by Eve Ensler
Then, after your speech, something happened that I will never forget. I have rehashed it here in limbo a million times over. I was anxious and disturbed, so I walked outside after your speech to have a smoke. It was a sweltering day in May. The air was thick. You walked out at the exact same moment. I lit your Lucky Strike. I lit mine. Your hands were still shaking. We stood there in silence, just the two of us, as the ceremony was still going on. It was as if the world had conspired to join us in this suspended moment. A perfect moment for me to praise you, to recognize your stunning achievement. And I knew, I truly knew you had in many ways done this for me, to get my approval and recognition. To show me that you had measured up, that in fact you were not lazy and stupid. And if I could take that moment back right now, I would. For I know my behavior was ruinous.
I stood there, stoic, cold, looking away, utterly indifferent and silent as if nothing had just happened, as if I might even have missed it.
And I could feel you then, Eve. It would be a lie to say I didn’t. I knew what you needed from me and I knew even then it would make all the difference for you in that glorious moment and in the years that came after. It would be a turning point when you were finally able to step into yourself, take charge of your destiny.
It was hinged simply on my humble willingness to acknowledge and celebrate you.
But I could not, would not give you that. I would not help you on your way. I needed to keep my claws in you. I needed to dominate and punish. So I said absolutely nothing. Nothing. Not one word. The silence was staggering. I had already cut off one main avenue for your future by refusing to give you a penny for graduate school. There and then I negated your speaking performance by withholding my approval. But the denouement was diabolical. As we stood there in that sinking sauna of punishing muteness, I slowly reached into my pocket. I handed you an envelope with a check inside. A thousand dollars. I handed it to you, shook your hand as if you were some corporate client and this were the completion of a business deal. I looked you blankly in the eye and without a trace of affection or care, I said, “Have a good life, Eve.” End of story. My obligations were fulfilled. You want to be a big shot on the stage, well, now you’re on your own. It was a gut punch to your future. Your knees buckled. You held back the tears. You turned without saying a word and walked away. To be honest, you never looked back. Rather than end the war, I dropped a close-range missile and leveled you.
You got very drunk that night. You were a mess and a public embarrassment. Your mother said that on a day you should have been dancing on clouds, you cried yourself to sleep. This moment would forever shatter your confidence. Every victory thereafter would be glazed with rejection. No accomplishment would ever be real or enough, every achievement forever fraught with a dreaded sense of betrayal and disappointment. I know, because I launched that bomb with that particular target and intention. I did that, Eve. I wanted you to fail. I wanted you to fall. I did not want you to succeed at anything.
Your mother could not understand this. Why, she would ask, would you spend all that money on Eve’s college education and then undermine her consistently? It made no sense. But there was a fiendish logic. The more independent you became, the more successful, the less control I had of you. You would become your own person then, with your own ideas and your particular version of reality. The more reliable and respected you became, the more possibility there was that you would be a trustworthy witness.
I knew by then that those nightmarish invasions in the dark had ravaged and destroyed you, and I knew you were defiant and rebellious. It was only a matter of time before you would get even. Or this is how my paranoid brain imagined it. I needed to disable you.
Who was I punishing, Eve, who was I trying to destroy?
All along, I made you feel like you were the one who had done something terribly wrong. Always anxious, in an ongoing state of unnamable guilt and dread, I made you the carrier of your father’s sin. You carried it like a warrior. You carried it like a wound. You carried it like a mutated cell that later became illness. You carried it like a scarlet letter imprinted on your defiled body, like a sign that you were disposable and forgotten. You carried it like an invitation to waiting predators to inflict more harm. You carried it like an omen that you would not live to be thirty. You almost drank yourself to death, putting yourself in constant danger, secretly dreaming that someone would take you out, stop the pain, undo the curse. And I watched and let it happen.
After college, there was no structure there to support you. You fell from those heady heights. You weren’t giving speeches anymore. You lost your voice, your purpose, and your way. I never stepped in to help you and I prohibited your mother from doing so. We visited you once in a sorrowful apartment in New York and the only positive thing I noted was it didn’t have rats. When your mother implored me to give you a hand, I railed at her and said you had to make it on your own. I insisted that that was the only way children find their way in the world.
In your deepest economic distress, I never offered you a penny. When you would call at four in the morning in a drunken, suicidal state, I forced your mother to hang up and would not allow her to call to see if you were alive the next day. And for a while you disappeared into the city, swallowed in descending nights of debauchery, danger, and despair. We heard rumors that you were waitressing at a Mafia joint, always drunk, lost on the streets, never awake before one in the afternoon. I was told you were dating a hit man.
Was I hoping you would simply disappear or die? I certainly behaved that way. I hear you crying out—What kind of father could have allowed his daughter to descend to this? What kind of wrath, of rage, could carry on so long? There must be more to this story. What were you getting out of this?
Here’s the horrid truth, Eve. It gave me pleasure to watch you grovel without money, respect, or a future. It amused me to see you fall from such willful heights chasing an impractical and grandiose future you had independently designed. What business did you have imagining you could be a writer or an artist when I had spent my best years as a high-end ice cream salesman to pay your bills? No Torah, no Plato, nothing to show for my dreams.
And this, I am afraid, opens a much more disturbing can of worms. I had become a person who derived pleasure from your suffering. Prince Charming had devolved into the Marquis de Sade.
As you fell, Eve, I could feel better about myself. You were no longer a threat to my ego or worth. You had betrayed and disobeyed me. You had cast me off and I soaked in satisfaction as the world, in concert with my assessment, dished out your punishment.
I reveled in knowing that you were nothing without me or my endorsement. I took deepest pleasure in proving you could no longer touch my heart. For what is sadism but tenderness disgraced?
And wasn’t this my emotional legacy to you—the desecration of your trust, the perversion of your central instinct to be kind? The transmission of this sadistic pleasure and these cruel impulses into the very makeup of your nature? I have often asked myself why you never had children. Did you fear these same urges in you? A teasing that goes on too long, an inner relief when they fall or fail, a sudden inexplicable smack or push, a child accidentally falling down the stairs.
After years, you finally came to visit, and you were newly sober. You were bloated, anxious, and extremely fragile. You had found a “community” and they were helping you. You spoke in absurd clichés and platitudes and spouted rubbish of a “higher power.” We were a nonreligious family and I found this departure particularly disturbing. I loathed cults and crutches. I despised groups of any kind. But I could sense a new resolve in you. You had found a raft and were holding on for dear life.
And instead of celebrating this new determination, I made fun of your sobriety, refused to believe or acknowledge you were an alcoholic, disparaged these pathetic losers you were now calling friends. And then, to evidence my condescension and disapproval, I mixed a martini and handed it to you. You were clearly shocked but quietly refused. I laug
hed at you and tempted you further, and when you held your ground, I said how sad it was that your life, at such a young age, had come to this.
But something had changed in you. You didn’t react or even try to defend yourself. You sipped a Tab and kept smoking and smoking. This rattled and provoked me further. You were suddenly out of my grasp. You weren’t taking the bait. You were with a group now with greater influence and they had clearly armed you with tactics to resist me. I was furious. I asked you what you were doing with your life. I drilled you and drilled you. I told you I had spent a fortune on your college education and you had succeeded at nothing. You were a waitress with no vision or plan. What a failure you had become. You did not say a word. You said you needed to make a call and left the room. When you returned, your bag was packed. You said that this environment had become threatening to your sobriety, that that was your priority, and then you were gone. It all happened so fast. You cut the cord that was choking you and walked out the door. And that severing sent me spinning. I was flabbergasted and insane. Who were you to walk out of my house, to claim a priority and way of life outside my purview? Who were you to take your life into your own hands? I know this sounds utterly bizarre in retrospect, but even in the midst of this endless time of wrath, you somehow still belonged to me; as long as you were disabled and drunk, I would own you. As long as you were a mess, you would need my approval and validation.
I grow sick of these horrific confessions and myself. Rattling and oinking on and on. Stuck like an unctuous pig spinning on a torturous spit of gangrenous self-centeredness. God, let me out of me. Break this impossible shell. Free me from this netherworld of endless mirrors. Have I even come close to touching the layer of veracity and admission that would free you? For it seems to me that an apology insists on a most primal intimacy. And if the confession is a request for forgiveness, the confessor must be stripped and laid bare.
I see now that this exercise is not simply a relaying of regrets. No, implicit in an apology is a reimagining of the basic constructs of our conditioning. And I sense I am failing. Even now, I wonder if the walls of my imperiousness allow me to truly see or feel you. Have I even stopped to consider or intuit what kind of ruptures and suffering these brutal acknowledgments are causing in you? Are you relieved, or shocked? Are you enraged? Are you sleepless and bereft? Are you finally vindicated and on fire?
And how would I know this? Do you even exist beyond the gates of myself? Are you a figment, a projection, an extension? Are you a target or a threat or a perennial resentment? My God, Eve, I am ashamed to say I do not know you. Well, I know you fancied marinated mushrooms and herring and dill pickles, but only because I fancied them. But I have no idea what books you read, what poems were your guides through life. Did you read Nietzsche, Emerson, Baudelaire? What kind of friends were you drawn to? What was a life in the theater like? Did you ever perform? Were you really a lesbian? Did you ever develop an appetite? Are you an ocean person, or do you prefer the woods and mountains? Why did you really become a vegetarian? What was the bravest thing you ever did? Are you funny? Did you move to the city because of me? Should I have brought you up as a Jew? Are you a morning person? Do you prefer roses to peonies? Did you have cats? Do you pray or believe in God? Do you drink coffee or tea? How did it work out with your adopted son? Did you ever make money?
Who are you, Eve? I missed everything. I missed you.
I miss you.
I refused to know or see you. And this in some ways was the most destructive and punishing deprivation. Isn’t that all any us crave, really? To be known? To be given shape and form by being recognized and cherished? For how else can we trust that we are even here? And perhaps that is why I became so extreme. Because I was invisible to myself, because I had been erased, I needed to find ways to experience my existence and feel my impact on others. For what is violence but energy given substance and force?
And I knew that from a very young age you were troubled deeply by this same kind of existential angst. I was surprised and a bit disturbed this had come to occupy you so early, but now of course it makes much sense. You were constantly obsessing about death, asking questions about what your body would become, where you would go, would you completely just evaporate one day, disintegrate and disappear?
One night when you were about nine or ten years old, your mother and I had been out for dinner and we came home to find the babysitter sitting outside the bathroom on the floor. She was a teenager and was clearly disturbed. You had watched a movie called The Invisible Man with Claude Rains which was way too mature for your years. You were inside, your head over the toilet, vomiting and crying, in a kind of spiritual despair, trying to catch your breath, hardly making sense: “He unwrapped the bandages around his head, Daddy, and nothing was there, there was nothing inside, no head, no person, nothing there. Where did he go? Was he ever here? Is there anything really inside our bodies? Do we even exist? Are we nothing? I feel like nothing, I don’t want to be nothing.” And then you would cry and vomit more. This went on for two days, as if you were consumed by an existential fever.
And now I am compelled to ask, who made you nothing? I have no excuses, as I knew too well the devastating consequences of not being seen, of disappearing in a family that never expressed any curiosity about who I really was, but determined my identity based on their own projections, fears, and needs. Curiosity is a form of generosity. Implicit in it is the recognition of another, requiring the puncturing of the vain inglorious shell of self-importance. Did anyone ever really exist but me? Did I experience or feel or perceive anyone outside myself? Did I know wonder?
As a child I was awed by sky and stars and the magnificence of creation. But all that was quickly discouraged and directed into performance. There was no time to linger in idle meditation. I was here like other boys to improve myself, to achieve, advance, and win. This world of mystery and wonder was not to be appreciated and revered. It was to be occupied, owned, and conquered.
Implicit in wonder is humility. To surrender to what is larger and unknown, to that vast, mysterious universe of which you are a tiny dot. I was not allowed to be a tiny part of anything. I had to be above, the best, on top.
I remember I must have been about five years old when I experienced a baby sparrow in my hand (it had fallen from a tree), felt its tiny heart beating in my five-year-old fist. My heart was beating just as fast. Who made this bird? Who thought up wings and beaks and claws? Did he get in trouble with his mother? Did she throw him on the ground? Was it an accident? Is he sad? Is he broken? Why can’t he fly? Will he teach me how?
I was stunned, terrified, in awe. It was almost unbearable having him so intimately there in my hand, but I could not, would not let go. I was in possession of a miracle. I had the secret to the universe wrapped in my knuckle. All time stopped. I was bird. I was rapture taken in the invisible current of awe. I was everything and all.
And then I was suddenly and rudely awakened, my mother screaming in fright. “What are you doing, Arthur? Get that dirty bird out of your hand. They carry terrible diseases. You are disgusting.” She shook me hard and knocked the bird out of my hand. He went tumbling and landed badly on the ground. He didn’t move after that and I was not allowed to help or go near him.
It was more than I could bear, and I burst out crying. I cried and cried, and this was the greatest lapse of all. To cry and show weakness. This was worse than being lost in awe and surrender to a baby bird.
And what, you ask, is a life without wonder? It is drab and dreary. It is one of imposed certainty and compulsory routine. It is devoid of splendor and excitement with a bolted doorway to astonishment.
So what, then, becomes of men’s passion and intensity? It is rerouted early on into dominance, aggression, and competition.
Which leads me to the contempt and cruelty I lodged at your first husband. Suddenly, after years of not visiting, you brought home a man whom you were planning to marry. A thick Irish Catholic fellow who could hardly spel
l. A bartender you met in some classless joint where you waitressed. A scoundrel at best. Maybe an embezzler or a thief. (Well, there was no evidence of that, but I treated him as such.)
Your mother said he was handsome and charming, but to me your choice felt as arbitrary as bringing home a stray dog you had found on the street. There was no conversation to be had with him. But did I try? I did not. His sudden existence was a most annoying intrusion. It was clear the only reason you were marrying him was to get back at me. He was everything I was not. Uneducated, rough, uncouth, and sober. Yet even though I detested this lout, I immediately set forth to make him my ally. At dinner, I told him you appeared to be one thing but you were really another. I thought it was best he be prepared and know what he was getting himself into. I acted as a man protector even though I had no interest in him at all. Then I gleefully regaled him with intimate details of your willful transgressions. I told him the terrible things you had done as a child and teenager; implicit in each was your questionable character. I complained that you were the most impossible child and had provoked me to behavior contrary to my nature.
I embraced him as a brother soldier in my army to defeat you. Even your mother was horrified by this. You were caught off guard, humiliated and furious. I was planting seeds of doubt in the man you were marrying—showcasing your lowly disposition and outlining your failures. This went on for almost an hour. At first you kept laughing, trying to deflect what I was saying and to move the conversation in another direction. But I would not be deterred. I went on and on with a vengeance until I delivered the final blow. I told him I had had to wash my hands of you, and I would understand, after hearing all this, if he needed to back out too.
But the wedding somehow went on.