The wall behind the television was covered in mirrors. Each square of mirror glass was splattered with gold designs that I sometimes saw faces in. “Groovy mirrors,” he remarked sarcastically. He ran a streaming commentary the entire time, but I only heard certain parts. I was nervous, expectant. I could tell he was trying to get a feel for the place, the people who populated it, who raised me. He was scanning the mirrors, the dark carpet, the enormous couches in a way that felt different than last time, like he was absorbing something I couldn’t see. I inserted remarks into his commentary and we played off each other. I loved hearing him laugh. We were making silly conversation and I relished it, unsure what could happen next.
When he moved closer to me my skin felt as though it was opening up to drink in the air. He had already squeezed my ass, ran a hand down my torso and along my hip, somewhere between my bedroom and the return to the living room. It happened so fast, he even retracted his hand quickly, like he had burned himself, but recovered to act cool about it. I knew this was difficult. I tried to disown my own nervousness. I inched closer to him to let him know that his touch was okay with me, that in fact, it was what I wanted.
Chatting nervously, I jumped off the couch to check the kitchen clock. “It’s three,” I announced. “My mom will be home around four, but she usually stops at the market.”
“I see,” he said, and moved closer still, and suddenly, before I could think about what was happening, I was pressed against the sofa, and he was on the floor on his knees in front of me, swiftly pulling my scratchy wool shorts down my hips. Even at this moment, between him nuzzling the arch of my foot as it rode the air, running his lips over my calves, he was giving me a running commentary.
I heard that he wanted me so much, that he could hardly wait until school was over so he could get my clothes off and see what he’d been missing. I heard that I was sexy, soooo intense-looking, and that my panties were hot, and maybe I needed some help getting out of them. I was ecstatically pliant, pointing my toes, flexing my calf muscles, arranging my legs just so as he took me by surprise, his five o’clock shadow brushing my thighs, his hands alternately holding my one leg splayed out and the other pushing my panties to one side.
My head was thrown back, pressing into the soft flesh of the couch. I had never done any such thing on this couch—I have never done any such thing, I thought to myself. He was licking, murmuring, and I was responding, like a conversation, sigh with sigh, grunt with squeal, his tongue lapping and murmurs of what I hoped was satisfaction. Then his face was in front of me and he was undoing his belt. He looked like he was in a trance. I became witness to his penis, my teacher’s you-know-what! and he positioned me and I heard him say, “I just want to feel the outside of you, just a little, just…”
Fuck. My God. It was happening.
“Okay, yes,” he said, and entered me.
Two minutes. Three. He pressed against me, and then, when my eyes were closed and my teeth found my bottom lip and I thought I could guess the rhythm that was developing, he was gone, out.
I dropped my legs down and situated my panties as he lay his head down on the couch. I pretended this was all very normal. He breathed hard, and I heard his refrain between breaths.
Oh god oh god oh god.
He looked up at me when I finished zipping up my shorts.
“I think I need some industrial-strength paper towels,” he said in a daze, and we laughed, the sound of my own tinkling out of me.
I checked the clock again. He had to go.
He gave me a platonic kiss on the mouth. Hungry, tired, and unsteady, I tried to pull him back for something more substantial, but he chuckled slyly at me and pulled away, as if I had asked for cookies and didn’t have any money. I let him go, waved at him as he left through the screen door which I locked behind him. He pulled away in his old green Porsche, one wave, then his eyes were on the road. I briefly glanced at the picture window of the house across the street. The small lamp was on above the easel forever stationed in that window, but there was no one there. I unlocked the screen, and shut the door. Bolted it.
I ran to my room and checked the digital clock. I counted on my fingers the time difference in Germany. I wanted to call Abigail, who was there for the summer, and tell her I had caught up with her. I was the third now among my friends. I stopped in the middle of my room and checked my panties for blood. I was not a virgin anymore.
Before I could make the international call, the phone rang and I ran to the kitchen extension. Maybe it was my mom, telling me she was too tired to go to the store or make dinner, and would I like Kentucky Fried Chicken? I stubbed out the cigarette I was carrying into the kitchen ashtray and waved one arm to spread the smoke around in the air as I picked up the phone.
“It’s me,” Jeff shouted. There was a steady roar of traffic in the background.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, scared, confused.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. Did I hear disappointment? Regret? Or resignation? I immediately felt like crying, then I steeled myself.
“What? What?” I said. I couldn’t think of what else to say.
“I had to pull over on the fucking freeway. I couldn’t drive. I felt like I was having a heart attack…Not now, though, but I just needed to stop a minute…”
I was silent, waiting, my forehead furrowed, holding my breath.
“I mean, c’mon, I just committed…I just committed the cardinal sin of teaching, Wendy! The worst thing…I just broke the rules, majorly, and I’m a little sick, I feel crazy…” He trailed off.
I tried to picture exactly where he was calling from, why it was so loud, was he really on the freeway? At one of those emergency call boxes? Was that possible?
“Okay,” I said. “It’s fine. Everything’s okay. I had fun!” Suddenly ‘fun’ sounded like something a fourteen-year-old would say and I bit my lip. “What—what exactly is making you feel sick?”
“Okay, okay,” he answered. “You’re not telling a soul, you’re not writing a word of this down anywhere, right?”
“Hell no!” I exclaimed. The “hell” sounded shaky. “No one knows anything. I swear!” Please believe me, I thought. Please don’t let this be the one and only time.
“There’s nothing to worry about, I promise,” I followed up. I listened to him for another two minutes, ranting, raving, until he sounded calmer. He was the teacher I knew again, laughing, witty, making fun of his own overreaction, ready to get back in the Porsche and head to Pasadena.
When we hung up, I glanced at the clock and recalculated the time in Germany.
SUMMER
1987
Puberty in a nutshell: I was regularly high, hormonal and passionately angry. My mother was deep in menopause and recently separated and the infrequent binges I knew from childhood were sorely missed because now she was at full throttle.
My father was becoming a memory who stepped in every once in a while to remind me he was more than a memory.
I awaited nightly the eager-sounding bell on the Princess phone in my bedroom to announce that someone was thinking of me, wanted to hear my voice. If I was sequestered in my room, this could also help avoid an angry collision with my mother, who began her descent into the weekend by six o’clock Friday evening, vodka and orange soda parked next to her, sometimes through Monday.
There was occasional respite from routine. There were Saturdays spent at Venice Beach, when she bought me clothes, colorful patches of peace signs and dancing turtles, translucent stickers and wine coolers, to make up for her being passed out the entire weekend before. I wound my way through stands of colorful clothes, choosing tie-dyes, jeans, Indian print dresses. I was evolving from my cocoon of black and gray clothing, wanting to be clothed in something that shouted my existence and was reminiscent of a more colorful, electric world that I wanted to be a part of.
No one car
ded me when I was with my mother, ever.
After a movie one Friday evening, my mother drove us to the Hidden Door, a bar by our house. She told me she just wanted one beer, and to come in with her. For fun, I ordered a Corona, and we looked at each other and giggled when the bartender served me. Four beers later, I waltzed to the bathroom, swaying over the toilet, and puked a steady stream of beer and popcorn.
The second time we went to a bar, it was The Townhouse on Venice Beach. The jukebox seemed a novelty to me, and again I was allowed to sit at the bar, smoke, drink alongside my mother. When asked by other bar patrons to shoot a game of pool, my mom nodded at me, as if giving permission, and I played a sloppy game. Someone gave me quarters for the jukebox, and I stood over it, concentrating on the block letters before they escaped me, trying to recall the songs I just decided on. The voice of Madonna lilted through the bar; someone told me I looked like her, and I drunkenly saw the resemblance in the shadowy glass frame of a painting on the dingy brown wall. I danced around the bar to “La Isla Bonita,” and no one gave it a second thought. My mother laughed like she enjoyed seeing me happy. Later, I tried to concentrate more on the free feeling I had that afternoon, and less on the feeling that my mother was absolutely batshit bonkers now that we were on our own, without my father to anchor us.
Earlier that day in Venice, I was hanging around one of the “No Nukes” tables on the boardwalk when a guy suddenly said into my ear, “So we’re going to coffee, right?”
I looked up. A complete stranger. I laughed and told him I was with my mom.
“It’s okay,” he said with a smile, and disappeared into the crowded boardwalk. I was suddenly consumed by the innocence of such a flirtation. There was no dirty talk, no intentional brushes against my needy skin. This man, now invisible among the masses, was harmless.
Even as my sandaled feet walked the overcrowded boardwalk, I recognized that I was becoming deeply acquainted with harm, with men in cars that stopped and offered me a ride to wherever I was headed, casually offering wine coolers or pot, if I would do them just one favor.
I shook harm’s hand, swung open the door, and got in.
1995
Many years later, on a wood floor with several other women, I practiced making a fist.
Even before we practiced making fists, there was a routine I was getting accustomed to with every lesson.
We stretched. We rotated our hips. We took deep breaths. And then we talked about intuition. We talked about our worth.
It seems strange, perhaps, but what a compelling subject. One’s worth. Around a bunch of strangers.
What we had in common was that we were women. We were women wanting to learn self-defense. We defined ourselves as feminists and we were processing the notion that in order to defend ourselves we might first have to address our own worth.
This was a radical concept. It was more radical than learning to enter a room and make an escape plan. It was more radical than practicing kicks or jabs or remembering that the eyeballs were an excellent target on an attacker.
I had had glimmers of considering the concept of my own worth, but often my worth had been screwed into an altogether twisted definition that I was presently trying to unravel with a bunch of other women in a room every week.
One woman spoke of sleeping with a knife under her pillow. Another spoke of feeling paralyzed by fear.
I couldn’t relate and I could. I was learning in these rooms and in college classrooms the words for the situations I had endured as a teenager. The words still did not roll off my lips but they were becoming more present to me. I may not have known what it was like to feel like you had to sleep with a knife under your pillow, but some part of me knew that if it made this woman feel safe, it was by all means good and right.
During those teenage years my self-worth was something I felt was small enough to hold. It was my pen, my paper and sometimes, maybe, my ability to attract people to me.
In college I began to see how this was a skewed self-concept. The word boundaries suddenly entered my consciousness and became a constant topic among women I found myself in groups with. Drawing boundaries. Good boundaries. The dreaded bad boundaries. That was something I knew a lot about.
There were the womyn-only spaces and the wimmin-only spaces and the bisexual-only spaces and the women-of-color spaces. I conformed to boundaries drawn. I drew boundaries around as much as I could. I was making up for all the boundaries crossed with and without my consent, my thirteen, fourteen, fifteen-year-old “consent,” not yet knowing I couldn’t totally make up for what was lost.
I listened attentively to discussions about confidence. Assertiveness. I learned the term “self-care.” A part of me scoffed but a much bigger part of me knew these were tools I hadn’t had, tools to carry forward into a much bigger, more satisfying existence.
I learned to use my feet, my core, my fists. I learned to embody what for years would be a mode of resistance before it could transform into something else.
SUMMER
1987
Most Friday nights, I was homebound—my mother’s imposed curfew—and voluntarily holed up in my room, with the occasional foray into the kitchen for snacks: Diet Cokes, popcorn, leftover pizza, chips.
At three in the morning, I turned off the television and closed the blinds. Until sleep caught up to me, the lights were low. The smooth, cream-colored finish of my little-girl bed’s headboard gleamed in the light, its etchings of leaves, vines, and tiny flowers not so apparent in the shadows. The bed was covered hastily in one sheet with the scratchy, knobby mattress peeking through the sides where the sheet didn’t reach. On top of my mattress, where I preferred less and less to sleep, the springs seemed to issue a constant threat of breaking through.
The bright, wheat-y looking yellow fibers of the carpet bent and swayed in traffic patterns. Later, dark spots would appear here and there, black blobs of hair dye saturating the yellow, marking the decision to go black after a round of orangey bleached hair. There was a cigarette burn or two, because if I was going to have a curfew, I was going to smoke in my room. (The carpet, I later learned, caused rug burns, which I modeled shamelessly in photographs at any given time from the ages of fourteen to eighteen. One photograph, circa 1988, shows me at age fifteen, knees bent displaying rug burns, one hand at my mouth securing a joint, the other making a peace sign. My eyes were scrunched close and the smoke practically wafts off the photo paper.)
Covering both sides of my bedroom door: Life in Hell comic strips from the pages of the L.A. Weekly; tattered business cards from Poobah’s and Moby Disc, record stores I liked to plunder; photos ripped from the pages of People magazine of John Belushi, James Dean, Natalie Wood; a shopping bag shouting “Aardvark’s Odd Ark” clothing store; pictures from a Disney coloring book that I colored in with old crayons: the queen from Snow White, the evil fairy from Sleeping Beauty, a Cinderella I transformed into a brunette.
My walls were an homage to the music I listened to faithfully from the time I used my first maxi-pad: Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo, The Police, Siouxsie and the Banshees. Since I started straying into the numbers at the middle of the FM dial, stations that Jeff listened to, lyrics he quoted began appearing on my walls: John Lennon, David Bowie, Jackson Browne. The lyrics, written in marker, framed pictures of Yosemite, culled from a calendar that Jeff gave me when the year was up, the calendar useless.
Books were stacked around my bed according to importance: if they were for school, they were positioned by the phone; if borrowed from friends, they lay next to the bed, with bookmarks stashed between pages. The little-girl dresser, which matched the headboard and two chests of drawers, connected to a desk and three shelves. The various drawers held notebooks, journals, things-to-do lists (which I made every night beginning in fourth grade and kept paper-clipped together), old pens, markers, letters and postcards from Abigail in Germany, green and
white hardcover yearbooks, Chuck E. Cheese tokens, dust bunnies, and later, the beginnings of a hidden pot pipe collection, and the occasional small packet of marijuana.
Under the large oval mirror, which came with the bedroom set, there was another short dresser containing foldable clothes and a top drawer I shared with my mom. Old costume jewelry, bobby pins, watches in need of batteries, terrycloth headbands, old makeup and stray hairs filled the top drawer, housed in a plastic compartmentalized case, in a semblance of order. The dresser top was covered with brushes, combs, the makeup of the moment, tiny pieces of paper, written on and torn from corners of notebook pages, matchbooks and cigarettes or their effluvia: crunchy wrapper, foil paper, errant strands of tobacco.
The two top shelves of the largest dresser housed old, cobwebby stuffed animals that my grandmother called “plush toys,” the “plush” always more heavily accented. I could always look up to the highest reaches of the dresser and see the crinkled paper of a handmade folder that contained all of my drawings, finger paintings, and stories, from preschool to first grade.
Dust was the patina covering most of the room. It covered the blinds, creating a thin grime on the cord I used to close and open the garish-colored slats. I remembered, from day one, my bitter anger at my parents’ decision to replace my curtains with metal blinds. I was all of seven or eight, and they chose what I thought to be, and still maintain, the ugliest color combination imaginable for blinds: a burnt orange, next to a flat brown and metallic green, that when washed, turned a flat silver. I stuck a couple of pieces of gum on the window ledge in protest.
I let clothes heap up around the bed, the dressers, on the closet doorknob. My mother kept some of her clothes in my closet and the floor space was covered by her old high-heeled shoes, my budding collection of boots and sandals and later, fringed knee-high moccasins and platforms. The shelf space was for junk she and I could not bear to sift through and make decisions about: my baby clothes, old records of hers, a couple of wigs she wore before I was born. I often closed the door on this alternate dimension and busied myself with what was tangible and in my line of sight: the books, the ashtray, the carton of Marlboro Reds, the telephone.
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