The Incest Diary Read online

  * * *

  I tried to run away once. I packed a green houndstooth suitcase full of Cheerios and pennies. I made it to the far road. I sat down on a rock and opened the suitcase. I ate the Cheerios. I sat in the sun. I looked around at the bushes and the trees and I looked up at the sky and the clouds. I got thirsty; I went home.

  * * *

  People told me I was a pretty girl. I remember thinking about pretty, and thinking about sexy. I remember the feeling of being desired. Sometimes it was like a power I had. And sometimes it was more frightening than a power.

  I got a new black-and-white bathing suit when I was in fourth grade. I wore it on a trip to a state park with my parents and my brother. I was walking ahead of everyone, and I remember feeling my father’s eyes on my back in my new low-cut bathing suit. Did he think I looked sexy? I hoped so. The back was cut all the way down to just above my bottom. I didn’t have breasts yet, but some of the girls in my class did. I was looking forward to getting mine. I remember going off the path and into the greenery to pull down my shorts and then my bathing suit to pee. The stream splashed up on my shoes. I wondered if my father was peeking at me. Sometimes I caught him looking at me when I was doing things. Not expecting to be watched, and finding him watching me. One time I was shitting and I was looking down through my legs and trying to watch the shit come out and fall into the water. Then I looked up and saw my father’s legs right in front of me. I didn’t like that. He wasn’t supposed to watch me shit.

  * * *

  I went up into the sky. Up, up, all the way up, and I looked down and saw a little girl and her father. Her legs were spread. His cock was going into her. He was piercing her with it. She had been wearing pink shorts, but her father pulled them off her, and her underwear, too. Her shirt had a hedgehog on it. It was from a nature center in England that her aunt had visited. She didn’t have breasts yet. She was maybe eight or nine.

  * * *

  Sometimes I read my father’s journals without him knowing. When I was a teenager, one time I read that nothing felt as good to him as being naked around me. Another time he wrote that little girls can be so sexy because they just love you and they want you to touch them.

  When Richard Serra was a boy, he was standing on the shore and he watched an old ship get launched into the sea. This gargantuan thing was set into the water, where it made the water move like mad, but the water held it. He says he thinks that all of his work might be about that day—about the transfer of mass and heavy things being buoyed up.

  Maybe all of the things I do are about my father raping me before I knew how to read or write.

  * * *

  There is a fairy tale called “The Girl Without Hands” in which a daughter cuts off her own hands to make herself grotesque so that her father will no longer want to marry her. My aunt Karen covers herself in ever-increasing rolls of fat. Her body is enormous from grief. She consumes and consumes and consumes. I think it’s her way both to hide her pain and her shame and to retroactively repel the advances of her grandfather. She is my father’s younger sister, and their grandfather Paul molested them both. Karen and I can’t talk about any of it. Eating with her is like being with a lion and her kill. Kill her pain with sugar, kill her body with fat. She wants to be grotesque. I didn’t and I don’t want to be grotesque.

  * * *

  It didn’t hurt when my father rubbed my pussy with his fingers, or when I rubbed my pussy on his leg. Those things felt good. I liked it when he masturbated. I liked it because it was exciting for me to watch. Sometimes he rubbed the tip of his penis along my pussy and that felt good, too. He liked looking down at his penis rubbing me. I liked looking, too. I liked the feel of his flesh rubbing my flesh. Putting his cock into me was pure pain until my body was big enough, which wasn’t until I was a teenager. I remember being afraid it would hurt the way it had before—like I was being torn, split in two, blood everywhere, but suddenly it didn’t. My body was finally big enough; I was wet, too. I must have been fourteen or so. I remember being naked on a foam mattress on the floor of one of the houses my father lived in after he left my mother. We were alone then, except for my brother. We hid from him just as we had hid from my mother, from the world. I remember the feeling of my body getting fucked on that foam mattress. There wasn’t a mattress pad—just a cotton sheet over the yellow foam—and it didn’t feel good to move on it. But it felt good when he was inside me finally—now that I was big enough. I had little breasts, too. It was different. My body was so much bigger and I was shy and covered my breasts while we did it. I remember those dark days full of light when my father fucked me.

  I remember years before—when I was little—feeling my wet pussy. My fleshy little pussy lips. He touched them with his large fingers; he liked the way it felt. I had orgasms. I remember how scary they felt. Scary and so good. Like I was flying and falling and exploding and about to die. I didn’t know if my body would still be there when it was over. Every time he fucked me, every time he made himself come, or me come, I was pushed further into solitude.

  I remember his sounds. His breathing, heavy and fast, trying to be quiet, trying to be quiet while his cock was so hard and he just had to, he had to rub it between my thighs. I remember his low moaning. I remember looking into his mouth. His mouth agape and tense as he rubbed his penis, looking down at it, rubbing it, getting more excited by looking at his penis with its wet red head.

  All things are lawful for me. (The Apostle Paul)

  I can see his face, his blue eyes, his white hair. I see his clean-shaven face. I can see his eyes like beams driving into me. They drive through my clothes and see all of my nakedness. Me as a child, me as a teenager, me as a woman.

  When I was in first grade, I took half of a plastic Easter egg and put it in my underwear so that it looked like I had a little bulging penis. I touched the hard egg in my underwear. I touched it and I rubbed it and I made myself excited rubbing my hard little dick egg.

  * * *

  I don’t know if this is accurate, but the feeling I have, and always had, is that really my father wanted to kill me but that I seduced him to keep him from killing me. I became sexy to keep myself alive. I saved my life by giving him sexual pleasure. And he became addicted to our sex, and then I did, too. Or maybe he really wanted to harm himself, so he caused me pain in order to feel his own pain. He destroyed himself by causing me pain, but that gave him pleasure. I read about a man who murdered his wife because he said that was the only way he could kill himself.

  * * *

  Several years ago, I fell in love with a man named Carl. At first I thought he was gentle, but another part of me smelled his violence. And he smelled my fear, like a dog. He smelled my need for violence, which I didn’t recognize that I had. One night, he demanded that I tell him that he owned me. His eyes were other. He was angry and I was frightened. But my reaction was not to run away. Sometimes I feel safer when I’m very, very still, barely breathing. My body became aroused, I was exceedingly wet, my body wanted safety. All I wanted to do was have sex with him to calm him down, to protect myself. I wanted to have sex with him all night until the sun came up, when I could be protected by the light of day instead. And then the following night, I wanted it to happen again. I asked him if he owned me, and he said yes. He told me that my body was made for him to fuck.

  In moments when he really frightened me, it took only a few minutes for me to come from his fingers, his cock, his tongue. The more I actually feared harm by him, the more excited I felt, the more deeply bonded I felt to him.

  * * *

  During dinner when my brother and I were kids, it was a frequent occurrence for my mother to sit down, take one bite, and then say she wasn’t feeling well and get up from the table and withdraw to her bedroom. She was very thin and rarely did we see her eat well.

  * * *

  When I was very young, my mother said we couldn’t afford red meat, real Parmesan cheese, or real maple syrup. We shopped for clothes in thrif
t stores that smelled like sour dairy. I remember passing stores and seeing brand-new little dresses and wanting one, but my mother said no. Yet my mother always had her horses. And my grandparents who lived in London paid for private school for my brother and me. I don’t know how my mother paid for her horses or steeplechasing. My parents didn’t drink alcohol because it was too expensive. We turned out the lights every time we left a room, and in the winter we were cold. We ate meat only on special occasions. It was the Parmesan and the meat that I wanted. I didn’t care about missing going to the movies, but I desperately wanted real maple syrup and beef.

  I lied to the children in my class and told them my family was rich. Wealth was equated with purity, safety, and good in my little brain. One day I had my friend Julie over to play. She saw my house. She knew we weren’t allowed to go into my parents’ bedroom, where my mother was in bed. She knew we had to be quiet so as not to bother her. Julie saw the things that we had in our small house. The chair with the stuffing popping out. The rickety yellow table with cat food and a bleeding heart plant on top. She saw that we were poor, not rich. She didn’t mind, but I didn’t want her to come over anymore, I preferred going to her enormous, clean house.

  Years later, around the time my father left my mother, when I was ten, he began to make more money. And then, when I was thirteen, his father gave him and his sister a living trust. So during my teenage years, my father bought me things and I was able to do things that my mother couldn’t. I went out to fancy restaurants with friends when I was fourteen. I told her about how soft and sweet tuna toro was. I bought myself expensive shoes. Shoes and dresses she told me made me look like a hooker.

  When we had fights about things and money, I reminded her about her horses, about the expenses, the vet bills that were sometimes thousands of dollars. I told her that it was all right for us to like different things. I wanted pretty shoes. And I wanted to travel. She said she couldn’t afford to travel. When I told her that if she wanted to travel she could choose to, she would get so angry at me that she would throw things at my head. Then she would cry. She wanted a daughter, but she didn’t want me for a daughter.

  * * *

  As a teenager, I had recurring nightmares about my bloody insides being everywhere. Getting caught in my own intestines. Finding my dismembered parts in the street, in public buildings, hanging from trees. I used to terrify my friends when I spent the night at their houses by screaming in the night, and sometimes I told them about these dreams. I thought it was normal for girls to have dreams like that. But they didn’t have those same dreams of walking through a city park and looking down, and where the green grass had just been were now bloody uteruses, vaginas, guts, lungs, wet pink brains sloshing around underfoot. And up in the trees, my decapitated head, my poked-out eyes, my long-haired scalp hanging from a blossoming tree branch.

  * * *

  For a long time, I couldn’t have an orgasm without seeing my father’s face. It was his white hair and his piercing blue eyes that I used to see when I came. The horror of seeing his face, and of that being the image that made me come, was overwhelmingly disturbing, and it also made me deeply excited. As if my ultimate erotic experience is being raped by the man who created me. His lust and his force infected my own desire.

  A couple times a year, I have a dream where it’s just him and me in the world. Finally just the two of us, and we can fuck all we want. I wake up nauseated and dizzy.

  * * *

  I didn’t touch myself ever when I was a teenager. When I was alone, I was frightened of my body, of what it could do, of pleasure.

  But one day in college, I was sitting and reading on top of one of the basement washing machines in my dorm, waiting for the wash cycle to be done. The vibration felt good. I reached down and touched my pussy while the washing machine whirred. I didn’t come there in the basement, but I did later that night in my bed. I felt the same terror and thrill that I felt when I had orgasms as a girl. And then it started. I masturbated all the time throughout my early twenties and during the first few years that I was married. I couldn’t stop. I did it everywhere I could. I did it in bed every night and in the shower and on long drives and in airplanes. I rubbed myself with my ring and middle fingers. I imagined myself as a nine- or ten-year-old girl—just before getting breasts—seducing men, strange men, grotesque men, holding their cocks, sucking them, making them fuck me, filling myself with them, their hands pressing hard on my flat child’s chest while they thrust into me. Sometimes the men wore masks, and sometimes the men were animals. Sometimes they covered my mouth, sometimes I watched them fuck other girls.

  When I was in first grade, my favorite pants were purple corduroy. One day, I shit my purple pants. I wouldn’t use the bathroom at school, and I had diarrhea in my pants. It reeked of rotten fish. I remember how hot my cheeks were with the shame. The shame blossomed red in my cheeks. The kids made faces and held their noses at the terrible smell I’d made. Miss Katie called my mother and said I was sick and to please come pick me up. My mother put a towel over the seat where I sat in the car.

  I wasn’t sick.

  * * *

  One day, my father found me looking at The Joy of Sex. I was sitting on the floor of my parents’ bedroom looking at a picture of a Japanese woman on a swing—sitting so that her huge, furled, pink vagina was exposed. A man with an erection was waiting in line with the swing so that he would penetrate her when she swung into him. My father screamed at me when he found me sitting on the floor looking at that book. He said that book was only for adults and I was a very bad girl for looking at the book I found on his bedside table.

  One night my father came into my room after I fell asleep and got into my bed. He clutched my sleeping body and woke me up with his penis between my butt cheeks—back and forth and back and forth—then jammed it inside me, my entire body being fucked by this enormous thing displacing my organs, making my vision blur as if his penis were going all the way up, all the way through me, up my rib cage, as if it would shoot out of my mouth, or go into my brain. That’s how it felt, like being impaled on a huge, thrusting spike. He was putting his penis inside me like those people I saw in the book—doing things only for grown-ups to do—and I knew my father was a liar.

  * * *

  I wasn’t sick either when I stayed home for two months in the fourth grade with a mysterious illness. I had symptoms like dizziness, muscle aches, sharp stomach pains and no energy or desire to leave the house. My parents took me to all kinds of doctors and they all said I was fine. When it was just the two of us, my father angrily said he knew I wasn’t really sick.

  I stayed home alone every day, and when I got lonely I picked up our rotary phone and called the bank number, which had a recording of the time and temperature. I liked listening to the woman’s robotic voice.

  * * *

  In ballet, every time I spread my legs I was worried other people would know. Would they see what I did at night? One day at my grandmother’s house, I lay on my back and held my little brother in the air over me with my legs, playing airplane. My grandmother startled me by walking in the room when I thought she was outside in her garden. I was so worried that she would know that I had sex. That she would be able to tell from how I lay on the floor on my back with my legs in the air. And could she tell that I liked sex?

  * * *

  Every time I spread my legs, I felt things going up inside me. Sharp things, hard things, body parts, toys, animals, car parts, skyscrapers. I fought with my mind to get things out of my body. But my body still feels it.

  * * *

  When I was eight years old, we moved to a new house. I assumed the master bedroom was for me and my father and that my mother would sleep in one of the other bedrooms. I had a count in my head of how many times my parents had had sex. This was very important to me. I hated them for having sex with each other. The number in my head was five. One for each time they conceived a child, and the three times that I had caught my father on to
p of my mother. His buttocks moved and clenched as he drove what was mine into her. I never wanted them to have sex again. I wanted them to separate. Two years later, they did.

  The mulberry trees were fruiting when we moved in. There was so much fruit we didn’t know what to do with it. The berries fell onto the ground and got stuck on the bottoms of my feet when I played outside. I made berry stains on the wood floors and my mother made me clean them with a rag.

  While we were in that house, my mother went down to Virginia on a horse trip of some kind. I sent her a card and on the front of it I drew a little girl with a cobra snake coming out of her mouth. My mother still has the card. She thinks it’s sweet.

  * * *

  One of my father’s aunts drowned herself. One of her daughters, a girl named Jacqueline, was a teenager when she got up from the table where she was having Christmas supper with her family and excused herself, and then they heard a bang. I told that story to the beautiful therapist and she said that it is unusual for a girl to use a gun.

  * * *

  In the master bedroom at our new house, something happened when my mother was away in Virginia. My father was threatening to hang himself. He was standing with a coarse, thick sisal rope around his neck. He was wearing a white T-shirt and gray athletic pants. He was barefoot. I was in a dress. A pale orange dress. I can see myself because I saw it from above. My hair, still blond, was up in barrettes. I wanted to save him. He was killing himself because of me. It was my fault. I put my hand on his crotch. My face was at the height of his crotch. He wasn’t wearing underwear. I stroked him the way I had watched him do to himself standing over my bed at night. I told him not to hurt himself. With the rope still around his neck he pulled down his pants and let me touch his bare skin. His penis was hard and up now, and his eyes were softer. We both used our hands on his penis. We touched and rubbed his penis standing there in the late afternoon until he came into his hand. Then he went into the bathroom to wash it off before he took the rope off his neck. I remember the outline of his penis in his athletic pants after he pulled them back up. I don’t know whether he could have really hanged himself in that room, I don’t know if there was anything strong enough or high enough, but, then, I believed that he could and was relieved when he took the rope back to the garage. I remember him stroking my head and squeezing the back of my neck hard when he came.