by Gabriel Roth
Her first semester at Ward College, her father flies up to Concord after his New York trip to take Maya and her roommate Emily out to dinner. He’s in a good mood, and she assumes that he’s bought something from someone who didn’t know what it was, or sold something for more than it’s worth. They order in French, except for Emily, and drink red wine, and when she and Emily get back to the dorm her head is dragging with exhaustion—from the wine, and from the effort of finding things to say that her father will deem interesting or clever or sufficiently justified. He might have been a trial lawyer: he’s one of those men who think the truth of a proposition can be measured by the force of the arguments marshaled on its behalf. In the restaurant, in front of her roommate, she had tried to transmute the first heady months of freshman year into something her father might accept as dinner-table conversation, to turn her wild new discoveries—that she’s still smarter than her peers, that she carries her anxiety with her no matter how far she gets from home—into something more than assertion and anecdote. Back in her dorm room she looks around at the institutional furniture and the anthropology textbooks and the other props and accessories of her life and feels as though she has betrayed them.
At dinner Emily had told a story about a party they had attended that was broken up by the police. Donald had listened and nodded and given every sign of enjoying the story, and Maya knew he was thinking, Well, this girl is a worthless idiot. After Emily finished, he had directed a conspiratorial smile at Maya, and she’d had no choice but to smile back. Lying on her bed afterward she remembers her father’s look and her stomach wells up. She runs down the hall to the bathroom and vomits into the toilet, shaking. He has never punished her, as far as she can remember. Only rarely has he raised his voice. But she is scared of him.
She hurries back to her room, stepping over the hippies who have turned the hallway into their common space. Inside, she locks the door. Emily is studying with her headphones on. Maya sits on her bed and starts to sob. She knows that if Emily hears her crying she’ll be in trouble, but she can’t stop. Finally, in the gap between two songs, Emily hears. She takes the headphones off and asks Maya what’s wrong. Maya can’t tell her. She sits on her bed, shaking and sobbing, afraid that Emily is going to call Donald and tell him to come and take Maya away. She knows she’s behaving strangely, but the experience feels self-explanatory.
Emily, whose parents write her long letters every week and frequently send baked goods or seasonally themed candy, doesn’t know what to make of Maya’s crying. Over their first two months at Ward they have affiliated themselves with different groups, but they still go to each other for sympathy. Now Emily is frightened by Maya’s unresponsiveness. She goes down the hall to Joyce and Melanie’s room, where she tells Melanie about the drama and asks her for counsel. They form an urgent little klatch, describing Maya’s breakdown to visitors in tones of deep respect.
Maya lies on her bed. She’s still afraid of her father, and she wonders why. He has never done anything to harm her. This is her story, as she has told it to herself since she became old enough to tell her own story: her mother died and left her with a father who was unable to meet her need for affection, and her personality has formed around the ambition to be smart and tough enough to win his love. But that doesn’t explain the fear. Tonight he had told her he missed her, and charmed her the way he sometimes chose to, especially in front of other people, telling little jokes and asking gently skeptical questions and savoring her answers. For some reason she thinks of her mother’s jewelry, which her father had given to her all at once on her sixteenth birthday. Most of it is back in Los Angeles; she brought only her favorite pieces to college. She wants to drop them down a storm drain.
Then a sudden flash of something terrible, something much worse than the fear. The feeling takes her over for a second, two, and then passes. This is what the fear has been pointing toward all this time. She lies on her bed. The feeling seems unconnected to anything in her mind. Except this: when her friends started talking about masturbation, she didn’t admit it, but she knew she would never, ever do that.
And she’s smart enough, she’s read enough books, and she knows: this is what happens to people who’ve been abused. It seems incongruous, a category she’s never imagined occupying, but she tries it on. Abuse: she turns the word over in her mind like a stone. Does this belong to me?
Every night she wakes in a panic—sweaty, heart pounding, the sheet clenched in her fist. In the daytime she feels as if she has to relearn every social tactic. She develops an odd mannerism: a little pause after someone directs a question or a remark to her, in which she calculates the appropriate response.
She has never seen a therapist; she was brought up to feel a mild contempt for people who did. Her father went to a Freudian analyst in the 1960s and came away from the experience eight thousand dollars poorer and more deeply embedded than ever in his own personality. “It’s a trap,” he says whenever the subject comes up. “Why would they want you to get better? They have a vested interest in uncovering more and more problems, so you’ll keep coming back.” This is the opinion of therapy that Maya has filed away as her own, until Lauren, in her capacity as WPC for Maya’s floor, tells her about the psychotherapy and counseling services available free and in confidence from Student Health Services.
She fears that the therapist will work in an office decorated with sentimental kitsch—teddy bears, inspirational posters—and will try to hug her therapeutically. These concerns are put to rest the moment the therapist fetches her from the waiting room. A middle-aged woman with a severe black bob, a knee-length leather skirt, and high boots, she suggests a professional dominatrix more than a mother substitute. Maya has been steeling herself for their session since she made the appointment nine days ago. She hopes she’ll be strong enough to recall and confront her past in its horrifying glory, to replace her nebulous feelings with clarity—where she was, how old she was, what he did. Abreaction, catharsis: if she can remember, she won’t have to keep reliving the feelings. She has imagined the shrink urging her to force the memories into consciousness, like a physiotherapist exhorting a quadriplegic to push his atrophied muscles back into service.
It’s not like that. The therapist asks why she’s there, and Maya finds herself unable to answer. She sits in silence, staring at the shiny leather of the therapist’s boots for three or four minutes, before she can find a way to speak.
She gets it out by telling it as a story rather than a fact: We went out to dinner, and I came back and threw up, and this feeling came over me, and ever since I wake up in terror every night, and here’s what I think it means. The therapist doesn’t encourage her to remember anything, just asks about her relationship with her father. Maya tells her, and things seem sinister that until now had only seemed sad. The therapist makes notes on a yellow legal pad that she holds on her knee in landscape orientation, writing across the lines. The end of the session comes more quickly than Maya had expected, at which point the therapist suggests that they meet once a week.
Over the next semester Maya and the therapist become friends. The therapist likes Maya and thinks she’s clever: she laughs when Maya says something self-deprecating or amusingly honest, and she occasionally allows her own wit and warmth to break through her professional reserve. She doesn’t push Maya to talk about anything in particular. They spend one early session talking about Maya’s frustration with her history professor, a self-important fool, and as Maya walks out of the Health Services Annex toward the library she realizes that they didn’t mention her father at all. Two weeks later, after a difficult night in which panic woke her twice, she finds herself describing her experience more vividly than she has managed before.
“It goes beyond emotions,” she tells the therapist. “It’s a physical feeling—not like someone touching you, nothing concrete, but… it’s not in the senses, it’s in the body. It’s like—in high school they thought I had appendicitis and I had to get a CT scan. You kn
ow how before you get scanned they make you drink those chemicals to make your organs show up? And they say strawberry flavor or whatever, and you tell yourself it’s a milkshake, but as soon as you taste it you know it’s not a milkshake, it’s not even food, it’s something that does not belong in your body. You have to force yourself to drink it, not because it tastes bad, exactly, but because your body doesn’t want it, and you have to overcome your body’s deep, deep resistance to drinking it. God, I can taste it now, and it’s been three years. Anyway: that’s what this feeling is like, times a thousand. Like your body is stating as clearly as it possibly can that what’s happening is not right.”
The therapist has been sitting absolutely still, as though to avoid disturbing a grazing deer. She waits a few seconds more, to be sure Maya has finished talking, and then asks, “Are there any thoughts that accompany the feeling?”
“When it first happened, there weren’t any thoughts,” Maya says. “Except maybe No, no, no.” She and the therapist smile sadly at one another. “But now I usually think about my dad. Nothing specific, just thinking about him. I don’t know if he’s in my mind or if I’m, like, trying to think of him.” The therapist nods.
At the following session, Maya tells the therapist about her sexual history, which now spans three years and seems to her a complex narrative with developments and reversals and surprises. She’s clever and tough, and boys have always liked her. The boys she likes are the ones who don’t have a clear place in the social hierarchy, not at the top and not in the middle striving for the top, but off to one side. She tends to break their hearts. She feels sorry for them when this happens, but there’s something she likes about the naked emotion, the pleading and seriousness. It feels sad in a way she might call realistic. And she enjoys the power, the boy swept up in his passion for her while she vacillates and searches her feelings and remains unmoved. She also enjoys sex. From the beginning, or what seemed to her the beginning—sixteen years old, Jeff Keyhoe, in his room—she was adept at it, confident, confrontational. One thing bothers her: intermittently she’ll find that she’s not really present; the sex is going on and she’s missing it. Once, with Jake Sohnfeld, an orgasm returned her to herself and she realized she had no memory of turning over onto her back.
The therapist refers to this as dissociation. “How often does this dissociation happen?” Not often, but more than Maya would like. “Is it frightening?” Not frightening so much as saddening, like she’s being deprived of something. “Does it seem to you as though it’s connected to the abuse?” It’s the first time she has referred to the abuse, and it feels right, like snapping together the tongue and buckle of a seatbelt.
Maya arranges to stay with Emily’s family in Boston over Christmas break. She presents it to her father as a fait accompli. He objects mildly.
In their second session after the vacation, the therapist gently asks Maya if any memories of the abuse are coming into focus. Maya is silent, examining the knotted strings at the edge of the rug on the floor of the therapist’s office. Then she says that, yes, certain images and ideas have lately come into her mind, along with sensations more specifically located in her body. The therapist carefully asks her if she feels she can describe any of these memories, and Maya does so: the feeling of her father’s large hand between her legs, and of his smooth chest pressed against her face. After this session she goes to the library to research a paper on Max Weber and bureaucracy, then returns to her dorm and cries.
As the summer break approaches, Maya makes arrangements to join a group of students on a volunteer trip to Gaza, where they build homes alongside a crew of Israelis and Palestinians. The trip keeps her away from Los Angeles for all but a week, during which she stays with a high school friend. She sees her father for a single lunch, at a restaurant. During the meal she describes things she saw in the Middle East, things that didn’t matter to her; she offers sketches of her professors, making them sound pompous and stupid in a way she knows her father will appreciate. As she listens to herself speaking, a valedictory feeling comes over her, and she knows she will never see her father again. Back at school sophomore year, describing the conversation to her therapist, she realizes that she remembers almost nothing her father said.
New memories emerge, escalating in clarity as though titrated according to how much she can tolerate. She has replaced her life story with a new one: a tragic childhood, a long adolescence of denial, and now the first steps into maturity and self-knowledge. Eventually the therapist asks her if she has considered confronting her father with what she believes.
Five days after she mails the letter, her father calls. She sits on her bed with Emily, still her roommate, as they listen to his voice on the answering machine, alternately begging and commanding her to call him back. In his fifth message he threatens to fly out to Concord to get her away from whatever has brainwashed her. After that she sees him everywhere—outside her dorm at night, in the crowd at a lecture, at the other end of the cafeteria. She avoids walking alone.
Whenever she sees his handwriting on an envelope in her campus mailbox, she drops it unopened into the recycling with the catalogues and the varsity sports schedules. He sends one with a printed address, to trick her. Inside are two articles about “false memory syndrome.” My daughter was brainwashed by a feminist cult! She starts checking the postmarks on her mail.
She wonders if he’ll cut off her tuition. She almost wants him to: she can’t bear that her existence here—her presence in classes, the food she eats at the refectory, the room she shares with Emily—is dependent on him. Her therapist offers to help her declare herself independent of her father so she can negotiate financial aid. She finishes college on scholarships, loans, and a work-study job manning a cash register at the college bookstore. She tells the bursar’s office to tear up her father’s checks, although she suspects that he keeps sending them and they keep cashing them.
The panic attacks diminish in frequency and intensity. For much of her junior year she takes every opportunity to talk about the abuse, and about the epidemic of child abuse in America, and the connection between the silence surrounding that epidemic and society’s attitude toward women in general. It thrills her, for a while, to force her past into people’s faces like a gun. But by graduation it has started to feel juvenile, and to remind her of the way she used to provoke people by mentioning her mother’s death. She stops talking about it so much, so loudly, although she doesn’t deny it. She particularly dislikes talking about it with boyfriends. She wants to keep her whole dark childhood as far as possible from her sunlit sex life; she finds that telling drains the simplicity from sex, which is a loss for her and a victory for the feelings she considers her enemy. She never gets comfortable with the word survivor, the term of art used in books and on message boards and by the Berkeley therapist she briefly sees after her move to San Francisco: it seems too obviously to have been chosen as a substitute for victim, as though you could absolve yourself of victimhood by refusing the word.
By now she hasn’t spoken to her father in more than five years. From her aunt she has heard that he is remarried, to a younger woman.
I don’t know much about the recovered-memory debate of the 1990s, and what little I have gleaned from magazines does not come to mind as we lie beneath her comforter in the afternoon light and talk, occasionally giving each other reassuring little strokes and squeezes. Much later I will read Susan L. Reviere’s scrupulously evenhanded survey Memory of Childhood Trauma: A Clinician’s Guide to the Literature, with its assertion that “no particular attributes of a given memory can be used to determine its veracity, and the ability of even professionals to make such distinctions is demonstrably poor.” But I am in love with Maya, and her command over her autobiography is near total, and she evinces no doubts about what has happened to her, and neither do I.
We lie on her bed and kiss gently. She squirms against me in an unfamiliar way, and it’s clear that things are different. The first time you have
sex with someone it’s all about mirroring. When she introduces a particular kind of tenderness or friendliness or roughness, you respond in kind. With enough calculations per second you can generate the impression of spontaneous compatibility, the way a grid of tiny pixels becomes a photograph. (If you pick up on certain types of passivity or submissiveness from her, obviously, you want to put an inverter in the signal path so that your response is complementary rather than imitative.) But this abuse thing changes the equation. Is it possible that by some defensive maneuver she transmutes her awful history into pleasure? If so, is that a triumph or a capitulation? It’s a lot to factor in. Any sudden moves and the memories she’s been blocking for so long could come rushing back. My hand is on her ass now, a great ass, everything I’d hoped it would be. I want to stop and ask her about the abuse thing and how I should be factoring it in, but she seems like she’s doing fine. It would be weird for me to be the one to freak out. Plus she’d probably feel stigmatized. She’s kissing the underside of my chin. She doesn’t seem like a person who’s about to have a breakdown. Maybe that’s exactly the kind of person who’s the closest to a breakdown. Maybe she’s brittle. My hand is under the back of her shirt, and the natural thing would be to undo the clasp of her bra. Is that too rapist? Is there a way to manifest male desire that doesn’t, in the wrong light, look like brutality? I move to stick my tongue in her ear; that can work wonders. Unless her dad used to wake her up that way or something. In which case I’ll just have to apologize.