My face began to itch as I thought of the pesticide. Small hives pimpled up and down my cheeks and clustered at the sides of my nose. To calm myself, I thought of a waterfall, a coping strategy I learned from a coworker who experienced post-traumatic stress syndrome after she saw a person get hit by a truck in Tribeca.
The body exploded into pieces, she said, and the pieces flew all over, and some of it sprayed me in the face. How am I supposed to live with that? Whenever I think about the situation, and I can’t help but think about it, every day, and at night before I fall asleep, if I sleep, I begin to feel the spray hitting my face, so my therapist told me to think of a waterfall, a beautiful, peaceful waterfall.
It was called The Waterfall Coping Strategy. An image flashed in my own mind of a waterfall, even though I had never seen a waterfall in person. I had seen a watermill, so I switched to that image, to make myself more comfortable: a broken-down watermill surrounded by a forest in autumn. My adoptive mother brought us there when we were young, at a time when her hobby was photography. She took black-and-white photos of familiar objects close up, on a micro level, transforming everyday objects into something unrecognizable and monstrous. I hated those photos; I thought they were disgusting, they made me think of pores on a face. As soon as the image of the watermill and her photography phase settled comfortably into my brain, I saw my adoptive mother taking pictures of the oak leaves in various stages of decay. She zoomed in on the pattern of holes that punctured a leaf’s tenuous fabric, while my adoptive brother and I hid behind the watermill. He was nine years old and I about to turn twelve, a repulsive time for me as I was just beginning to menstruate. Together, he and I had invented a game, because our adoptive parents were far too cheap to buy us board games or video games.
You each have the faculties to create your own games for fun, they told us. All you need is your imagination.
We made up a game called CONFESSION.
Do you ask for forgiveness of your sins? I said to him.
I played the priest, naturally, because I was older and more mature.
I want to confess my sins, Father. He bowed his head.
Go ahead, young man.
Last week I lied to our parents. I told them I had after-school baseball practice, but I didn’t. It’s not even the season for baseball, and besides, I’m terrible at it.
What did you do instead?
I went to the park with Max and we brought a magnifying glass. The sun was out, shining brightly, and there was a little boy there by himself. We snuck up behind him, grabbed his arms, and held him down against the gravel, Max rolled up the little boy’s shirt, and I burned his back with the glass. He had pale skin. Max and I watched the sunlight laser into it and burn him. I remember he had freckles and moles. We burned his skin with the sun. Before we let him go, I realized he was much younger than I thought, probably four or five years old. I think he wet himself, because he smelled like urine. And for this, Father, I ask for forgiveness.
Do you understand that lying is one of the gravest sins, I said, worse than stealing, worse than kidnapping?
I told him he would have to humiliate his body in some way, in order to atone for his sins and the harm he did to the little boy. He threw himself into a pile of leaves and rolled around, and he suddenly looked old, in the sun-dappled dark, and at that moment it occurred to me that one day we would both be dead, composting like leaves and garbage in the worm-ridden earth. After a few minutes of rolling around in the leaves, he sat up and asked if he was forgiven.
You’re going to die at some point, I said, and it’s over. It’s really over. It doesn’t matter if you’re forgiven or not. It’s made up, it’s all pretend. Do you understand? It doesn’t matter!
I saw my adoptive mother come up from out of nowhere like a shadow and she began to wipe his face with a brown greasy napkin from a fast-food restaurant.
Why do you have dirt all over your face? she said. What kinds of filthy things have you two been doing?
When she was done wiping my adoptive brother’s face, she strode right up to me and struck me across the face.
No adoptive mother of mine! I cried as a red star spread its points across my cheek.
That morning, she had leaned over eleven-year-old-me to shove the tampon up my vagina, because I was unable to do it on my own, it was always a trial to get the tampon up and into my vagina without the feeling of something being torn. She and my adoptive brother were the people closest to me in life, based on the sheer amount of time we once spent together. That afternoon with them, I skulked in the shadows and ate a heel of stale crusty bread meant for feeding the ducks. I was full of competition; I have always experienced extreme fits of jealousy, the type of jealousy that destroys the peace.
10
Helen, why are you so unhappy? my adoptive mother would ask me over and over throughout the years of my childhood and adulthood. Why do you hate yourself so much? she would ask. It wasn’t true! I argued as a child and adult. I was very happy and always had been. It was true to this day; I even found happiness in the free bagels my organization sometimes provided during work meetings! Would an unhappy and miserable person find perfect peace and contentment in stale bagels with no cream cheese?
It irritated me to be irritated in relation to my adoptive parents.
Your mistake is to isolate yourselves from us, she once said to me, you have an entire system of support at your disposal and you don’t use it.