The Incest Diary Read online

  In the cabin were beautiful colored-glass cups. They shone like jewels. Deep, rich colors. Teal, turquoise, golden ocher, royal blue, purple, scarlet, fuchsia, silver gray. I loved drinking water out of those colored cups with question-mark-shaped handles. They were kept in the same wooden hutch as a drawer that held spices in little jars sealed with shaved-down corks. I liked to open that drawer, pull out the tiny corks, and smell the spices.

  I remember the red-stripe ticking on the mattress in the bed where I slept. My father took off my pants and my underwear. I remember being facedown, biting the button on the mattress while my father put something inside me. I felt him rub his penis between my butt cheeks. I ran my tongue along the button I was biting. I remember the taste of the mattress. Smoky canvas. The smell of the mattress. Old fabric, firewood smoke, musty smell.

  * * *

  A mouse who lives in a warm nest where it is well fed will venture out and then, when frightened, rapidly return to its home. A mouse who has an uncomfortable nest—where it experiences pain and lack of food—when out of its nest in a place with warmth and food, and then suddenly frightened, will also return home, just like the other mouse. Experiments with other animals proved the same—when an animal is scared, it goes home, no matter how terrifying home is.

  * * *

  I climbed on a stool and opened the medicine cabinet over the bathroom sink and took out a bottle of my mother’s Nivea lotion. I unscrewed the top and left it inside the cabinet. I liked the smell because it was the smell of my mother. I sought comfort from her in her scent since I didn’t have it from her directly. I carried around the lotion bottle and smelled it while I sucked my thumb. Smell and suck, smell and suck. Smell the sweet perfume, suck my soothing thumb. I made my thumb turn white and withered with all the sucking. I sucked it all the time until my dentist, who called me Princess, told me I would get buck teeth if I kept it up. He told me he would be proud of me for quitting, and I wanted my dentist to be proud of me. But I like to have things in my mouth.

  * * *

  When I was very little, I couldn’t sleep because of my nightmares and I peed in my bed every night. A few times at the grocery market, I walked up to a stranger who looked nice and asked if they would take me home with them. I was difficult at my school. I hit the boys. I drew coiled cobras in beds and girls being impaled by large buildings. When we went on a family trip to Boston and New York, I had strong pains in my body, because every time I looked at the big tall buildings I felt that they were about to fuck me. I wondered if I was pregnant all through first, second, and third grades. I obsessively masturbated. I had open sores on my hands from washing them over and over until they bled.

  But to my mother, I was the other woman. She often told me that she wished I hadn’t been born.

  * * *

  For discipline, my father tied me to a chair. Sometimes he put the chair in the closet. Over time, I learned not to scream. I learned that eventually my father would come and let me out.

  * * *

  I remember looking at a painting in a book of a woman wearing a white dress hanging off of a bed. An evil, ugly monster was sitting on her belly. It scared me and excited me to look at her. It also excited me to look at the painting, in my mother’s book of the Louvre, of the two women, topless, where one is pinching the other’s nipple. I looked at the saints with eyes plucked out, bodies pierced by arrows, Saint Bartholomew skinned. I looked at the pictures of the Sabines being abducted. And Judith slaying Holofernes. I looked and looked and ran my finger over that bleeding, murdered man.

  Years later, when I saw Botero’s paintings of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, blindfolded and restrained, it excited me. Botero paints all the prisoners as very fat. They are easier to look at fat. I like to be gagged and restrained. It makes me think of the time my father tied me up in the closet and face-fucked me until he came in my mouth and I vomited up the semen. I’m thinking of me as a very fat five-year-old girl and my father as a fat Botero man, naked but for his hat.

  * * *

  My mother blamed me for everything that wasn’t right in our house. She even blamed me for my father’s hair going completely white before he was thirty years old. She called me whore, bitch, fucking bitch, and little shit. My least favorite was being called little shit. Maybe I was a whore and a bitch and a fucking bitch. But I wasn’t a little shit.

  I remember my mother telling me many times that life is about two things—sex and the fear of death.

  * * *

  My father is my secret. That he raped me is my secret. But the secret under the secret is that sometimes I liked it. Sometimes I wanted it, and sometimes I seduced him and made him fuck me. I have seen therapists and psychiatrists and psychologists and analysts, and I told them about missing my grandparents. I talked about missing my three friends who died. I talked about my mother slapping me hard across the face and then crumpling into a pile on the floor, weeping, telling me she was terrible, such a terrible mother. And I would comfort her and tell her not to worry, it didn’t hurt very much and I was fine. I did tell a few of them that my father molested me. And if they wanted to talk further about it, I stopped the conversation. I never told any of them the whole truth about me and my father.

  * * *

  Today I read in a book about torture that the more a captive is raped, the more likely she is to experience pleasure. Pleasure as a means of survival. The more she is raped. The more pleasure. Does this mean I have felt the most pleasure in the world? My body is pure rapture. Writing this arouses me. I think about my father and I get wet. I think about my father and I feel him in my pussy.

  Pleasure as a means to survive. My father is my sexual pleasure. I’m tied up and he’s hand-feeding me his semen. Hand-feeding me what he just jacked off into his palm. This great pleasure of ours is bursting in light. I feel God in my heart getting bigger. I’m swallowing his sperm while I’m bound to the chair, and I have rays of light shooting out of my head and face.

  * * *

  I get warm, soft buzzing feelings when I think about that. Being locked in the closet tied up, waiting for him, waiting for my father to rescue me after he hurt me. He rescued me. I was so relieved. So happy when the closet door opened and he untied me, undoing the knots holding me to the chair. He let me out, he let me run. I ran out into the sunshine.

  How could I not love the man who set me free?

  I was afraid of fire. I was afraid of the house burning down. Afraid of my body being burned. But I burned my body. I burned my own body. I needed to feel pain. I remember that gray gas heater.

  My mother got me out of the bath, I was very young. She told me to dry myself off while she went into the other room. I sat down on the heater. I remember the burning smell of my skin. I remember the silver metal table at the emergency room. The doctors in blue gowns and white face masks. They cut off my pants. I remember the gooey ointment and the sound of medical tape being torn and the feel of it sticking to my bottom to hold the bandages in place. A nurse told me that I had second-degree burns. She explained to me that burns are the opposite of murder. Third-degree burns are the worst, but third-degree murder is the least severe. She also told me a joke that I then repeated to everyone I met. What is brown and sticky?

  A stick.

  * * *

  Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that the key difference between animals and humans is incest prohibition. What does this make me?

  I remember one time in my bed watching my father’s enormous penis riding my flat-breasted chest—the fleshy head coming at me, erupting in fluid that got everywhere, but I especially remember it pooling in my belly button.

  * * *

  My mother was terrified that if I played outside barefoot I would cut myself and get tetanus. She was afraid, too, when I had a paper cut that it would get infected and kill me like that lady in Alabama. But when I showed her the blood between my legs when I was very small and, on a different day, blood on my unicorn-patterned sheets, she said nothing, she did nothin
g.

  I wanted to hurt myself when I cut my thigh with a paring knife. One morning while my mother was making coffee, I sliced my leg with a knife. She told me not to get the blood on the carpet where I sat. It felt good to have that kind of pain, a different kind of pain, but I remember the shame I felt when she didn’t care.

  My school was concerned about my abdominal pains, and, once, I was rushed to the hospital to have an emergency appendectomy. But it was because I hadn’t shit for a month.

  * * *

  When my second-grade teacher told us the story of Scheherazade, I felt I was like her. Every night she had to save her life. Every night I had to save mine, too. My father told me that he would kill me and himself if he couldn’t have me.

  * * *

  When I was five or six, I realized that having a sibling meant that my parents had had sex. I knew how babies were made and I was furious. I didn’t like my father having sex with both of us. A man sleeping with his wife and her daughter, his daughter.

  * * *

  I know people with better memories than mine, but mine is better than most. I think part of it is just that I have a good memory and part of it is something I don’t understand. But I don’t have a good memory about everything. I have large gaps and blurs. There was one house my family lived in for more than a year, and I have only one memory of my father in that house—and it’s of him fucking my mother. She was in her nightgown, and he was on top of her, humping, naked, one leg bent up toward his chest. When my mother and I had the one conversation that we ever had about sex, which happened when I was seventeen years old—just before I left home—she told me that she loved having sex with my father, and that was what she missed most about him. She told me that he used to have sex with her while she was sleeping.

  Some memories didn’t come to me until I was older. Many things I have forgotten and might never remember. The feelings are stuck in my body and my body remembers everything. But many of my memories are fractured, shattered, pieces here and there. A smell, a sound. A burst of fear. Sometimes they make me feel frozen and paralyzed and I forget who and where I am. The smell of diesel fuel. The smell of strawberries. The scent of dried sage. The feel and smell of blood and slimy semen between my legs. Sometimes now, after I have sex during my period, I don’t wash immediately afterward, but I lie in bed and I look and I see and feel and smell where and how I was hurt. Some things that still make me freeze and feel terrified are the sounds of moaning and of a door being carefully closed. The rustling sounds of clothes being carefully removed and dropping to the floor.

  My memory is better than my brother’s, but he remembers some things that I don’t. And my mother remembers some things that we don’t. But she refuses to remember our unhappiness.

  Does my father remember what it feels like to have his penis inside a three-year-old girl? He says that the years when I was little were the happiest years of his life.

  * * *

  On the nights when my father didn’t do anything to me, I felt abandoned. I loved him. Sometimes it was weeks, sometimes months, maybe a year, I don’t know how long, but sometimes he didn’t fuck me and he didn’t masturbate over my bed while I was supposed to be sleeping. Why was he leaving me alone? Why was he neglecting me? Did he not love me as much anymore? Was I not good enough anymore?

  * * *

  When my brother began to walk and run, it was summer. I remember him running naked and I looked at his little penis. I was excited that I now had a little body to play with—and a body with a little penis. But then, when I was holding his little body, I decided that I would take care of him instead. I slipped up one day, though, while we sat naked in the sandbox. I asked him if he “wanted to fuck.” He still didn’t talk and could not answer me. But after I explained how the man inserts his penis into the woman’s vagina, an enormous wave of guilt washed over me, and I was filled with shame, and I jumped out of the sandbox. I never said anything to him about it again. I started praying to God that I hadn’t harmed him. It became my nightly prayer. For years, until I was a teenager, I told God that I would do anything if He would please help my brother not be harmed by what I did.

  * * *

  My father still excites me and he still scares me. When I think about him, I feel aroused. I feel tightness, constant awareness, and sometimes very sharp pains in my pussy. My gut is tight and it feels dark. My throat feels constricted, like I can’t breathe. My pulse quickens. My hands shake. I fall into a trance, as if I’m in another world and not in control of myself at all. I feel like throwing up. I would do anything he tells me to do. I want to please him and also to murder him. I need to be obedient to him and to make him laugh and smile and feel pleasure. I want him to be proud of me. I want him to think that I’m clever. I want him to think that I’m sexy. And I want to savagely mutilate his body and feed his corpse to dogs.

  I was maybe eight years old, and I told my mother that I loved her. She said that I told her that too much. You don’t need to tell me every day. So I stopped telling her that I loved her.

  I don’t look in her eyes. I look at the bridge of her nose when I speak with her. I look at myself reflected in her glasses. I watch her hands, her nervous fingers twiddling about. Always moving. She can’t sit still.

  * * *

  I remember a friend of mine coming over for dinner at my mother’s house a couple of years after my parents had separated—I was twelve or thirteen. I was cooking dinner for my mother and brother and my friend Francine. As I cut up vegetables for a salad, Francine said to me, “I can’t believe how many mean things your mother says to you. So much mean teasing.” I hadn’t noticed. Sometimes she was so sweet to me, and proud of me. But she slapped me, backhanded my face, called me names, falsely accused me of lying, smoking. “You hate the people you love the most” was something she liked to tell my brother and me.

  One time I remember her walking into my room, where I was quietly playing with my dollhouse, and screaming at me that she hated me.

  She still wants me to ride horses with her. She wants me to steeplechase, too. But I don’t give a fuck about steeplechasing. I hug her rarely, but when I do, I try not to breathe in her smell of sandalwood and cat.

  * * *

  My mother taught me to be afraid to talk about money. My mother told me to be very, very careful of how much I eat so that I don’t get fat. She taught me to be afraid of butter, afraid of walking on street grates, afraid of strange dogs, afraid of germs on public door handles, afraid of the sun. She taught me to hate the people I love the most.

  * * *

  I feel compelled to tell my mother gory things. I tell her things I read about in the news or in history books. I tell her details about the bloodshed in Sierra Leone and about the massacres of Badr Khan. I can’t help it. All I want to do is to tell her stories of violence. It comes from a deep rage that I can’t express to her. A desperate need for her to face the truth, which she refuses to acknowledge and probably never will. More than everything my father did to me, it hurts me that she denies it. I show her pictures of the slain beauties at La Specola, the natural history museum in Florence. The eighteenth-century figures of pretty murdered women with their innards exposed—intestines and livers and stomachs, hearts, kidneys spilling out of their perfectly made, peeled-open, and glowing wax skin. Their faces are peaceful; they wear pearls; they lie on beds of lace.

  * * *

  I also like telling her about beautiful things coming out of terrible things. Like the beetles who can lay their eggs only in the charred trees left by a forest fire. New life in the wake of destruction. I also feel the need to remind her of triumph. It comes from a fierce rage, too.

  * * *

  My brother lives in Charleston now. He and his wife are both surgeons. They have three daughters and two hypoallergenic dogs. My brother and I would both say that we are close. We trade recipes, we talk about cooking and food, his daughters. But we don’t talk about the rest of it. There is a closeness, though. It’s as
if we are very, very close—too close, even—in one way and galaxies apart in every other way. We are close because of everything we don’t—and probably never will—talk about. He doesn’t know that us both having heard the sounds of our father masturbating in the other room, in the bed with the French doors open to the light rain, makes us closer, but it does. Closer and farther away at the same time.

  We don’t talk about the times our father screamed at me and choked me while my little brother watched. My brother and I don’t talk about the one time we did talk about all that happened. My brother needed it to be untrue. He still needs all of it to be untrue.

  It makes my palms sweat remembering how my father asked me if I wanted to fuck when I was little. He asked me in baby talk if I wanted to fuck. Yes, I replied, let’s fuck.

  * * *

  I wasn’t afraid of my father. My father was the one who fed me, got me dressed, took me to school, made me pasta, bathed me, dried me off with a towel, brushed my teeth. Thoughts of monsters were what kept me from falling asleep—hidden under my sheets, trying not to move or breathe.

  There were two fathers, so there must have been two of me.

  * * *

  I masturbated with the smooth back of my little wooden hairbrush. I felt ashamed, but it felt so good. I would be overcome with desire, and I would feel the desire here, in my pussy, and I would rub the back of the hairbrush along my pussy. Secretly, quietly. Full of shame and remorse. Hoping I wouldn’t need to do it again. But I would. When I was a little older, sometimes I thought about a boy named Harry while I rubbed myself. I remember the wood of the hairbrush covered in my slimy wet.

  * * *

  I was too shy to stick out my tongue around other people. Would they be able to tell that this tongue had licked a penis? Would my tongue give me away? My vagina looked like a bird. Like how you draw a bird—an m in the sky, with soft tips, like a McDonald’s m. When I looked down at my vagina, the pudgy lips were like a fleshy bird. This made me uncomfortable when I drew birds, because then maybe everyone else would know what I looked like naked. Would they be able to tell that my vagina looked like a bird? And if they knew my pussy looked like a bird would they know that my father rubbed his penis on it and that he fucked me? And would they know then that it was my fault?