The Animators(45)

“I don’t want to look anymore,” I said, louder than I meant to. Looked down. My hands still grasped the pictures.

Teddy reached out and gently took them from me, then dropped them into the bag. We were both sweating. “I’m sorry,” he said. And he sounded like he meant it.

I didn’t care what my sister would say about it. I reached over and took Teddy’s hand.

I couldn’t eat or sleep for days after. My mother took me to Dr. Ingram, who pressed on my belly, listening, his eyes gazing into space. It was impossible to get away from myself. Whenever I closed my eyes, I was in that house, seeing those pictures, smelling those smells.

I never entered the Caudill house again. As much hell as we collectively caught from my sister, I had Teddy over to my house to eat, spend the night, jump on the trampoline, and live out the rest of that summer. I kept him with me for as long as I could. I swore I would never let him out of my sight.

And then, before school started that August, Teddy was gone. His mother came for him. He moved to Louisville, and he grew up there. When he moved, the memory faded into almost nothing, leaving only the dark place in my head where it once sat, and the feeling that I’d been marked, but I didn’t know by what, or how.

It took a long time, but I was able to convince myself that the afternoon never happened.

—

Mel has folded her body forward as if to protect a tender spot at her center, a wincing, thirty-degree angle she reserves for when she is ill.

When she looks up at me, her eyes are big, blank; they seem separated from her face. And I see something I have never seen before in Mel: self-removal. Inside, she has fled. The ability of anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of something violent to grasp the details that remind them of their humiliation—smells, colors, sounds—and blur these details so that they become foreign, someone else’s property. It is a cultivated skill, requiring time, experience, unspeakable mental real estate. It is, for the desperate, the only chance to leave what happened with the part of yourself that is still yours.

Children learn it. Boys, but more often, and more closely, girls. When girls learn it, they learn it for the rest of their lives, inventing two separate planes on which they exist—the life of the surface, presented for others, and the life forever lived on the inside, the one that owns you. They will never forget how to make themselves disappear.

Mel breathes slowly, with effortful depth, as if instructing herself. Her lips part. She looks elsewhere. I do, too. If she cries—something I have never actually seen her do—I’m not sure I won’t flake apart completely.

There’s a lot that can bring two people together, it occurs to me. They may, unawares, have entire conversations that do not take place in words. They may never know, themselves, what is admitted, what is declared. What binds.

She doesn’t say anything for a long, empty moment. I pull my sweater around myself, shiver, make a face. I’ve sweated through the fabric.

When Mel speaks, her voice is low and flat. “Did he hurt you.”

“No,” I say immediately.

She looks at me, finally. I can see the color of her eyes; not often visible through the lenses of her glasses. They are green tonight, veiled with a tired gray.

I repeat, “No.”

Even as I say the word, I feel a twinge in my midsection. I don’t have the heart to say it: I am the least qualified person to answer this question. How well do I know my own mind, the wormy crannies of my memory? My particular blank space, so white and unknowable that it hurts to look directly into it?

—

I grew up. I left home for good. My exit was a foregone conclusion. I pursued my life as if it were the loose end of something I abandoned at birth and, at eighteen, set out to reclaim. I became an artist because I wanted to make a world in which I was not the pursued but the pursuer; because I needed to discorporate. I struggled. I was afraid I wasn’t very good. I was jealous and lonely. I was frequently sad.

But even as my mind forgot, my body never did. I felt my animal hackles rise when in a room with large, silent men. I scrabbled for closeness, feeling myself shut closed like when the time for intimacy came. It made me sweat to have my picture taken. I never shook the feeling that what I had seen somehow made me dangerous, that there was something I needed to keep moving to avoid. I felt a fear like hunger; it promised to swallow everything.

But I propelled myself forward, a struggle that often felt like cutting my way through neck-tall weeds. I met you. And it felt like the struggle got a little easier.

—

Mel has folded over again. She doesn’t speak.





—

I was sitting at my drafting table one night, by myself, working on something particularly dumb—sketches of demented dogs in pimp costumes for a cartoon strip I would never start called Small Potatoes—and I was letting the CBS Evening News play out behind me on a small TV I’d bought at a yard sale because the prefab antennae and channel dial, the kind that goes tok tok tok, reminded me of the old set my family had when I was a kid. And Dan Rather mentioned a child pornography bust in East Kentucky, where the supplier of illicit materials, a napper of small girls, appraiser of unspeakable objects, had been arrested by the FBI. And on the tiny screen I saw my old holler and I heard the name Caudill pronounced Cow-dihl, and I saw the very edge of the house in which I grew up at the screen’s corner and realized the name of my hometown had not crossed my lips in an astounding number of days. I dropped my pencil.