All Is Not Forgotten(46)

Tom went to his computer and pulled up photos from the high school Web site. He was looking for pictures of students. He was looking for blue sweatshirts. Charlotte went to Jenny’s room. She found her daughter reading a history textbook. The tutor had just left, and Jenny seemed calmly engrossed in an assignment.

It was the kind of moment that would have gone right by me before the rape. My eye was trained for abnormal behavior, misbehavior. If I saw her on her laptop but couldn’t see the screen, for example. I’d go in and pretend to be opening a shade or putting away some laundry so I could get a peek at what she was looking at. Or if she was speaking too quietly on the phone, I’d check our account to see what number she’d called. Things like that. I guess you could call it spying, but it’s just what we do. We all do it, the mothers. We talk about it at lunch sometimes, share our notes. But now, it’s the normal behavior that stops me in the hallway.

Charlotte went into Jenny’s room. Jenny looked up and smiled at her. It was not a happy smile, but it wasn’t fake either. Jenny asked if I had told them. Charlotte nodded. She did not press Jenny for details or offer any opinions or advice.

I walked to her bed and climbed in beside her. She looked at me strangely at first, but then it was as if she remembered how I used to do this with her, how I would climb into her bed and she would lay her head on my chest and I would rub her back. When she was a little girl, I would read to her. Sometimes we would just talk. That probably surprises you.

“Why do you think it surprises me?” I asked her.

Because of how our relationship changed. How she grew closer to Tom and more distant from me. But it seemed normal. I think it was normal. She needed to distance herself from me to grow up. Isn’t that what girls do?

“Yes, it can be very normal. You didn’t get to experience that, did you?”

How do you mean? I couldn’t have been more distant from my mother.

“But you didn’t get to separate in a safe environment. Where you knew you could go back to being a little girl if you needed to.”

Charlotte thought about that and nodded with ambivalence. Well, in any case, I climbed into her bed and she put her head on my chest. I kissed her hair and I ran my hand up and down her back. I kept thinking about her scar and how I wanted to reach under her shirt and touch it.

“Why?” I asked her, though I knew the answer.

I guess I wanted her to know that I knew it was there. Well, of course she knew that. But that I really knew it was there. That I knew … or that I felt it.

Charlotte couldn’t find the words to explain herself.

“What did you feel?”

It took her a long moment to answer.

When you told us what she said, how she felt like … like she was an animal being ridden and how she could tell it satisfied him when he’d finally, you know … it’s not easy the first time. He had to work for it, didn’t he? He had to put in some effort and listen to her screams, didn’t he?

“Yes, I imagine that’s true.”

And maybe she thought he wouldn’t be able to, that maybe it wasn’t possible for it to happen like this. That maybe the fight she was putting up … every muscle working to keep him out, to keep him from succeeding … There’s this moment when he breaks through and finds his way in, all the way inside you and then his body just shakes with ecstasy and yours with pain and this feeling of, God what is it? What is it that’s more than the pain?

“It’s your will, Charlotte. Your will is broken.”

Charlotte looked at me with wide eyes, her face replete with relief. I shouldn’t have made it that easy for her. I should have led her to it but let her find it on her own. She would have. And then it would have been more hers than mine. And, the truth is, it was mine. My childhood assault had felt that same way. I believe this is true for anyone who is attacked physically. I was not at my best that day she told me about her talk with Jenny. I was impatient, even at this most profound moment for Charlotte Kramer. My mind was not on Charlotte and Jenny but rather on my wife and my son.

Yes! She said, Yes. Your will is broken.

I sighed with frustration at my incompetence. I know better than this. Still, there was value in her having the answer, no matter how sloppily we had managed to come across it.

That’s why you feel like an animal. You have no power, your voice is not heard, your body is not your own. Yes, that’s what it is! Like you can’t believe you have lost your power over your own body, over your movements and your … your integrity … your physical integrity. We do this to animals, don’t we? We take wild horses and we ride them into submission. But they, they get over it, don’t they? They sit in their stalls and eat their dried hay and shit at their own feet and savor the stroke of a brush held by the very creature who broke their spirit.

“Yes,” I said. “Some animals can thrive in a submissive environment. Others do not. Humans do not. History shows this, doesn’t it? War? Rebellion? What did you do then? Did you touch her scar?”

Charlotte shook her head. No. I hugged her and I told her that it wasn’t going to be like that ever again. That she had to think of it like a wave in the ocean that takes you by surprise and tumbles you to shore. Have you ever felt that? My kids love to ride the waves at the beach. And even after they get tumbled and their bathing suits get filled with sand and they even get scraped up sometimes, they still go back because it’s fun to catch one and feel that you’re on top of that power and not beneath it. And then you and the wave just ride safely to shore. I couldn’t think of a better analogy. I don’t think she understood completely. But it was a start.