It wasn’t soon enough. It wasn’t loud enough.
I was a child, too. It’s not my fault.
No one said it was.
I conjured an image of Toshi as a befuddled, stick-limbed boy being hustled out of a basement apartment in the dead of a warm autumn night. His mother! He’s going to need his mother! Was I more worried for that boy or for the girl or for myself or for the baby in my arms who embodied the vulnerability of us all?
Abandonment stunned me again, and the rootedness of nursing began to feel like a burden. I was trapped on the bed when I wanted to twitch away, to run, walk for miles, to leave this family behind and lick my wounds in private, make of them something else. But I couldn’t.
The baby’s sucking slowed to a nibble. He dozed; I sat, stuck, roiling. Four months into parenting, and already the contrast between physical constraint and a churning mind had become characteristic of the venture for me, but I’d not yet felt it to this extent. I sat within a tent of love and agony and impatience, the small space filling with my hot breath, the arrhythmic pulse of our two hearts. And then he roused again. He arched his back and twisted his face and gave a bleating cry. He dove to my breast for comfort and rooted furiously. I felt the letdown, but he was beyond the help of milk. In fact, it made it worse. He pulled away. He was full-bellied and in pain. I elevated him and patted his back to soothe him, but it was no use.
There was acid in his belly. There was acid rising up our throats. It stings. It burns. Where do we turn for succor? Here? There? Nothing works. The sleeping house filled with screams.
The first time I told anyone I had been sexually abused was in 1980, when I was twelve. I told Heather Moosier, while we were standing in a tight vestibule at the college in Western Pennsylvania where both our parents worked. Every Wednesday, Heather and I walked up the hill from our Gothic junior high school to campus, where I took violin lessons and she studied flute. After the half hour, we’d walk together to the administration building where both our mothers were secretaries. Our fathers were professors. This was enough to bond us in our small rust belt town, where professional jobs were rare, but we hadn’t really known each other. Neither had our parents—or not well. But hers had used the faculty directory to find our phone number and call one night to discuss the possibility of Heather taking lessons on the same day as I did so that we could walk together.
I can still hear the ring of the phone, a portent harmonizing with the notes from the opening bars of All Things Considered and cutting through the steam rising from spaghetti just poured into a colander. The window above the sink looked out onto a rural route and some woods, shadowy in the twilight. I’d been roaming the woods since kindergarten, just about; I’d been allowed far afield in every direction for years. Previously, I’d walked to violin lessons alone, and my family thought it a little odd that Heather needed accompaniment, especially since she was a grade ahead of me. But being requested as a chaperone for an older girl puffed me up, gave the walk the weight and gravity of a milestone.
“Yeah, sure,” I shrugged. The indifference was put on.
I HAD LONG FRIZZY HAIR, braces, and elbows wider than my biceps. I was part of, if not a clique, a boisterous group of girls just learning to use eyeliner and curling irons. Heather was taller than any of us, with a cap of feathered auburn hair and heavy breasts, and she was quieter. Instead of a group, she had one best friend, Carrie. But Heather and I got along. She immediately took me into her confidence, and I learned what she and Carrie had in common: they were both having sex with their boyfriends.
Each week, the two of us would leave school and stop at the corner gas station for a snack, and then we would begin our trudge to the college, Heather informing me in her lispy, whispery voice of the dramas and logistics involved in early adolescent fucking. There were trysts in the walk-in cellar, broken rubbers, passed joints. There was the acknowledgement of which couple had done it most: Raymond and Carrie. Carrie lived, like Raymond and Heather’s beau, in the decaying heart of our town, where houses were closer and neighborhoods had sidewalks. Heather had to get dropped off at Carrie’s on the weekends from her home in an outlying development and hope that Tommy would come by. They were all four in the cellar the time Carrie got Raymond riled up and then withheld the rubber once his pants were off, teasing him.
“Carrie, you give it here!” Heather mimicked his deep-voiced, tight-lipped delivery and then broke into a helium giggle that doubled her over.
I tried to join in but could not find the humor, could not even fake it. I was agog. Raymond was short but explosively muscular, with shoulders like a steel beam. His sprint times had attracted attention from the high school football coaches, and this, along with his unsmiling intensity and the fold of skin above his brow, gave him the air of a man. I’d never spoken to him. That slight little Carrie would tease him in the face of his anger, that she felt safe enough to, that she was so far from his urgency herself even as she flitted in her underwear in front of two boys moments away from letting one stick it in her . . . My synapses were firing like rockets. I might have looked like a scrawny child, but my interest was keen.
I’d been introduced to the pleasures of salacious reading material via the underlined V.C. Andrews novels passed through my sixth-grade classroom. I’d graduated in junior high to slipping books out of the public library—The Mating Dance, The Joy of Sex, Love Machine—and hiding them in my pillows to pore over at night. I felt lucky to have found a firsthand source of information in Heather, to peep in on real lives that matched the drama on the pages I was queasily drunk on. Carrie was performing the tease, just as Cathy Dollanganger had done to her mother’s second husband in Petals on the Wind. Just like the big-breasted actress had done to the famous nightclub singer in Valley of the Dolls. But the plot arcs of the novels left no question about what these characters had wanted in exchange for the sex they advertised and then withheld. I wasn’t sure of Carrie’s aim. She had from Raymond all she could get from him; she’d given what she had. And there she stood dangling a rubber. Laughing in her underwear. In front of two boys. One with his dick out. The scene Heather had drawn hovered before me, more vivid than the sagging asbestos-sided homes that lined the sidewalk beneath our feet, but just out of reach.
As we walked on those afternoons, our instruments would bump against our knees, the oft-gray sky would darken further. Most weeks Heather could offer a new installment of her sex life. After Raymond broke the rubber two times, he started doubling up. One week Tommy decided that instead of letting her toke from the joint herself, Heather could only inhale what he delivered shotgun style. Listening, I would consciously savor the cream dollop in the center of my second Ding Dong. At home, sweets were counted out parsimoniously—five M&Ms at a time, one half of an off-brand pastry snack—and having a twin pack of Hostess to myself was decadent.
Heather, doing most of the talking, didn’t have time to eat. She would begin to pant softly about halfway up the steep incline. She regularly voiced a worry that her parents would smell the cum on her.
“You can smell it?” I asked. “What’s it smell like?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “It just does.”
MY VIOLIN TEACHER was a man with a dramatic forelock and intense brown eyes who seemed to loathe accepting my check—we paid fifteen dollars for thirty minutes. It was three dollars more than the last instructor charged before he escaped to greener pastures, and my mother complained about the increase, hesitated each week with furrowed brow over her signature. I was working on the theme from Ravel’s Bolero that winter, and the instructor and I were twinned in our humiliation: mine over having my parents pay someone to listen to me struggle with the notes; his, presumably, over the paltry price for which he sold his trained and refined ear to an unexceptional school girl. One day, he grabbed my violin from me and