The Unknowns (16 page)

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.

She’s unbuttoning my shirt. This is a crucial bit of data. I start unbuttoning hers, and then her bra is off, and I run my hand over her breasts, which are small and pretty, and all I can see is her father doing the same thing, and he’s so much bigger than her, and he probably loves her, but he loves her the wrong way. And she’s kicking off her jeans with this gorgeous little writhe of her hips. She’s beautiful. I want to keep her safe. Our chests are pressed up against each other and the contact feels strange and intense, the way it always does the first time and then never does again. She’s reaching down and undoing my pants, and everything’s starting to speed up, and now we’re fucking, and in my head I am me and her dad and her nine-year-old self all at once. It’s awful. Fortunately, she can’t tell, and she seems to enjoy it.

I’m roused by the throbbing and rattling of my cell phone on the nightstand. Maya doesn’t move, but I don’t know if she’s a deep sleeper or if she’s strategically pretending. The phone’s screen says
MOM
. The words
I love you, Mom
did not enter my head once last night. I answer the phone and slip out into the living room in my underwear. When I get there, my mom is already talking.

“Come home for my birthday, Eric,” she says. “I need you here. I’m lonely, and it isn’t working out with Wade.” The sound carries in here, so my end of the conversation consists largely of murmured
Mmm
s and
Uh-huh
s. “It’s not like my standards are so unrealistically high. I’ve given up on looks entirely at this point. I’ll go on a date with the ones who don’t put a photo up on the website, that’s how ready I am to settle. But Wade—in his first email he said he runs his own business, doing digital photo printing or something. Turns out
he makes fake IDs for the kids at the high school. A real prize, I’ll tell you. It’s going to take me forever to get my profile back up there again! You remember, we spent hours on that profile, making sure all the descriptions of me were good.”

I do remember this project, as you’d remember a severe bout of food poisoning. “You didn’t just deactivate it?” I say, leaping, as I so often do with my mom, to the single least important point. “You actually deleted it?”

“Eric, I’m forty-nine years old,” she says. “I don’t know the difference. And plus, yes, I deleted it. That was the arrangement Wade and I had, to take down our profiles. And now my birthday is coming up, and he’s not going to be there, so it’s going to be just Stacey and Victoria from work, and I told Stacey you were coming.”

I do something that is either stalling or acquiescing and get off the phone. Maya, sprawled like a starfish across the center left of the bed, doesn’t stir. I slide in next to her and lie awake for a long time, until eventually I find myself at a party whose guest list comprises me and two dozen naked women. The room is small, and we are dancing in close proximity, and while dancing the women rub against me and against one another.

We cut to a businessman in a limousine. The businessman is hungry: he requests some hamburgers, which appear on his lap in a McDonald’s bag. A disembodied voice sings the McDonald’s jingle, “You Deserve a Break Today.” I am annoyed that the party has been interrupted by advertising, but even asleep I am aware that the dream’s lavish production values—all those naked women!—have to be subsidized somehow.

MR. NAYLOR HELD UP
a test tube containing a vivid blue solution of copper sulfate. I leaned toward Danny Keach, sitting to my right, and in a low parody of Naylor’s orotund Southern voice said, “I’ve filled this test tube with a sample of my urine.” Halfway through the sentence I became terrified that Danny would think I meant that it was
my
urine. But he laughed hard enough to cause a small disturbance—he was an enthusiastic laugher—and I had my first experience of social triumph since Tara Pulowski confessed her woes to me two years earlier.

I wouldn’t have had the courage to attempt such a joke until recently. By the middle of junior year a self-conscious maturity had begun to settle on the class of 1996, and my classmates had begun to treat me with neglect rather than contempt. We aspired to adulthood now, and outright cruelty usually sounded juvenile. My ninth-grade notebook was mentioned rarely, almost nostalgically, as though anything that had happened a full two years ago was the work of a younger self for whom I couldn’t be held accountable. Who knows by what social contagion, what hormonal surge or slump, these transformations happen?

At the end of class I wandered alongside Danny as he met his friends Cindy and Paul at a water fountain on the second floor. As
far as I could tell they hadn’t expressly planned to meet, but their habits had grown entwined around one another’s, and they tended to intersect at certain interstitial points in the day. We all continued down the hall to the student lounge, and I waited for one of them to say,
Uh, are you going somewhere, or are you just following us
? but it didn’t happen. Cindy even interrupted a story about her English teacher’s idiocy to fill in the background for me, an accommodation for which I was pathetically grateful.

The student lounge comprised some beat-up furniture in the stump of a hallway, as though someone had said,
Let’s just dump it all there and call it the student lounge
. By custom it was reserved for juniors and seniors, but the seniors had off-campus privileges and hung out at Carl’s Jr. Danny and Cindy and Paul took the couch, Cindy on Danny’s lap. I was perched on one arm of the armchair, trying to look comfortable. The three of them were in the broad middle of MLK’s social hierarchy, neither popular nor picked on, and the idea of spending a free period with them would not long ago have seemed as realistic as playing professional basketball.

“The platypus is the coolest animal in the world,” Paul was saying. “Because it doesn’t fit into all the, you know, the
categories
.” Paul had a long, narrow face on which he wore wire-rimmed glasses that made him look prematurely serious.

“What are you talking about?” Cindy asked him.

“You know, it’s like, it’s not a mammal—” Paul began.

“There’s a million things that aren’t mammals,” Danny said. “Birds aren’t mammals. You’re not talking about how birds are so rad.” I wasn’t sure if Danny was being serious or if he just couldn’t be bothered to sit through an explanation.

“I know what you mean,” I said to Paul. Everyone ignored me.

“I’m not a mammal,” Danny said. “Am I the coolest of all the animals?”

“Are too a mammal,” said Cindy, reaching up to tweak his nipple
through his T-shirt, making him cry out. Cindy was Danny’s girlfriend. She was less pretty than he was—her smiley features seemed lost in her chubby face—but she wore jeans and sneakers every day, and she never wanted to do anything besides hang out with Danny and his best friend. I had noted these qualities abstractly: having a girlfriend of my own seemed a ludicrous ambition. You need friends to get a girlfriend, especially in high school, where everyone’s social life is on display.