“Both have injuries from the past that show up in your dreams, yet yours are unavailable to you.”
“I’m trying. I want to know. It’s just that I can’t put my finger on anything.”
She looked at me with a curious intensity and said, softly, stressing each word, “Too-painful-to-look-at.”
“It is. I mean I guess it is.” I paused, and said, “What could be so damned painful that I refuse even to look at it?”
“You tell me.”
For the life of me I didn’t know why, but I began to cry. Dr. Sophie waited respectfully.
After a full minute of silence—an eternity in a therapy session—she said softly, “You told me once that you often bite on your tongue with your back teeth. You also said you had an awful repeated dream about big teeth coming at you, and you would wake up frightened. Lots of teeth images.”
“Yes. I still have that dream,” I said, knuckling away moisture on my cheeks. “Rapierlike teeth. Sometimes it’s a dog, other times it’s some weird animal I don’t recognize.”
“That dream started when you were quite young.”
“I think I was ten or eleven. Around then.”
She hesitated, as if her next words would be critical, and maybe impertinent, but she went ahead anyway.
“Tell me if I’m way off base, but that was about when your parents broke up, and wasn’t it also when your mother did some dental work in your mouth?”
Wham! I had never put that together. Teeth, huge, sharp teeth rushing at me like an attacking beast—and my mother invading my mouth with glee, as if she relished drilling away at me. “Making holes,” I said, “and filling them up.” Making holes. Eerie. When I thought of holes I shivered.
Nothing escaped Dr. Sophie. “Tell me about the holes.”
“She gouged out the cavity, made it round so the silver could nestle in,” was all I could think of at first.
“But something else about the holes. Buried deep. I can’t remember. Other holes.” I began to cry again.
“Other holes,” Dr. Sophie said. “Go on. Tell me about the other holes.”
I started to shake. The room felt cold, frigid, as if a wintry surge had found an opening and reached its icy fingers around corners and under doors. Some deeply veiled memory stirred, like a sleeping ogre, the monster in fairy tales that eats people, and I was certain it would wake and chew me into little pieces—the teeth thing again. A silent voice was shouting. A shield over my heart was quivering. It would come. It was about to come. But could I abide?
Softly, as if struggling to find a voice in my dreams, with closed eyes, I began a monologue, mysterious words that seemed to trickle out without thought, like a mountain stream pulled down by gravity.
“I’m in my bed. I am little. My dreams scare me. No father around. It is dark as a cave. I feel you. I feel you, Mother. You are in my room. You are in my bed. You are touching me, taking my hand. You are rubbing my hand. You put my hand somewhere. It is warm. You move my hand up and down where it is warm. I feel softness. It is … it is a hole. I feel a hole. My hand is in the hole. You are moving my fingers in the hole. I hear you moan. I feel you shudder hard, the way a pup shakes off water. You stop. My hand is wet. You wipe my hand with your gown. I see nothing. It is black as mud. You pat my head. What did you do? Why did you do it?”
I stopped, my heart a speeding motor, my body damp with perspiration, eyes open, wild and disbelieving. I glanced quickly at Dr. Sophie, embarrassed, certain she thought of me as perverted, a sick baby, faithful to a twisted mother.
All she said was, “A child violated. A hurricane of buried hurt.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
For three days I was obsessed with the thought that Abby confronted her abuser and it changed her dreams, and now I had unmasked my mother’s hidden offense. Would that scuttle my long-held nighttime terror?
The irony struck me like a heavy thump on my heart, that both Abby and I had been violated sexually as children, our young lives brutally distorted because of adults trespassing against us.
Outrage, finally and harshly, surrounded me like an all-encircling prickly mantle, and I understood, with amazement, the kind of fury that absorbed Abby.
Another few days passed before I could corral my itinerant emotions enough to try to figure out what to do. My first act, I decided, would be to go right back to Dr. Sophie and consult with her.
“So,” I said on the phone, “what do I do with this repulsive new awareness? I mean, how do I handle it with her, with my mother?”
In her usual manner, she tossed the ball back at me. “What do you want to accomplish? Punishment? Forgiveness? Do you want your mother to stay in your life?”
Hell, I had no idea what I wanted. I was experiencing disgust, a sense of my childhood corrupted. Should she, somehow, pay for her ravages, her callous womanly frustrations? She could not get her sick needs met with an adult man, so she foraged around in her own home and picked on her little boy. How devious that was, how cruel to treat your child that way, how utterly destructive!
“She should know,” I said, my voice a thin filament of sound, mourning in it, bleakness.
Dr. Sophie heard me clearly, and said back in a tone matching mine, “You might want her to join you in a session with me.”
The notion was scary, but it took me only a moment to digest her words, and I said, much more forcefully, realizing the ally I would have at my side, “Yes!”
The next few sentences were shrouded in fog, and I was surprised I remembered the two alternative times Dr. Sophie suggested. But I did, swallowed hard, and, in a bold gush of courage, dialed Marilyn Candle-Klotz’s number.
Virtue Vista, the poet laureate of my father and Lee’s aesthetic evening, began to date Stevie. The difference in their ages may have bothered Stevie’s mother, and to me the difference in their worldly views would someday be an issue, but at least for the time they seemed to be a compatible couple. That accomplished one positive thing: it detoured Stevie’s fixation on me and, thankfully, her ubiquitous presence in my weekly routine; no more cars parked next to mine, the end of looking over my shoulder to see if her lovely face was smiling at me longingly, angularly, from a distance, at almost any venue.
It also accomplished that her sister, Jeri, seemed freer to communicate with both Abby and me at times other than our biweekly Writers’ Guild lectures. That, I must say, warmed my heart. After the terrible revelation about my childhood molestation, I relished the wholesome fluidity of Jeri’s energy.
When I saw her next it was at my father’s house, a casual family dinner, though Stevie was working, and when I entered, Jeri shook my hand in mock formality. I thrilled at how her hand tightened against mine when I expected it to let go. My smile brought a return, dimple and all, and I swear, for the first time, I saw a few freckles on her nose—how unobservant that I never noticed them before!
That evening, also for the first time, I entertained the thought that when around Jeri I felt incredibly comfortable—no teeth on tongue at all––and the companion thought that she carried so few emotional burdens, unusual among the people I knew. I wondered, fleetingly, and with a sly smile, if the woman gallivanting about Europe with me in my ideal dream could be a prototype of Jeri Hawn, my little stepsister.
After dinner, Dad and Lee and I sat in the den, a room of disarming warmth, with a slump-stone fireplace and a jumbo original oil painting above, discussing poetry—I had just seen a TV special on Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, a key figure in the Academy Award nominated film, Il Postino, in 1995—trying to be generous about Mr. Vista’s postmodern creations. He was no Pablo Neruda. Jeri, who, I remembered, also had a passion for art, was painting something on canvas, across the room, absorbed as if it were the final touches on her masterpiece.
When she and Stevie were nine and ten, Lee had given them choices about what lessons they would like; Stevie picked voice and Jeri art. Both, it turned out, were wise choices for the girls, Stevie with a trained voice that
could, given her employment around the industry crowd, lead to a break of some kind, and Jeri, more tranquil, introspective, proud of the several oils and acrylics adorning her family’s walls.
When it came time for me to leave, Jeri approached and said, “Would you like to see what I painted?”
“Of course,” I said, and sauntered with her over to the canvas. I peered at a rather abstract painting, muted in color, with little bars of parallel swabs showing a pleasing aesthetic balance and form, and in my naiveté, complimented her with, “I like it. It is an unusual representation of a cat, though I can’t be sure of its species, if it is an African big cat, or a tame, domestic feline.”
She burst into laughter, eyes never leaving mine, and said, through tears, “It’s a portrait of you!”
Lee’s fingers were over her lips. My dad sported an amused grin. I smiled and said, “Absolutely. Anyone can see that.”
Mother agreed to join me in my therapy session. I put it that it would help me understand myself better, avoiding any intimation that she might be on the spot. Her only hesitation came about the date and time. She and her peripatetic husband, she told me, were off to Africa for two weeks, on safari with an American woman and her partner who regularly lead such excursions. They would be on the Serengeti, in Tanzania, secure in their screened jeep wagons, within yards of yawning lions, jaunting above the jungles in hot air balloons, trekking though monkey-filled rainforests, relaxing in a butterfly preserve—all these things she told me in a minute over the phone. So, I pinned her down for a date two days after her return. It would be a Wednesday afternoon at four o’clock. Dr. Sophie confirmed.
“Agutter?” Mother had asked. “Is she licensed? Do you know if she’s any good? Have you been seeing her for a time? What is her orientation? Is she Freudian?”
My reply: “All in good time, Mother. Have a good trip.” It is probably not surprising that I had a difficult time using the word that represented her relationship to me. Mother came hard from my lips.
That she wasn’t to come in for a time helped me shore up my courage. I saw Dr. Sophie again and tried to glean from her some helpful ways of confronting.
I had come to expect her deflection as she said, “I would love to know what you wish to have happen. Do you want your mother’s contrition? How about an apology? Or, as I asked earlier, punishment? Perhaps confrontation, with an accompanying ration of guilt? It is entirely up to you how you orchestrate the meeting.”
I knew enough about therapy not to ask, “But what will you be doing?” since I was well aware that her style was to be the consummate listener and clarifier.
“All of those things, I guess. She has to know that I know what she did.”
Dr. Sophie looked at me with her piercing blue eyes, eyes that seemed to invade the recesses of my darkest thoughts, eyes soft and tolerant, yet relentless in their scrutiny.
“She has to know that she knows what she did. A mother violating her own child needs to be confronted.”
I left my session that day aware that it was my script, my cast, my lyrics and my show. All I needed was the nerve and some bit of skill to pull it off.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Another week had passed, and I had not seen any gross display of brutality from either Ken or Abby. I remembered that she had muttered something about getting him before he got her. My take on it was that he was shrewdly sinister and could think up almost any get-even scenario, while she was crafty and determined, and could well design a way to outmaneuver him. Either way I was concerned. Neither seemed under full control.
There is an element to punishment that is sordid. Most folks who trespass against others in a violent manner were themselves hurt along the way, usually in childhood, often by one or both parents, sometimes by other family members, possibly by strangers. They do what they do out of pain. I have yet to see any proof of the ‘bad seed’ notion. The culture tends to punish these wrongdoers, even to the extent of execution, but my view is that they are sad, wounded specimens who desperately long for, and are without, love in their lives.
Abby and Ken are prime examples.
Jeri and her sister are the antithesis.
The cleansing that took place when Abby confronted her cousin seemed to alter her dream flow, and, my hope but not yet the reality, was for it to soften her severe vengeful needs as well. Alejandro, as an object of disgust, may have been shunted aside for the moment, but our Guild pal, old Kentucky Prism, was now Abby’s focal point, as was she his.
I was waiting for both shoes to drop.
It was midnight. The story was reproduced by a totally terrified Abby, so I can only pass it on as accurately as I had taken it in.
She was returning from an evening at a girlfriend’s place, a small gathering of four women who had known each other since their teen years in high school. Reminiscing was valuable for Abby, since she had precious few positive memories of her childhood. That she even had old friends was rather a revelation to me, but a salutary one. I saw every encounter with people who cared about her a plus, a rung on her ladder toward higher self-esteem.
Mellow, in an unguarded manner, she had parked her car and was walking around to her front mailbox, humming softly to herself. In her words, a “sick” voice suddenly whispered at her from behind a lantana bush, “Pretty melody, pretty lady.”
She spun around to see who it was, saw only shadows, felt instant fear, and began to back toward her apartment door.
All the bushes were menacing, danger screamed in a silent voice from every leaf and each branch, imagination ravaged her humor, fantasy worse than reality, something grotesque was stalking her, would assault her.
It was then, as she backed tenuously toward her apartment, she realized it had to be Ken Prism. But what would he do? How deranged was he?
In her small clutch purse she carried mace, a buffer against muggers, a carryover from her earlier years in a neighborhood of fear.
As if knowing, as if anticipating her line of defense, the voice said, “Hands out in the open.”
She felt like a character in a western, in a gun duel, arms out to the side, ready to grab for the weapon at the first sign of movement.
There was none. Only the voice. Then a crunching sound off to her right, as if something heavy had fallen in the bushes. She spun about and, as she did, the voice, now behind her, said, “Surprise! Same old plot. Throw a stone. Get their attention.”
An arm went around her neck, another across her body, and the voice said, “Don’t move. Perfectly still. It’s a game. I make the rules.”
She managed to blurt out, “What do you want?”
“You. I want the part of you that will shut your filthy mouth for good.” As the voice said these words, the hand around the body slid up to her breasts, fondling them roughly, squeezing hard, as if they were water balloons he were trying to empty.
She began to struggle but the powerful body behind her, in its strength, half walked, half dragged her behind a hedge of white oleander and twisted her down in the grass.
The voice whispered, “Make a sound and I’ll smash your eye. You don’t want to go through life with one eye.”
The face behind the voice was covered, a narrow black sheath of cloth tied around, but there was no doubt it was Prism’s voice.
He tore at her blouse, buttons snapping away, cotton material splitting. A thin shaft of light from the apartments filtered through the hedge and shone on her chest, as the masked face and brutal hands and sickening voice worked to slide her bra down and her skirt up.
It had happened to her before. This position, on the bottom, pinned like a defeated wrestler, unbearable, this event, another rape….
The attacker fumbled with his own clothing, one hand holding Abby by the neck, the other at his fly.
She felt him hard against her.
Then, as if he had a change of heart, the hand on her neck pulled away, the body over her suddenly jerked upward. She stared in the darkness and saw the masked head l
ifted to the stars. Something had it by the hair, was twisting it violently.
She felt a splash, damp, a drop, several, warm, like oil, falling on her face.
The body above her was slid to the side and she shimmied backwards using her hands and feet to get to the base of an elm tree.
As she peered in the darkness, she saw the other figure, a man, dark, obscured, shadowy, heavy, standing over the prone Ken Prism.
Light glinted off something in his hand, a small metal blade.
Another voice, one she knew from long years back, one she heard again a few short weeks ago, said, “I think I killed someone. I think I’m a murderer.”
TWENTY-NINE
“Three-inch gash on the upper neck. Lots of blood. Missed the carotid artery.” That’s what the medic reported to Abby.
He added, “The guy’s grip was shaky, a wobbly cut made by an unsteady hand.”
The wrench upward and the hard twist had rendered Prism unconscious. When medics arrived on the scene, they stemmed the flow of blood and quickly inserted a drip to restore liquid. At the hospital, they transferred two pints of blood. He was A-Positive, a plentiful supply available.
Ken Prism did not die; he was never the same.
The police appeared along with the ambulance, and a confused cousin was cuffed, arrested, charged, and later arraigned. It remained to be seen if, when an indigent man cuts the throat of a rapist, is it attempted murder, is it rescue, would he be considered a hero, or shunted away to a mental hospital? The intricacies of legal mumbo-jumbo would now begin, and our ponderous justice system would take its sweet time.
Though he would have no awareness of the word’s meaning, expiation is what we decided was Alejandro’s motive. Conscious or not, at some level he needed to absolve himself of guilt.
For Abby it was an implausible happening, two despised men in a confrontation that would have been hard to justify in a work of fiction. This assaultive relative had been a legend of corruption in her thoughts for ten years, so how could he now be a savior, a redeemer, one who thwarts an assault?
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