he came in.
“Are you sleeping? Are you sleepy?” His hands would already be on or in my underwear. I wanted to push the intrusion away, but my limbs felt tied at my side, they wouldn’t obey my groggy brain. “Are you sleeping?”
“Mmmph.”
“Are you sleepy?”
“Yes.” During these first months, his insistent questions and his dismissal of my affirmative answer felt as assaulting as the touching itself.
“Are you still sleeping?”
I’d reply yes, but it would be a lie. Toshi would know it.
“Do you want to play our game?” The crux of the game at this point was which I liked better: to have him stroke my vulva with his hand over my underpants or beneath. I always replied that I liked it better over my underpants. The alternative made me squirm, felt sharp and prickly, like the sting from unwiped pee.
“Are you sure?” he would say. “Let me try it again a different way. What feels better, like this? Or like this?” There were many variations that had to be assessed.
If he entered the room before I fell asleep, the game elicited a combination of curiosity and stoicism from me. What was it that was happening? I usually tried to say as little as possible, to keep my answers monosyllabic, to take in more than I gave out so that I could gain some understanding and perhaps an upper hand. I recall this feeling vividly.
But at least one time I caved: “What did Haruna like better?” I remember asking. Even then my spoken words sounded pathetic and plaintive to my ears, but I was looking for a guide, wanting to bring her back into the room to release some of the lonely intensity, to make it more like a real game, to illuminate the mystery.
If he came in during the dead of the night, I had no curiosity. The doggedness of his fingers against my heavy body could be almost intolerable. Better not to be dragged from slumber if I could help it. Better to fight sleep off.
The second person I remember telling that I had been molested was a man I took up with when I was twenty. It’s possible that I told other friends before then, but if I did, it was the same version I told Heather, it was a story of sexual activity passed like a V.C. Andrews novel. With Carl, it was a little different.
We had met in West Philadelphia in 1988, where I had moved for the summer to stay with Reba, my best friend from high school, who’d been renting out the attic in a group house. The decrepit Victorian was filled with anarchist kids and counter culture types, and was a gathering place for neighborhood squatters and itinerant punk rockers, with one or two hippies living in the school bus parked out front. I was as titillated in the presence of these colorful ragamuffins as I had been at twelve hearing about sex from someone who’d had it. I’d been attracted to alternative cultures even before I knew there were such things—since Suzanne in her rags and feathers, since the Clash appeared on Saturday Night Live and raised every hair on my body while the girl at whose house I was sleeping guffawed and mocked. I’d picked my college based on a belief that punk and bohemian types congregated there, and I’d made my plans for the summer between sophomore and junior year on a similar basis.
I had only been sort of right about the college. When I arrived at Oberlin, I was surprised to see so many copies of On the Road by bedsides and on bookshelves; hitherto I had felt the book to be my own personal bible, handed down to me by my special father and unknown to anyone else my age. But it took me less than a semester to realize that my fellow students were more likely to have bought their crushed velvet and cracked leather at Agnes B. than at Salvation Army counters, and to have slept off their CBGB’s hangovers in homes on the Upper West Side rather than in an Alphabet City tenement, as I presumed real punks did. These differences mattered.
Meanwhile, plenty of my new acquaintances were surprised to learn that not everyone paid for SAT prep classes, and they were confused by rural experiences that weren’t covered by Outward Bound tuition or had at a summer home, amused by the low prices in the town diner that was still too expensive for me to visit more than once a week, despite my food service job. Some of the big-city transplants were less incredulous about rust belt realities than wearied by them. Used to being among the financial and cultural elite, they were outspoken in their annoyance at the high number of fellow students who had been the strangest people in their Midwestern hometowns. They missed New York and compared notes about hot spots.
I had a complicated relationship to these cool-club rich kids (“rich” to me meaning anyone who didn’t receive financial aid). I wanted in, to some degree—I certainly didn’t want to be pegged as an outsider—and so I studied their habits carefully. I filed away the derisive comments, and used them to sharpen my sense of myself for years. But I also used them to blur my own origins. At my twentieth college reunion, when an undergraduate acquaintance told me that he’d always thought I was one of those people who attended Saint Ann’s, a private high school in Brooklyn that bequeathed to Oberlin many a sartorially impressive art major, I felt, to my chagrin, as if I had won some kind of lifetime achievement award. But the victory was hollow, because I never wanted to be a daughter of the privileged set, exactly, or even to be seen as one. Despite my awe at my sophisticated peers and what had been accessible to them, I also maintained my own streak of separateness and superiority. Money itself did not impress me, and in my view it could hamper the ability to accrue what did: the accretion of gritty experience and the recognition of unvarnished truths about what life was really like—probably tough, messy, twisted. Though my college friends might have been to Paris and hung out in Washington Square Park, they were low on street cred. Not only was I convinced that I had some, but I believed that I, more than many of them, was primed to get more.
PHILADELPHIA WAS ALL ABOUT street cred. Although some of the West Philly people had finished college, a greater number had slipped away from homes made tumultuous by drug or alcohol abuse, by enraged or disengaged or dogmatically Christian moms, or by lecherous stepdads. Most of them earned what money they did off the grid, making armor or low-budget gay porn, selling plasma, renting themselves out to medical studies, dumpster diving to reduce the need to buy things. A few of the girls worked as strippers or prostitutes, and just as I arrived more young women were taking up that beat, getting on the roster to dance at the Bounce Babe Lounge, a little dive in Center City that had a low barrier to entry. Newbies often worked the day shift, and in my first few weeks in Philly I adopted a routine that included making the rounds of restaurants accepting applications, stopping by the ice cream parlor where Reba was scooping cones for minimum wage, and then heading a few blocks north to have a drink at the Bounce Babe.
Reba’s brand new girlfriend Catanine, a butch dyke even younger than I who carried a staff, was a regular at the ice cream parlor and the Bounce Babe, too, but she and I didn’t hang. She never sat at either place, and never partook of the free scoops or beer; she stood at one end of the freezer case or by the wall close to the door at the club, hands resting together on her carved stick, keeping an eye out. There was a coolness between us: I was miffed that she’d horned in, and she’d made no conciliatory gesture. She and Reba had gotten together on my very first night in town, laser-beamed into each other’s eyes so deep that they must have teleported up the three flights of stairs into Reba’s bed; I sure didn’t see them leave from the front porch where a group of us had been sitting.
The woman whose room in the house I’d be subletting was not leaving until the next day, and the only place I had to sleep was on a mattress tucked in the rafters of the attic where Reba lived. Hours after the lovers disappeared, realizing that Reba was not coming back to escort me, I made my way up there, literally crawling on the floor to find my bed in a pitch black garret alive with sex sounds: the click of mucous membranes, the bedspring groan of bodies shifting, the paired and labored breathing. I finally slept, and when I woke, they were at it again, or still. I watched them. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. I recognized that waking in this attic to this sight was the type of vérite I’d craved, and I chalked up a tally, but the inevitability of loneliness settled into me. I would have to face this new environment alone.
I