Therapy! This was the most I could have possibly hoped for. But the idea of sitting with my father in some new therapist’s office made me want to throw up. I’d be forced to defend myself, and my side of the story, like I was in a courtroom.
I wished I’d never said anything. I wanted to go back to the way things were. They were still my parents. The only people who had to love me no matter what. Though my father still sometimes yelled or cursed, he didn’t hit me anymore. More often he was nostalgic and “Jessica-sick” about their empty nest. My mother said he didn’t know what to do with himself now that I was gone. When I came home, he took me out for sushi or Italian and listened to my problems and encouraged me about my schoolwork. I sometimes checked my old diaries just to make sure I wasn’t making all of this up.
After that, I decided I was done talking to my father about the abuse. What more was there to say? He’d apologized. I was the one who couldn’t handle going to family therapy with him. But I needed to speak to my brothers. This had happened to all of us, not just to me. How could we not talk about it? By then Josh was living in South Dakota, selling fertilizers and pesticides to farmers. Mark was in Cincinnati, working at Procter & Gamble headquarters. At a Long Island diner, the three of us back home over Christmas and out to a rare meal together, I gathered my nerve. I wanted to know what they remembered, why they didn’t seem troubled by our past, why it was something we never talked about, and how they were able to have a seemingly untroubled relationship with our father.
Josh didn’t want to talk about it. He made a dumb joke and shifted in his seat. Mark put his sandwich down and edged closer to me on the banquette. He looked at me, ashamed, and nodded. Yes, it had happened. Mark even told me why they’d come back early from Scout camp, how our father had hit Josh and that other camper and been sent home. Proof. But I was making too much of it, Mark said. “It’s not that big a deal. Dad loves you. You’re his favorite.”
Shit happens, was Josh’s attitude. He shrugged.
I should try to forget about it, they agreed.
The confrontation, I decided, had been a big mistake. I dropped the subject with my father. He’d apologized and I’d forgiven him. It was over. We didn’t speak of the abuse, other than elliptically, after that. I took refuge in the typical life of a Vassar girl. I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, got drunk three or four nights a week, spent the other nights studying in the college library reading rooms tucked above a spiral staircase, and fell in love with a boy who wouldn’t love me back.
* * *
Benjamin wasn’t my boyfriend, but he was the boy I loved. We met the second semester of my sophomore year when I was still with Alex. I noticed Ben the moment he walked into the faculty parlor of Main Building and took a gangly, cross-legged seat on the floor. We volunteered with a peer-counseling group called The Listening Center. I was drawn to him in a way I’d never been drawn to a boy before.
Ben had translucent skin (underneath his pinkish-red pimples) and a lanky, economical frame. His jeans hung off his backside, revealing a hint of boxer short. At his neck was a leather cord with a crystal pendant that I wanted to clasp in my hand. He wore black Adidas soccer sneakers or else tattered boat shoes. He’d soon trade all of that in for flannel button-down shirts with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, or paired with gray wool sweaters, and brown desert boots, all of which I loved even more. Though to anyone else he might have seemed just a shy pimply boy from New Jersey, to me he possessed a sort of brightness and luminosity, as if he could glow in the dark. Together, I was certain, we were more than the sum of our suburban parts.
We started spending nights together, moving our conversation from the dining hall to the library to our rooms. I broke up with Alex. But when it came to anything more than friendship, and occasionally sleeping in the same bed and cuddling, Ben was withholding and elusive.
While I was abroad, I’d thought about him constantly—while trekking in Nepal, while working in the kibbutz fields, while having sex with other men. I’d composed careful letters and carried his few (sweet but vague) responses with me. I’d poured all of my fucked-up and confused feelings about my father into my feelings for him, projecting every worthy trait onto Ben and hating myself for not being good enough to make him love me.
When I got back from Israel, I called him, breathless with nerves, and we arranged to meet at a café in the Village. I wore a spaghetti-strap sundress with chunky brown wooden clog sandals and a thin crocheted cream cardigan.
“What happened?” he said, laughing when he saw me. “You look more Vassar than when you left. I thought you’d come back a big hippie,” he teased, pretending to be disappointed. I handed him the poncho I’d bought for him from a shopkeeper in Kathmandu.
We sat across from each other with our iced coffee. I could feel Ben taking me in. I was tan and thin and healthy, and my wavy hair was long and lightened by the sun. His skin had cleared. We were older now. Maybe we were ready. We went to a bar and spent more than we could spare on good beer. We stopped in at a sidewalk psychic to have our fortunes read. He drove me to his mother’s place in New Jersey with one hand on the wheel and the other on my leg, drunk-driving through the Holland Tunnel. It didn’t matter, I told myself. If I died with him in that tunnel, I would die happy.
We spent the hours between midnight and dawn talking in his waterbed. I was desperate for him to touch me. My heart was beating wildly. I had to say something.
I sucked in my breath and courage, as if about to dive underwater, and told Ben I was attracted to him and needed to know what was going on between us.
Ben said he was attracted to me, too. But I’d had a boyfriend, and then I’d been away for seven months. (An eternity at twenty and twenty-one.) Now he had a sort-of girlfriend.
“She’s going to be a sophomore,” Ben told me. “It’s nothing serious. It probably won’t work out.”
Oh. I wasn’t sure whether to let myself be momentarily elated that he had at last admitted there was something between us, or to hate him for not waiting for me and, on top of it, making me wish I’d never left school.
“Besides,” he continued, his face aglow from the lava lamp, “if we got together, it would be pretty intense. I’m not sure I could handle it.”
I ignored that last part. There was hope, I told myself. I could fix this. Benjamin was attracted to me. That was the important part, the thing that really mattered.
* * *
Franny and I were living in a connected pair of rooms called the Rockefeller Suite, sharing a small first-floor wing of Jewett dorm with a faculty member who was said to be sleeping with one of her students. We had a claw-foot tub and a Salvation Army couch. Franny moved into the private inner room; I had the larger, more public one with the sitting area. All I thought about was Ben and how to make him want me. I stopped eating out of nerves and because I somehow figured the thinner I was, the better my chances were with him. To make Ben jealous, so he could see what he was missing, I kissed guys, including one of his closest friends, right in front of him. My obsession flattened everything else. Ben was all I talked about, putting Franny and the rest of my friends through countless hours of conversation about the state of our relationship. I made him mixtapes. Bonnie Raitt singing “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” by the Smiths. We exchanged notes. I confessed everything, told him exactly how I felt, held nothing back. He just wanted to be best friends, he said. Couldn’t we be?
“No,” I said. It had to be all or nothing. “If you don’t want me, you can’t hang out with me.”
One night before finals during an early-December snowstorm, we started talking at a party and went home together. We drank too much wine. I practically forced myself on him, begging and demanding, my hands firm on his thighs. He and the sophomore had broken up by then. We kissed on the staircase of our dorm, and I moved my hand from his thigh to his inner hip. His lips were there, his tongue, even, but he wasn
’t. He couldn’t be with me, he said. Not then. Not yet. He didn’t know why. He was sorry, though. “Wait five years,” he said. We were soul mates and best friends and would probably end up getting married.
I gave him the most hurtful punishment I could think of. I shut him out completely.
At the start of the next semester, Ben was seeing someone new, a Nirvana-skinny first-year with short platinum hair, the kind of hipster-cool girl I could never compete with, no matter how much weight I lost or how knowing my sense of humor. I’d see them together and want to slice my wrists. Then they broke up, but we still weren’t together. What was wrong with me? Why wasn’t I good enough?
* * *
Around this time, I found a small paperback in a Poughkeepsie bookstore titled Outgrowing the Pain: A Book for and About Adults Abused as Children. It was written by Eliana Gil, a psychologist. It took more courage for me to stand at the register in the mall and buy that book than it had to cross any rickety, rotted Nepali footbridge, or even to tell Ben how I felt about him.
I brought the book to my dorm room and read it with a highlighter and pen. I starred an early passage: It’s hard to acknowledge being abused as a child because in doing so, you also admit that your parents were wrong, or not perfect. “Honor thy mother and father” is a very strong lesson, and seeing your parents as abusive may feel like a betrayal of them.
A few paragraphs later, I underlined a sentence that the author had boldfaced:
It was a problem with your parents, not with you.
I felt guilty and ashamed, seeing my experiences reflected in print. I wondered for the hundredth, the thousandth, time whether I was making too much of my parents’ mistakes. This, Gil explained, was called minimizing. There were no excuses for abusing a child, she wrote. I furiously underlined and then hid the book under my bed like my brothers had hidden their porn magazines.
* * *
That winter, Mark cashed in some frequent-flyer miles and sent me a plane ticket to visit him in Cincinnati. He and Abigail took me to restaurants and to the museum at Union Terminal and to a Procter & Gamble party. It was a tense weekend. My brother’s MBA applications were almost due. (Abigail’s parents were going to pay the tuition if he got in.) Abigail, anxious about moving, was struggling with her eating. When Sunday morning came, I was relieved to leave and eager to get to the airport for my scheduled flight home to New York. We woke up to falling snow and a couple of inches already on the ground. Abigail didn’t want Mark to drive me, thinking the roads were too dangerous. I didn’t want to waste money on a taxi ride I couldn’t afford. Mark offered to pay, but I refused. I wanted him to do this one thing for me, to take care of me in that mild Ohio snowstorm.
We fought—a terrible fight. Maybe I said he never stood up for me or took my side anymore. Maybe he said I was being a spoiled brat. Maybe I said all he cared about was money. The next part I could never forget. I knew just what to say, what to accuse him of that would hurt the most.
“You’re pussy-whipped,” I said. “You are so fucking pussy-whipped.”
His face changed in an instant. I’d never seen him like that before, ready to explode.
I didn’t care. Fuck him. I slammed a door and went to take a shower. Leaving my nightclothes in a heap on the bathroom floor, I took one of Abigail’s plush towels and wrapped it around me, ready to turn on the hot water.
Mark pounded on the door, just like my father. “Let me in!”
I unlocked the door. He came in after me. He was yelling and cursing. “You fucking bitch.” Then time stopped. Mark was pushing and shoving me. The towel fell off my body. He grabbed me and slammed me against the shower wall once, and then a second time, and then a third—hard—before leaving the apartment with Abigail. In shock, I called Stefanie, and then a cab, and later on my parents from a pay phone at the airport.
“Mark hit me, Mark hit me,” I said over and over. Whether he had pushed or punched or slapped didn’t matter, he had put his hands on me. I couldn’t make sense of it. My parents picked me up from the airport, and I cried and shook all the way home, repeating like a mantra, Mark hit me, Mark hit me.
Mark had been the one to look out for me as a child, to make me feel special and something like safe. He’d guarded me in his bedroom while my parents fought. That he would hit me was the worst, most unexpected betrayal, and proved I couldn’t trust anybody in my family. I didn’t care about anything that had come before, about anything good he had ever done for me. I hated him.
I swore I would never talk to my brother again, but my mother said that was not an option, I had no choice, I had to—she couldn’t have her children not speaking to one another.
“Why not?” I said. “Dad doesn’t talk to his sister or brother.”
She gave my father her worst I told you so look.
I blamed Mark, and of course I blamed my father.
“No one will ever hit me again,” I vowed to my parents. “You will never hit me again,” I said to my father.
I tried to calm myself, but how could I? I had stood there defenseless and naked. But with my mother saying I had to get over it, I tried rationalizing. Siblings fought. I didn’t have a black eye or anything. The whole thing had lasted just a few minutes. But no, there was no way. Not this time. This I couldn’t block out or get past or forget.
At our parents’ insistence, Mark called me, or maybe my mother or father dialed the phone and made us get on with each other. My brother apologized. He loved me, he said. The apology counted for something, I knew. I wanted things to go back to normal. But I didn’t see how they could. I wanted to hurt him back.
“Do you hit Abigail, too?” I asked. That really pissed him off.
I told him he could never, ever do that to me again. I told him I didn’t know if things would ever be the same between us. I truly was frightened for Abigail. And would he abuse his children one day? I said the only way we could continue having a relationship was if he went into therapy to deal with what he’d done. He had to be willing to at least make that much of an effort. (I didn’t think about my own inability to enter therapy with my father.) He was silent on the other end before agreeing to consider it.
Mark called me at school a few weeks later. He’d decided against therapy. He had enough on his hands, dealing with Abigail.
* * *
The second semester of my senior year, I interviewed with a Peace Corps recruiter and was offered a regional placement somewhere in rural Latin America. My mother was not pleased. This was the time, she warned me, when husbands were met and careers established. How would I feel, coming back in two or three years to nothing, with no money and nowhere to go? Having to move back home at age twenty-four?
I decided to pass on the Peace Corps and return to Israel. I’d heard about a Hebrew language and culture program in the desert that would help me find a job there. All I needed was a few thousand dollars for the flight and program fees.
By spring, Ben and I had started talking again. I couldn’t stay away from him. My father came up several days before graduation to bring a carload of my things home. He was in one of his moods, angry and hotheaded like I hadn’t seen him in a long time. Maybe he was nervous about my coming home. I certainly was.
I was in my mess of a room, stuffing winter clothes in a moving box, when he went off on me. I hadn’t packed enough of my things before he arrived, and my lazy fucking friends, whom he had taken to dinner the night before, hadn’t shown up to help carry boxes to the car, as they’d promised. Ben and the rest of them were pieces of shit and fags. I was a selfish bitch. How dare I? He was screaming at me, cursing, and I was supposed to be spending the summer in his house, saving money for Israel. Kerry, a friend from home who’d also gone to Vassar, was visiting. She and Franny saw everything.
My father stomped out, and I stayed on the floor crying. Kerry was still living with her parents a year after her graduation. She knelt next to me and put her arms around me. “Sweetie,” she said. “You could alwa
ys come live with my family for the summer.”
I was too proud and ashamed to take her up on it, to shun my parents and move into a house down the road from them. (And though it made no sense, I wanted to sleep in my own bed.) But I carried her offer around with me for years like a talisman. It was what I had always most wanted to hear from a friend.
Ben was a junior but stuck around for graduation week. We went from one party to another, from afternoon late into the night. Our friend Natalie lived off campus, with posh housemates who had family fortunes that I’d later read about in Vogue. We went to a party they threw, and I cornered Ben in the downstairs hallway.
“You have to tell me how you really feel about me,” I demanded. “Right now.”
It all came pouring out, all the real reasons why we weren’t together. How he felt like a quarter of a person. How he felt empty inside, like there was a void where his feelings should be. How he didn’t know himself well enough to be in a serious relationship. How ours was the closest relationship he’d had, and he loved me too much to put me through what he couldn’t help doing to women. How he didn’t like physical contact or being touched that much, anyway. And that we could be so close because we weren’t sleeping together.
“I feel like a little boy. You’re so much more mature emotionally than me. I plan out every move and overanalyze. I turn things around on the other person,” he said.
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