The Unknowns (15 page)

She learns that when you say
My mom is dead
, kids say things like
Did your dad kill her
? Grown-ups, on the other hand, usually give you whatever you want. As a teenager she will realize that she has learned to deploy her mother’s death to her advantage. She has to train herself to stop.

Starting in the fourth grade, the texture of her memories is different, as though seen from a greater distance. She remembers her teachers, her best friend Christine Dunlap, a class trip to the La Brea Tar Pits, but not much that happened at home. She has a generic memory of her father sitting in the living room, reading a book and watching television at the same time. It’s important that he be sufficiently entertained. Did he read with the TV on every night? Just once? Never? She spends a lot of time in her room, where she inhabits a vaguely sketched fantasy world in which she has a dog who speaks to her telepathically and accompanies her on adventures. As an adult she sometimes remembers the dog as though it were a real pet. She knows that she didn’t just gradually outgrow the fantasy; it ended with some specific event. She can’t think of this without a pang of guilt, and she suspects that she must have killed the dog.

Every morning before work her father goes outside and swims one hundred laps. Every evening he prepares dinner, which is eaten at eight. Alcohol is involved. At dinner he introduces topics for
discussion:
What grounds are there for believing in God? Would it be ethical to genetically engineer children for high intelligence
? She’ll improvise an answer, and he’ll probe her to determine whether her thinking is sufficiently rigorous. She remembers being thirteen and wrestling with
What is art
? and realizing, with a burst of angry exhilaration, that he’ll challenge her no matter how she answers.

Around that time he starts to ask her about boys—whether she has an interest in any of the boys in her class, whether she’s acted on that interest. He asks in the same spirit of intense but clinical scrutiny with which he might ask
Should drugs be legalized
? It doesn’t register as prurient. The discomfort she feels at this new line of questioning is continuous with the discomfort she feels when he’s interrogating her in the usual way. Despite the discomfort she answers straightforwardly. There’s not much to tell anyway. Soon, though, she begins dating, and there are things she doesn’t want him to know, and she’s in a difficult position: she has allowed a precedent to be established in which she answers his questions. She lies to him and confuses her desire for privacy with shame.

Once or twice a year Donald goes to New York to attend auctions, keep up with clients, comb the antique stores for pieces that might be misattributed or undervalued. After Maya turns sixteen and can drive herself to school, she stays by herself in the big ranch house up the canyon road. These weeks are accompanied by a relief so intense it’s frightening. She occupies as many rooms as she can—lying on the living-room couch with a book until early in the morning, leaving her used dishes on the kitchen table. The time always passes in a rush, as though she were gulping it down.

Her first semester at Ward College, her father flies up to Concord after his New York trip to take Maya and her roommate Emily out to dinner. He’s in a good mood, and she assumes that he’s bought something from someone who didn’t know what it was, or sold something for more than it’s worth. They order in French, except for
Emily, and drink red wine, and when she and Emily get back to the dorm her head is dragging with exhaustion—from the wine, and from the effort of finding things to say that her father will deem interesting or clever or sufficiently justified. He might have been a trial lawyer: he’s one of those men who think the truth of a proposition can be measured by the force of the arguments marshaled on its behalf. In the restaurant, in front of her roommate, she had tried to transmute the first heady months of freshman year into something her father might accept as dinner-table conversation, to turn her wild new discoveries—that she’s still smarter than her peers, that she carries her anxiety with her no matter how far she gets from home—into something more than assertion and anecdote. Back in her dorm room she looks around at the institutional furniture and the anthropology textbooks and the other props and accessories of her life and feels as though she has betrayed them.

At dinner Emily had told a story about a party they had attended that was broken up by the police. Donald had listened and nodded and given every sign of enjoying the story, and Maya knew he was thinking,
Well, this girl is a worthless idiot
. After Emily finished, he had directed a conspiratorial smile at Maya, and she’d had no choice but to smile back. Lying on her bed afterward she remembers her father’s look and her stomach wells up. She runs down the hall to the bathroom and vomits into the toilet, shaking. He has never punished her, as far as she can remember. Only rarely has he raised his voice. But she is scared of him.

She hurries back to her room, stepping over the hippies who have turned the hallway into their common space. Inside, she locks the door. Emily is studying with her headphones on. Maya sits on her bed and starts to sob. She knows that if Emily hears her crying she’ll be in trouble, but she can’t stop. Finally, in the gap between two songs, Emily hears. She takes the headphones off and asks Maya what’s wrong. Maya can’t tell her. She sits on her bed, shaking and
sobbing, afraid that Emily is going to call Donald and tell him to come and take Maya away. She knows she’s behaving strangely, but the experience feels self-explanatory.

Emily, whose parents write her long letters every week and frequently send baked goods or seasonally themed candy, doesn’t know what to make of Maya’s crying. Over their first two months at Ward they have affiliated themselves with different groups, but they still go to each other for sympathy. Now Emily is frightened by Maya’s unresponsiveness. She goes down the hall to Joyce and Melanie’s room, where she tells Melanie about the drama and asks her for counsel. They form an urgent little klatch, describing Maya’s breakdown to visitors in tones of deep respect.

Maya lies on her bed. She’s still afraid of her father, and she wonders why. He has never done anything to harm her. This is her story, as she has told it to herself since she became old enough to tell her own story: her mother died and left her with a father who was unable to meet her need for affection, and her personality has formed around the ambition to be smart and tough enough to win his love. But that doesn’t explain the fear. Tonight he had told her he missed her, and charmed her the way he sometimes chose to, especially in front of other people, telling little jokes and asking gently skeptical questions and savoring her answers. For some reason she thinks of her mother’s jewelry, which her father had given to her all at once on her sixteenth birthday. Most of it is back in Los Angeles; she brought only her favorite pieces to college. She wants to drop them down a storm drain.

Then a sudden flash of something terrible, something much worse than the fear. The feeling takes her over for a second, two, and then passes. This is what the fear has been pointing toward all this time. She lies on her bed. The feeling seems unconnected to anything in her mind. Except this: when her friends started talking about masturbation, she didn’t admit it, but she knew she would never, ever do that.

And she’s smart enough, she’s read enough books, and she knows: this is what happens to people who’ve been abused. It seems incongruous, a category she’s never imagined occupying, but she tries it on.
Abuse:
she turns the word over in her mind like a stone.
Does this belong to me
?

Every night she wakes in a panic—sweaty, heart pounding, the sheet clenched in her fist. In the daytime she feels as if she has to relearn every social tactic. She develops an odd mannerism: a little pause after someone directs a question or a remark to her, in which she calculates the appropriate response.

She has never seen a therapist; she was brought up to feel a mild contempt for people who did. Her father went to a Freudian analyst in the 1960s and came away from the experience eight thousand dollars poorer and more deeply embedded than ever in his own personality. “It’s a trap,” he says whenever the subject comes up. “Why would they want you to get better? They have a vested interest in uncovering more and more problems, so you’ll keep coming back.” This is the opinion of therapy that Maya has filed away as her own, until Lauren, in her capacity as WPC for Maya’s floor, tells her about the psychotherapy and counseling services available free and in confidence from Student Health Services.

She fears that the therapist will work in an office decorated with sentimental kitsch—teddy bears, inspirational posters—and will try to hug her therapeutically. These concerns are put to rest the moment the therapist fetches her from the waiting room. A middle-aged woman with a severe black bob, a knee-length leather skirt, and high boots, she suggests a professional dominatrix more than a mother substitute. Maya has been steeling herself for their session since she made the appointment nine days ago. She hopes she’ll be strong enough to recall and confront her past in its horrifying glory, to replace her nebulous feelings with clarity—where she was, how
old she was, what he did. Abreaction, catharsis: if she can remember, she won’t have to keep reliving the feelings. She has imagined the shrink urging her to force the memories into consciousness, like a physiotherapist exhorting a quadriplegic to push his atrophied muscles back into service.

It’s not like that. The therapist asks why she’s there, and Maya finds herself unable to answer. She sits in silence, staring at the shiny leather of the therapist’s boots for three or four minutes, before she can find a way to speak.

She gets it out by telling it as a story rather than a fact:
We went out to dinner, and I came back and threw up, and this feeling came over me, and ever since I wake up in terror every night, and here’s what I think it means
. The therapist doesn’t encourage her to remember anything, just asks about her relationship with her father. Maya tells her, and things seem sinister that until now had only seemed sad. The therapist makes notes on a yellow legal pad that she holds on her knee in landscape orientation, writing across the lines. The end of the session comes more quickly than Maya had expected, at which point the therapist suggests that they meet once a week.

Over the next semester Maya and the therapist become friends. The therapist likes Maya and thinks she’s clever: she laughs when Maya says something self-deprecating or amusingly honest, and she occasionally allows her own wit and warmth to break through her professional reserve. She doesn’t push Maya to talk about anything in particular. They spend one early session talking about Maya’s frustration with her history professor, a self-important fool, and as Maya walks out of the Health Services Annex toward the library she realizes that they didn’t mention her father at all. Two weeks later, after a difficult night in which panic woke her twice, she finds herself describing her experience more vividly than she has managed before.

“It goes beyond emotions,” she tells the therapist. “It’s a physical
feeling—not like someone touching you, nothing concrete, but… it’s not in the senses, it’s in the body. It’s like—in high school they thought I had appendicitis and I had to get a CT scan. You know how before you get scanned they make you drink those chemicals to make your organs show up? And they say
strawberry flavor
or whatever, and you tell yourself it’s a milkshake, but as soon as you taste it you know it’s not a milkshake, it’s not even food, it’s something that
does not belong in your body
. You have to force yourself to drink it, not because it tastes bad, exactly, but because your body doesn’t want it, and you have to overcome your body’s deep, deep resistance to drinking it. God, I can taste it now, and it’s been three years. Anyway: that’s what this feeling is like, times a thousand. Like your body is stating as clearly as it possibly can that what’s happening is not right.”

The therapist has been sitting absolutely still, as though to avoid disturbing a grazing deer. She waits a few seconds more, to be sure Maya has finished talking, and then asks, “Are there any thoughts that accompany the feeling?”

“When it first happened, there weren’t any thoughts,” Maya says. “Except maybe
No, no, no
.” She and the therapist smile sadly at one another. “But now I usually think about my dad. Nothing specific, just thinking about him. I don’t know if he’s in my mind or if I’m, like, trying to think of him.” The therapist nods.

At the following session, Maya tells the therapist about her sexual history, which now spans three years and seems to her a complex narrative with developments and reversals and surprises. She’s clever and tough, and boys have always liked her. The boys she likes are the ones who don’t have a clear place in the social hierarchy, not at the top and not in the middle striving for the top, but off to one side. She tends to break their hearts. She feels sorry for them when this happens, but there’s something she likes about the naked emotion, the pleading and seriousness. It feels sad in a way she might call
realistic
. And she enjoys the power, the boy swept up in his passion for her
while she vacillates and searches her feelings and remains unmoved. She also enjoys sex. From the beginning, or what seemed to her the beginning—sixteen years old, Jeff Keyhoe, in his room—she was adept at it, confident, confrontational. One thing bothers her: intermittently she’ll find that she’s not really present; the sex is going on and she’s missing it. Once, with Jake Sohnfeld, an orgasm returned her to herself and she realized she had no memory of turning over onto her back.

The therapist refers to this as
dissociation
. “How often does this dissociation happen?” Not often, but more than Maya would like. “Is it frightening?” Not frightening so much as saddening, like she’s being deprived of something. “Does it seem to you as though it’s connected to the abuse?” It’s the first time she has referred to
the abuse
, and it feels right, like snapping together the tongue and buckle of a seatbelt.