The Beat of My Own Drum

by Sheila E.

  Once we got into the cramped, spidery space, though, I wasn’t so keen. Then he did something strange and pulled out a tube of glue, unscrewing the top. He squeezed some of the goo into a brown paper bag, which he held up to me in the half light, and said, “Sniff this.”

  I shook my head. The bag was stinky, the space was dark and dirty, and I told him I wanted to leave.

  “Look, it’s fine,” he said, and shoved his nose into the narrow opening of the bag to inhale. When he lifted his face, he was grinning.

  He placed the bag in my hand. “Try it,” he urged. “It’ll make you feel good.”

  He made it seem like fun, so I eventually gave in. No sooner had I taken a sniff, though, than I felt unwell. Dropping the bag, I lay back to stop my head spinning. I thought I might be sick.

  While I lay there helplessly, the boy reached under my dress and began to touch me. What was he doing? No one ever touched me there.

  I felt ill.

  I didn’t feel right in the head.

  I knew this wasn’t normal, and I told him, “Stop! Please!”

  “Don’t worry, this’ll be fun, too,” he soothed.

  I squirmed, but he was much older and stronger than me, plus my head was still spinning. As he pinned me down with his leg, I was powerless against him. I remained cognizant enough to know that I didn’t like it, and I asked him to stop. But he just carried on groping me.

  I felt weird and disoriented. I wanted to get away from him, and I eventually pushed his hands away and wriggled free. “I have to go home,” I told him as firmly as a five-year-old can. “My mom’ll come looking for me.”

  Before he let me go, he gripped my arm and told me harshly, “Don’t tell anyone what we’ve done. It’s our little secret, okay?” Although he was smiling, he was holding me too tightly, and his words were laden with threat.

  I crawled out of there and ran home as fast as my little feet would carry me. I was very confused. What we’ve done? I didn’t do anything, did I? I felt suddenly ashamed that I’d let him touch me. Was I to blame?

  Moms saw me come in and frowned. “How did you get your dress so dirty?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I was playing outside.”

  That was the start of my lying.

  “Sheila, you know not to play outside in your good clothes!”

  It didn’t occur to me to tell my mother what had happened, and in any event I just wanted to forget it. I may have been only five years old, but I made sure to keep well away from the Gypsy boy after that.

  I wish he’d been the only one who made me keep secrets, though. I had two older cousins in their teens who, on separate occasions, seemed to find me an easy target. If either of them was babysitting at night, they’d wake me up long after my brothers and I had gone to bed. I’d open my eyes, groggy with tiredness, and wonder what was happening.

  “Let’s watch some TV,” they might say. “There’s no one to stop us watching what we like.” As soon as we settled down in front of the television, my molestation would begin.

  It never took long for me to shake my sleep off and become instantly, terrifyingly alert. What had I done to deserve all this sudden attention? Why did they all want to touch me—there? It always felt wrong to me, but it had happened before and I was helpless every time.

  Those cousins made me feel as if I had a notice on my forehead that said, IT’S OPEN SEASON. COME MESS WITH ME! I don’t know if they were secretly talking to each other or whether, at five, I was just coming to the age when I was getting noticed, but it seemed that everywhere I turned, somebody wanted a feel.

  I dreaded seeing them after that; I was always so uncomfortable at family gatherings. I tried to make sure I was never left alone with them, but if they were innocently picked as our babysitters for the night, I’d think to myself, Oh, no, here it comes.

  I never said anything to Moms or Pops because I knew family was everything to them. “Family is what we are, and family look out for each other,” was the code. “Never stir things up or get anybody into trouble. All we have is family, family, family.”

  The fear of stirring things up tormented me, along with the relentless questions that spun round and round in my mind, despite my best efforts to make them stop.

  Why me?

  Why is it always a secret?

  Why is it always in the dark?

  And then came the darkest night of all. The night the Bad Thing happened. It was a night that changed my world forever.

  I was still only five years old.

  5. Snare

  A length of hide or gut stretched across a drumhead

  Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

  MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

  I was fast asleep. Moms and Pops were out at a gig, and my brothers and I had gone to bed in the room we shared, just like always. Juan was three years old and Peter Michael was still a baby. They were in bunk beds while I had a single bed all to myself.

  A teenager who was a distant relative was babysitting us for the first time in that duplex. When my parents had asked if he’d mind keeping an eye on us for a few hours that night, he smiled and said he’d be happy to.

  In what felt like the middle of the night, I awoke to find myself being taken into the next room. It was the dining room that Moms and Pops had made into their bedroom by placing a mattress on the floor. I looked up into my babysitter’s face, but he wouldn’t return my gaze.

  Why is he bringing me here? I thought sleepily, not suspecting a thing. I hoped I hadn’t wet the bed again—something I’d done a few times lately.

  He sat me on the mattress in the half light that shone in from the hallway, and then he told me we were going to have a good time.

  I rubbed my eyes with my fists and yawned.

  “I’ve got something special to show you,” he said. Then he unbuttoned his pants and took out something I’d never seen before.

  The boy with the glue under the house and the cousins who crept into my room had only ever touched me, never themselves.

  As my whole body stiffened with tension, the babysitter unscrewed a jar of my mother’s Vaseline, covered his hand in it, and then spread the sticky goop over my right hand. I’ve never been able to smell Vaseline again without my stomach turning.

  I turned my head away when he placed my hand on his penis and clamped his fingers around mine. We sat there together like that for a bit, but I had my eyes closed, and all I wanted was for it to stop. He made a moaning sound, and I was frightened by it and by the effect of my hand.

  Rigid with fear, I was still frozen to the spot when he lifted my nightgown—my favorite one with a pretty flower pattern. He laid me on my back and then he lowered himself on top of me. His body was heavy and his breathing ragged in my ear. He forced my legs apart with his hands, and the next thing I remember was searing, burning pain.

  I cried out and pleaded with him to stop, but he kept going, pushing, thrusting. I screamed out loud, and he pressed his hand so hard against my mouth that I tasted my own blood. His hand was so big it covered my nose, too, and I thought I would suffocate.

  “Be quiet!” he hissed. “No one can hear you! You’ll be in even more trouble if you make another sound!”

  I tried to stop crying, but the pain only got worse and worse. It left me breathless and, in the end, voiceless. He removed his hand, and my mouth opened and closed in a gasping, silent scream.

  The next thing I knew I blacked out, or at least my mind shut down.

  When I eventually became aware again, he was lifting himself off me. I heard a noise and realized it was coming from my mouth, which was fighting for breath with rasping sobs of pain and fear.

  I lay there, exposed, shivering and crying.

  “Go to the bathroom and clean yourself up!” he snapped.

  I couldn’t move.

  He went away and fetched some paper towels. I wondered why. Then he started frantically wiping something off my parents’ dark sheets before wiping himself.
r />   Feeling sick, I rolled away from him onto my side. The pain made me cry out once more.

  “Shut up!” He gripped my wrist and yanked me roughly to my feet as I almost blacked out.

  I could barely stand. Everything was wet and sticky between my legs.

  Shaking all over, I stood watching as he grabbed a wet rag and continued scrubbing at the sheets.

  “Go clean up!” he commanded.

  I shuffled to the bathroom with baby steps and switched on the light. I looked down and almost fainted, clutching the basin as my knees buckled. There was blood everywhere—running down my thighs and soaking into my nightgown. I think I must have blacked out again, and I don’t know to this day what happened to my favorite flowery nightie.

  The next thing I remember, my attacker was with me in the bathroom. He looked as frightened as I felt. He must have seen all the blood. I stood in front of him shivering so much that my teeth were chattering.

  Somehow I’d been changed into clean pajamas, and through the screaming in my head I could distantly hear him telling me to go back to my room and go to sleep.

  “Forget about this and don’t tell a soul—or else . . .” he said, his eyes boring into me.

  I shuffled painfully to bed and fell facedown onto my pillow. Afraid of waking my little brothers, I used it to stifle my cries.

  Whenever I try to remember more details of that night, it comes to me in jagged pieces like fragments of broken glass. As an adult, I know that I must have disassociated myself from what was happening as my only method of dealing with it. Even today, when the memories occasionally creep back into my dreams, they appear as shards, but they always bring fear, pain, and shame—feelings I’m still unable to fully articulate.

  Or perhaps the experience of a five-year-old girl being raped simply defies language.

  The pain woke me the next morning. I didn’t know exactly where it was coming from, but I ached all over, and my tummy really hurt. I hobbled to the bathroom and tried to urinate, but I couldn’t—it stung too much. I wiped myself and cried out when I saw blood on the paper. Once again, I couldn’t understand its source. Having seen so much blood the night before, this fresh bleeding only intensified my fear.

  Was I dying? What if I had to tell Moms what I’d done?

  I sat on the toilet rocking back and forth, cradling myself with my arms and trembling all over.

  It must have been summertime, as I can’t have gone to school that day and I have no idea how I spent the next few hours, apart from worrying how much my tummy hurt.

  I couldn’t pee or poop, and I was so afraid of Moms finding out. I didn’t eat or drink anything, and when she asked me what was wrong I merely mumbled that I wasn’t feeling well.

  Instead of showing Moms the blood, I tried to figure out how to tell her what had happened. I kept waiting for the right moment, but there never seemed to be one. It wasn’t until much later the following night that I finally broke down and told them that a Bad Thing had happened.

  “What do you mean?” Moms asked.

  “He hurt me,” I blurted, saying it as quickly as I could to get the words out and away from me. As I said them, big, fat, oily tears began to roll down my cheeks. Catching my breath, I looked out the window and noticed that it was dark already. Night was coming, and I didn’t think I could face another one with all that pain and fear.

  “Who hurt you?”

  “The babysitter.”

  “The babysitter? How?” my mother pressed.

  I shook my head. I knew from her expression that he was going to get into trouble for what I’d said, and then he’d be really mad at me. If he was mad at me, he might come back and hurt me again. I believed that I’d be in trouble for making trouble. Too afraid to say another word, I shut down once more.

  So that was as detailed as my allegation got. At such a tender age, I lacked the vocabulary to explain what had happened, and my fear of stirring things up prevented me from saying more.

  The ensuing hours and days have remained so confusing and distressing to me and to my family that we are rarely able to discuss them—even after all these years. I do know that after my parents gave up trying to pry more information out of me, there was suddenly a lot of movement in the house. I remember how upset and angry they were. That’s when I knew I really was in trouble.

  They confronted the babysitter about what I’d said, but he laughed and flatly denied everything. Then they came home and continued to question me, asking, “Are you sure, Heart?”

  They wanted more details.

  “You have to tell us what happened—exactly.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t just have a bad dream?”

  It had never occurred to me until that moment that they didn’t believe me or that I couldn’t tell them the truth.

  “This is serious, Sheila. Talk to us!”

  I began to panic.

  They didn’t know what to think.

  “Maybe you had a nightmare?” Moms pleaded again.

  I half nodded, afraid to say any more. I couldn’t speak the words I wanted to say, and she wasn’t able to hear them. I’m sure her mind blanked them out, as the truth was simply too painful to face—for all of us.

  The more she asked, the more I clammed up, until the silence seemed for the best.

  Not long afterward, my attacker cornered me in the hallway, pulling me to one side. His fingers pinched my arms, and his eyes glinted as he lowered his voice to a growl. “I’ll be back,” he told me between gritted teeth. “Shut your mouth, or next time I’ll hurt you even more.”

  His threats worked, because I decided never to say anything about it again.

  Incredible as it may seem now, because of my silence nothing was ever done about it. The young man who raped a five-year-old girl in what should have been her safe haven got away scot-free. He remained part of the family and was even an occasional guest at reunions and celebrations.

  That’s the part that kills my parents to this day.

  That’s what my mother especially still holds on to.

  She feels that she let me down.

  The truth is, I couldn’t talk about it then, and I wasn’t able to speak about it properly for more than thirty years. It was my dirty little secret, and I locked it away in the dark where no one else could see it.

  My ordeal might have ended there but for the fact that I developed a morbid dread of going to the bathroom. In my child’s-eye view, everything distilled down to the blood—the blood between my legs. My blood on him. The blood he’d wiped from my parents’ sheets.

  Blood had come to symbolize the intense and unhappy time we had in that house. I’d had terrible nosebleeds there. My aunt upstairs had blood all over her hands. I’d bled after the dog bit me. Moms had lost a baby there and bled. Juan had spurted blood after falling onto the glass. The president and his assassin had all been covered in blood on our TV screen.

  Blood stained everything there.

  I bled for a few more days, and every time I saw it, I felt even more afraid and ashamed and dirty and bad. Those feelings poisoned both my mind and my body. For the next few nights I waited until daylight to go to sleep because I was convinced the babysitter would come back.

  I went from being a carefree little girl from a happy, loving home to someone who felt scared and anxious all the time.

  Our bathroom became the center of my universe. Part of me wanted to lock myself away in there, but the other part was frightened to, in case I saw blood on the toilet paper again.

  Whenever I did enter that scary place, everything around me seemed to come into much sharper focus. That little space became all I knew, and I saw every detail with dazzling clarity—the tiled white floor, the sink on the right, the toilet to the side of that, the shower to the left. There was opaque glass in the window so you could see people walking by, or—worse—standing outside waiting.

  And all the time I was sitting and rocking and holding everything in, hyperventilating with the pain.


  I was still so sore, it was uncomfortable even to sit. I couldn’t allow myself to strain in any way. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t function. I stopped eating and drinking so that I wouldn’t have to go. After a while my stomach began to bloat and I became feverish and sick.

  When I wasn’t in the bathroom, I shuffled around with my head lowered. My entire focus was down—down to where it all happened. Moment to moment, I was just trying to exist and breathe through my fear.

  What am I going to do?

  How can I not go to the toilet?

  What if I can never go again?

  Everything hurt. It was getting worse. I lived in secret horror for weeks.

  My parents were both busy working and Pops was out every night, but they kept asking me what was wrong. I merely repeated that I didn’t feel good. I wouldn’t explain why, and their growing frustration with me was evident.

  All my life they’d been supportive and protective, but they couldn’t help me, and I couldn’t ask them for the comfort I needed—comfort they’d have lovingly provided if only they’d known the truth.

  I had never felt so alone in my life.

  After weeks of being unable to use the toilet, I became so sick that my mother had no choice but to take me to the hospital. My stomach was badly distended. The doctors at the community Highland Hospital checked me over and took my temperature and drew off some blood.

  When they got the results, they told Moms it was a good thing she’d brought me in when she did. “Your daughter is so full of toxins that if you’d waited any longer, her life could have been in danger,” they told her gravely.

  To my enormous embarrassment, they put me in a diaper. I was humiliated and begged them to take it off. “I’m too old!” I cried. Then they said that they’d give me some suppositories. I didn’t know what they meant, but when I learned that a stranger planned to put something inside me I became hysterical, screaming, “I don’t want anyone to touch me! Moms, please don’t let them touch me!”

  The doctors tried to reassure me that suppositories would release my blockage, but I wouldn’t let them near me. My mother persuaded them to let her administer them at home, which she did while I cried. Then she took me to my grandmother’s house.