October 1976, Alabama

By Claire Adelsay Browne

There were no hearts and flowers, no breathy fumblings in a dark backseat - of that I can be sure.

Truth be told, it probably didn’t happen at all the way I remember it. Such is the way the mind works, offering Polaroids that cloud and run together before being shaken into focus, only to change colors and fade as the years pass.

I wish I had a better story to tell - a winding, lyrical ellipses of frustrated passion and bittersweet fulfillment - but it would take a dozen lovers, a thousand miles, and three decades before I would know that high. What I knew on this morning was pain. A lot of it.

Lying in my mother’s bed, tangled in the scent of her Jontue perfume, I closed my eyes and waited for it to be over. The man grunting above me was oblivious to my presence, sweat dripping from his chest hairs into my eyes, mingling with my tears.

From time to time, he stopped, frustrated by his attempts to solve the biological equation of our unequal bodies, and I pleaded my case wildly, my voice shrill with hysteria.

“Mama will be home soon,” I said, straining to lift myself high enough to see the clay driveway that had taken her away.

“Your mother doesn’t care,” he hissed, and in retrospect, I don’t suppose she did. I probably ended up being fucked in her bed more often than she did, and I doubt she minded at all. She didn’t like sex.

I could see why. With his hands gripping my thighs, his head bobbing like a demented jack in the box, I couldn’t imagine how anyone would ever enjoy this. I was grateful for a reprieve from the shredding agony of his thrusts but confused by this bizarre thing he was doing.

For a while, I asked questions: “Is this a new game?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Does Mama play too?”

“No.”

“Is it supposed to be fun?”

Silence.

“I don’t think I like it.”

A hand around the throat, the sound of Captain Kangaroo in the background growing dim.

“You won’t tell unless you wanna see your Mama hangin’ from that tree outside your window.”

As he looked at me, his beard dripping with saliva, his face mottled by whiskey. I suddenly felt very cold. Very, very alone. I stopped asking questions. Stopped struggling. Stopped caring.

Caring was pointless - I think I knew that even then. Would Mama care? Would the neighbors care? Would my teachers care? Would anyone care about something I was pretty sure I’d brought upon myself?

Thirty years later, I learned the answer. Someone did indeed care - enough to drag the words out of me in a hellish 17-e-mail exchange.

I’d known all day that I was going to tell. I could feel it turning in my gut, clawing, rumbling. A total stranger was daring to ask questions, hard questions, becoming more and more brazen as the January afternoon grew colder and the shadows crept longer.

He wanted to know what was wrong, why a trip home for Christmas had sent me into a tailspin of near-suicidal depression.

When the night was black, and the hour was nothing, I took a long swig from a bottle of vodka and washed two Valiums down.

“Tell me,” the e-mail said.

And so I did. I’d write for a while, send the e-mail, take a few more swigs, and pop a few more Valium. Then I’d take a deep breath and begin the next e-mail, not waiting for the faceless stranger to catch up.

From time to time, he’d send a short response: “Keep going. You’re doing fine. Keep going.” And over and over, “It wasn’t your fault.”

I glossed over those words. Of course it was my fault. Had to be. And by the end, one person on Earth would know the truth.

My typing became sloppy, barely coherent, as I wandered the hallways of my childhood, telling a story I’d never wanted to tell to a person I knew I’d never meet. He didn’t know it at the time, but I had a plan: I was going to write everything, the whole truth about my stepfather’s repeated assaults, and then I was going to say good-bye. Forever.

If I had succeeded with my plan that night, to walk the slippery planks of the railroad trestle, to let myself fall into the muddy river below, I’d have never learned the greatest lesson of all - that a story can change when you least expect it. And sometimes that plot twist makes all the pages that went before seem worth slogging through.

Over the next two years, that faceless stranger became my best friend. I told many more stories, but I told these stone-cold sober, living them fully and letting them go.

If that were the end, it would be a pretty happy ending. I was writing again; I was traveling; I was enjoying life for the first time. But my friend had a plot twist of his own: he kissed me.

It was soft and sweet. Tentative. Infused with love. Grounded by the trust we’d spent so many months building. And so I kissed him back, head clouded with wonder at this odd quivering inside. I was shaken. Reborn. A virgin again, finally free to take pleasure in something I’d only known as shame.

It’s odd, this meandering path our friendship has taken. I feel like I’m unfolding, piece by piece, sloughing away the terrified tomboy, revealing a starry-eyed teenager I never had the chance to be.

Strange things are appearing in my house - girly things: dangly earrings, perfume, fingernail polish, lingerie. I’m giddy-stupid with happiness. And every time he touches me, it’s always the same, awkward fumbling turning to lust-driven wildness, fingers tracing skin in amazement at this new land we’ve discovered.

Every time is like the first time, except this time, there are flowers. And hearts.

Claire Adelsay Browne is a writer and photographer living in the Deep South. She’s spent the past three years learning to accept this story for what it is, just another chapter in a hopefully long and happy book. She is writing under a pseudonym.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, December 31st, 2007 | Email This Post

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