he said, swooping my revered instrument back to me as if it were nothing but a stick, “is how it should sound. Feel what you’re playing.”
I felt it. Oh, I felt it. I glared at him before tucking the violin back under my chin. I scraped the bow across the strings and fought back tears of shame and anger.
I HAD BEEN DRAWN TO MUSIC even before I had been drawn to whispers of masturbation, menstruation, and brassieres. There was the overheard, the glittery confetti of “Dancing Queen” at the ice rink, the slicked-up wail of Styx on a school bus eight-track. And there was my parents’ record collection, folk and folk pop, and the corner nook between the couch and the love seat where the stereo lived and the albums were stacked and I could just fit, crouched or cross legged, flipping through the covers—the lady with whipped cream for a dress; Peter, Paul and Mary against a brick wall—while listening, listening. Airborne particles from the disintegrating cardboard sleeves singed like incense and made my nostrils burn. When in fifth grade a fiddle teacher had come to my school and played a tune, my chest creaked and billowed with the same majestic thwang as it did to the opening bars of my favorite Gordon Lightfoot song. I took up violin immediately, practiced assiduously, and made the all-city orchestra in short order.
But this passion of mine didn’t last long. I had three teachers in four years, and something about the making of music was altered for me with that last one, squashed under his withering condescension, suffocated by the gendered gloomy sex vibe. Was the sex projected onto me or did I project it, clunking down the long music department hallway to his door each week with my hormones raging, my ears full of Heather’s stories of dick and cum?
The question unfolds for me now: projected onto or projected by me? In its wake is the quiet as the needle pulls back from the record, lifts, retreats. Another album drops down. The skid of vinyl on vinyl. Judy Collins plays. Hers was among my favorites of my parents’ LPs, and the song that most captured my imagination was her cover of “Suzanne.” I loved it when the switch occurred, when finally she touched his perfect body with her mind.
I didn’t share my parents’ music with my friends. At school, it was Michael Jackson and AC/DC. I introduced Heather to the girls I knew. Her social circle expanded. Still, after many weeks of only listening, I felt like I had to contribute something to our conversations. Or maybe I felt I had to prove something, prove I was older than I looked, more mature than my behavior at my first make-out party suggested, where I’d opted to run races with the boys instead of neck in the woods with the one I’d been assigned. One evening, while Heather and I stood in the vestibule waiting for one of our mothers to drive us home, she was whispering on about penises and maybe I just grew tired of the dirty talk, of my nose being pressed to its glass, and I wanted to shut her up. Or maybe the dirty talk is what dredged up the memory, sunken in my mind, its features still muddy but suddenly recognizable. Suddenly nameable.
“The only hard penis I’ve ever seen is my cousin’s, when he molested me,” I said. “He used to come into my room at night when I was little.”
Maybe I just wanted to see what would happen if I said it.
My eyes slid off Heather as I spoke. I looked out the safety glass of the vestibule door, which was crisscrossed with thin wire. Soft clumps of lamp-lit snow were falling from the black sky. There was a beat of silence. Then Heather asked in a low, solemn voice whether I’d told my parents.
I hadn’t, and I flinched at the implication that I was a child, that I needed guidance and protection. Whatever I’d wanted to accomplish with my disclosure, it wasn’t that. What did my parents have to do with anything? Had she told her parents that she whiled away her Saturday afternoons fucking? Had Cathy Dollanganger told her mother that her brother had raped her (but only because he loved her so much)?
Of course, the difference was that I’d been so young. I’d said so explicitly. What I hadn’t said was that in some ways the teenage encounters I was now reading and hearing about didn’t seem all that different from what had happened to me. My sixteen-year-old cousin had started out wheedling and whispering, silently fumbling, asking awkward questions about what felt good—like any teenage boy might, in the basement with a girl. Then he abandoned persuasion and courtship on the day—I’d recently turned five—he finally took his penis out. Except for my very young age, that part of the story seemed common, too—an overpowering male, a female’s will ignored. The memory of it was like breath under covers, too close. Heat was blasting from the vestibule’s vent and inside my coat my armpits were sweating, but my feet were still cold. A gulf opened between Heather and me; while her confessions had brought us intimacy, now the boat on which I sat was moving farther from her shore.
It seemed to me then that the onset of womanhood—or more to the point, of sexy teenaged girlhood, of thrill—was all about externalization: boobs popping, menstrual blood flowing. None of this had happened to me yet, but something had. It had. It had. These other things were taking forever, but I’d been carrying this for so long, wondering what it was, waiting for it become clear. Now, finally, someone was talking about penises! Didn’t offering one up make me a teenager? Perhaps not, said Heather’s pause.
I stole a look at her. She resembled her mother—same auburn hair, full bust, round face, and ruddy cheeks—and never more so than now. She’d squared her jaw at my admission, her underbite becoming more pronounced above the ruffle of her plaid blouse. Her stern remove bit my skin. Shame oozed into my veins, something I’d only felt an inkling of before. It was creeping curiosity, mostly, or dumbfoundedness, that had previously slicked my memories of the bedside visits, when they arose at all. Still, I anticipated some sort of momentous alteration after sharing my news, believing I had been changed by the telling of a sex story, by using the word molestation in relation to myself.
BECAUSE IT’S A BIG DEAL, right? The happening of it? The naming it? Or is it not? For many years after that first telling I was unsure, confused by cultural messages and my own shifting responses, the different ways my memories could be made to fit with the identities I was trying to form. I don’t recall telling anyone else about what my cousin did to me until I had moved out of our family home. It took me even longer to realize that Heather’s instinct to connect my parents to what took place in my childhood bedroom was not entirely misplaced, however much I didn’t want that to be true.
OVER THE OCEANS AND THROUGH THE WOODS
My cousin Toshi first came to live with us in the early 1970s, when he was sixteen. My father’s brother had asked my parents to take him in after he and his second wife couldn’t figure what else to do with him. Toshi’d been arrested. He’d run away from home. They couldn’t keep him.
Toshi was the oldest of the five kids in the house, with one full sister, Haruna, and three much younger half siblings. In my head, I referred to the whole brood as “my Japanese cousins.” My uncle had been born in Pittsburgh during the Depression to working class Jewish immigrants, but at eighteen he joined the military and was stationed as a member of the occupying army in Japan, and it was in that culture that he found his life’s calling. On the GI Bill, he studied Asian literature, and not only did he become a translator and scholar of Japanese texts and a professor at a respected university, he also, in my view, and I imagine in his own, became Japanese. “He insists that the children only speak Japanese at home,” clucked the grown-ups to each other, in tones alternating between admiration and skepticism. “Next fall they’re going back to Tokyo again, but only for six months this time.”
I was suitably mystified and impressed by these tidbits, in large part because he and the word “Japanese” correlated to the wedding portrait that figured prominently in the family photo gallery on the stairwell at my grandparents’ house and in my imagination. In it, Morris and his Japanese bride are both wearing kimonos. His is plain and dark, bisected with a blindingly white sash, hers pale and elaborate, with a huge bustle. His hair was black, his eyes narrow triangles, his thick brows writ over them like calligraphic dashes on his dark complexion—nothing marked him as American. Her face was painted alabaster except for the rose bud of ruby staining the center of her lips. Her glossy hair was sculptural, spiked with combs and tasseled sticks—everything