By Brooke Segarra
When I told my mom that my dad touched me once, I might have said, “I think dad touched me once. On my vagina.” I can’t remember the exact wording. Things never come out the way you want to say them, but what was clear is that my father touched me in a way that I can’t hold safely in my memory and I can’t put down. But why should this awkwardly worded declaration have given my mom alarm when it did not fit in with her reality? She just said, oh, your father, facetiously, and divulged to me for the first time that my great uncle touched her as a little girl repeatedly. I guess her telling me that was her version of walking out of the room like I had done to my grandmother with Dementia when she thought I was her dead husband and our realities did not align. For my mom, there was no way that the man she married, had sex with, had us with, and did laundry for could be a pervert. It was not in her reality that she could be living in conditions where something like that happened to her daughter. Not necessarily me, just ‘her daughter.’ The mysterious ‘daughter’ that she knew she’d have one day when she was five dreaming of a home and a white picket fence. The daughter she hoped to have when she became an adult and had me, the daughter who could never live up to this fictitious daughter who she knew so well. This daughter was like her imaginary friend who would stand next to me, and she would talk to. Maybe she would have noticed me, her real daughter, if I had teared up when I told her, “I think dad touched me once. On my vagina.” But, I couldn’t tear up about this incident with my dad, because I wasn’t sad about it. I wasn’t sad that he touched me. I guess my mom and I were both unable to be in that reality. The reality in which my father touched me. But somehow, the conditions were just right that night and I glitched the Matrix because, for a brief moment, she had heard me. If she hadn’t, she never would have told me about her experience with her uncle. I know because, before that night, her and I had never talked about sex before. We never talked about changing bodies or puberty. When I got my first period I didn’t tell her, and it’s only now that I realize why she was on the verge of hysterics when she found my Tinkerbell underwear in my closet with droplets of blood on the panty lining. For a fleeting moment, she had come face to face with the very real possibility that she had raised some pervert’s fucking wet dream.
Mom, do you think that just because dad always gave you the last spring roll when we ordered takeout that he was softer when touching me than your molester? Do you think because I just woke up to blood and pain that I have the privilege of doubt about my college rapist? The privilege of second-guessing? The college nurse would not buy it. I had to point out to her the purity ring on my finger that I was still fucking wearing because, to me, until I met my partner Russell, sex, regardless of how much I wanted it, was the most terrifying thing. But why should it have been? I was scared to have my first sexual experience, not realizing that the worst had already happened. I had already had it. But because it was with my father, I was unable to recognize it.
Sometimes I feel like half an abuse victim. Like a Frankenstein. Someone who doesn’t know or feel pain like she should. Like the rest of you do. Like someone who only got half abused. Someone never finished the job. And now I’m stuck in this weird purgatory.
Maybe because I can’t walk in this narrative with conviction, my brother Danny can’t believe me. When I tell him about the leering, the comments, and the touches, they are either not quite recognizable as abuse or not abusive enough, you paranoid bitch. I thought he was old enough that I could talk to him about it. I thought we had enough distance from it, with neither of us being under our parents’ roof anymore, that we could talk about it. But I was wrong, and the only reason I brought it up, paranoid bitch that I am, is because I wanted to know if he noticed any of these tensions. If he sensed what I sensed from dad. But he didn’t and mom didn’t. So if this only exists in my brain, does this reality exist at all? I’m sorry I keep bringing up the one moment in high school my dad walked into my bedroom when I was pretending to be asleep and put his hand on my pussy. It’s not usually something I think about. I spend much more of my waking time counting and making meaningless lists.
When I think of my father I think of the pungent scent of his breath, the knots in my stomach, and the wanting him to feel good. I wanted to make him feel good. So I never bothered him with me. I was a good girl. My problems would never be big enough that they couldn’t just be solved by mom. I would never ask for anything. Everything he could give was enough, and all was okay. Even every one of his mistakes. Being okay with cruelty doesn’t mean that you are okay. It’s all so emotionally rough, I think I keep using the touching thing to just smooth things out. For there to be something truly awful. If there is something truly awful then I would have a right to speak. To speak on everything. And I guess it’s not right. I’m giving him a lot of credit. Maybe it’s unfair of me to write all these scenes of violence. It’s not like they happened all the time. Or even most of the time? Most of the time, he was just sitting in that recliner in the basement drinking a generic brand of Coke and watching TV. Sometimes reading a book. Most of the time doing both at once which always confused me. He spent a lot of time in that basement. Looking back on it now it was kind of like a luxurious prison cell. He could have gone out with his friends, but he kept flipping through the channels because there’s so little to see on the TV which was easier than seeing the house that needed to get fixed, mom’s two bowls of ice cream every night, the blood pad stain on my wall-to-wall bedroom carpet because the sticky side of the Always pad got stuck to my foot, and the neighborhood he placed us in that had two break-ins on our street. Once, I asked dad to make sure he locked our back door when he came into the house after his cigarette at dusk. He was amused. Maybe because I never made many demands of him. He assured me that if someone broke in he would kill them. I knew there were some knives in his nightstand. He never had a gun fearing that, if he did, he might one day become a guy on the six o’clock news. He would be that guy on the news for me though. I knew that. He would kill for me — if he had to. Kill because of me — if he had to. I’m the last person he would want to hurt, which is why, if he ever read this, I fear he’d lose his temper, and kill me.
Do you think my murderer will think twice about killing me because him and I could stand next to one another and smile in a family photo at Christmas? Which was really for you, mom. Because we weren’t facing one another. We were facing you. We were smiling for you.
I do not like writing this down. It feels powerful and uncomfortable. I wish you would have listened to me, mom. Heard what I said, so you could have handled it. But I guess now I have to handle it, because the daughter I hope I have — I think I know her too well.
Like you, at the end of the day, I don’t know what to believe, and I don’t know what I want, but I believe that the bar will never run out of alcohol and I will have another drink. I will have another drink if Russell and I go out, so I’m not left alone to drink alone and count. I’d rather listen to someone else’s problems than count to myself. Counting to myself gives me headaches after a few hours. At the bar, Russell will talk to me about work and some drama with a co-worker and his new desk seat, and I will be a good listener as I swallow the beer, and in the aftertaste of wheat, simultaneously feel all these emotional things he doesn’t want to know about me that I swallow, at the bar, sitting pretty.
Brooke Segarra is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, NY. Her stories have appeared in Hobart Pulp, Maudlin House, Grimoire Magazine, Wyldcraft Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel. You can find her online at brookesegarra.com