American Monsters (4 page)

You suspect that your husband has been molesting your daughter. She’s seventeen now and you aren’t sure how long this has been going on. To make matters worse, you have no idea why you didn’t notice it sooner.

Tonight at dinner he kept touching her face, and she looked tormented and disgusted as she shrunk away from his touch. It can’t possibly be any other thing. You pluck up the courage to ask him what is going on. You screw up though: you get all hysterical and shrieky, which he hates, and so with a condescending smile he pats you on the shoulder saying nothing. He smiles that disconcerting smile that makes him look like a stranger, someone terrifying you’ve never seen before. You wonder where the man you married has hidden. He goes off for his after dinner cognac and cigar, leaving your daughter with silent tears, and you with a heart full of fearful questions.

What do you do? Economically you depend on him, and you have always trusted him. Where did you even get this idea from anyway? It’s probably nothing, you know. Lana is a beautiful girl, maybe you are just confused and reading too much into her father’s affections. But the tears... the disgust on her face. No, something is wrong. You need to call someone... but whom? This is not a big town, what will people say? It gives you shivers to think about your family being the brunt of gossip, especially if it is the talk that goes on about inappropriate relations between a father and his daughter. When does he do it? Has he been leaving the room at night? Have you ever even noticed? Oh God, this is too much.

You brush your hair before bed, staring at your face in the vanity mirror. Nothing is the same. These wrinkles, this worry and fear in your eyes, you never had these before. Your hair too. It’s limp and the curls no way near as bouncy as they were in your youth. Like your breasts. You think about Lana’s breasts, so full and unfettered by all these years of gravity.

Bob stands behind you and hands you your nighttime glass of milk. Something is different tonight: He has a biting intensity in his eyes. He watches you carefully as you drain the glass, doesn’t leave until you do. Even putting his hand up to the glass to make sure you drink each drop. Instinctively, you hand the glass back to him instead of placing on the table. He seems to be waiting for something. You lie down.

There is a funny taste in your mouth. Bitter and medicinal. You can barely keep your eyes open, so tired, all of a sudden, so, so tired. You close your eyes and the spiked milk knocks you unconscious.

You begin dreaming that something is not right. You watch a man walk up a familiar flight of stairs. He feels you watching and turns to look. He sees no one. You see your husband. He continues his ascent. He get
s to the door and opens it. You see Lana in bed. She’s awake, her eyes are wide with fear.

― No. Please no. Not tonight. Just please, leave me alone.

He says nothing to her. Moves to sit on her bed. She shrieks and moves as far away from him as possible.

―
Please daddy, please stop. Please stop doing this to me.

― Now honey, don’t cry. I’m not trying to hurt you, I just love you so much. Can’t you let me show you how much I love you? Don’t you love your daddy? Don’t you want to be a good girl?

― Daddy, no.

Lana sobs.

― Please, daddy. I won’t tell anyone, please just stop.

― Stop acting like this, right now. You don’t want daddy to get mad, do you? We know what happens when daddy gets mad, don’t we?

Lana begins whimpering, just as do you in your comatose sleep. You feel like vomiting, but you know if you do, you could choke. You need to watch, see if there is something you can do to help her. And at least now you have no more questions. Now you know.

He unbuttons his shirt silently. Folds it and places on a stool near the bed. He begins to take off his pants.

― I heard around town talk of you running around with boyfriends. Not just one boyfriend, but a few of them.

Lana whimpers and shakes her head. He’s told her before if anyone else touched her, he would kill her.

― Now, Lana, I’m going to trust you on this, but if I hear that again I’m going to cut your tongue out, you hear me? Cut it right out of your head. You’re mine, do you understand? You are mine. Lie down and stop crying.

Back in your bedroom your eyelids flutter. You cannot even begin to believe what you are seeing. The fury is exponentially increasing in your body and spirit. You are shaking, as if wracked with electric seizures. You see him climbing on top of your daughter, your daughter!

Your silent scream begins. The scream begins in your toes and moves all the way through your body until it reaches your brain and in a burst of energy that scream of rage and hopelessness surges into his head. He puts his hands to his temples and falls backwards. Lana gathers the sheets, crying, and covers herself with them. He falls to the floor, writhing and moaning, while you continue your breathless scream. He stops moving. You see a trickle of blood from his right ear. It pools on the floor.

Lana is shaking. She has no idea what has just happened. Nor does she have any idea of how many times her father has come to her room. She is trying not to think about it. She wonders if he’s dead. She wonders if she did it. She wonders if it is over.

You watch your beautiful daughter in her confusion. She gets up out of bed and quickly dresses, crouched on the floor where she can’t see him and vice versa. She begins crying again. There is a railroad of scratches along her arms where she has been raking her nails over and over. So that’s why she’s only been wearing long sleeves, you think.

She goes into the bathroom and begins running a bath. She goes through the medicine cabinet, takes out a packet of her father’s razor inserts and places one by the bathtub. You watch your daughter, your only baby, the one you haven’t truly seen until this day, as she prepares to kill herself. She is still crying.

NO!, you scream. HONEY, I LOVE YOU, DON’T DO THIS.

She sits on the toilet waiting for the water to fill up. You wish you knew what you had done to her father, you wish you could call on it again, you want to save her, God damn your body, God damn your husband.

Lana climbs into the bathtub, tears streaming, and picks up the razor. In your dream you reach your arms out to her: they are so long, stretching through love and space, but still they are not long enough to reach her. You graze her shoulder as her body slumps over, and the tub fills with red.

You wake up in the morning, feeling oddly refreshed from your long sleep. Even though your dreams were nightmares, they are over. You look over to Bob’s side of the bed, and see he’s not there. An icicle of fear lodges itself in your throat. You begin shivering. You walk upstairs to Lana’s room. You find Bob, where you left him in your dream last night, the pool of ear blood on the floor.

― LANA!!!, you scream and scream as you run to the bathroom. The door is locked. You throw yourself at it until the lock gives, you feel a detached pain where several ribs and a clavicle just broke. There is your baby, in the bathtub. The razor is on the floor having tumbled from her bloody fingers. You pull her from the water and continue screaming until the neighbors call the police and send an ambulance over.

Yesterday you were a prepubescent boy. Today you wake up with your pajam
a bottoms covered in a sticky white substance you had never seen or felt before. Somehow, everything inside you has changed, although it’s not quite clear how or why.

You grudgingly discuss this with your father, and he, equally grudging, gives you a video to watch that is supposed to make you aware of birds and bees, or something. You don’t really know how birds and bees connect to the white stuff, unless it comes from them, but to not feel stupid, you nod your head with him as if you already know well what he’s talking about.

Your dad lets you move one of the VCR’s into your room to watch the tape, Debbie Does Dallas. You wonder, What can someone do to Dallas? while staring at the young blond girl on the cover. This is all so confusing.

It becomes even more confusing when the tape begins and what you assume must be sex, is initiated. You watch transfixed. You are puzzled at the opening shower scene where two cheerleaders have assorted sex with three football players in the girls locker room. Is that what happens in locker rooms? It must or else they would have done this business somewhere else. You wonder if it looks like that in real life. You begin to wonder what it feels like. You are certainly glad to be male for the sight of the girls being impaled like that...Yuck. You wonder if it hurts. You wouldn’t like anyone sticking anything in you. Injections come to mind. But, still, fascinated, you continue to watch, and think, and plan.

After the video you’ve figured out the white stuff comes from your penis: The how and why are still not completely clear, but it has something to do with pleasure and that strange space in a woman. You decide to check out the girls’ locker room the next day. Maybe you could join in or something if that really goes on. After a bit of consideration you decide that you would indeed like to participate, just to see what it’s like. If it’s birds and bees then it’s just natural. Right?

You have changed. You no longer feel comfortable with your mother and sister at the dinner table. You can’t quite meet their eyes. When your sister accidentally bumps into you on your way to the bathroom your heart just about stops from fear and guilt. You feel you are on the edge of a cliff and somehow jumping will not hurt you, but you just need a little push to the next level. That little push to become a man. You go to bed and wake up with that stuff on you again.

All day at school you are anxious. You are waiting for time to break away and sneak into the girl’s locker room. Sitting in class, you realize the only time you will have is at lunch, and you are just hoping (praying) that whatever activities go on in there will still be taking place when you get there.

Your heart is pounding as you stand at the door. You listen for voices. There is nothing too audible. There are no moans, but you do hear the shower going. You smile to yourself, It’s going to be true, you think and open the door. The locker looks surprisingly similar to Debbie’s, except that it appears to be empty. Dammit, you think, relishing the cuss word. The shower is running and you enter the large room towards the sound of water and the billows of steam. Your heart pounds. This is it, this is it, you think excitedly. This is where it will happen! Your crotch swells in anticipation, uncomfortably pressing against the zipper of your jeans. You unzip your trousers, the pressure eases and you take a moment to admire the length of yourself.

You peer into the shower area and stare at the naked girl showering. Her back is to you, thank God, and it gives you some time to examine her body. She’s a little on the chunky side, but so were some of the girls in Debbie’s movie. She has longish brown hair, muscular arms. She begins to turn around. You see the sides of her breasts, your eyes want to travel further down but her face: Holy shit, it’s your sister! You are so stunned all you can do is stare at her. She’s finished her turn, runs her hands over her shampooey hair, opens her eyes and meets yours.

You have no idea what to do. It’s your sister naked. Oh my God, you are going to get in sooooo much trouble, she’s going to tell, she’s naked, she’ll turn you in, your parents, she’s naked, oh my God.

She looks as if she is about to scream so you slide your way over there. You are afraid to touch her (SHE’S NAKED!) but you cover her mouth. It’s too much to be this close to her. Quickly you grab her hair and shove her head into the wall. In the process you both slip and she hits her head on the shower dial. There is blood everywhere, it swirls past your soaked body down the drain. She moans. What have you done? You have to finish it, she’ll tell that you came in and looked at her naked, she’ll tell, she’s naked, you are going to be in so so so much trouble, you grab her hair again and smash her face into the floor. Once, twice, she’s still. You think she’s dead. She’ll never tell. No one will know that you saw.

 
No one will ever know.

You turn around to see a group of cheerleaders staring at you, in complete shock. You faint dead away.

The next thing you remember is waking up in juvenile hall. You don’t remember what happened, you know you don’t want to remember. And this becomes your life, this unremembering. You know horrible things happen to you that first night in juvie, you dream about them sometimes, but the image is disconnected. You can’t quite superimpose the horrors of your dreams onto the things that may have happened.

 
You have vague memories of your sister, something you did, or was that a dream too? You wonder if you’ll ever wake up. You kind of don’t want to wake up, so you keep taking your medicine. Sometimes you say things to get more pills. To help numb your body and your mind. Numb. That’s what works for you.

Time passes, but not to you really. You sometimes look at your fellow inmates and imagine what they would look like with kitchen knife gashes, with blood spurting from their wounds and their mouths. Sliding a knife into their bellies and feeling the warm blood pour out. You like this image. You imagine what their blood would feel like on your fingers.

The older boys come to you in the night, but like everything, you only remember bits and pieces. There is some pain, is it yours or theirs? You have painful dreams, but are they really dreams? You know they are hurtful, your sheets feature pools of blood and echoes of pain.

 
You take your pills and dream in crimson.

Years pass. You are 18, and according to the prison board you are no longer a threat to yourself or others. You will be released.

It is too difficult to distinguish between reality and the drugs, so you begin hiding them under your tongue, pretending to take them. You know you will have to pretend a lot once you are back in the world.

The lack of medication unlocks the self-censored portions of your memory. In Technicolor and Dolby Digital surround sound you remember the names and faces of the boys who visited you in the night. They impaled you. You were their Debbie.

It’s your first day out and you stop at a Kwik-Gas mart. You decide to wait in the women’s bathroom. You never did get that Debbie lay all those years ago. You wait for her. You’ve been waiting for her for years.

Debbie, Debbie, Debbie. Here she is and here you come.