Dating : Chapter 11: The Doorway

“Don’t you like that?” he asked me softly, his voice shaking with what I recognized, despite the fact that I could count my years on one hand, as a mix of fear and excitement. I squirmed. He wasn’t hurting me yet but his dry, old-man fingers wiggled down the back of my panties in a way that didn’t tickle. I most certainly did not like it. Deep-down, in a part of my tummy where foods like Brussels sprouts, meat loaf, and smoked salmon tended to cause trouble, a queasy rumbling began. But this wasn’t food-related. This was a different sickness, a kind of sickness that made me want to twist away from him.

But I was going through an obedient phase, and a grownup had told me to come into the bedroom and sit on the bed. So I had. His reasons didn’t matter. Since he was an adult, and was doing something unpleasant, child-logic dictated that I was in trouble. I was five, perhaps six. Photos of me from that visit to their house show me wearing a pastel sundress and sandals, my sandy-blond curls framing a face that bare my baby teeth in a strained smile that does not reach my eyes.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, my legs sticking straight out over the side, I hunched my shoulders and twisted my hands in my lap. I shook my head in answer to his question — No, I don’t like that — and winced with pain now, as his fingers found their mark.

I can’t remember how he got me into the bedroom, since I wasn’t fond of him nor prone to follow him about. Memory begins with him patting the empty spot beside him on the twin bed that matched the one on the other side of the night table, where my grandmother slept. I felt strange sitting so close to him. He smelled strongly of aftershave and shoe polish. I couldn’t remember doing anything that would’ve gotten me in trouble. I hadn’t sassed or spit, or broken anything, or teased the cat. I looked down at my knees, which were knobby and lightly tanned; but I can’t recall if my feet were bare, or if I was wearing socks or sandals. Probably bare, and dirty. I liked to run around in his garden with no shoes.

My grandfather — my father’s father — worked the soil in their small backyard. My mom had taken me to visit them that year, traveling all the way to San Antonio from our home in Kenai. She wanted to stay close to her former in-laws, partly for my sake and perhaps to retain a sense of family. Her own father had died when she was twenty. My grandfather may have seemed benign to her, soft-spoken as he was. He took me out to the garden and told me the various vegetables that grew in tidy rows. But I didn’t bother to remember and I didn’t mind where I trod in the garden, whether between rows or upon the fragile tops of the things that lay beneath the black earth. I didn’t like him and I liked my grandmother even less.

“Kara Beth,” she’d say, pawing at me, “now don’t let the sun damage your pretty white skin.” I hated my formal name, hated being corralled inside. She was always correcting something about me: brushing my hair, forcing me into shoes, restraining me from running in the house or out of it. She insisted I be ladylike, quiet, polite. While she and my mother visited, I buried myself in books or practiced scowling in the mirror or snuck outside and teased Susie the cat.

I remember, if I put my mind into my child-self sitting there on the bed, that I heard the shower going in the bathroom adjacent to their bedroom; but I didn’t think of calling for help. Why would I need help from another adult when there was already an adult in the room? Also I felt, besides the pain and the nausea, that his whispering must mean this was a secret. Something was going wrong here, although I couldn’t have told anyone what it was, couldn’t have articulated it to an adult, and in fact, never did. Not till years later, not till far too late. My mind was a wide, white blank. A peculiar paralysis kept me from moving.

We just have the memories that we have. I am certain of the shaking in his voice, the words he said, the feeling of his hands on me. And the sound of the shower going on and on, although it couldn’t have been so very long. How long does somebody stay in the shower? Seven minutes? Ten? I can’t be sure. I can only recount the bits of memory that remain solid: what I heard, what I felt, what I saw.

And I did see something. Something that made me look up, toward the open door that led to the living room. There, in my misery, my child psyche straining under the question of doing some unknown bad thing that had gotten me here, I glimpsed the shade of an animal standing just outside the doorway. Its presence startled me so deeply that my mind jumped, for a moment, out of my body. My physical self was still there on the bed, a sad, tense little ball; but my mind was immediately distracted, filled with questions, burning with the urge to tiptoe across the room and peek around the door. What might the creature be? I got the sense that it was large. It threw a long shadow.

I could not leave the room, pinned as I was to my place on the bed; but I found I could issue a sort of plea, a command even. I need to see you. Come here. And I thought the shadow flickered, as if drawn to me. It grew larger, longer, it came closer. The thing was coming through the doorway! I was transported. I nearly forgot where I was, the anticipation was so great.

But there my memory stops. The shadow is destined to remain a shadow. I cannot even say what shape it took, if any; only that it was large, that it was animal, and that it stopped just short of the door. I knew, too, that it was watching me, and that it had come in answer to my trouble.

I’m not sure how long the trouble went on, that day. His shaky hand, his quavering voice, the gradual weight of him crushing my breath. It can’t have been long, because the person in the shower, probably my grandmother, would eventually have gotten out. I do know that it happened at other times. Peering into my little-kid self sitting there on the bed, I can see her thinking oh no, not again.

Strange the things we remember: this same man who hurt me used to catch little green lizards for me in the garden. As quick as they were, he was quicker, his powerful hands grasping them gently by the bellies as their hearts beat visibly, fearfully. I can still see the dirt beneath his nails as he showed me, one day, a lizard that was missing its tail. I looked at him with consternation; how did the lizard lose its tail? Did it hurt? And he told me about how they were capable of growing new tails if grabbed by a predator.

I was awed by this. Grow a new tail! It was magic. I believed him unreservedly on this point, that a lizard could grow a new tail; but I trusted him about nothing else. For years I could not spy these gorgeous green lizards, their lovely little jeweled presences, without falling into a confused haze of beauty and pain.

That was the year my tummyaches began. The queasiness I felt that day was to visit me often, waking me up in the middle of the night to hug the toilet bowl, sometimes falling asleep on the bathroom floor with my blankie. I spent many mornings in the nurse’s office, staring at the ceiling, counting its foam tiles and waiting for my mother to pick me up from school. That was also the year the creatures came to keep me company. The shadow outside the doorway eventually did step in all the way — into my mind. The dragon came first, followed by herds of horses, then a huge tiger, and a pack of wolves. The dragon accompanied me most closely, growing larger along with me, his jeweled eyes and saffron wings ever-visible as I struggled my way through the interminable boredom and oppression of church and school.

Nobody caught on — not to what the old man had done, and not to the creatures that crawled and fluttered and roared through my imagination. I kept them to myself. The part of me that had been broken — grabbed by the predator and torn in two — was slowly healing in its own way. Nobody saw it, and nobody knew, not even myself. But eventually it did regrow, and when it finally began to show itself, many years later, it manifested not as a healthy, normal psyche, but as a fierce and deadly reptile.