Where Where You?

Where Were You?

I had never made a therapist cry before. 

“Inappropriate” was the word Judith, my therapist, used to describe my father. I sucked on that word as if it were a lifesaver, but not the good cherry kind. This was a yucky green one. I had always known something was not right in our family. I had witnessed the interactions of my friends with their families and relished sleepovers where I could feel like part of another family, even if just for a night. At one sleepover, my friend Laura’s father had yelled at her, but then apologized a few hours later, driving us to Chinatown late at night for a conciliatory meal. It was strangely wonderful and a favorite memory I bring out and savor from time to time.

In elementary school in the 1970s, I watched reruns of “The Munsters” and identified with Marilyn Munster, the niece who lived with the ghouls. She was a beauty by societal norms, but unattractive by the Munsters’ standards. Though Marilyn was not a very well developed character, I felt in tune with her outsiderness, living in a family of werewolves, vampires and other monsters. Marilyn was my soul sister, sometimes even more so than my real twin sister was.

 ***

It was hard to be honest with Judith in therapy. My grandma said, “When you speak of your troubles, people look down, not up.”  My family was like a skein of yarn knotted with secrets that we kept from others and ourselves. My older brother was not mentally ill — he was just lazy. That heroin rig I found in the bathroom and showed to my parents did not belong to my sister – it was her friend’s.  

 In time, I was able to play for Judith the cassette tape that ran in my head. 

“You’re a prude,” dad said when I told him to stop making comments about my budding breasts. 

“She wouldn’t even know what to do with him,” dad chuckled when mom did not want me alone in the apartment with my high school boyfriend. 

 (You think you’re) “Smart, smart, smart — but you don’t know anything. I would never take you on a bank robbery,” dad spat whenever I said anything that proved that

I did not have “street smarts” like he did. He was a scammer, putting scotch tape on counterfeit coins to use in parking meters, ditching his non-working car and reporting it stolen for the insurance, and sneaking into a second movie for the price of one ticket.

 ***

My parents, my twin sister and me, my older twin brothers, and our Cairn terrier occupied a two-bedroom apartment in a pre-war building in Brooklyn. Years of too many coats of paint meant that no door ever closed completely, not even the bathroom door. My sister and I stuffed socks in our bedroom door to help it close, but mom always told us to stop stuffing shmatas in the door.  Growing up in this household, I knew nothing about boundaries, but my body knew.  I kept guard constantly for perimeter breaches by my father.

Doorways featured in every one of my recurring childhood nightmares — like the one where I went to open the apartment door and a big, amorphous blob-man fell on top of me, smothering me. In another, little men would enter my bedroom, put me on a conveyor belt and handle me roughly while my mom and sister would be watching from the doorway, unable to hear my pleas for help. 

The truth is that in my day-mares, Dad’s eyes were always piercing my sister and me through the crack in our bedroom door. He made no bones about his constant surveillance and would say things like “You sleep with your butt in the air” to my sister.

“Stop dad! You’re lying,” we protested. 

Nevertheless, the next morning my sister awoke to find a Chiquita banana sticker placed on her butt cheek and a smirking dad at the breakfast table. 

 ***

I wish I could say it was not always this way, but it was. I buried a lot so that I could survive. My sister has an eidetic memory, well able to see things long after they happened. She has a catalog in her mind, an easily accessible collection of injustices, and dad and mom always said “That never happened.” when she brought out her memories. When I would tell my sister I could not remember what she described, she would shake her head and utter three words: “Where were you?”

I know what you are thinking. How was my mother complicit in all this? How did she not do anything? How did she not know? All I can say about that is that the science of gaslighting is serious business. Dad manipulated us all.

 ***

As a child, I had frequent nosebleeds. When I had my tonsils out in elementary school, the surgeon cauterized the inside of my nose, sealing blood vessels to stop the bleeding. But it did not stop.

Mom had a bad neck after being mugged. After that, dad did more than just leer through the door crack. He slithered into our beds many nights so that mom could “sleep better”. He reminisced years later that we used to fight over who would sleep with him. However, when I play the cassette for Judith, she hears me fighting with my sister over who had to sleep with him, our skinny little bodies unable to move under the weight of his legs wrapped around us. I would smash my nose into the wall trying to escape his breath on my neck, his greasy skin pressed against mine, leaving drops of blood on the wall and staining my nightgown

From then on, when my mom removed the long green pillows from the living room daybed my brothers slept on, she placed them on my bed to cushion the wall at night. Problem solved.

My sister ran away at fourteen to follow the Grateful Dead on tour. I can’t blame her. Two years later, it was my opportunity to run off to sleepaway college. Before she left on her real trip, my sister first took a bad acid trip. She was in our bedroom when, suddenly, the two drama clown masks hanging on the wall above my bed terrified her. Tragedy clown had a tear falling from one eye, its lower lip pushed out in a pout. Comedy clown had crescent moon eyes and dad’s grotesque smile – mocking, contemptuous, and smirking. I admit I could be projecting here, like the Ancient Greek actors did when wearing the masks to exaggerate emotions.

Whatever it was, my sister fled.

 ***

I thought going to college meant leaving my family, but I brought them all with me. I started therapy senior year and then tried psychoanalysis with Judith after college. It was the whole shebang – Judith sat behind me and I laid on a couch talking to the paintings on the wall in front of me.  During one session,  I heard her sobbing behind me and she confessed that hearing my story moved her deeply.  She taught me the vocabulary of abuse, but it was a long time before I could even utter that word.  Though it was not as comprehensive as my sister’s catalog, I explored my own catalog of memories, played my cassettes for Judith, and started the work.  

 ***

After a couple of years with Judith, I started seeing Linda. Linda was like a mother to me, only one who could see. Linda encouraged me to face my childhood clowns. I started by writing apology letters to myself from my father as practice. I was an FBI profiler, trying to understand his manipulation, his deception, his narcissism.  It helped some to read the apologies I wrote from him, but I wanted the real thing.  In my mid-20s, Dad took me to Chinatown.  We ate Lo Mein and shrimp with lobster sauce and at the end my dad had us do a dine and dash and leave without paying, which, as always, exhilarated him but embarrassed me.

Over the meal, we talked for the first time about my sister’s accusation some years earlier. She had been jailed briefly in Toms River being caught with heroin in her purse at the front gate of New Jersey’s Six Flags Great Adventure park. As part of her release, she had to enter a drug treatment program and attend family therapy. After a few sessions, she announced matter-of-factly to the family therapist that our father sexually abused her.

Dad said, “That’s not true. How could I abuse one daughter and not the other?” He then asked me directly if he had abused me.  All eyes on me, I choked.  I did not have the language yet to describe what happened.  I shook my head no. Just like my sister fled into the night years earlier, she fled again out of the room and out the door. We never returned to family therapy.

I was complicit with my father in my sister’s abuse, even though I, too, was abused.  I could not let this continue and gave him one last shot to make it right. I told my father over Chinese food that he did and said a lot of things that made me uncomfortable – made both my sister and me uncomfortable. He said neither of us could take a joke and that he was only teasing when he did and said those things. When he gave us “the business” by pinning us down on the floor and pressing his face and his prickly mustache all over our bodies, that was just tickling.  I guess I had my day in court and I did not get my closure then, or ever, but he did acknowledge that my sister and I may have been uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. 

My sister does not speak to me anymore and my parents are both dead. When my father was riddled with cancer, I remember helping my mom change his diaper days before he died. He was aware that I was doing it, and I could feel his humiliation at having his daughter wipe him like a baby. His defeat was a small victory for me.

Now, I listen to Leonard Cohen’s song, “Anthem” and it feels like he wrote it for me.  The chorus goes:

“Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in”

I am still confronting my brokenness, the crack in my door. To this day, I bolt awake screaming if anyone touches me while I am asleep. Sometimes I still find myself putting my arm behind me when I walk up stairs so no one can touch my rear.

Life is flawed, and while those eyes  peeking through my door terrorized me, that crack also let some light in. Wading through sewage is sometimes necessary before you can allow joy and hope to come in through the cracks. You’ll never know unless you try.