CW: This chapter contains a description of sexual violence.
Two weeks into our forced hiatus, Viktor made arrangements for me to meet Marin with the hope that she would feel more comfortable with him seeing me once she and I met in person. I had no template for how the visit would go. The only model I had for two women sharing a lover mirrored the basest offerings of popular culture: soap opera-style catfights with face slapping, hair pulling, and a lot of screeching. It was hard to shed the vague sense of opposition I felt toward Marin because I had no previous experience or mental framework for how we could relate.
Viktor wasn’t proposing Marin and I become friends, exactly, but that we become familiar to one another. If it meant I could see him again, I was willing to try. Also, I was curious to meet her. By then I’d seen her photos on Facebook, so I knew what she looked like, but that’s all. Viktor proposed to join us, which I thought would be less stressful than meeting her one-on-one. Nonetheless, I bought a pack of cigarettes the day before because I felt so frantic about the meeting and imagined it was the only thing that would calm me down.
I wore a lace blouse that I bought for the occasion. It had a choker collar and cutout at the neck. I selected it thinking it would remind Viktor of bondage in a flowery sort of way, but it felt like a straitjacket and made me sweat. I finished the outfit with black slacks and heels. It was a bizarre choice—more appropriate for the Symphony than a weekday lunch at a Thai restaurant—but I guess I wanted Viktor to perceive me as the type of woman who wore lace to eat lunch. I guess that was the woman I imagined he might adore.
Marin smiled warmly and watched as I took my seat. Our eyes met, and for a moment we were both silent. I felt frozen with tension. She commented that Viktor had texted to say he’d be along soon.
Marin was so pretty it was hard not to stare. She had sparkling blue eyes and a gorgeous white smile. Her long hair was dyed every color, ROYGBIV, around the crown of her head—a veritable Rainbow Brite. It was a stunning effect. I marveled it was even possible—something like that would never have occurred to me. I’d only done a temporary color once or twice, a dark brown on top of my darker brown.
Marin was not like the women I was used to relating with—my friends of many years, Asher’s friends’ parents, and the moms I saw at school drop off and pickup. Most of the women I knew had children. Fortyish. Dressed casually—yoga pants or some variation of PNW casual. Several stayed at home with their kids. Others had “good jobs,” which is to say they worked for someone else and had paid benefits and upward mobility. They were almost all married to men, thus presumed heterosexual and monogamous.
Marin was in her early 30’s. No kids. Divorced. Worked for herself as a freelance designer. She was bisexual and nonmonogamous and her head was a pinwheel of color. She was uniquely herself.
Sitting there, observing her, I wanted what she had. Not her boyfriend, but the permission she’d given herself. I, too, wanted to live on my own terms. I wanted to be free…not of my husband and child, but of the limitations I’d always put on myself because of who I thought I was supposed to be: Normal Girl. “Normal” was my bid for safety and security, a trap I’d made for myself.
Marin did not seem like she’d spent the day stress smoking. She did not appear worried about sweat stains on her outfit. She seemed calm, like she’d done this before, like she knew how this worked.
She saw him before I did because my back was to the door. She stood, so I did too. He appeared. They embraced. He looked into her eyes and gave her a kiss. He hugged me—it felt rushed. He paused for us to sit and then plunked himself in the chair next to Marin. As he resituated his place setting, he said something about the workday and parking, concluding “but I’m here now.” He was bright, just a notch below hyper, precisely in character.
Facing them in the silence that followed I felt awkward and naïve, like a pubescent teenager cast into a spotlight that illuminated every mortifying detail of their transformation: every pimple, every body odor, every leaky tampon, every social gaffe, every uncertainty. I was nearly forty, but sitting with the two of them, I felt barely a day over 15, in the midst of a similar transformation, but with much higher stakes.
Ninth grade was the first time it occurred to me that I didn’t have to be like everybody else, that I could live outside the box. I began to ask myself who I wanted to be. How did I want to look? Who did I want to be friends with? How did I want the world to perceive me? Who did I want to become?
Most of all I wanted to be myself, but I didn’t know yet who that was. I thought I might like to be like Angela from My So Called Life. She was original, always in her feelings. Or better, Angela’s best friend Rayanne—a girl with real problems, perhaps, but she wasn’t going to let that keep her from smiling and having fun.
Over the course of that year, I started to morph my personal style away from a generic, preppy look to a more individualized, alternative one. I saved my babysitting money to spend on Sassy magazines and Doc Martens, which I wore with loose-fitting men’s jeans from Value Village and t-shirts I thought were artsy (my favorite was covered in M.C. Escher drawings). I pierced my belly button with a safety pin, dyed my hair with Kool-Aid, and shaved the back of my head with the clippers Alex left behind when he moved away to college. I splatter painted my bedroom teal, which I thought was very original, a la Jackson Pollock. I wrote a poem about a cigarette and gave it to Chet, the boy friend I hoped would become my boyfriend. I interpretive danced to Fleetwood Mac and the Doors and Pearl Jam’s Ten. One day my friend Jenna joined in, which was the best thing ever because it meant I wasn’t the only weirdo who thought that was fun. Afterward we ate Cool Whip and Wonder bread sandwiches that we washed down with her mom’s peach Bartles & Jaymes.
In the spring of that year, I heard you could overdose on Dramamine to get high. I don’t remember what I thought it would do for me. All I remember was that I was curious about drugs and that was one I could steal from a drugstore, which is exactly what I did.
My friend Richelle and I decided to split the pack of 24 one evening before we went to Zane’s house. Zane was a boy who I kind of knew from our junior high—he was captain of the football team—whose house was near the duplex where I lived with my mom and Mari. Richelle and I took the Dramamine, then walked over. Zane and his friend offered us some pot, which we happily smoked (the second time in my life I’d ever tried it). Soon we found ourselves laying four in a row across the full-sized bed in his room, our legs sticking off the side like matchsticks—Zane, Richelle, me, Zane’s friend—stoned out of our minds.
Neither Richelle nor I knew what we were in for, but Zane did. He had clearly put a lot of thought into how the night would go. The whole setup strikes me as crazy even now, but this is what he had engineered: a wooden box containing a red laser pointer was propped at an angle inside an open dresser drawer so the light would shine through an etched glass mug he had hung from the ceiling with a thumbtack. He spun the mug on its string. The red light shining through the mug produced a laser show in the corner where the ceiling met the wall. It reminded me of the time Alex took Mari and I to see Laser U2 at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, which I thought was the epitome of cool. Achtung, baby.
Richelle and I looked at each other excitedly, like we were waiting for our favorite movie to start.
“Can you feel it?” she whispered.
“I can’t really feel anything, so I think so!” We giggled.
Zane turned off the lights and turned on Doin’ It, by LL Cool J. Doin’ It is the kind of song that would horrify most church ladies, which is why I liked it, even though at age 15 I had no frame of reference for what it described. Next was something by Ice-T; I didn’t know the song but I liked being exposed to something so different from the Indigo Girls, my favorite band at the time.
As we laid there watching the laser dance, my body started to stiffen. The feeling of strangeness in my body seemed to be accelerating. Soon I could barely move. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and I couldn’t lift my hands. I started to feel afraid I might have overdosed, or that my body would never go back to normal.
Zane jumped up and said to his friend, “Pantera.”
“Yeah…”
I had no idea what Pantera was, but as soon as he pushed play, I felt like I’d been immersed in the soundtrack of hell. Every second grated on me like a blade scraping steel. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to ask him to change it. Maybe because I wasn’t sure I could form words.
Zane’s friend tried to put his hand under my shirt but backed off when I grunted no. Zane lacked such manners. Eventually he started kissing Richelle, then got on top of her. I could feel him moving against me. I heard her tell him no. I willed my hand to grab his arm so I could get his attention, but it dropped dead next to me. I slurred what I intended as daggers from my throat, “Don’t have sex with her.” But it came out like garbled marbles, “Derhasillepper.”
The next thing I heard was a zipper. And then I heard her cry out.
I laid there, stiff and powerless, blinking tears from my eyes, the music screaming.
When it was over, and we could finally move again, we got up and walked home in a shell-shocked stupor. Richelle started to whimper on the way—one of the saddest sounds I’ve ever heard.
“If you get raped does that mean you’re not a virgin anymore?”
“Noooooo,” I told her. “You’re still a virgin until you want to have sex. I’m so sorry that happened.”
We were standing on the side of a busy road with gravel underfoot and streaks of head lights burning our stoney eyes. I gave her a hug, which she accepted with her arms braced in front of her body and her face buried in her hands, sobbing.
“Are you going to be okay? I’m so sorry.”
I patted her back and told her over and over I was sorry. I didn’t know what else to say or do, or how to help, but I knew I had really fucked up. The drugs were my idea. The boys were my idea. The need to escape was mine. I don’t remember ever looking Richelle in the eyes again. Her mom pulled her out of our junior high. That night was the last time I ever saw her.
By the end of my freshman year, I had a friend who got pregnant, one that got caught stealing, and another who went to drug rehab. In hindsight, I see that I gravitated to troubled kids because they felt safe—I knew they wouldn’t judge me for my bad dad. I felt I could relate to them, and they to me. I had no idea how identified I was with my dad’s failures.
Unsure what else to do and desperate to get me back on track, my mom sent me to be a Counselor-in-Training at a Christian camp that summer. It worked. Spooked by the night with Richelle and the trouble my friends had gotten into, I decided I would get back in the box. I’d go back to coloring inside the lines. No more teal splatter paint or DIY piercings. My experiments of identity and differentiation were fucking scary. I decided to be godly instead. I decided I’d be “good.” “Good” and—there it is again—“normal.”
And that’s exactly what I did. I went to high school in the fall and made new friends with kids I thought were kind of boring, because there was no drama. They thought it was fun to go to the movies or hang out in the Taco Bell parking lot, hopping from car to car. Up until that year, I had used the movie theater as a shield for whatever badness I was really up to—stealing sundries from the Kmart next door, smoking with Chet, shotgunning beers with older boys in the parking lot. These were things to get excited about. Now I actually watched the movie I professed to my mom I was going to see. I watched boys my own age play video games in the arcade and developed a taste for those crispy cinnamon churro thingies at Taco Bell. I started going to youth group, and to Young Life.
I had no idea how to find contentment in just being: hanging out with friends, playing sports, exploring new interests, reading, practicing activities I liked. If I wasn’t feeling something intensely, I didn’t guess it was worth my time. This is a common issue for people who grow up with trauma. Nonetheless, I tried to get psyched about Young Life—those kids all seemed so earnest and made life seem simple. I wanted that, even if I didn’t subscribe to the rules of their god. Even if it meant I would never feel understood by the people around me.
What I wanted most of all, though—my truest longing—was for a love like the couple that ran our Young Life chapter, because they seemed so devoted and pure. I wondered if they had sex before they were married and thought they probably hadn’t, which meant the husband loved the wife before they even had sex. He loved her enough to protect her virtue. This was how I thought about it. I knew you weren’t supposed to have sex before marriage—(not so much a family ethic as fumes I ingested from the cultural ether)—and aspired to wait like I imagined they had. Somehow this seemed like the epitome of true love, and I wanted someone to love me like that. I didn’t know what I would have to do to get it, but for starters I figured I’d go back to shopping at the Gap instead of thrift stores. I’d be cute and preppy and conventional. I’d repaint my walls white and I’d stop writing in my journal…god. What was the point of exploring feelings I didn’t want to have?
My efforts to be godly and good were thwarted a year later, in the summer before my junior year of high school. The phone rang just before 11PM. My mom answered. Right away her face turned serious, almost grave. I stood close, trying to hear. As best I could tell it was my brother.
“Is that Alex?” I asked. She nodded yes.
“Is it about Dad?” She ignored my question.
“Oh Alex, I’m so sorry.” My mom sounded pitiful, as sorry as could be.
“WHAT?!” I asked her. I thought my dad was dead.
She made her hand into a gun, then motioned like she was pulling a trigger.
“Someone shot Dad?!”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head no. Then she said it again. “Oh Alex, I’m so sorry.”
When she got off the phone, she explained. Some guy in his building had jumped my dad the night before and beaten him up. My dad, black out drunk at the time, went to his apartment and shot him in retaliation. Later he told the police, “I shot the fucking (expletive) in the belly to teach that bastard a lesson.” He sealed his own fate. Clearly it wasn’t self-defense, as he would later plead.
I don’t remember much else of what happened after my mom got off the phone except that I vacillated between hysterical and hyperventilating for a long time. She took me outside and tried to calm me down. I walked barefoot in circles over the black asphalt, still warm from the hot July day, crying, moaning, and asking questions that begged for a different reality. He did what? How could he? Why?
My most lasting impression of that night was my certainty that a new fate had been sealed for me. Life as I knew it—Young Life, normal girl—was over. My dad was a criminal, a convicted loser. It stood to reason that as his offspring, I must be, too. I wondered if I was being melodramatic when I sobbed to my mom, “No student body president has a dad who’s in jail!”
I didn’t feel entitled to be so devastated. It’s not like we were close. Even as I paced the black ground, I wondered if I was just miming upset. Did I really care that much? I had managed through his absence and more or less ignored his existence for years. Why should it be any different now that he’d committed a crime he didn’t get away with? I blamed myself. I shouldn’t be surprised. I should just get over it. I concluded it was something I had contrived, a sort of armchair psychology: the subject feels inferior because her paternal figure is a fuck up.
But that’s exactly how I felt, and I believed I could be no better than him. I had planned to run for school office that year. I wanted to be a Daffodil princess, a coveted honor in our small town that I thought would look great on a college application. I wanted to play sports and take AP classes and get good grades. I’d spent the year before minding my manners, doing well in school, being generally responsible, going to youth group, and avoiding the new trouble my peers were getting into. I planned to go to DePauw—the school my mom meant to go to before she found out she was pregnant. I was going to be an obstetrician; I’d been dreaming about it since I could remember.
But my dad’s crime changed all of that. I was and would only ever be one thing: a loser.
The following school year, I had 39 unexcused absences before winter break. I often didn’t even have a reason to cut class—I just didn’t want to go. When my pre-calculus teacher got on my case about missing so much school, I explained that my dad was on trial (true) and said I had been going to court to support him (not true). She looked mortified, and I got what I wanted. Her expectations of me changed. She got off my case. I continued to forge notes from my mom so I could get the blue slip I needed to get back into class whenever I deigned to return.
I didn’t have to believe the narrative that nothing but poisoned fruit came from a poisoned tree. But I did believe it, consciously and unconsciously. None of my friends understood, at least none of the “good” kids. So, I moved on. I took classes at the local community college instead of going to high school all day. I worked full time at a coffee shop and took up with my first serious boyfriend, who proposed to me after two months of dating to alleviate my guilt that we were having sex. I didn’t know how else I could reconcile my overwhelming desire to have sex with the guilt I had about having it, so I said yes to the proposal. It lasted about three weeks before I realized the absurdity of being engaged at age 17. I gave the ring back. We kept dating, we kept having sex, and I continued to feel guilty and wrong, wrong, wrong.
Two years later, I married Ethan—my attempt to rebuild a shelter for myself. I knew well enough by then I’d be safer inside the box than out in the great wide open. It wasn’t the love I longed for but, believing I could be no better than my dad, I hoped marriage could at least save me from myself.
I didn’t realize the inherent problem with this—that being saved from myself meant I could never become her.
Sitting at lunch facing Viktor and Marin, I realized they weren’t trying to be “normal.” They weren’t trying to be everyone’s best friend. They were unapologetically themselves. I envied their liberation and felt wholly inadequate for the way I had failed to differentiate myself. To become myself. To let the colors of my own freak flag fly. I’d gone to lunch thinking I was so brave and bold and evolved with my open marriage. I tried to emphasize that Jack and I had been open now for more than a year—which was true, ish. But Viktor had changed everything, and it hadn’t even been a full season since we met.
Facing the two of them, side-by-side, I considered the viability of a less conventional lifestyle. And I saw the permission I hadn’t known I had been waiting for to finally be myself.
Chapter 34: Little Boxes