge,” I told her.

  She shook her head in a very understanding way, “This probably brings up a lot for you.”

  I exploded. “It brings up the fact that you’re ignoring a suicide attempt outside your own office. You’re pretending it’s not even happening. How could you possibly help me? You’re exactly what I’m trying to avoid. You’re exactly like my mother—like my entire family. You’re what’s making me want to jump out a window.” I swooped up my coat and backpack in one hand and headed for the door.

  “You owe me a check,” she had the nerve to say.

  “Bill me,” I said, slamming the door behind me.

  I walked into the street and looked up at the small, gray-haired man crouched on the ledge. It was about thirty degrees outside, but he was wearing only a white muscle T-shirt and cotton pajama bottoms.

  I wanted to scream, Don’t let them talk you down! You’re right! It ain’t gonna get any better! Jump!

  I sat down on the curb with my backpack between my knees and watched two police officers extending their hands out the window. The old man startled and leaned forward. I slapped my hands over my ears as if stopping the sound might stop the action, giving the officers time to grab him.

  Don’t fall, I prayed. Please don’t let him fall. My prayer surprised me. It was as if this elderly man in the thin, striped pajama bottoms was holding my fate in his hands. If he jumped, the hopelessness that was already sinking me would win, but if he lived, the hope that was constantly fighting to be realized, would take the prize.

  A woman officer poked her head out the window of the next apartment and called to the old man. When he turned to look at the woman, the other two officers leaned out and grabbed him, pulling him gently inside.

  I thought of JoAnn telling me she’d planned her own suicide on the beach. I hoped there would always be hands to pull her back in. I was beginning to worry that those hands would not belong to me. I didn’t know how I was going to handle the pressure that was pushing against my own sanity.

  I stood up, barely noticing the too familiar tears starting down my face and dripping onto my coat. I wanted help, was searching for it, but it was nowhere to be found.

  I called Daniel from a pay phone on the corner.

  “Can I come out?” I asked.

  “When, tonight?” he asked.

  “Right now,” I said.

  “It’s so late. Are you sure you want to come this far?” Daniel had moved to New London, Connecticut, which was at least a two-hour trip.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On the corner of Broadway and Seventy-eighth.”

  “Don’t you need to get your stuff?” he asked.

  “I don’t need anything.”

  “Come on out,
then,” he said.

  As Metro-North rumbled out of Grand Central, I placed my forehead against the chilly window and closed my eyes. It was unfair to turn to Daniel, who had always been so kind, but I couldn’t think of anyone else.

  Inside me, a terror had been unleashed by the man on the ledge. I couldn’t face the night alone in Brooklyn.

  The next morning Daniel got up for work and I didn’t. I didn’t get up, in fact, for five days. No eating, no teeth brushing, nothing. Daniel called his therapist, who came to the house to see me, wearing baggy corduroys and carrying a blue canvas briefcase.

  After about ten minutes of sitting on the side of the bed talking to me, he sighed as he put his hands on his knees and said, “Suicidal people bore me. They’re self-centered shits who need to get off their asses and do something with their lives. Now, why don’t you just…get up?”

  This added two more days to my bed vigil.

  After that, my old friend Rachel, an actress I had worked with in La Jolla, called from Los Angeles. “Honey, what’s going on?” I had refused to come to the phone on three separate occasions, so she’d called back, demanding to speak to me.

  “I’m having some kind of breakdown, I think.”

  “Maybe you should come out here for a while. Stay with us until you get back on your feet,” she offered. She lived with the most wonderfully smart and sensitive woman.

  “I don’t have any money,” I told her. “I haven’t been able to save anything.”

  “You’ll get yourself a job. You always do. Come out and we’ll at least get to see you,” she said. It sounded good. Really good.

  Daniel bought me a very expensive plane ticket, and I flew to L.A. two days later. He was relieved to have the weeping woman gone, and I didn’t blame him. Maybe the cross-country distance would give me perspective.

  Everyone at The Strategist Group understood I needed to leave. I hadn’t shared everything with Elliott, but he trusted me. I was doing what I had to do.

  Once I was in L.A., I stayed in Rachel’s guest house. We’d become close friends in the six years since we acted in that play in San Diego, and now she had swooped in and saved me.

  I called Mom. “JoAnn’s much better, which is good, because I can’t be responsible for her any longer.” I didn’t pause for Mom to interrupt. “I’ve moved to L.A. The weight of everything that’s happened has finally caught up with me. I feel lost and panicked.” There was a long pause.

  “Why don’t you call back when you’re feeling better,” Mom said.

  I laughed as I slammed down the phone. I laughed because I was tired of crying. I laughed at the absurdity of turning to my mother for help.

  If feeling better meant I’d have to call Mom back, I wouldn’t be feeling better for a long time.

  Rachel introduced me to a psychologist who was completing her training in analysis and needed a patient to work with. She was charging a small amount of money, and my insurance would cover what little she was charging. (Elliott had kept me on COBRA at The Strategist Group.)

  In time, I found a job working with Daniel’s cousin, Beth, at a personnel-recruiting agency in West Hollywood. This not only helped me afford therapy and a studio apartment, but gave me an opportunity to meet new friends.

  While trying to understand my part in the abuse, I continued going to therapy five mornings a week and read as many books as I could on the subject.

  In the books and articles, I read about cases where memories were unearthed after a person had been coerced by a psychiatrist. So I questioned myself. Would that happen to me? But in my sessions, my therapist refused to offer any of her own opinions or speculations. I talked and she listened.

  The things I remembered about myself were disturbing, but nothing compared to what JoAnn had gone through.

  For instance, Dad was always staring at us. Even when he wasn’t home, I imagined he was watching me—even in the bathroom. When I realized I still had that paranoia, I was finally able to let go of it.

  And I used to think that Dad pulling down my pants in public was to humiliate me, and that was part of it, but I now think that he wanted to see me naked; that he wanted to look, and that there was a sexual aspect to it. Even now I feel the heat of embarrassment—the shame of being publicly exposed.

  When the one solid memory I had of Dad’s abuse finally surfaced, it didn’t happen in therapy, it happened in my dentist’s office.

  I was waiting to get my teeth cleaned when I picked up a magazine. I opened to an article about a young woman who had been raped on her college campus. What struck me most about her experience was that while it was horrific to be raped, she described the sex as “eerily ordinary” in the back of the rapist’s car. “It wasn’t violent or rough, it was clumsy and ridiculously ‘normal.’” And almost as if a switch clicked on, I realized I was looking for the wrong thing.

  I was trying to remember being held down and viciously raped—especially after JoAnn’s harrowing journey. But it was less frequent and more “ordinary” for me. I hadn’t counted on abuse feeling so chronically familiar, instead of excruciatingly violent.

  I was less than six years old when it happened, because it took place in our bedroom at the old house—the bedroom with the grate in the floor.

  My father was not brutal or crazy when he came in the night, he was tender and loving, making it a bedtime ritual, a silly game. He even had a name for it, but I can’t recall what it was. This was by far the biggest betrayal. After he was so mean, how confusing and twisted it was to have him choose the middle of the night to say he loved me.

  He manipulated love into something perverse, confusing me about what love is, causing me to sexualize friendships and relationships, teaching me without words what I was worth. Violence would have been more honest.

  And with that memory, I had the orgasm mystery solved. It was Dad, and it was during the night, only I pretended to sleep while he touched me. I tried to move away from his hand, but it was pointless. After a while, I couldn’t feel his hand. I couldn’t feel anything, not even my arms or legs, which is why I was afraid of being immo-bile in my casket with Dad walking by. It’s why I was afraid of his hands when he accidentally touched me in the cab of his truck. And when the orgasm finally came, it was the one feeling I couldn’t numb out. It actually felt good, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  And then there was Mom.

  The blond psychologist at the psychiatric facility in Washington had been right about my facing Mom’s role. It was the hardest part.

  I’ll never know why Mom slathered all three of us girls with Vaseline every night. It didn’t make sense. Did it have anything to do with Dad? If we were chapped or red for some reason, why wasn’t she curious about what was causing it?

  Why wouldn’t she let us wear panties to bed? I had friends who remembered their mothers telling them they needed to “air themselves out” at night, so maybe that’s all there was to that. But I worried.

  Mom’s insistence that Dad was harmless made him more dangerous. She wasn’t monitoring him—no one was.

  Again, I remembered Mom warning Becky about the way Dad looked at her when she was in junior high. At least there was that much awareness on her part—but why didn’t she make sure Becky was safe? Why didn’t she kick Dad out right then?

  I can’t forgive my mother for choosing not to change, for living her life exactly as she did before the abuse came to light, whipping into a fury if I talked about it. Refusing to see what I was forced to see—through JoAnn and through my own experiences—irreversibly separated us into two different worlds. She lived in the past, and I lived for the future.

  Mom chose not to confront Dad—even though they lived eighteen miles apart, even though she occasionally ran into him at the gas station or the grocery store. “He won’t care,” she said, not realizing that we cared. It would have been an attempt on her part to protect us, not just from the sexual abuse, but from the violence as well.

  The worst
and most unforgivable thing of all was that she declared herself one hundred percent “not responsible.”

  I let go of Dad first (or rather, he let go of me), and now it was time to let go of Mom.

  The last time I spoke to my mother wasn’t the worst talk we’d ever had, it wasn’t an argument, but it was, in my mind, the end. Years ago, hearing her tell the story about Dad and how one day, when she was standing by the washer in the hallway, she suddenly didn’t care about him anymore, I didn’t know that was how she and I would end. Nothing dramatic, nothing came crashing down; after an ordinary phone call, I just didn’t try to love her anymore.

  It began with my phone ringing and then a really high voice (my mother’s) going, “Say ‘yippee’!”

  “What?” I asked, trying to buy time. I’d had a long day.

  “Just say ‘yippee.’ Right now,” she demanded.

  “Why?”

  “JUST SAY IT.”

  “No.”

  “Why do you have to ruin it for me?”

  “Ruin what?”

  “Exactly. You don’t even know why I called. Now I don’t even want to share my good news with you, so there.”

  “Mom, I just came from the emergency room. I hit my head on the trunk of my car and got seven stitches in my forehead. I’m not in a great mood. What do you want?”

  “I want you to say ‘yippee.’” She couldn’t stop herself.

  “Yippee,” I finally said.

  “That wasn’t even excited, that was shitty. Just forget it.”

  “Well, thanks for calling, anyway,” I said. “Have a great day.”

  “It was a happy day until now.” She was pouting.

  I got off the phone as quickly as possible.

  Mom has some version of what that conversation was, and she has some version of who I am, and I don’t care what any of that is. It’s not the truth. It never will be.

  We hung up and I haven’t spoken with her since.

  Knowing there is no cavalry is much better than hoping for a cavalry that never comes. I am strong because I have to be. I am the cavalry.