25. Humble Pie

My final meal is a large dish of Humble Pie.  It seems I’ve been so busy passing judgment on others I’ve avoided facing my own failures. 

It was fifteen years ago that a reunion with my high school sweetheart triggered repressed memories of childhood sexual assault. I spent the next decade trying to make sense of those memories. Most of the time I was wandering blind through land mines that exploded whenever I triggered a repressed memory. Then shame, repulsion and disgust would come in waves. The nausea was crippling. Nothing eased the pain since I couldn’t trace its source. I couldn’t pull out the splinter, bind the wound or treat the infection. The only thing that helped was inflicting new wounds that would give the pain a source. This self-destructive behavior, the compulsion to degrade myself so that the shame made sense, has plagued my life. In some twisted logic, I believed I must have done something to deserve the pain, so I made sure I deserved it.

The rest of the time, I tried to live careful, walking only well-worn paths until my life became nothing more than a series of obsessive-compulsive rituals. I thought that if only I were good enough I would be safe. I maintained rigid control over my actions and even my thoughts had to be pure, unblemished by sinful wants. But no matter how vigilant I was, chaos would find me and expose the wickedness inside. Or worse yet, it would find my children.

Unraveling that twisted thicket was a tedious, agonizing, life sucking endeavor. I coped with the process by writing down my stories like recipes, each incident an ingredient in an entrée, each dish a course in my life’s menu. I called it an anorexic's cookbook. Last year I thought I was finished. I’d put the stories away and I was looking forward to writing about heroes and nourishing food. I wanted to write myself a happy ending.

Then it all came back with the sound of car wheels on a gravel road. I’m not sure where I heard the sound, but it seeped into my subconscious and triggered another round of   self-loathing. Car wheels on gravel was the sound that my sister Kitty and I heard right after headlights flashed across our bedroom walls like a prison searchlight. And like convicts, we pushed deeper into the corner of the double bed and tried to hide. I remembered the light flooding in from the hallway forming the outline of his body when he opened the door. And that was all I remembered, until he laughed and slammed the door behind him.

Forty years later, when we thought it was safe, Kitty and I talked about that night and she cautiously asked what happened after he opened the door. I told her about the laugh and the slamming door because it was all I remembered. Kitty was disappointed with my answer. But as usual I brushed her concerns aside and assured myself that she was wrong. Not long after that she quit speaking to me. I still don’t really know why but I think I failed her once too often.

For weeks that memory has been sitting on my shoulder, if I turn too fast it startles me. I don’t want to remember and try to push it away but dreams invade my waking hours. Doors that were once tightly shut now fly open and synaptic connections that were impossible are flashing like an electric short-circuit. There is no safe passage, the triggers are everywhere. I know I need to remember but I am afraid to go back into that room alone.  In the past my therapist Joshua has used guided meditation to help me recover memories. I scheduled an appointment with him.

We begin. I close my eyes and focus on his soothing voice. But the memories are impatient and within seconds I’m back in that room. It’s an old house and the bedroom wall slopes on the right side. Kitty and I are huddled together in that back corner against the flowered wallpaper. I can feel the dry paper violets on my face. Kitty mumbles something to me and I shush her. “Stay quiet” I whisper, thinking we can hide, thinking if we’re very quiet, if we’re very good and do the dishes and don’t make a fuss, we’ll be safe. We hear him grunting and panting as he climbs the stairs.  We smell Aqua-Velva and Kessler’s Whiskey as it signals his approach.  We hear him pounding on the locked bedroom door. We hear the sound of cracking wood as he breaks through the door and shoves the dresser out of the way. His angry arms reach out to grab us but we stay tucked up in the corner arms wrapped around each other.  Then he catches Kitty’s ankle and pulls her.  I try to hold on I really do but I’m scared and I let her go. Then it’s black and there’s nothing, nothing but pitiful sounds. Is it me? Have I left my body again? Have I disassociated? Is that my cry? Or is it my little sister? I don’t know, my eyes are closed and I am curled up in a ball inside myself. I am tiny, oh so very tiny, so no one can get to me.  Oh my God, the sound is Kitty. But I am frozen, unable to move. “I am not here. This did not happen.” I chant to myself.

As I write these words, big itchy red blotches break out all over my hands and face. My whole body aches, even my missing teeth. My throat closes and it’s hard to breathe. I am suffocating.  Joshua tells me to stop. He tells me I don’t need to remember now; I don’t need to take the blame. He tells me to forgive myself and let it go. He doesn’t understand that I cannot face God with this lie in my heart. I cannot face my life knowing this lie is in my heart. I have to expose the truth even if it kills me, even if it kills the image I had of myself. Even if it means I have to admit that I am not the good sister after all. Maybe it’s Kitty who is.

Self-preservation takes over and I make excuses for myself.  I tell myself that there’s no reason to go down this road at all. Who can it possibly help? My revelations won’t be welcomed by anyone and especially not Kitty.  The sister I once knew is long gone. In her place is a treacherous woman who steals the things I love only to prove that she can break them.  Each and every time I’ve tried to reconnect with her, I’m rewarded with a vicious betrayal. My hardened heart doesn’t want to give her the comfort of acknowledgement. I dig at the old wounds to remind myself to hate her. It’s the only way I can hate her. I replay her sins over and over, each time making them more unforgivable than the last. It takes a lot of work to hate her but I’ve spent a lifetime practicing.  

Weeks pass and turn into months. I’m in and out of the hospital with pneumonia.  The recovery is slow. Out of necessity, I’ve pushed the memories back down deep but still they refuse to stay silent.  Images float in and out of focus and reminders of forgotten sounds and smells appear uninvited.  I remember coming home from school the day of tires grinding gravel and seeing the driveway full of strange automobiles. Our step-father, the Admiral, owned an auto repair shop, so it wasn’t unusual to find a strange car in the driveway. He sold our nice cars and drove home the old clunkers he was fixing. In the winter our cars had no heat, in the summer they had bad radiators.  All last year he drove a car with a cock-eyed headlight that he never got around to fixing. But the Admiral’s car hadn’t been in our driveway for a month, not since Kitty told about his nighttime visits to her room. Not since I vouched for her story. Not since our Mom told all his relatives and all our friends and everyone at school what our stepfather was doing to us while she worked nights as a waitress. Now everyone knew our secrets and looked at us differently. Either they avoided us because they believed us and thought we must have invited it or avoided us because they didn’t and thought we were pathological liars. Either way, school hallways cleared as we approached and lunchroom seats became scarce. We were each other’s only friends now.

That day there were three cars in the driveway, two old clunkers and a brand new shiny black Buick. The Buick looked like the funeral directors car. Inside Kitty and I found a living room full of people. Our step-father was there along with our Mother, half-a-sister Rayleen was hovering nearby and a strange man stood in the middle of the room. It was a 1966 version of an intervention. We were told to sit down. Then the strange man approached and said, “Hello girls, I’m Reverend Wright, pastor of the Church of … something or other, I didn’t hear what. Kitty and I sat close together holding each other’s hands very, very tight. The Right Reverend continued, “Girls do you know how God feels about liars? About bearing false witness?” After that he continued to tell us about hell fire and damnation and how we could burn eternally in the pit of Hell if we continued to tell the stories about the Admiral’s nighttime activities. We were told that the Admiral would be moving back in and he was the boss at night while our mother was at work. We were shell-shocked. We sat with our heads bowed praying for divine intervention or at least for a friendly nod from our Mother but neither came. The half-a-sister grinned and popped her chewing gum. The next thing we knew Admiral left to pack his suitcases and begin moving back in.

Mom dressed for her dinner shift at the restaurant. Before she left she took me upstairs to one of the small bedrooms. She sat down on the bed with me told me that Kitty and I should sleep together in that room and to be sure to lock the door and push the dresser in front of it. She told me to look after Kitty.  I was confused.  If she didn’t believe us then why did she want us to lock the door? If she did believe us, why was she letting the demon back in?  I didn’t ask her those questions, I never asked those questions; I just did what she told me.  Later that night, Kitty and I crawled into the bed together and waited like the victims in a horror movie for the flash of headlights and the sound of his tires on gravel.

The next day Kitty moved into the yellow bedroom at the top of the stairs with lots of windows. That bedroom had a cubby instead of a closet. It was only three feet high but it was a good nine feet deep. If you curled up at the back, the Admiral couldn’t reach you and you were safe. Kitty never gave me another chance to fail her. She slept in that cubby till we moved out of that house. As for me, I’d try to stay awake until my Mother got home. It never worked and I learned of the Admirals brutality and his anger myself. It took forty years to remember those nightly visits by the Admiral and the pain he inflicted on me. What happened to Kitty took even longer. I guess pain is easier to face than guilt.

A few days later, on the way home from school I stopped by St Joe’s Catholic Church to ask God why he sent the Right Reverend to our house. I wanted to know if the Right Reverend spoke for him and what he told my Mother.   I wanted to know why wasn’t answering me.  I continued this daily ritual for months, praying for salvation. On one of my visits, I told the priest during confession about the Admirals nightly rapes. I told him that we told our Mother. I told him about the Right Reverend. I asked if God would let me into Heaven if I killed myself.  He told me he would not. I asked if I could kill my step-father and he said I could not.  He said I could defend myself and if my stepfather killed me that would be alright. That same night I put on knife under my pillow and waited to become a martyr, but I never got the chance to use it. The Admiral stopped coming home. He’d found another waitress with young girls to groom. Maybe a smart one like me that he could reward with quarters for report card “A”’s and maybe an adorable one like Kitty that he could tease. Maybe they’d think they were just like the television families for a few years, till the nighttime visits started.

We left him and all those memories behind in the big white house with the wallpapered bedrooms and the gravel driveway. I let the wounds scar over and forgot those nights. I told myself that what I didn’t remember didn’t actually happen and couldn’t hurt me. For decades I held my hands to my ears to drown out the sound and shoved the memories down deep inside. I have constructed a reality that allowed me to remain the “good sister, the good daughter”. And now that I remember more, this mask that I’ve created for myself as the eternal victim, the long-suffering good sister, morphs into a monster. Kitty and I have been replaying this night our entire lives. It’s at the core of our pain. Not just the violence of the Admiral’s attack but the betrayal of a sister who turned away. My greatest sin was never acknowledging her pain.

Have you ever thought “If only could go back in time and change one thing”? If I could go back, I’d open my eyes and be brave and be a better sister. Not out of some selfless sense of sisterly love but because I never recovered from the losing Kitty’s friendship. I could have defended her. I could have tackled him from behind and given him a bloody nose. I could have grabbed his arm, hit him with something or kicked him. We could have run out the door. I could have called my Mother. I could have yelled and yelled and yelled till someone listened. But I shut my eyes. I always shut my eyes.  That’s what Kitty didn’t know, I always shut my eyes and pretend it didn’t happen just like I’ve done since I was six years old.

I may never know the whole truth; my childhood is fractured and broken in bits. But I know that this version slides together like the last turn of a Rubik’s cube. It clicks into place, the Chinese puzzle box opens, and maybe it will finally set Kitty free.

I am sorry little sister. You are not to blame; it’s not your fault. I failed you.