In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

  He grabbed my hand once more and finally held on to it tightly enough that I couldn’t pull away, turned it over, and began rubbing the back of my hand against his bulging crotch. I didn’t know what to do. His friend was looking at us with a smirk. I glanced at my friend, and she was glaring at us both. So I looked away, toward the floor, ashamed and embarrassed and afraid to move. He told the nineteen-year-old cousin it was time for him to go home, and Louis’s friend got up to drive him there. When they left, my friend stood up and said she was going to bed, the anger in her voice apparent. I sat there for a moment and realized that I could go to bed, too, so I jumped up and said I was sleepy.

  I made it to the hallway, and he told me to come back, to sit beside him. I looked at him, not sure what kind of crossroads we were at, but knowing I would have only myself to blame for whatever happened if I returned. I told him no, I was tired and needed to go to sleep. With a serious edge to his voice, he told me again to come back and sit down beside him. Once again, I told him I was going to bed, and I quickly walked into my friend’s bedroom just a couple of steps down the hallway.

  She was mad at me when I came into her room. When I asked why, she said she didn’t know why he and I had to act like that, and I tried to explain to her that I didn’t know what to do. She told me Louis had a peephole in the bathroom and would watch her taking showers, but she had found the peephole and stuffed toilet paper into it. Then, one day while she was showering, she saw it moving as someone tried to push it out of the hole, and she put her finger there to make sure it wouldn’t come out.

  The next morning, the house phone rang and I answered it, but there was an immediate click as the caller hung up. It happened again, and I told my friend. It’s him, she said. He’s dialing our number and letting it ring, and when you pick up, he’s hanging up. Though she didn’t seem alarmed and drifted back to sleep, I didn’t know what to think when the phone rang another ten or more times that morning, apparently as Louis waited for one of us to pick up again while he called from the bedroom at the end of the hall.

  Her mother finally came home late in the morning, and as she drove me to my dad’s, she crowed over the man she had been with the night before, telling us how they danced all night long and that she was leaving Louis. Since she was leaving him, I thought I might as well let her know what he had done, so she would realize she was making the right choice. My friend was angry—she didn’t want me to say anything.

  You don’t think I should say anything?

  Well, it’s too late now. Now you have to tell her.

  Tell me what? her mom asked. So I told her, and not a lot was said after that.

  Later that week, I came home from school and found a state trooper waiting for me in the living room of our trailer. He asked me careful questions as my mother and stepfather sat there, listening. After he left, my mother asked her own questions, and I quickly learned some important things. I should have called someone to come get me. I should not have been wearing shorts. I should not have even been awake.

  By the following summer, the situation had evolved dramatically. At first, all the adults insisted that I testify in court, that I prevent anything from happening to another girl at his hands. Then, as my mother’s questions amplified, dissent crept in from everyone I loved: Why was she awake? What was she wearing? She wanted the attention anyway . . . Finally, my friend’s mother decided that she wasn’t leaving her man and that he hadn’t done anything wrong. My father’s girlfriend—my stepmother—didn’t want to talk about any of it and said she wasn’t picking a side. My friend even seemed to forget about the little peephole into the bathroom that was apparently made especially for her.

  As my dad drove me to court on my fourteenth birthday, he told me everything I needed to know. That I had humiliated my father. That he was going to kill that man. He would kill that man, and what the fuck was wrong with me anyway? Did I want to spend all my life acting like a goddamn whore in a goddamn trailer?

  I had never kissed a boy.

  Soon, I sat in the full courtroom not far from the man. Other people sat in the back of the room—his relatives? His friends? They were not my relatives, not my friends. The prosecutor asked me whether I was ready, and I calmly told him: I have nothing to say. Within minutes, I sat in the judge’s chambers, surrounded by men asking questions and making declarations: Has someone threatened you? You can’t do this—think of the other girls he might hurt. Everyone’s waiting for you, you have to talk.

  For the first time in my life, I refused. I told them again: I have nothing to say. And then, I said nothing.

  I knew by that point that it didn’t matter what I said anyway. Someone was going to use my words against me—both in that court of law and at home. I felt powerful, for a brief moment, when I refused to speak, when I realized that I could refuse to speak. I could withhold my truth and protect myself from the betrayal I knew would follow if I made myself vulnerable to them. But after fourteen years of speaking and being punished, there was a dark lesson taking shape within my mind. I realized that the people who were supposed to love me, who were supposed to protect me, would actually sacrifice me and send me to a witness chair to be cross-examined by a man who didn’t know me and whose job was to reveal me as a liar. The people I loved sent me to that courtroom with my father—my mother didn’t come, my stepmother didn’t come.

  Before I got to that courtroom, I knew they no longer cared what had happened—they didn’t doubt it had happened but were sure I had wanted whatever he had done, no matter what I said. And if my own family felt that way, I knew everyone else would, too. I knew that the truth no longer mattered, especially my truth. That there was more risk in speaking than in keeping it secret.

  CHAPTER 13

  Hunger

  On the ride home from court, my father told me again how I had humiliated him. How I was just like my mother. How he would kill that man. And he drove to a fast-food restaurant, but I wasn’t hungry as I sat next to him in the drive-through, every bit of myself knotted up inside, afraid he would annihilate me with his rage, controlling my face so that I showed no fear, no anger, no despair.

  I had to go to counseling for a while, in a building on Main Street, where I sometimes saw too-thin adults sitting on the steps. In court, the judge sentenced the man to probation, without me saying a word. Why? I often wondered afterward. The cousin was subpoenaed to testify, but he had to work, so everyone understood he wouldn’t be showing up. Maybe the judge already knew this man in front of him. Maybe he knew what it was I couldn’t say.

  I couldn’t have told the judge that I realized it wasn’t the worst thing—he hadn’t raped me and had hardly touched me. Even though shame and fear were still there, even though I still wonder what would have happened if I had gone back to sit next to him, it was not the worst thing. I couldn’t have made the judge understand that I only ever said anything because I wanted to help this woman who I thought might be like a mother to me, even though she made the worst gravy and biscuits I ever ate, and I had not wanted the grown man to want me, but I had lapped up that family’s attention like a starved dog.

  Did I deserve what he had done? Had I asked for it? We were living in two different worlds, he and I. I hadn’t been afraid of him and didn’t recognize him as a threat. He made holes through cheap paneling and flirted with girls who hadn’t kissed anyone.

  I told my counselor a little about what had happened and a little about how I was afraid of my dad. She told me she was addicted to nose spray and not to tell anyone. There was a painting in the waiting room, and I studied it endlessly. Impressionism—I had the slightest understanding of that painting style. It was always one of my least favorites, maybe just a little better than abstract art. Everything was so blurry, so undefined. The world melting into itself. The faces unreadable.

  The last whipping I got came when I was fourteen years old. My father’s girlfriend and her three children still lived with him. Her daughters were both younger, maybe
nine and eleven, but the son was a year older than me. On a summer afternoon, I sat on his lap as he rested in a dilapidated rocking chair. When the chair gave way beneath us, he threw his Mountain Dew can across the room in anger, though at what, I am not sure. His sisters were quick to tell my father and their mother when they returned, since their brother had made a mess in the house. My dad whipped him, I remember, and I’m sure his mother was never able to control him after that. He was livid that this man was able to strike him—not his father, not even really a stepfather. The man who slept with his mother.

  I didn’t expect it, but I got whipped, too. I had no idea I had done anything wrong. Sitting on a boy’s lap, however, was unacceptable. Though we slept in the same house, sometimes in the same room, and ate together and called each other’s parents our own, this was a boy I was not to sit so close to. I knew without anyone telling me that the reason was the closeness with a boy, the good feeling I had when he was nice to me, when he didn’t seem to think I was repulsive. I wasn’t allowed to have that good feeling and was likely a whore for wanting it in the first place.

  That was around the same time my dad rested his hand on my shoulder for the first time, as we walked toward the house together. We were coming from the driveway and talking and laughing about something. He put his left hand on my right shoulder as we walked, and I was surprised—he never reached out like that, and for a second, I thought I had finally done it, I had finally won his love.

  But his grip tightened, and I looked at him in confusion, trying to understand. He had a smile on his face—the same smile I had seen so many times. He squeezed my shoulder so hard that I could no longer walk and buckled from the pain, collapsing there in the yard next to him.

  Dad, you’re hurting me, please.

  He looked at me and said nothing, then let up and walked back into the house, our conversation forgotten.

  After she and my father argued one day, my stepmother told me she noticed that I complained about my stomach hurting every time they had a disagreement. She asked me why, and I asked her, What if he hits you? She assured me he wouldn’t, and I hoped she was so confident because she knew something about him that I did not. When he did hit her, it was beyond whatever I had imagined. He hit her son first, and when she tried to stop my father, she found herself thrown onto their bed as he choked her. She moved out soon after. They reconciled to some degree for a while, but eventually, it ended. It was the last time his house was clean, or full of laughing children. It was the last time I ever thought he might be okay.

  I entered high school just a couple of months after having refused to testify in the courtroom. I was angry at the world, and high school did nothing to change that. I had always been an A and B student, always capable of earning As but rarely really trying. In ninth-grade gym, I earned a C one quarter and then for the entire class. I also earned a C in geometry, of all things. In gym, I hated running around, doing laps and dancing to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” trying to learn our overweight gym teacher’s choreography. I hated being graded in volleyball, where I was scared the ball would hit me in the face, or someone’s elbow would catch my glasses and they would get broken. When I was younger, I always got whipped if my glasses were broken, no matter what the situation was or who was responsible. According to my dad, I was responsible for them no matter what, and I took that responsibility seriously.

  In geometry class, though, I spent most of my time thinking about ways to kill myself and how much I hated my classmates, many of whom had been my tormentors from the gifted program. We had an interior brick wall near the lunchroom, and sometimes I would drag my knuckles across it, tearing off as much skin as possible in one rough slide. I tried to make myself vomit into the school toilet but couldn’t figure out how to gag myself. I tried not to eat but was no good at starving.

  Each day, I walked into the lunchroom in a haze of confusion that was periodically interrupted by terror at being in the wrong place, saying the wrong thing, doing everything wrong in general, always. My mind felt alien, hostile.

  At home, I kept a razor blade in my bedroom, and I showed it to a girl who came over once. She warned me to be careful with it, and I said, Oh, don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt. To prove it, I stuck the point of the blade as far into my leg as I could jab it and pulled hard upward for about an inch. See? It doesn’t hurt.

  She recoiled in horror, and something about that surprised me. Weren’t all girls like us feeling this way? I could sense it, but it seemed so inconsequential at the time—I did not think of it as real pain. Feeling physical pain seemed to ease the anguish that burned inside me. I walked through our small trailer, past my mother and stepfather as they watched television, with a line of blood rolling down my leg. I stuck a bandage on it and went back to my room, unnoticed. The scar is much wider now than it seems it should be, considering how fine a line the razor drew.

  Thoughts of suicide were nothing new to me, but I was not always interested in killing myself when I wanted to hurt myself. The first time I pretended to cut myself, I was about five years old and found a tube of Halloween vampire blood in my brother’s bedroom. I squeezed a line of it across my wrist—how I knew that was the right spot, I have no idea—and ran into the kitchen, clutching my arm and dragging my leg a little, for effect. My mom was distracted, but when she saw my wrist, she started screaming and rushed me into the bathroom, thrust my wrist into the sink, and began running cold water over it. Concerned by how upset she seemed, I told her, Mom, it’s not real. It’s fake. She fairly exploded because I had fooled her in such a way, and that began a new favorite pastime for me that lasted through my teen years, though I never went quite that far with it again.

  As a fourteen-year-old, when I was thinking about death, I was seriously contemplating the repercussions of various approaches. My favorite fantasy was one in which I would somehow procure a handgun, bring it to school, and make a small speech before shooting myself in front of my geometry class. Some very publicized school shootings occurred around that time, and it was the first time I saw the video for Pearl Jam’s Jeremy, in which a young boy does much the same as I imagined doing. But whenever I asked myself whether I wanted vengeance, I quickly realized that I did not wish my classmates any harm, other than to know my pain for one moment.

  By that point, I was overwhelmed by their ridicule, which had gone on for more than five years. It was hardly anything by the time I was a freshman in high school, but the looks on their faces said everything to me. I had stopped trying to perform well on the Speech and Drama team—during middle school, I had occasionally won awards, but when I did, the popular guys on the team would ask with disdain, You won something?

  My father took me shopping at a clothing store in eighth grade—he somehow had plenty of money on hand, so he insisted on taking me to a real clothing store and told me to get whatever I wanted. I was so excited to have a silk shirt before they went out of style, and I wore it to one of the Speech and Drama competitions. When we were getting on the bus, one of the kids asked me where I got it, and I think they complimented me on it. For some reason—whether they asked or I volunteered the information, I don’t remember—I told them how much it cost. Soon after, someone else told me it was a nice shirt and asked how much it cost. Then another, and another, and another.

  I realized they were mocking me, and I finally wished that I wasn’t wearing my new silk shirt and that I had never gotten it at all. I was afraid to wear it to school after that, thinking they might pour their derision on me without mercy, but it was the most expensive thing I had ever owned, and I felt obligated to wear it, although I assumed my father had probably stolen the money or sold drugs to get it.

  I had sat with some of the popular girls in one class in eighth grade, but another kid brought me down a peg when I joined the other girls in making fun of him. You’re just their errand monkey, he said with contempt. He was right—when everyone finished their papers, I would take them to the teacher’s desk at the front of
the room, happy to be so visibly part of their group, pushing away the nagging thought that I, in fact, did not belong.

  I just wanted to tell them what my life at home had been like that whole time. Distraught over the nasty words and looks they seemed to take such pleasure in, I did not know how to stand up for myself. I could not understand what I had done to deserve it, but most of the time, I believed it was my fault—after all, I did not look like them, I did not own the things they owned. I realized I did not know how it felt to be them. In my isolation, I wanted them to have to listen to me, and I wanted them to wonder how it felt to be me, trying to bear their cruelty while I was trying so hard to survive my home, to endure being in my body.

  But I said nothing, did nothing.

  When I look back on those years, I try to make sense of how I kept going. All the things that had felt possibly safe and good were suddenly gone—church, my mother, my stepmother. The scraps of approval and affection were no longer, and I was further away from everything, and everyone, than I had ever been before.

  CHAPTER 14

  Happy Now

  The summer after my freshman year, I ended up going to a movie with an older boy from school. Shawn flirted with me a lot wherever I had run into him—at the city pool, perhaps, but he was a rougher sort and not the kind of teenage boy who spent his time by the pool. Since Mom worked for the city, we got discounted passes. Shawn was the type who started smoking cigarettes when he was fourteen or fifteen, and he went on to join a motorcycle gang, though what that meant in our little town, I was never sure.

  Shawn told me to meet him at a movie, and I was excited to go on my first date—it seemed like this was what normal people did. I didn’t have to wonder for long whether he would make a move—he spent most of the time kissing me too hard, to the point where my lips were bruised a light purple the next day. He also put his hand down the front of my pants and into my vagina. A few minutes after that, he pulled his hand out and looked at it in the light of the movie, then laughed a little and wiped it on my jeans. I saw later that it was blood he wiped on me, and he left my breasts sore from squeezing them so hard. I was just happy that someone finally liked me, and it didn’t occur to me it was a problem that nothing he did felt good. I was excited afterward at the thought he was interested in me, but he didn’t call me or otherwise show any inclination toward seeing me again. We may have talked again at some point, but I had no idea what to expect and so expected nothing.