The Incest Diary Read online

  * * *

  We rolled the Christmas cookie dough out thin on pastry cloths with my mother’s big rolling pin. We got down the tin full of cookie cutters and we cut out deer and bells and rabbits and Santa Clauses. Hearts and owls and angels and little houses. We decorated the cutout cookies with colorful sprinkles and silver balls. My mother was happy the days before Christmas.

  She would put felt antlers on Stradivarius and Hookah. My brother and I dressed up like Santa Claus and rode the horses around to the neighbors’ houses. We ended up at the house across the road from ours, where everyone would gather for carols and eggnog.

  We made holly wreaths. We made gingerbread houses. We put real candles on the big Christmas tree. We set up Nativity scenes in various little spots around the house. I loved the ceramic, wood, straw, and china Holy Families, wise men, and animals. I thought baby Jesus was beautiful. I loved that he was conceived without sex.

  My mother wasn’t happy on Christmas Day itself—but the days up to it were filled with joy, cheer, and excitement. On Christmas Day she was sad. I don’t know why. I never understood her sadness. Why she would get up from the table in the middle of dinner and burst into tears and go to her room and shut the door.

  * * *

  At the new house, there was a big climbing tree. It was a maple that I named King Henry. I remember filo dough in the freezer. I used to eat it cold. It was like eating paper. My brother played with trucks. I did ballet. The neighborhood girls didn’t like me. One day I put a jingle bell inside myself. I took out the bell and smelled my pussy on the metal.

  I remember my father’s green bathrobe. And his dark green slippers. I remember his white hair messy in the morning, his blue eyes, his scratchy face. He was on the bed in the master bedroom. Lying on top of the covers in his bathrobe, surrounded by the newspaper. His robe was open and he had no underwear. I went into the room. It was just us in the house. I don’t know where my mother and brother were. I could see his large testicles between his legs and the open green robe. His penis wasn’t hard yet. He told me to climb up on the bed. I did, and I climbed on the newspaper. He pushed my head down with his hand to rest it on his belly. My head was there, with my ear near his belly button. I could hear the sounds of his digestion, and I saw his flaccid penis and his testicles. He rubbed, he touched them, he played with his penis. It started getting bigger. It got big and it got bigger. He was playing with my hair while his left hand ran up and down his cock, which was dancing as it got harder, dancing as he played with it. He asked me to lick it. Lick it and suck on it. He put his right hand inside my nightgown. Inside my underwear. Underwear pulled down and off. And he took my nightgown off. He put his hand on my flat chest and rubbed the tip of his penis up and down my pussy. I was on all fours on top of him. He put his penis inside, not all the way up, but partway. He moved his hips and he moaned. He pushed on my head to make me move. Then we played with the cum. He rubbed it on my body and between his fingers. Stretchy gloopy egg-white goo. I shouldn’t have done that, he said, let’s clean you up. I remember the stink of his coffee breath mixing with the sweet, bleachy smell of his semen.

  Some of his cum got on the newspaper. The ink came off into the cum, making the liquid black. I squished the inky cum in my hand.

  I remember that was the year we gave my father a new bathrobe for his birthday. One with red checks. That year my teacher was Ms. Carleton. She spoke Italian. She taught us songs in Italian.

  Il merlo ha perso la lingua

  come farà a cantar?

  Il merlo ha perso la lingua

  come farà a cantar?

  Il merlo ha perso la lingua,

  povero merlo mio, come farà a cantar?

  The blackbird lost its tongue,

  How will it manage to sing?

  The blackbird lost its tongue,

  How will it manage to sing?

  The blackbird lost its tongue,

  My poor blackbird, how will it manage to sing?

  Ms. Carleton desperately wanted a child of her own. She finally became pregnant. But the baby girl was stillborn. Ms. Carleton explained to our class about babies being born dead. The girl’s name was Alice. Ms. Carleton cried telling us this story. I thought a lot about poor baby Alice Carleton, who didn’t even get to live for one day.

  * * *

  Feeling hands on my neck and big fingers fingering me. Thinking of my fear. I can’t help it. If I think about my father, the blood rushes between my legs.

  * * *

  I felt sorry for my pitiful father and my body made him feel better. This gave me an odd sense of my own power. I remember being asked by my high school friends how I would defend myself if a man attacked me and I readily replied that I would just have sex with the attacker to calm him down. I wasn’t afraid of hijackers on airplanes the way my mother was, because in my mind, I would just have sex with them and they would stop hijacking the plane. I wasn’t afraid of thieves the way my mother was because, again, I would fuck the thieves and they wouldn’t steal from us.

  * * *

  I felt like I had something that my father wanted to take from me. I had something he didn’t have, and he wanted it. I felt that way sometimes with other men later in my life. That they were trying to take something from me.

  Climbing on my father, making his penis hard, made me feel powerful beyond feeling excited. Look what I could do. I could make this big strong man hard, and then he would rub it in my pussy, and I liked that and it was just us, just us in the world. Rubbing his big hard cock head in my little hairless pussy. He trusted me to do the right thing. And I did, I rubbed it and I held it throbbing in my little hands and I made him come.

  * * *

  When I was a little girl my father took me for Sunday drives. He made me a tree house. He brushed out the tangles in my hair.

  Sex with my father made me an orphan.

  * * *

  I remember him cleaning the cum off of me with a paper towel before getting me dressed for school. I remember him ejaculating inside me when I was a teenager. My father may be crazy but he’s not crazy; he wouldn’t have risked getting me pregnant. He had a vasectomy sometime after my brother was born. Was it so he could fuck me?

  * * *

  Sometimes around cats I want to crush their skulls. But I never have and I never would. I did kill caterpillars, and once I wanted to hurt a little girl named Natalie. I killed the caterpillars with a rock and I watched the green and yellow ooze from their squished bodies. The little girl Natalie was the daughter of neighbors. When I was fifteen, they asked me to babysit. I walked down the road and across the field and over the hill to their dark, sad house and met the little girl. I don’t know why, but I didn’t like her at all. I wanted to harm her. I felt these things well up in my body. I wanted to tear her apart. I didn’t want to be alone with that child for fear of myself. I was terrified of myself around that little girl, and I told her parents I didn’t actually have time to babysit.

  I babysat other children for whom I cared deeply. It was just that one—that little blond-haired, ugly girl—whom I wanted to injure.

  * * *

  Once, my parents had friends from out of town who came to stay with us. This was not long before my father left, but before we knew he was leaving. I was nine or ten years old. They had a daughter my age. I can’t remember her name, but she was bigger than me and had long curly hair. She and I slept in the same bed. When she was asleep but I wasn’t, I climbed on the girl who was my parents’ friends’ daughter and rubbed myself on her thigh. I pretended to French-kiss her and told her how pretty she was. She woke up with me riding her leg and whispering in her ear. She didn’t seem to mind, in fact she liked it, and we continued. We pretended that I was a man and she was a girl. We did this for all of the nights they stayed. We never spoke to or saw each other again.

  * * *

  My mother’s closest friend was an Indian woman named Lavanya. She and her husband, Charlie, lived in a three-story house with a
big field out back with an old red McCormick tractor, which their daughter, Leela, and I played on sometimes. My mother and Lavanya would ride horses together, or spend afternoons whispering, huddled over teacups in the kitchen with the red table nestled into the gabled windows with duck-patterned fabric on the window seats. I remember, when I was very little, the two of them laughing one day at all the penises I drew. It made me ashamed and I stopped drawing penises. I didn’t know that that was a funny or a surprising thing to do.

  I liked playing with Leela. She and her family went to Bombay twice a year and brought back wonderful clothes and jewelry. We dressed up in her bright orange and blue and pink flowing saris, and painted red bindis between our eyes with her mother’s Chanel lipsticks. We did dance performances in these clothes, and we played duets on the piano in the living room with some of her toy animals dressed up seated next to us. We had tea parties on the floor in their living room and we invited all her dolls.

  Leela’s father, Charlie, made wonderful food. I remember him toasting spices in a cast-iron pan to make garam masala. The cloves, the mustard seeds, the cardamom. Charlie made us Caesar salads, pastas, and grilled cheese sandwiches, too. Sometimes he would pretend to be a zombie and chase us around the house. One day he scolded us for dressing the cat in Leela’s doll clothes and holding it down while we pushed it around in a toy perambulator.

  I got my first period at their house. I was in the basement bathroom, the one with the mint-green tile from floor to ceiling and the chain on the toilet that you had to pull so hard to make it flush that I had to use both hands. Leela and I had been going through her mother’s closet downstairs—the one with all the fancy dresses that she never wore anymore. We tried them on secretly, running to look at ourselves in the full-length mirror on the back of a door in the basement. Then running back and returning the dresses to their proper hangers in the zipped bags that smelled of mothballs and her mother’s perfume.

  I went to pee, and when I pulled my pale blue cotton underwear down to my ankles, I found a smear of red and brown blood. I thought I was dying. I didn’t know what a period was. I told Leela that something was terribly wrong. She told me about menstruation and gave me a pad. I spent that night in Leela’s trundle bed, and when I woke in the morning, there was a large bright red bloodstain on the sheet—my blood had leaked through the sanitary napkin. I remembered my grandmother saying to use cold water to remove stains from eggs or blood. I took the sheet and put it into the washing machine and turned it to cold and hoped that Lavanya wouldn’t notice. I was embarrassed already, since Leela and I had gotten in trouble the day before for hitting the hanging bird feeder with badminton rackets.

  When Lavanya drove me home in her old Land Rover, she asked me if I had gotten my period before. I said no. My face was red with shame. She pulled out three sanitary napkins from her purse and handed them to me. “Welcome,” she said. She told me to talk to my mother about it. But I didn’t. It was my father who bought me menstrual pads of different kinds and sizes. Regular, overnight, panty liners. With wings and without.

  * * *

  I have a friend whose father was violent, but not sexually violent. When my friend David was eight years old, his father beat him for getting a poor grade in math. David knew that his father kept a handgun in his bedroom closet. That night, while his father slept, David snuck into the closet, found the gun, and went to his father’s bedside. He aimed the gun at his father’s head. He wanted to kill him. He stood there for some time, holding the gun, prepared to kill his father. But he couldn’t do it. He returned the gun to the closet and went back to bed.

  After that, David stopped eating meat. The reason was, when he was holding the gun aimed at his father, he felt his own violence and he felt the strong desire to kill him. But he didn’t want to be a killer. He was afraid, though, of his desire to kill. This, anyway, is the answer he gave me when I asked him at a restaurant why he became a vegetarian.

  * * *

  The day my father left us I stopped eating meat. I was ten years old. We ate it more often in those days. Meat was my favorite thing to eat. I needed to deprive myself of something I didn’t want to live without. I remember that my mother cooked bacon the first morning my father was gone. I adored bacon, but I told her I was no longer eating meat. She didn’t think it would last beyond a day, then a week. But then years went by and I refused to touch or to eat meat. When asked why, I told people that it was for environmental reasons, but that was a lie. And I wasn’t afraid of my desire to kill. I was afraid of my desire to have sex with my father.

  I didn’t eat meat for several years. Until one evening when my father and I were at a restaurant and he ordered us both New York strip steaks. I reminded him that I didn’t eat meat, and he said it was time to start again. I ate the meat, and then I threw it up in the bathroom. A few days later, I tried meat again and I didn’t throw up.

  * * *

  From the time I was very young, my father told me that we were one person, that I was just a part of him. I grew up with that inside me. I grew up with him inside me.

  I feel his pleasure exploding out of me. His pleasure between my legs. I want to fuck myself like that, feel him splitting me in two. Feeling us become each other and something else entirely.

  * * *

  Is this a love story? It’s a creation story.

  * * *

  After my father left my mother, he moved around a lot. I remember the house with the yellow foam mattress on his bedroom floor. I remember the house with the leaking roof and the white mildewed shower curtain in the bathroom. And later, the house near a pond. It was in the house near the railroad tracks where I was very concerned about the Persian Gulf War. I wrote letters to President Bush. I wrote letters to soldiers. I read Herodotus and Henry Miller and Flaubert. I won the prize for most promising young science student. My teachers were thoughtful and asked me to talk about how I was feeling about my parents’ divorce. I said I was fine. I wore white collared shirts and pink, navy-blue, forest-green, and black cardigans. I wore black skirts and my hair up in a twist. I didn’t pay attention to the boys. I had two close girlfriends, and I did my homework. I got my period for the first time and I finally had breasts big enough for a bra. I played tennis.

  In my English class in eighth grade, we were required to keep a daily journal that was reviewed once a week by our teacher, Ms. Olinski. After a couple of months she called me into her office after school. I was so afraid I had done something wrong. “No, no, dear, you are doing wonderfully. But why haven’t you once mentioned something about yourself in your diary?” I wrote about only two things: daily details of the Persian Gulf War and the weather. I wrote about the war and the weather and I described them in detail every day.

  The curves of the clouds, where they were white and where they had gray. If the gray was from shadows, or if it was from being full of rain and the clouds were about to burst. I wrote about the color of the sky. Whether it was hazy or blue. What kind of blue in the morning, what kind of blue at noon, and the blue before the sunset. And the blue of dark, of night, and the moon. Waxing or waning. I wrote about the shadows of the clouds on the fields. I wrote about birds. I wrote about how the air smelled. I wrote about dust, I wrote about wind. I wrote about how the smell of the rain hitting the earth was like yellow mustard.

  * * *

  One night, in the house with the leaky roof, my father asked me to watch the movie The Name of the Rose. He asked me to pay particular attention to the sex scene and tell him how it made me feel. Did I like how that wild peasant girl seduced the boy? Did I like the squealing sounds she made? Yes, I did.

  * * *

  One day, at Leela’s house when we were teenagers, we made sandwiches to take on a picnic. Her father, Charlie, taught us to sprinkle salt, pepper, and a little oregano on the tomato in the sandwiches. We didn’t do that at my house. It made the sandwiches taste so good. On our picnic, I asked Leela if her father ever asked her, when they were in public,
if people thought she was his young girlfriend or his daughter. She replied that maybe it had crossed her father’s mind at some point, but it wasn’t something that he would ever say.

  Charlie also taught us how to roast red peppers. To cook them at four hundred degrees, until the skins turn brown and black and make popping sounds. Put them in a plastic bag and let them cool. Then peel off the skins, slice the peppers, and place them in a bowl with olive oil and minced garlic. He said you can add a pinch of salt or not.

  * * *

  I liked very much to be in their company, and it made me feel lonely. To be around a father and a daughter who loved each other very much, who teased each other and enjoyed each other. A father who wanted the best for his daughter. A father who was a father and a daughter who was nothing more than a daughter.

  Leela lost her virginity to a wonderful boy. I know he was a wonderful boy because he was the first boy I kissed. He wanted me to be his girlfriend. I was fifteen years old. But after a few weeks, I had to tell him I couldn’t see him anymore. How can you have a boyfriend when you have a father like mine? You can’t. Then he and Leela started dating, and then having sex. I never spoke to him again. I was afraid of my own desire and I felt desire around him and that made me feel ashamed. I avoided him at school. If I saw he sat in a particular chair, I never sat in that chair again. I didn’t want to touch anything he touched. I started washing my hands too much again. Washing them until they bled.