The Heart Asks Pleasure – First – and Then – Excuse from Pain – and Then – Those Little Anodynes That Deaden Suffering

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The Heart asks Pleasure – first – And then – excuse from Pain – And then – those little Anodynes That deaden suffering –

—Emily Dickinson

“You are turning into a very interesting person,” my paternal grandmother Esther announced the day she gave me her four Emily Dickinson books. At that point in my college

English major years, Dickinson was just an idea, an important poet I knew little about. It turned out my grandmother Esther had been the secretary for some of Dickinson’s early editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd—those who infamously took the dashes out of Dickinson’s poems. The books Esther was handing me were the fruits of her secretarial labor, and they contained pruned versions of the poems I would encounter in my Norton anthology.

Long before my grandmother was alive, Mabel Loomis Todd (with Henry Higginson, briefly) had joyfully set to work on editing the very first officially published Dickinson poems. A strong believer in Dickinson’s poetry, despite its unruly dashes, Mabel fully committed herself to the project. Yet, when news of an affair between Mable and Emily’s brother, Austin came to light, the family began a painful lawsuit against Mabel. Mabel responded by locking the trunk—for forty years—and refusing all access to scholars and family alike.

After forty years of silence, Mabel asked her daughter Millicent to open the trunk.

The lock, as it opens, plays a little tune, Millicent wrote in her introduction to the 1935 poems. Millicent resumed the editorial work her mother had begun, at which point my

grandmother enters the story, hired as Millicent’s secretary, to execute the keystrokes, or lack thereof, that erased the strange alchemy of dashes and capitals for which Dickinson is now famous.

Mabel, it was said, fashioned the poems into her own image, her own writing style.

Millicent perhaps simply carried on the “style” passed down from her mother. But at some point in the editing, there must have been a moment of interfacing with what is a breathtaking array of incomprehensibility. For it is not, as college students are led to believe, that there were “original” poems with dashes in them—the poems we find in

Norton anthologies, and that are so obviously perfect as they are. Readers of the two- volume Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, a collection of facsimiles of the hand written poems from the trunk, know that what is called the Dickinson dash is actually a variable line, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, sometimes vertical. The Dickinson poems are fragments written on the backs of envelopes, on a chocolate wrapper, on brown paper bags.

What could be one, two, or three poems appear on the same page. Individual lines are written vertically in the margins of a letter.

Faced with the human stain of Dickinson’s compositions, was the editing like an embarrassed hush for Mabel and Millicent and my grandmother, so that after inventing a simplified version of Dickinson’s messy process, they could act as if the “half-cracked” lines had never happened?

I have wanted to weave some grand narrative between the locked trunk, the dashes’ erasure, and the silences and repressions within my own family, but it’s not that simple.

Like anyone hoping to look at her past, correction of my own falsely transcribed life leads

1 “Contained in this short life,” Emily Dickinson Archive, www.edickinson.org, Amherst College, Amherst MA, Amherst Manuscript # 159, January 19, 2018.

me to the same inevitability. Whatever happened cannot be recovered because it happened multiply. Like the many-vectored Dickinson compositions, there are as many different ways to read the past as there are people who lived it. And yet, as in Millicent’s pruned and repackaged New Poems, it is possible to detect something missing, something falsely arranged in the historical record and the family myths. It is possible to listen to the narratives inside ourselves, the assessments and judgments about those closest to us, and to hear what interpretation is held together by fear. The small child’s fear writes the wide world manageable. And this smallness, unexamined, is passed down from generation to generation. But we may also back out of our tiny binoculars, see for the first time how they pulled the vast world into the scope of two tiny hands or a trunk’s keyhole. Like those

Dickinson scholars who opened the trunk to restore the original, I find there is no original of my past to “restore,” but the work is no less necessary for that.

[—]

One summer when I was twelve Grandma Esther took me on a road trip through the

New England of the Dickinson relatives, which was also the land of the far less moneyed

Clarkes and Nichols, my paternal relatives.

“So in a court room you wouldn’t say anything about ‘tubby time,’ right?” my gray- haired grandmother asked as we drove down the Pennsylvania turnpike in her no-frills, blue Ford escort.

“Uh…no. ”

I wouldn’t say anything because while I understood her reference, I truly had no memory of the bathtub molestation my father (her son) stood accused of. I also wouldn’t say anything because I was sure that Esther’s love was conditional upon my silence.

I can’t say how I knew the rumor of molestation, but somehow, I had heard it before, had tried to erase it from my mind, and like a recurring nightmare, it had come back to haunt me.

As Esther drove the Ford through Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, the baby fat poured off my body like miles of highway swept under the wheels of her car. I discovered I had the ability to say no to dessert—otherwise a compulsion and not reserved for after diner—and I chose to act on that ability. With Esther I was constantly moving, every few days in a new place, and constantly pulled out of my self and into the other, where I could be whatever self I chose. And on this trip I wanted to be the child who politely said no to dessert.

While I look slim in the pictures from our trip, I also look sad. I didn’t know any of the people we were staying with, and there was that pillar of silence that grows anytime someone tells another they cannot speak. I knew I had not been abused, had no interest in going into a courtroom, but what I heard her saying was: if you were abused, don’t tell anyone.

At home in Pittsburgh, sweets assuaged the sorrow of my mother’s severe alcoholism and neglect and my father’s absence a thousand miles away in Pensacola. I truly had—have—no memories of him abusing me, though I have deep memories of pining for him. Though I seem to demonstrate no dramatic signs of having been abused, and feel no fear or anger towards my now deceased dad, I have lived with anxiety, depression, and

body dysmorphic disorder, most of which may be attributable to the profound neglect of my mother, the absence of my father, and the narrative, however false, that my father, whom I loved, was actually a sexual predator.

While grandma Esther required my silence, relatives on my mother’s side ushered the abuse I didn’t remember through that silence. When I was just past puberty, my maternal aunt Kathe took me for a walk on their expansive horse farm and, again, suggested Dad had molested me. “You will have a hard time having a boyfriend,” she said,

“if you don’t talk about what happened with your father.” As with Esther, I had no idea what my aunt was talking about and was horrified. After years of watching after-school specials about child sexual abuse, I knew that people repressed what they didn’t want to acknowledge, so I also knew that my absence of a memory could never count as proof and might even count as evidence of denial. To deny was to be “in denial,” or to be on the wrong side of Oprah Winfrey’s axiom that, to the question, “Were you abused?” all you can ever say is “Yes” or “I don’t know.”

Yet even in the face of my own truth—that nothing happened—waves of shame and shock crushed me. Despite the distinct absence of any memory of abuse, the “news” broke me apart. As a result I was given a father to grieve while he was still alive, and every time I saw him for the next thirteen years until his death, I swirled with fear, confusion, and disgust. But like the locked trunk, I said nothing.

In my twenties, when my mom was dying of lung cancer, I knew I had to ask her about my father before it was too late. It was a very confusing time, she said to me in our living room, both of us on our feet as if this were a conversation on the run. When we were living together in New Orleans, she thought she had overheard some inappropriate talk

from outside the bathroom door while my Dad was giving me a bath. In all my life, until that moment, mom had never mentioned the molestation rumor, as if she didn’t even know about it, and yet, frustratingly, now she did not speak against nor seem surprised to hear it.

Inappropriate talk, inappropriate touch. These vague words don’t fit with my understanding of what it would mean if I suspected that my own daughter were being abused. Why was my mother’s truth so foggy? Why weren’t the details of a two-year-old’s alleged abuse something she could remember with some kind of certainty? Imagine your child asking if their father abused them, and all you offer are two noncommittal sentences. I say this not as judgment but as sign of an erasure. My mother was never a good liar, nor do

I think she was in this moment lying. She did not propose the molestation theory, but in that moment she didn’t do a good job of refuting it. I think she was a baby deer. I think she was frozen by her own shame. What kept her on the other side of the door? Why couldn’t she remember?

Because, as with so much of my childhood, she wasn’t really there.

When I would walk home from the bus stop in elementary school, mom would be passed out in the middle of the kitchen floor. My older brother, Daryl, isn’t with me in this scene, though we went to the same school and he took the same bus home every day.

Maybe he was at a friend’s, of which I had few, or at sports practice, as would be his pattern to stay active and out of doors whenever possible. To my eyes alone then her body looked like Ks and Vs across the 1980s laminate. I was six, seven, eight, nine. I was ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. When she was in a rare sober spell, she might be on her hands and knees all morning, scrubbing that floor, inch by inch, with a Brillo pad.

Her passing out looked like the last stage of a fall, not like falling asleep, and she had dangerously fallen several times—once, I’d been told, tipping backwards in a wooden kitchen chair. Her arm had been slung around the back so that, when she hit the ground her humerus bone snapped between the floor and the back of the chair. The surgeon had to put a pin in, and ever after her upper arm bore a scar that looked to me like the thread smile on the stuffed animal I slept with—just a line of indentation in the flesh.

Two accidents could have killed my mom: cracking her head in the porcelain bathtub when I was eight, and a car crash, with Daryl and I in the backseat, when I was a baby. Head trauma from the car crash left her with epilepsy.

This kind of bottom is what psychiatry names “Substance Use Disorder: Severe.”

There are eleven symptoms of Substance Use Disorder, according to the Diagnostic and

Statistical Manual, including:

• substance is taken in larger amounts or over a longer period of time

than was intended

• great deal of time is spent in activities necessary to obtain the

substance, use the substance, or recover from its effects, and

• recurrent use of the substance in situations where it is physically

hazardous.

Severity is measured by number of symptoms: 2-3 = mild, 4-5 = moderate, 6 or more = severe. Mom easily met all eleven criteria. In fact, her level of compulsion could make one think they should invent a new category, with symptoms like: consumes the substance as rapidly as possible to induce unconsciousness despite taking zero pleasure in the taste.

In one version of the car crash in my mind, Mom drives baby me and my four-year- old brother down the street in New Orleans, where we lived with my father until I was just past two. Before we reach Popeye’s Chicken and Biscuits, where we’re headed for lunch,

Mom passes out at the wheel, and the car rolls into one of the flood ditches that accompanied nearly all the lawns in our suburban neighborhood.

Another version of the crash, told at Thanksgiving dinner one year by mom’s older brother Carl, says she had intentionally driven the car into a ditch filled with rainwater when the car started overheating and she thought the steam was sign of a fire. I remember so clearly uncle Carl’s astonished laugh, clattering across the crystal water glasses and elaborate holiday centerpiece. Carl’s was the laugh of the absurd, of someone who had heard it all and still there was more. I didn’t know, though, exactly what piece of the story was absurd: had she lied to him about the cause of the crash and he saw through it, or had she really nearly killed us in an attempt to save our lives? In any case, where my memory starts, we never had a car, mom couldn’t by law get a license, and no one talked about why.

[—]

A dash can indicate the absence of information.

[—]

A medium named Martie Hughes tells me that she would “stake her career” on the fact that my father did not molest me. In her mind’s eye or with her physical eye, Martie sees a tableau of my family: on my left, Dad points to my mom over on my right: I wonder if you have the guts to say it. My grandmother, standing behind my mom with a stick, prods

her to say it, say it. I have no idea what Mom is being instructed to say, and, baffled at this turn of events, I ask Martie how the molestation narrative could exist if nothing happened.

Martie, who is a medium, says the story began with my mom’s relatives and that Mom had been too afraid to go against them, as if she would disappoint them.

“The dead cannot lie,” Martie says from the rose pink velour chair across from me.

“And the dead cannot apologize.”

[—]

As I try to un-write this enigma of my life, I reach out to aunt Kathe and uncle Carl, my only adult relatives who were in contact with us as children. “You will have to talk to

Carl about it,” Kathe says, so I call Carl, my mother’s brother, a successful lawyer, a man who when he must hug does so with as little bodily contact as possible. Yet, Carl also surprises me with rare moments of connection, like when he held my three-month-old baby (I wasn’t sure he would) at Christmas, walking ever-so-slowly around the living room, staring awe-struck into her eyes.

“When I was about twelve, Kathe took me for a walk and told me I was molested,” I say over the phone. “What evidence do you have that I was abused? Because honestly, it doesn’t feel true to me or to the father that I knew at all.”

In my mind, I assumed everyone in the family lived with the same narrative of molestation that I did—that every time they saw me, that’s what they were thinking about.

So it was quite a surprise when Carl didn’t seem to recognize my version of the story.

“I’m not sure that the word ‘molested’ was ever used. We weren’t sure. When you were living in New Orleans, your father was taking baths with you and we were worried

maybe something happened, so I asked your aunt to talk with you about it. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have put that on her.”

Maybe? Maybe something happened? My entire life, my entire relationship to my dad was electrocuted by that maybe. By a tragic error. By a miscommunication. From my perspective, this wasn’t one instance of my aunt saying one incorrect accusation—it was the ongoing rumor of my childhood, stewing in my head to such an extent I can’t say how or why it technically started, as if it were simply in the air I breathed.

Twenty years ago on my aunt and uncle’s horse farm, had I misheard? Did I take a question as a statement? I am pretty sure my aunt asserted this had happened, because I remember I did not feel room in the conversation to say no it did not.

“How old was I when my Dad was taking baths with me?” I ask Carl, in the dark, on a cellphone in my backyard. But I already know that it couldn’t have been past age two because my parents were divorced by then and no one in Pittsburgh would have any way of knowing what was happening in visits to my dad down south.

“I don’t know, it was past an appropriate age, if there ever is an appropriate age.”

If there ever is an appropriate age. For men of a certain generation and culture, I believe there is not; perhaps such men’s bodies are a source of panic for them. Or perhaps there are other reasons, secrets no one in my family speaks of so readily as they speak of my “abuse”—secrets I know nothing about but whose shame has been passed down to me.

And now I can start to see more clearly what’s really going on, what had been going on all along. That word again, inappropriate. Perhaps it was my relatives’ fear of being inappropriate that fueled this entire narrative. Projecting fear of their bodies onto my father and me.

Sensing, maybe, the damage wrought by my aunt’s conversation with a thirteen- year-old girl, my uncle responds: “It’s a terrible thing. I hope you are never in a situation where you have to choose between saying something like this to a child or not.”

[—]

If the dead can’t lie, then the truth I speak on behalf of the living is that as a child I had been sexually assaulted or near-assaulted—twice—but not by my dad. And I never didn’t remember it and I never spoke of it to anyone.

[—]

For a long, hot summer when I am maybe eleven years old, I share a bedroom with my maternal grandmother, who we call Mer, while the handyman renovates the attic. I toss and turn without AC while she reminds me that being still will cool me down more than fanning myself. “Who is “Greg?’” she asks one night, and I suddenly flash back to the previous night when I woke knowing I had said the name in my sleep. I am convinced she thinks I’m having sex dreams, whatever a sex dream is. “Someone at school,” I say, and don’t tell her, don’t tell anyone, that Greg is also the name of my brother’s teenage friend who, in the closet of this shared bedroom, pulled my pants and underwear down during

“hide and seek,” would have done more if I hadn’t pulled free and run.

Maybe Greg is the reason the air has become so embarrassingly thick. But Greg is like additive shame to a specter who visited much earlier in my life. When I was maybe

seven years old, my best friend Drew and I had gone looking for the older boys’ secret

“shack” in the woods. We find it, and the penalty exacted upon me is a Marie Howe “Sixth- grade”-esque ritual. In the poem, the speaker and her friend are tied “spread-eagled” to an ever-so-suburban garage by the neighbor boys, and threatened with sexual violence and humiliation with a deer’s leg, “dried up and still fur-covered,” from one of the boy’s father’s hunting trips. In my story, an older, neighborhood bully named Tommy—Tommy, how I hesitate to write his name!—ordered or coaxed me to pull down my pants. Surrounded by younger boys of varying ages, he instructed me to insert objects into my vagina.: a rusty nail, a bottle cap, what else? As was probably true of many of the boys who surrounded me,

I complied out of fear of the consequences. I remember really hesitating at one of the objects, maybe the bottle cap, and then it all goes fuzzy. Somehow it ended. Perhaps my brother, who may have been there, put a stop to it. Perhaps another child ran to get a parent. I have no idea, it all goes black.

[—]

I am sure the onlookers suffered a penalty that day, too. Drew, a year younger than me and a petite boy, surely suffered the secondary trauma of watching violence, powerless to stop it.

If my brother was there, my consciousness won’t allow me to see it. But I can imagine him, almost four years my senior, though younger and shorter than Tommy. I picture Daryl caught between an instinct to protect and an instinct to avoid the very real possibility of a beating.

I picture all the boys, my neighbors and classmates, frozen under Tommy’s spell.

What spell can I cast to release us all from this terrible tableau? Am I writing that spell? I read once that the secret to spell casting was being deeply connected to the earth.

You had to know the four directions in order to invoke them, had to witness the specific quality of the sun and moon at dawn, noon, sunset, and midnight. Witches, in other words, need to know of what they speak. My knowing does not require I establish a definitive truth of the past, but that I recover myself in the present. It requires the most obvious and frightening conversations imaginable—with my own relatives, about the past we do and do not share. It requires refusing the seeming safety of silence, a prison. In a family that can say nothing clearly for forty years, the forty years of my own life, I cross a distance—just two mouths, two voices on staticky cell phones, Hey, do you remember when….? A distance more scary and vast than that between the living and the dead.

And the lock, as it opens, plays a little tune.