We planted marigolds and raked leaves, Jocko beaming at me as if he needed my help. And I felt important, forgetting that there was anyone else in the world other than him. When the doorbell rang, I dashed inside to answer it without thinking and found myself standing in near nakedness before my would-be friend and her father. She awkwardly stammered something about bringing her new set of jacks and I, without a moment’s hesitation, told her to leave. When they stepped away bewildered, I closed the door, then leaned my forehead on it, listening to the sound of their car driving away, feeling profoundly alone and numbed with shame.
And always, always I was called.
I watch my feet as they travel the length of his back. Little steps, baby steps, toe to heel. I want to look up… look up to the window where I can see the tree. The tree I love to touch. I can see my hand against the tree, gliding across its ragged bark skin. But I must watch my feet. I don’t want to slide off his back. I want to do a good job. I’m glad he’s on his stomach. Maybe that will be all. I wonder if he’s asleep and I’m alone here. I’d rather be alone. But no, he moves, begins to turn over, careful to hold the sheet, the sheet that once covered my mother too. He lays it loosely across his waist with a sigh. “Keep going, Doodle.”
I watch my feet, careful little feet, my feet, not his, mine! I stay high on his chest but he puts his face under my nightgown. I don’t pull it back. I can’t. He watches his own hands as they slide up my legs and my bare body, gliding across everything that is girl of me, not invading, savoring, and I want away. I want away. He murmurs directions. “Down.” I’m stepping on his stomach. “Down.” I’m on the edge of the sheet. “Down.” I see what he wants me to walk on. I don’t want to. I look up through the window to the moving leaves outside. “Down,” he crackles. I walk carefully, keeping the man of him between my little-girl feet.
I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be alone. But I was there. Constantly, endlessly, there. And as I grew, the game grew too. He started calling me when my mother wasn’t at home, often in the middle of the day, no longer looking for my feet to soothe his morning-stiff back.
When I was twelve or so I would lie awake in my bed, not because Christmas was near or the following day offered something special, but because I was terrified. My sleeping sister was so close, but I couldn’t reach for her, or call her name. I’d lie in the dark with my heart pounding, listening to the oleanders smack against the windows, waiting for the sound of a window sliding open. I waited and when the wind’s tapping never altered, I was sure that whatever was lurking out there was already inside—and was waiting too. Waiting for the right moment. I pulled the blankets to my chin, feeling something getting closer, ducking under the covers before the icy hand could grip my neck. I was sure if I jumped from the bed in a mad dash to get my mother, the thing would grab my ankle and drag me under—under the bed, I guess, or just under altogether. I wanted to call Baa but couldn’t make my mouth move. Call her, call her now, call her, a voice inside my head kept demanding. Sometimes I actually did manage to call softly, “Baa. Baa… Please hear me.” Too soft. Call her again. “Baa!”
Every once in a while, she came. Not often. Usually Jocko’s voice bellowed from somewhere—under the bed, I presume—“Go to sleep. Your mother’s busy.” Mostly I lay with the blankets under my nose, stiff with fear, listening and waiting for something I was afraid of. The thing that I was sure would get me.
And then I am not as young as I had been. I am twelve and then thirteen, almost fourteen—and I knew. I knew. I felt both a child, helpless, and not a child. Powerful. This was power. And I owned it. But I wanted to be a child—and yet.
I’m naked. How did I get naked? Did I do that? Did he? He pulled the plastic bags off the dry cleaning that hung in the closet with the sliding doors, the sliding doors with big mirrors on them. He wraps the plastic bags around me—just so. Through my legs, around my chest. He lays me down on the white shag carpeting in the big bathroom and gets into the adjacent shower.
“Okay, Doodle, let me see. Move.”
The merengue. I am learning to do the merengue. The dance he showed me one night in the den with everyone watching as he instructed. I practiced in the den and now I’m practicing here.
“Come on, let me see.”
I push my face down into the carpet that smells of dust, trying hard to thrust my butt high in the air and down and side to side. I want to be good, but more than anything I want it to be over. And some part of me feels I’m in danger. I hold my face deep in the shag. Hide in the carpet. Not to be at all anymore—and yet. And yet…
This man’s focus is totally on me; at this moment, I’ve won him. I am flypaper, the sweet sticky temptation, and he’s caught. A tiny sliver inside me starts to stir, feels powerful. I am powerful. No… no. I want to be a child.
And then he slides from the shower, wet and erect and I don’t know how he ever gets that thing in his pants, since I never see it in any other condition. He gently picks me up and sets me on the bathroom counter. I sit on the cold tile surrounded by mirrors, me in my Saran-wrap dress. He kisses me, not any different than other times. And yet it’s different, it’s different. Many times, he would playfully try to push his tongue into my mouth. I would always clamp my teeth closed. I’d never been kissed by anyone and didn’t know what would happen if my teeth weren’t clamped shut.
“Open your mouth,” he breathes.
I don’t.
He sets his penis, as muscular as the rest of him, between my legs and pulls my littleness toward him… and it.
He loved me enough not to invade me. He never invaded me. In all the many times. Not really. It would have been one thing if he had held me down and raped me, hurt me. Made me bleed. But he didn’t. Was that love? Was that because he loved me?
5
What Goes Up