by Eve Ensler
You will not go back to school. You will not be a cheerleader. We are sending you to reform school and you will sleep in the basement from now on with the dog. I drag you down the stairs and push you into the cellar. In the morning you are gone. You don’t come back for weeks. I won’t allow your mother to call and find you. We don’t call school. We never ask around.
One day you suddenly appear. I’ve instructed the family to act as if you’ve died. No one is allowed to acknowledge or speak to you or they will be punished. You are driven mad. You leave again.
• •
I am reeling now imagining the tsunami of fright you were pushing back in your little body and being since you were five. How this daily and extraordinary exertion taxed and tore your muscles and blew out the fragilely webbed fibers of your nervous system. Your violent death was ever present. And each murderous episode escalated the stakes and the brutality.
I imagine it was all you could possibly think about. When would I strike again, how would you protect yourself? Would you die? You lived in constant anxiety and dread, and these emotions eventually became the neurotic ingredients of your character. (I am sure it’s why you later drank and did drugs, trying to soothe yourself.) This high-level stress made it impossible for you to think or study or play or dream or learn or concentrate or remember anything. You could not relax. You did not sleep.
Then there were the ongoing, more methodical terror punishments. I needed to find ways to constantly keep you on the hook. These involved bizarre and creative castigations, concoctions of humiliation, brutality, and pain. One particularly stands out. I will call it the Ping-Pong Paddle Sessions. I have my secretary, Annette, type up an accounting each week on my office stationery. From the Desk of Arthur S. Ensler. A list of each bad thing you have done, each lie, each transgression. I gather details from many sources and undercover scouts in the family. Each week I call you into my bedroom. I make you read the list out loud. Then I ask you to count the number of your wrongdoings. Sometimes it’s six. Sometimes it’s ten. It’s never fewer than four. I ask you if you have anything to say to me. You mumble, “I’m sorry.” “I can’t hear you, Eve, do not mumble.” And then you say too loudly. “I’m sorry.” Then I ask you one more time, and finally you say it sincerely, obediently, and politely, “I am sorry, Daddy.” I say. “Better.” “Now go and get the Ping-Pong paddle.” You know where it is kept and you know its purpose. For each item on the list you will get a hardy whack.
I tell you take down your jeans and underwear. You do this hesitantly. “Speed it up. I don’t have all day.” I tell you lie facedown over the bed. You know the drill. You lay there, your bare and tender rear end exposed so vulnerably on my bed. You are sixteen. You are already a woman. I can see your hands already clutching the bed covers. The Ping-Pong paddle has a ridged green rubber covering and when I smack it hard enough it leaves indentations. This is my goal. Tattoo the design of punishment so you will not forget. The first paddle you are brave but after two you try to protect yourself with your hands. I tell you move your hands away. You begin to cry. “Please, Daddy. Stop. I didn’t mean it. Please, it hurts. I’ll do better next time.” “Move your hands. Don’t you cry.” I smack. I whack. I smack. I whack until I’m done. When it’s over you stand and pull up your underwear and pants. Your body is trembling. You are crying. I can see it isn’t easy for you to walk. You limp out. This goes on week after week. This is our ritual. You pull down your underwear, bend over the bed. I lift my paddle.
Then one day your attitude has changed. You come and read the list with energy. You do not pause but say with almost hypersincerity, “I am sorry, Daddy.” You go right away and get the paddle. You confidently take down your pants and underwear. You do not clutch the bed covers. You do not scream or beg or cry. I smack you seven times. When it’s over you stand up. You pull up your pants and underwear. You look me in the eye and smile the broadest smile. “Thank you, Daddy. That felt so good. I loved it. I look forward to doing it again.” And you all but skip out of the room. You won, Eve. The Ping-Pong Paddle Sessions stopped right there and then. You won this battle, but at what cost? Who and what had you become? What new entity had my malevolence constructed?
Where did your rage and hurt and suffering go? You seemed to bury them under this new hardened and numb persona. But unlike Shadow Man, who would exact revenge and wrath upon the world, you would eventually turn it entirely on yourself. This once highly penetrable, feeling creature could no longer be accessed or found. You could not be touched. Your windows shut. It began that night when Shadow Man found you in your room appearing dead, but now it consumed your personality.
And you easily could have become a very dangerous person. Perhaps it was the magnitude of your heart or simply being a powerless girl, but instead this began the years when you consciously or not set out to destroy yourself. I no longer had to lift a hand or raise my voice. You were more violent to yourself than my worst imaginings. And here it can only be said, with deepest despair, that I had, through my brutality, turned this angel tender girl who cherished life into a madly suicidal teenager. I watched with horror, disgust, and remorse as you went on a reckless rampage. It lasted years. You smoked and drank incessantly. You were stoned or high throughout most of your days at school. I believe you were stealing. You hung out with nefarious characters, drug addicts, dealers, and criminals. You were having sex with these miscreants who were often three times your age. It was only a matter of time before you got pregnant.
You became a wild hippie. You stopped wearing a bra, grew armpit hair, and looked a disgrace. Everything you did was a slap in my face. And I knew violence was no longer a deterrent. Even when I grounded you and refused to let you out of the house, you would defy me by sneaking out in the middle of the night. You were reckless in the car. You were willing yourself to crash, to be caught, to be arrested, to be obliterated. Your grades and performance in school were assuring you would not go to college or have any future. You stopped eating and were frighteningly thin. You were hyper and you never stopped moving your leg. You were intolerant and disagreeable. There was nothing that could pull you back in.
At eighteen you were in a madly spinning downward spiral, on your way to some irreversible tragedy or possibly death. I blamed this on your willfulness and badness. I blamed and shamed and hurt you more. I never for one moment tried to prevent you from falling.
What is this gnawing, burning sensation in my chest? Oh Eve, oh Eve, is this your heart inside me? Am I feeling what you were feeling then? This is too much. Oh anxiety, oh loneliness, oh despair. Despair.
The sinking impossibility of a life, the hatred of yourself, the suffocating rage at me, at your mother, at your family, at the heartless world that brought you here. Paralyzing dread. No place to turn to. No one understands. Claustrophobic cage of hopelessness closing in. Let me out. Let me out of here, out of here. How did you breathe, Eve? How did you survive?
What is happening? The vapid nothingness of limbo suddenly growing dim, growing dark. A falling night. But not night so much—more like a ruinous pit. I must be tumbling into hell. Demonic cave-blackened wound. Contractions of shame cut through me. Dying a thousand deaths but no death lets me die. Shock inside shock, burning concatenation of carnage and deceit. Each death links me to a history of deaths—those that are mine and not my own. Faces of cruelty unmasked. My God, this is my lineage. This is the poisoned soil from which I grew. My father, Hyman, is here and his father and his and on and on. Fathers who wreaked their merciless havoc on the world.
A chain of generals, conquerors, CEOs, con men, tyrants, thieves, exploiters of every kind and fools. They die and die here again for all eternity. These are my fathers. These are the men. Allegiance our highest calling. Obedience outweighs logic, morality, or sense. They have called me here. Urging me to cut this foolishness with you and retake my place in the righteous male hierarchy. How wholly absurd. To be zapped over and over like a programmed machine for eternity in order to prove my strength and
worth.
I ask you, Eve, what then is the alternative? What is a man cast out of the kingdom of men? Perhaps you cannot understand this loyalty. It’s what gives us purpose and meaning and place. What land will we walk on after exile? Adam disobeyed once and we know what that delivered us.
I could stop here. My confessions have already improved my karmic disposition. This dark hell realm is certainly more bearable than the previous limbo. At least there is the sensation of ongoing pain and the motion of repeated dying. And unlike limbo, I am not alone here in this dark room of the fathers.
And I am sure, Eve, this is what I deserve.
But I am conflating the exercise. You bade me here to make an apology. I promised to make the most thorough accounting I could. I did not say I would stop if I landed in a more bearable position. I am doing what I did while I was alive. Bargaining, manipulating, holding my own interests above all else. Habits die slow.
This apology is a much more grueling and impugning task than I had imagined. The closer one gets to it, the further away it becomes. Each admission begs a deeper accounting; each reckoning has another embedded inside it. It is most certainly a Pandora’s box, but these are wrongs already unleashed upon the world. They hang there unaccounted for like ominous and poisonous clouds in the collective psyche. It becomes more and more evident that the story that isn’t visible, told, or owned is the one that holds the most power.
Each admission here defies a blood vow determined long before my birth. An apologist is a traitor of the highest order. How many men, how many fathers ever admit to failures or offenses? The act itself is a betrayal of the basic code. It sprays shrapnel of guilt in all directions. If one of us is wrong, the whole structure and story come tumbling down. Our silence is our bond. The power of not telling, of not letting on, is the most ancient and powerful weapon in our arsenal. But there are other techniques that are offered in our basic training manual. Techniques that are in some ways more effective and long-lasting than any physical damage.
Techniques that I used to cause you to doubt your experience, your perceptions, and your worth. How many times did I convince you, in the act of greatest cruelty and violation, that what you were experiencing wasn’t that bad, that your reactions were exaggerated and extreme? How many times did I insist that what you were experiencing as pain wasn’t pain at all? How many times did I blame you for what I was doing? Or tell you I loved you so much that I was throwing you against a wall? Doing this for your own good. How many ways did I intentionally confuse you and wear you down? How many cases did I build against you and how many witnesses and allies did I rally to my cause?
Daily gaslighting. Until the bitter end, I left you with those lingering doubts, which would wake you, breathless in the night. Had you imagined everything? Was it really as terrible as you remembered? Why didn’t the others seem disturbed? Why didn’t they say anything? Was something wrong with you? Why not just move on? Why call attention to yourself? Why make a big deal? It’s just the way things were. Why rattle the cage, upset the nest? He was your father. He did the best he could. This was your family. You were always so difficult. Why can’t you just fit in? Always have to be so grandiose. So special. So, he shoved his grown-up fingers in you when you were five? So, he asked your mother to get a knife from the kitchen so he could stab you? So, he made you bleed and choke? So, he threw you down the stairs? You survived. There are far worse things. Get on with it.
I know all this because these are the questions and self-doubts which consumed me. I bequeathed them to you. These are the incertitudes that kept me wanting, in compliance and in step with the fathers’ army.
But even at a young age, you broke rank and would not march. In spite of your brokenness, confusion, and doubt, you somehow questioned and fought back. And I see now, it wasn’t initially just rage I felt at your defiance. No, it was awe. It was astonishment. How could you, a ten-year-old girl, be brazen enough to challenge the givens? How could you, a mere child, stand alone outside the circle? What spirit lived in you, what grit, what valor? But admiration was something I could not abide in my limited lexicon of emotions and it quickly turned to resentment and jealousy. Yes, Eve, I was jealous of you. I begrudged your audacity. I could not tolerate the inviolable force of rebelliousness, which made you separate and superior. It showcased all the ways I had betrayed myself by aligning with power. It made my weak and willing acquiescence and submission irredeemably apparent.
But more humiliating, you had dared to openly contradict your father. You had asserted yourself as if you were an equal. You had brazenly challenged my supremacy. You, ungrateful brat, had dared to think you might know better. And you had weakened my authority in the presence of my own kingdom, which was my family. You had wronged me, Eve. And there would be no forgiveness.
This sparked the inexorable winds of wrath and until the day I died and even hereafter they have driven and possessed me.
A wrath spurred by pride and grandiosity. A wrath at myself for betraying my conscience. Wrath at the morbid boredom of domestic life, at annoying children who never measured up, at becoming a corporate idiot and machine. A wrath spurred by the repression of a sickening guilt that I had touched you indecently when you were five and the terror of being found out.
A wrath at all the pathetic people in the world who wasted my time and did nothing more than occupy space.
A wrath that tore down buildings and dreams and personalities, blindly and willfully devastating everything in its tracks. Wrath negated my wisdom and intelligence. It sullied my charm. I was no longer a man. I was a storm.
“All nations shall say, Why has the Lord done thus to this land? What does the heat of this great anger mean? Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt; For they went and served other gods, and worshipped them, gods whom they knew not, something that was not their portion. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land, to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book; And the Lord rooted them out of their land in anger and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day.”
I cursed you, Eve, and cast you from my land. I undermined and ignored you. I belittled your ambitions and erased your possibilities. And there was nothing, nothing you could do to win me back.
No plea of your mother’s touched my heart. It didn’t matter how far you fell, how close to ruin or poverty or death. It didn’t matter how much you craved my acknowledgment and support. I invalidated you on every count. And to this day, I don’t know how you did it, but after one year at some third-rate women’s college, you turned your academic life around and were able to transfer to a prestigious school. Perhaps it was finally being away from me. Perhaps it was the raging impetus to prove me wrong.
When you came home on a break, you were filled with a new brashness and fire. You were discovering your interests and your talents. You declared at dinner you were going to be an artist, a writer. You were not going to take sciences or math, as I had strongly advised you. You were going to study philosophy and literature. Your arrogance and sureness enraged me. (I see now, again, it was jealousy.) Who were you at nineteen to think you had any idea what you wanted or what you needed to study? I asked you how you thought you would make a living writing “poems.” You said you would figure it out. I said you would take classes to prepare you to be a lawyer or an accountant. You said you wouldn’t. I said if I am paying for it, you will take classes that prepare you for a realistic future. “No, I will not take those classes. I am getting straight A’s now. I will get a scholarship. You can keep your money.”
Boom! I pulled the chair out from underneath you and lifted it to crash it on your head. And to my shock, you lunged at me, pushed me back until I almost fell. You lifted your fists. “You don’t have to support my classes or my dreams, but if you ever touch me again, I will leave this house forever. I promise
you.” My God, you were willing to die for this? Raise your fists and strike at me? I was staggered and impressed. You had become a viable adversary. I knew then I had to develop more effective and ruthless strategies to delegitimize this fantasy and bring you down. Battle on.
You were accepted early into the top graduate drama school in the country, one out of six places in the class. You came home on a rare visit to share your excitement and enlist my support. You made your case. You would be graduating from college in a few months. You were clear you wanted to go into the theater. This graduate program would provide the best training and offer a network upon graduating. It was a huge deal that you had been accepted. And again, the hyperbole: “Daddy, it is everything!” And looking back, Eve, it probably was.
“I told you years ago, if you wanted to go this route you would go it on your own.” “But I can’t get a scholarship if you have money.” “That’s your problem, Eve. You made your choice. It’s up to you to figure it out.” Right there I thwarted your foolish dream. Or at least that’s what I hoped and thought. At your college graduation you were somehow the keynote speaker. As we sat down in a crowd of thousands, I heard people behind us whispering, “I hear there is this radical feminist addressing us.” I suddenly realized they were talking about you, my daughter, and in that moment, you were suddenly a stranger. I did not know you. You had gone away from me to school; you had distinguished yourself and made a life. And as much as I wanted to be proud, I could not bear that you dared to be separate. Who were you to go off and chart a path, determine your own existence? Who were you to think your words and opinions were significant enough to hold the attention of this hall? And more worrying, if they would listen to you, wouldn’t others? I sat through your speech, but to be honest I did not hear a word you were saying. There you were at twenty-two standing in front of thousands, filled with charisma and strength. The audience was enraptured. You received a standing ovation. And I am utterly revolted to confess that it infuriated me and threw me off balance. I was the one meant to hold center stage. I was the one entitled to command such admiration and authority.