Sheila Writes a Memoir

You know how it happens: there are certain atrocities parents should not commit when it comes to their children. Still, parents, like all members of humanity, are imperfect. Something large or small, it doesn’t matter, drives them over a line they never thought they’d cross. They strike out, fists clenched. Those punches land on the soft, warm, resilient bodies of their children–loving miniatures who are uncertain and afraid. The children grow. They find out through friends or television that what their parents are doing is wrong. It’s not the natural order of things. Feet and fists and curses do not, in other homes, fall out of the sky like rain.

These children, now gripping truth in their own little fists, find a small way to fight back–to retain a small piece of purity in themselves. Something secret, untouchable, unharmed. A safe place they can return to when the world outside is not safe. They tuck it away deep, deep in their minds until they are big enough to change their circumstances. Old enough to dig that scrap out again. But they always need help.

Sheila needs help.

This is why she sits in a room with a chocolate wall and writes on butterscotch paper.

It has taken her years to pick up the pen. She has had countless arguments alone on her licorice futon. She doesn’t want witnesses. These words she is bracing herself to purge–because writing them will be a removal of their ever-present burden, she is sure–will be a transcription of the sins of her mother and father.

No one will know, she tells herself. I never have to share it. I can burn each page after I write it. But she won’t do that. She will keep every page, look at them again and again. Rewrite, reshape, rethink, return. She has the arc of her story in her mind, assembled in a way she believes–no, hopes–will be interesting to a reader. Someone that is not herself.

I can always take a pen name, she tells herself as she lowers her pen.

She draws back again. There’s always a paper trail. Even with a pen name, the trail will lead right back to this notepad. She might publish her story and die. She may never publish. She may leave the papers behind in this life for whoever sorts through her belongings to find. Maybe her sister or her brother. She may die and leave a wake of pain for the surviving members of her family.

She re-enters the argument with herself. Why does she care? Why should she? Why is she so loyal, like a beaten dog, protecting her beastly parents when they never protected her from themselves?

Sheila takes a deep breath. Because they are not the same. I’m not the same. They made the effort. We’ve all changed. And then there are my siblings. This is their story, too, and they don’t want it told. Even if it could save other parents and children from a life like their own. Knowledge is power. Sheila grits her teeth. Both knowledge and power are horribly frightening.

But this is also my story. I have a right to withhold it or share it. It’s not just my story, it’s my life.

The lamp behind her casts her shadow onto the paper. She presses the ball of her pen down too hard and begins to fill the lines of her silhouette.

***

There are several false starts.

My boyfriend didn’t rape me. My mother did.

Some daughters run away from their crazy mothers, but I had nowhere to go.

My father beat me.

My first memory of sex is from when I was four.

The thoughts take shape on the paper, ink from the nib of her pen. Black blood on butterscotch. Her heart beats out of rhythm. A wall falls on her chest. Her throat constricts. She’s changed her mind again. She doesn’t want to do this, but before she can rip the page to shreds and chuck her pen in the trash, she latches onto that first opening and lets it all pour out. Therapeutic. That’s what this is supposed to be. Let her mother take the blame. Let her take it all. Her boyfriend didn’t rape her. Sheila had lived a lie for years, claiming a sixteen-year-old with sandy blonde hair had burst the damn of her hymen by force. And why had she said it?

My boyfriend didn’t rape me. My mother did.

Not in the physical sense, but all these years later it is clear to me that she was there in that dirty room with creaking floorboards and a single, dusty lamp to light it. She was there, pinning me down, that voice in my head telling me I deserved this. I had it coming. That no, I didn’t want this, not with him, not now, but why stop it? Just let it happen. Life boils down to one thing before death: sex. Women are holes men stab themselves into. I’m nothing more than a hole. A walking, talking hole built to please some pervert man who handles himself when he’s alone, thinking about all the other walking, talking holes in the world and how many of them he can squeeze himself into.

Hey, Mom, I know you’ve been through some shit, but fuck you.

Sheila leans away from the words on the page. Strikes them out. It felt good to write them, but that’s not who she is. She loves her mother, forgives her for what she can, and as much as she’d like to explode in her mother’s face, she can’t. She won’t. She’ll never grab her mom by the hair and rub her face in the pile of noxious waste that makes up the memory bank of her childhood. She thinks again of tossing the butterscotch paper. She still has the option of burning it. She fiddles with her hair while she mulls her choices. Pen back to paper. She wants to get through this. Onward.

***

She doesn’t know how she learned about sex, but she knows roughly when. It was some time before kindergarten. Possibly before age two. Her first memory is of a boy and girl, both quite young themselves, trying to molest her with a spoon. It was much more ominous than show-me-yours-i’ll-show-you-mine. There was threat and fear. Sheila was terrified. Someone was there to protect her. It was not her mother.

She sat on a plastic picnic blanket on a living room floor. It was the first of several times her mother had left her father. This time, her mother had run with Sheila to her own abuser, a childhood neighbor with children of his own. A sexual predator who reproduced when he ran out of available living sex toys. He opened his home to Sheila and her mother. It was his children who wielded the glinting, silver spoon, approaching her with the goal of putting it inside. Somewhere inside, and that would hurt. That’s all Sheila knew.

Why did my mother bring me there? Sheila writes. Why did Mom take her baby girl to the home of a man who repeatedly raped her as a child? Why was I introduced into the arms of a man who made up the stuff of nightmares?

So far, her manuscript consists of pages of rage-driven scrawl and unanswerable questions.

It is so easy to imagine my mother, a little girl, trembling under her blanket. Holding her breath so those hands wouldn’t find her again. Praying she would become invisible. There wouldn’t be any pain, any confessions of love, any hand over her mouth, any pushing and grunting, any threats of recourse.

The man had three daughters. One is insane. One is in prison. One committed suicide. It was the third that removed my mother from the situation. Her suicide note told it all, ending with, “If you don’t believe me, ask that neighbor girl. He gets her, too.”

To this day, she talks to that man. He was in and out of prison, supposedly reformed. I know it’s not true. Otherwise I wouldn’t always feel this way. Like something is missing. There are gaps. Things I can’t, or won’t let myself, remember. Is it Stockholm Syndrome that keeps her connected to him? Some other syndrome? I love my mother because she is my mother, but I hate my mother the abuser. I love my father because he has changed, but I hated my father the abuser.

Confusion roils inside her. She loves her parents. She forgives them, to an extent. Always, always, she’s defended them. So many times she wanted to run away. Maybe she could have. She had friends who offered to take her, their parents complicit in an extension of good faith. She hadn’t gone. She’d stayed and allowed the abuse to continue. But would it really have worked?

By then she believed she deserved the beatings and cut-downs. She believed the police would think her a liar and drag her back to her parents so that they could knock some sense into her. By then the degradation was affirmation of what Sheila suspected about herself. She was worthless. That hole between her legs coupled with her rebellious thoughts guaranteed that she would become a whore. When men and boys looked at her, they knew what she was. No man would ever love her. She wasn’t good enough for that. She would be used and cast aside. She would sate some lust, and if she was good enough–if she could keep a man interested in that hole between her legs and the bumps on her chest–she might secure a place in his life, tie him to her, so that he would mistake his lust for love until the day her sex appeal slackened. That’s what women were good for.

I couldn’t have put this into words even three months ago. What has changed for me? Is it that I no longer talk with my mother on the phone? Is it simple distance?

Sheila doesn’t realize, but the change has come from her community. More specifically, from Yusuf, the Palestinian man who attends the weekly study circle at the mosque. Often, they speak to each other. In the library of her mosque with plenty of chaperones, Sheila feels safe to talk with him, though she keeps her eyes down. He is a beautiful man, with short, curly hair and green-brown eyes. When he grows excited, he lowers himself from his knees onto the floor to keep himself in check. He speaks softly. He is curious about her. He is not pushy.

Sheila can’t imagine the truth of it, but Yusuf hopes to court her. She wants this. She’s met other Muslim men, good and bad. She’s met too many non-Muslim men–the kind that witness the inner terror she tries to hide–the kind that know that if they push her, they can break her. She is careful to stay away from these type of men, Muslim and non-Muslim. Still, she doesn’t trust herself.

This lack of trust is what Yusuf senses. He also realizes the truth of victimization. His family, with the exception of the one sister who escaped with him to the United States by way of Canada, were casualties of guns and bulldozers. Unlike Sheila, Yusuf is able to separate the attitudes of some from the attitudes of many. It helps that it was Israelis who spirited him out of Palestine, whispering urgently that they could not condone ethnic persecution. It was why their families had come there in the first place.

But Sheila can’t imagine this, and when she recognizes her attraction to Yusuf, she entertains it briefly, pushes it down, and turns back to her writing. As if this, these words she puts to paper, could purge a history from her so deeply ingrained that she is nothing without the girl she was.

***

Here she is. Sheila. A young woman. A Muslimah. Arab-American. Spirited. Dejected. Confused.

Here she is at home with a pen and a butterscotch pad of paper, sucking her own tongue and cannibalizing her lower lip as she tries to make sense of her life. She bends the words to define herself, but no matter how tightly she coils them and locks them into place, they always fire free. Perhaps words cannot contain her. Perhaps this exercise is futile.

Here she is with Yusuf. A young man. A Muslim. An Arab-American comfortable with his many labels and hyphenations. Here she is with red in her cheeks when their eyes meet or the air carries his scent to her. He is the one. She is the one, but she is afraid to be the one.

Here she is back in her apartment. All the lights are out except one desk lamp that bends over her butterscotch paper and pools lemonade light over the words she now cries between the lines. She is afraid of more than love. She is afraid of the memories that bubble up to the surface. They fragment her with the pain of truth. She is heated and thawed and dried out and burned by her fractured innocence. She is tempted by the thought but will not voice it: Why me?

Here is Sheila, face in hands, mulling over the latest hurt to break the surface. She is riddled with pockmarks. She shivers from the tears that have run down her arms and pooled around her elbows. She is angry. Will she scream? Will she throw her teacup or the plate of toast? No. She will breathe deeply. She will check her oxygen levels. She will dive again.

***

Sheila writes poetry on napkins at Starbucks. She stashes them in her purse, then pastes or copies them into her diary at night, sometimes editing, other times appreciating them for the simple release. She must have hundreds of poems long and short crammed into the diaries she’s kept over the years, filed away with no explanations.

Sheila wonders why she can keep a diary but she can’t write a memoir? Okay, so she is writing a memoir, but the process is grueling, whereas writing in her diary is second nature. She flips through the pages, reading old entries:

June 2, 2004

“These memories keep coming back. It hurts. I don’t want them. I keep wondering why this is my life. Maybe I should talk to someone? Is there anyone? Not sure. The memories are blue and green with mist in that place in the woods by the first house.”

October 2005

“Talked to M today. Betting it won’t work out. Feel like a trollop. Why can’t I just do this right? I’m always in too fast. Stupid. I know.”

January 7, 2006

“New year hasn’t begun well. Thought it would go better but I can’t keep to resolutions. I’m reminded of my teenage years. Have I whored out my soul to Satan? Was sure I did then. Silly thought. Know it’s not true. Feeling a bit like a garish billboard. Everyone have a look. Open legs. On display. Ugh I’m such a fat shit.”

She stops looking back. The entries are spaced and sporadic. They’re also vague in every area except her disgust with herself. She turns her attention to today’s napkin. What she has written in her memoir has been explicit. Every hand-scribbled page has dredged up an emotional ton, and she carries the elephant of memory inside her head. She is sure this journey into her personal history is the cause behind these headaches and her racing heart at night. It is so tempting to throw in the towel.

Sheila closes her blue, leather-bound diary. She squints at the brown napkin still in her hand, considering. Before she loses her nerve, she grabs the latest butterscotch pad (she’s already filled three), and begins to copy the poem down. It’s bad, but it’s true. More true than anything else in her diary. When she’s done, she looks at the words.

Delivery

There are three reasons why I believe in love:
my mother
my father
the pain they pushed me through.

There are two reasons why I believe in pain:
my mother
my father.

There is one reason why I know pain exists:
my mother.

The breath comes whooshing out of her. She nods to herself, chews the inside of her cheek thoughtfully. Untrue? No. Unfair? No. This is more than true or fair. This is right. She’s beginning to see that; some things are right. She tucks the pad away and twists her hair as her thoughts stray to Yusuf and what he said when he phoned last night.

***

Yusuf told me that we all have our demons. It was on the tip of my tongue. I wanted to tell him that, by age four, I had observed demons dancing on laundry lines and watched Satan emerge from my bedroom floor. I held my tongue. He and I—we—are just beginning. Can I expect him to understand the level of crazy I hail from? Can I tell him that, at the same age, I’d seen my sister through across the room into a door? Or another time, watched her pajama dress fly up as she was launched against a wall by the man who was supposed to protect us? By the most important man in our lives? Can I open my heart and spill out my mother’s numerous cautions to “be good.” Her warnings of “Don’t agitate your father. If you make him mad, I’m not gonna put myself between you. You know better, and whatever he gives you, you’ll deserve.” How many times did she pack my sister, brother and I up and tow us cross-country, removing us from the festering poison of one violent man only to bathe us in her own putrid brew? My mother. My mother could talk anyone down from the highest high until the urge was to commit suicide. I know. I tried it once—to saw through my breastbone with a butter knife because I believed I deserved a slow and painful death. Should I tell him that?

Also by age four: I knew how to hide, how to hate, to lie, apologize, scream for help, not breathe for fear of making a noise, never to trust my father or my mother. I knew about sex—that it could be had. That it could be good. I knew that there was beauty in love. At age four, when I was just learning to control my body and swing myself from the first to second monkey bar, I knew about lust. My stuffed animals were my loeers. My rolled up blankets or folded-over pillows were men who spanked me lightly , groped my chest and begged me to ride them.

When I was four, if you had named this masturbation, I would not have known what you meant, but I might have admitted to loving it. Because, I knew when I “developed” sex couldn’t be good anymore. It was only in my fantasies that I would be allowed to have control or an emotional connection with my partners. I had learned many things that most four-year-olds do not know, but until I was five, I never learned about shame.

It was an oversized teddy bear with a white patch of his left eye. That night, he played the part of my lover. My sister was sleeping. It was dark. I was having trouble drifting off after my mother tucked me in. I didn’t expect my father would say goodnight. I understood privacy and wanted it when I felt the tingle between my thighs as I did then. I wanted to be alone, to rub myself against something soft but firm until I peaked and calm washed over me.

I pushed my door mostly shut and climbed back into my bed. My sister’s breathing was even. I’m certain I talked to the bear as I shoved him into my underwear and started to rub against him. I’m not sure where I was in my fantasy when my door swung quietly open. My father stood there, looking in on me in horror and anger. I felt naked when he told me to step into the hallway. His voice was calm, but I shook a bit as I removed my bear from my ruffle panties and pulled my pajama dress down. I was uncomfortable with arousal as I stood in front of him. The hall light fell on me at an angle. My father was silent, but I could see the fury building in his eyes. His foot flew from the shag carpet. I saw my mother and brother at the end of the hall, my sister in our doorway, their faces contorting in fear.

My father was screaming, his face plumped and tomato red as his foot met my delicate V, the part of my body just effused with pleasure and now exploding with pain. The world snapped from silent, slow motion to cacophony as I was lifted off the ground by the kick and thrown backward from the light. My body found the door of the linen closet. I slid onto the floor.

My sister shrieked. My mother moved toward me and shouted at my father. “Don’t do this!” She called him by name, telling him, “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

But he was already lifting me off the floor by my armpits, standing me up so he could kick me again. He was hurting me, but I couldn’t feel pain. Someone told me to run. Sister or brother. My mother was between my father and me. My sister held our door open. My brother pushed me inside. My father reached in and grabbed me, throwing me back to the ground and kicking me in the ribs. My siblings had my legs and dragged me away. I remember thinking I should cover my head. My mother did it for me, blockading the door when we four were secure, waiting for the dust to settle. My sister braided my hair while I sat huddled on the floor, bruised and humiliated though I was uncertain why what I had done was wrong.