FUNNY UNCLE

[Some folks might be sensitive to a relationship that goes where it shouldn't. But then, that's kind of the point...]

“Just say the word,” Uncle Randall tells me, with all the weight of his judgeship behind him—but something stops me.

I know he has the power; I’m confident that he can help me put a certain creep behind bars, if he thinks I want him to. And as a budding prosecutor, of course I want him to. But something stops me. I mean, something besides asking my uncle to do—just for me—a quasi-legal thing.

Uncle Randall is what people winkingly call a “funny uncle.” But he’s also a very funny uncle in fact. He used to visit us three or four times a year, and during those visits we’d be in stitches. Uncle Randy, as we called him then, would walk on his hands, touch his nose to his chin, pretend to throw us into the creek or the campfire, sing a song about jumping on your toothbrush or your grandmother, and when otherwise uninspired simply make “that face,” the face that was only funny because it was him making it. He might have been a bit slimy, but I may also be reinventing him in the light of our later ‘association.’

It's this ‘association’ I guess I need to be talking about. Specifically, the association that makes him willing to do a quasi-legal thing for me twenty years later. Ugh, it’s like jumping into an ice bath. I don’t want to dramatize, or patheticize. Honestly. I simply want to understand why I’m unable to “just say the word” when the saying of it would remove a dangerous criminal from society and give my professional reputation a boost. 

Or maybe I’m trying to find out what that magic word is. To Uncle Randall, it’s “Go,” or “Sure, do it.” Easy enough to say—but I can’t. Besides, I keep feeling that the word he really needs from me is something deeper, more complex. “Forgive”— maybe that sort of word. Well, I can’t say that one either. 

Back when I turned thirteen—which is when we had the ‘association’—I was definitely not good with words. At least, not where Uncle Randall was concerned. He is the kind who uses words brilliantly, like a juggler (which is maybe how he ended up a judge), but doesn’t much hear other people’s words. He showed up the morning of my birthday and informed my mom that he wanted to treat me to a celebration dinner. And when Mom said she couldn’t go because she had a cold, my uncle said, “Hey, not you, Sis! No, I wanna take this little girl out and show her what a sophisticate she can be. We’ll have fun. She needs a break from mommy.”

So, out we went that evening, in a taxi. I wore a blue velvet dress with a white crocheted collar—sort of a little-girl dress, but it was all I had for this occasion. The velvet did have a nice soft strokey feel to it. We went to a restaurant that was more than a few notches up from any I’d been to before, and there’s no denying I was crazy for it. A man in a suit slithered my coat off my shoulders when we entered. A woman in a bosom-revealing dress brought my uncle an adult drink with an olive and me a Shirley Temple with a cherry. A waiter in black vest and crisp white shirt-cuffs approached me with his ten-inch pepper-grinder. And once we were alone, Uncle Randall murmured, “You should take sips of my martini when you can. Gin is a learned skill, which you may as well start now.” 

It is indeed a learned skill. But I have—or I had then—an inherent sense of adventure about things I shouldn’t do. I stole many sips of that martini and also the next one. The one after that, no; I was done sipping. But my uncle ended up fairly drunk, as even a kid could tell. By the time we were back in another taxi, he was lolling against the head-rest with loud—yes, funny—groans, “O-o-oh, your poor old uncle went and got himself shitfaced.” I told him it was okay, we’d be home pretty soon. Then he turned to look at me for a while, and he said, “Are you kidding? With this traffic? We’ll be an hour.”

I didn’t mind an hour. The taxi was a warm, purring place, and I was a tiny bit drunk myself, which I wouldn’t want Mom to see. I leaned my own head back, though it didn’t quite reach the head-rest. I remember I didn’t quite know what to do with my hands. Not that this is important, it’s just a thing I remember because pretty soon I didn’t know what to do with anything. I was suddenly feeling very awkward. It may have had to do with the way my uncle had looked at me when he said we’d be an hour. It was a gaze of thoughtful intent, struggling through an alcoholic glister. He was seeing me. I was not accustomed to being seen.

“No,” he said, turning away to stare out the window. “Bad boy. Bad.”

Everybody knows grownups are weird, and no one knows it better than thirteen-year-olds. Okay, Uncle Randall had had a bad thought—he’d said so himself. I couldn’t imagine what it was, I just knew he’d had one. And I figured he’d get over it. I looked out one window and he looked out the other. I heard him laugh, then sigh, then laugh more softly. Whatever it was, it didn’t involve me. I shoved my hands deep into my coat pockets and settled back to wait for the ride to be over…

“You cold?” he suddenly asked. I told him it was roasting hot in here.

He said he’d seen me put my hands in my pockets and therefore thought I might be cold. I said I was broiling.

He sighed some more. Then he said I was growing up so fast. “Almost a woman,” he said. 

I couldn’t think of any words to say back. I felt unconvinced, though up till that moment there was nothing I wanted more than to become a woman. To wear lipstick. To drive a car. To smoke a cigarette—and as if reading my mind, now Uncle Randall shook out a couple of Parliaments, one for each of us. “Don’t tell your mom, okay?” Of course I wouldn’t. We chuffed them down to the recessed filters, using the ashtrays by the door handles. Then we were done smoking.

Almost a woman? No, I was not. Not even from smoking a cigarette. 

Girls talk a lot about womanhood before they get there. They talk with enormous enthusiasm about all the grody or icky stuff, including why guys want to put their hand on your leg. I mention this because that was exactly what my uncle had suddenly done. I tried to believe it was by accident, but he made it plain it was on purpose, by keeping it there, rubbing it softly up and down my thigh, on the velvet—up and down, up and down—and then unexpectedly slipping it under my skirt. At that point, I thought I had better say something.

This was when I found out I had trouble with words, at least where Uncle Randall was concerned. It’s not that I didn’t know the words—words like STOP, or NO. It was the overwhelming fact that he was a grownup, and my uncle, to boot. I’d have felt ridiculous telling him to stop what he was doing, or even to admit that I had noticed he was doing it. I kept my legs close-clamped, my hands in my pockets, my eyes straight ahead through the faraway windshield. 

This in no way discouraged my uncle. In disbelief I felt his fingertips scrabbling under the elastic of my underpants. And I knew then that there was a thing happening, one of those things that my little gang of girls talked about with whispered giggles. Usually it had already happened, to some girl we all disrespected, like Gloria Barns. This time, it was happening right now, to me. But I felt no inclination to giggle, because it wasn’t funny at all. It was an extremely uncomfortable social situation I was not prepared to handle, and I didn’t know how far it could go before I absolutely had to do something about it. I simply had no words. None! The longer I waited, the more impossible I found it to say something.

“Did it surprise you,” my uncle breathed into my ear, “when you started growing hair down here? I mean, did you know it was coming, or did you just look down one day and say I’ll be darned?” 

“I knew,” I admitted, as if under cross-examination. But good lord, why did I answer at all? Or why couldn’t I have said, “None of your stupid beeswax,” which is what I wanted to say. Wrong words are worse than no words. How could I be sitting in a taxi letting my uncle finger his way into my privatest of privacies while discussing my hair-down-there? The weirdness made my flesh crawl but also tied my tongue.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t do anything bad to you. I just want to feel you a little bit. It’s like drinking a martini, right? There’s skills you need to learn.” While he said that, he was busy worming farther down my pants, easing my thighs apart, and getting to what the boys used to call ‘home base,’ all at once, with a single hand. He had a learned skill for sure. And I absolutely, positively had to come up with some words now.

“Please quit that,” I managed at last between my teeth.

“I don’t want to,” he answered, nuzzling my shoulder. “You don’t want me to, either.”

“I do want you to.”

“No you don’t.”

“How do you know what I want?”

“I just know,” he said with a laugh. “You never in your short little life felt anything this good.”

“Yes I did.”

“When?” He was moving the hand all around, as if he knew me in great detail. “When you did it to yourself?”

“I never did it to myself, “I retorted indignantly. 

But I lied. It was the night before that I did do it to myself—giving me the surprise of a lifetime, by the way: I wonder what will happen if I keep going round and round like this, because I really really want to, because I feel like I AAAAAAA what on earth is happening to me??

I tried again, “Please stop.”

“Okie-dokie,” he said. But he didn’t stop. 

Instead, he slowed down. That scared me, because it was more—purposeful, I should say. It could be like last night. What if the surprise came again and he knew about it? That would be beyond mortifying. But I didn’t see how I could stop it, because the harder I tried to send it away, the feeling, the more insistent it became, humming like an approaching cloud of bees, right now, all over me, oh no, OH NO, OH NOOOO

“See?” said my uncle, making a show of pulling the blue velvet back down and patting it. Like a diaper. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Once again, I was without words. I couldn’t say either yes or no. Yes it was so bad? He knew better. No it wasn’t so bad? I could not tell him it wasn’t so bad. 

Why not? It wasn’t so bad. It was actually fantastically good, in a morbid, secretive sort of way. The part that was bad was a thing I had yet to learn.

But if I didn’t know, Uncle Randall did. He was very quiet for the rest of the trip, and he didn’t walk me to the door. Good, I didn’t want him to. I didn’t ever want to look at him again. I heard his voice shout from inside the taxi, “Tell your mom I said you’re a good kid.”  The taxi drove away, and the next day my funny uncle went back to wherever he lived. Ohio, I think. 

When my mom met me in the hall and asked if I’d had a good time, I said, “No.”

“No?” She gave me a piercing look.

“No. I was bored.”

“Oh well,” she smiled. “There’s worse things than boredom. I suppose he made you drink some gin and smoke a cigarette?” 

What, she knew he would do that? What else did she know? I didn’t answer her; I couldn’t, of course, think of the right words in time. Who could have?

That night, probably by coincidence, I had my first period. This may be a gratuitous detail, but I'm pretty sure it isn't.

Now, whether or not I should have felt shame over this business with my funny uncle, the fact is that I did. There was a deep untruth going on. Did he hurt me? No. Did he—as I now know to say, as a prosecutor—penetrate me? No. Did he leave some lasting scar? No…

No, but yes. I was profoundly a fool. He made me a fool, and he made me a liar. He gave me a secret I could never share with anyone, most importantly my little gang of girls. Maybe this was a very small matter, one I should have been able to laugh off before the week was out. But Uncle Randall didn’t laugh it off. He made no more trips to visit us, except for my wedding, when he made a brief, formal appearance and gave me a check for $1,000 (which admittedly I accepted). So he, too, knew something was wrong. Yet what was the exact wrong? There are civilized cultures all over the world where uncles and aunties take on the responsibility of introducing their young relatives to the mysteries of sex, and no one seems to suffer from it. Why can I not say merrily, “Well, that was how I got introduced!”

Because it wasn’t the mysteries of sex I was introduced to. It was the mysteries of inter-human relationships, under whose influences we learn who we can trust, who we can’t—and whether we will ever truly trust anyone at all, including our future husbands. Whether it’s maybe ourselves we can’t trust. These are the things we’re supposed to learn from our grownups, who we trust to have our back.

Anyhow, Judge Randall has phoned me with a generous offer. Yes, I’ve been embroiled in a difficult court case, and there’s an issue of whether a certain critical piece of evidence can legally be declared admissible. Without getting into details, which I can’t air anyway, let me just say that Uncle Randy, evidently following the case from a distance, has grasped my predicament and promises to pull the necessary string, or turn the necessary blind eye, at some small risk to himself…

Because he thinks he owes me one. And if he thinks so, it must be true. He inflicted an invisible consequence on me, and while we may never know what it was, we agree it happened. He took something from me. Now, he wants to repay me with a favor which, if accepted, will amount to my saying bygones are bygones. He knows as well as I do that the word he really wants to hear, deep down, is “forgive.” But I can’t. Good grief, that isn’t even morally acceptable. He made me implicit in a lie. So, another lie will fix it? I don't know--I don't know--I don't know. Who can I even ask? 

“Just say the word,” Uncle Randall tells me, with all the weight of his judgeship behind him—but something stops me.