When I was eight, my brother Michael Jr. was born, and then there were three of us in all the pictures, often huddled together, or holding hands as we stared into the camera.
As much as I wrote, I lost myself in books even more. I read everything I could get my hands on. My favorite books were the Little House on the Prairie books. I loved the idea that Laura Ingalls, an ordinary girl from the plains, could live an ordinary extraordinary life in a time so different from mine. I loved all the details in the books—Pa bringing home delectable oranges, making candy in the snow with maple syrup, the bond shared by the Ingalls sisters, Laura being called half-pint. As the Ingalls girls grew up, I loved Laura’s rivalry with Nellie Oleson and her courtship with Almanzo Wilder, who would eventually become her husband. I was breathless when I read about the first years of their marriage as homesteaders, enduring the trials of farming and raising their daughter, Rose. I wanted that kind of steady, true love for myself, and I wanted a relationship where I could be independent but loved and looked after at the same time.
When I moved on from Little House on the Prairie, I read everything by Judy Blume. I mostly learned about sex from her novel Forever . . . , and for many years, I assumed that all men called their dicks “Ralph.” I read books about adventurous girls mining for gold in California and surviving the trials and tribulations of the wagon trail. I became intensely obsessed with the loving rivalry of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield in the idyllic California town of Sweet Valley. I read Clan of the Cave Bear and learned that sex could be far more interesting than the youthful fumblings of Katherine and Michael in Forever . . . had indicated. I read and read and read. My imagination expanded infinitely.
There are countless pictures of me wearing skirts and dresses, pictures where I am a girly girl with long, done-up hair, jewelry, doing the whole pretty-princess thing. I long thought I was a tomboy because I was the only girl in my family. Sometimes we try to convince ourselves of things that are not true, reframing the past to better explain the present. When I look at these pictures, it is quite clear that while I enjoyed roughhousing and playing in dirt with my brothers and such, I wasn’t entirely a tomboy, not really.
I played with G.I. Joe action figures and built forts in the empty lot next to our home and caroused in the woods on the edge of our neighborhood because my brothers were my playmates. Most of the time, my brothers were my best friends besides the ones I found in books. The three of us got along well, except when we bickered, and oh, we could bicker, particularly my brother Joel and me. We bickered about everything and nothing and then we made up and made trouble. The baby, Michael Jr., was so much younger that he was, generally, a willing accomplice to our shenanigans. When he wasn’t our accomplice, he was the target of petty cruelties, like when we sent him down the basement stairs in a laundry basket or tormented him with a plastic spider or, worst of all, ignored his plaintive desire to play with us. Somehow, through it all, he adored us, and Joel and I basked in the glow of his adoration.
These pictures from the photo albums of my childhood are artifacts of a time when I was happy and whole. They are evidence that, once, I was pretty and sometimes sweet. Beneath what you see now, there is still a pretty girl who loves pretty-girl things.
In these pictures, I get older. I smile less. I am still pretty. When I am twelve, I stop wearing skirts or most jewelry or doing anything with my hair, instead wearing it back in a tight bun or ponytail. I am still pretty. A few years after that, I will cut most of my hair off and start wearing oversized men’s clothing. I am less pretty. In these pictures I stare at the camera. I look hollow. I am hollow.
11
I don’t know how to talk about rape and sexual violence when it comes to my own story. It is easier to say, “Something terrible happened.”
Something terrible happened. That something terrible broke me. I wish I could leave it at that, but this is a memoir of my body so I need to tell you what happened to my body. I was young and I took my body for granted and then I learned about the terrible things that could happen to a girl body and everything changed.
Something terrible happened, and I wish I could leave it at that because as a writer who is also a woman, I don’t want to be defined by the worst thing that has happened to me. I don’t want my personality to be consumed in that way. I don’t want my work to be consumed or defined by this terrible something.
At the same time, I don’t want to be silent. I can’t be silent. I don’t want to pretend nothing terrible has ever happened to me. I don’t want to carry all the secrets I carried, alone, for too many years. I cannot do these things anymore.
If I must share my story, I want to do so on my terms, without the attention that inevitably follows. I do not want pity or appreciation or advice. I am not brave or heroic. I am not strong. I am not special. I am one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced. I am a victim who survived. It could have been worse, so much worse. That’s what matters and is even more a travesty here, that having this kind of story is utterly common. I hope that by sharing my story, by joining a chorus of women and men who share their stories too, more people can become appropriately horrified by how much suffering is born of sexual violence, how far-reaching the repercussions can be.
I often write around what happened to me because that is easier than going back to that day, to everything leading up to that day, to what happened after. It’s easier than facing myself and the ways, despite everything I know, in which I feel culpable for what happened. Even now, I feel guilt not only for what happened, but for how I handled the after, for my silence, for my eating and what became of my body. I write around what happened because I don’t want to have to defend myself. I don’t want to have to deal with the horror of such exposure. I guess that makes me a coward, afraid, weak, human.
I write around what happened because I don’t want my family to have these terrible images in their heads. I don’t want them to know what I endured and then kept secret for more than twenty-five years. I don’t want my lover seeing only a moment from my assault when they look at me. I don’t want them to think me more fragile than I am. I am stronger than I am broken. I don’t want them, or anyone, to think I am nothing more than the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I want to protect the people I love. I want to protect myself. My story is mine, and on most days, I wish I could bury that story, somewhere deep where I might be free of it. But. It has been thirty years and, inexplicably, I am still not free of it.