I just got back from Thanksgiving, and I have the night off, so I’m going to see if I can work out the next steps of this story I’m drafting about these crazy four years I lived somewhere else because my mother accused my father of being a child abuser. I launched an undercover investigation into what happened when I came out of these years when I was nine.
I wondered if my mother had really been abused, younger than I was, and I was fascinated by what this situation reflected about abuse.
I’m thinking outloud right now as I try and finish a story about these years. As a recap, Angelica Leibowitz tells us that my mother said that my father was raping me, beating me, the works. Then, I introduce myself as I’m watching the tennis match, as the majority of my investigation happened at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. This situation spawned an obsession with psychology. I take you through the first step in my investigation which was to establish the basic timeframe for this situation: four years. I ask her to describe what happened when she came over to my house.
I alerted her upon entry, and my mother, Dr. J, comes down the steps.
“What did she appear like? What was the first thing you noticed?”
“She was the whitest woman I’ve ever seen…” it was hard not to laugh. Angelica even compliments her breasts. “She had beautiful breasts.” Which, the first scene set it up: it’s a little sex scandal. My mother was, she could get naked, so Angelica had seen her breasts, of course. I’m going to briefly describe her look, the pale skin, the eyes as blue as the sky, the red wig real but fake. “She was beautiful, attractive,” my mother. They turn to one another between tea cup sets, as my mother arranged them on their individual pedestals. She was a real mad hatter, Dr. J, in a killer expensive suit. She looks as if she could be in Alice in Wonderland, which fascinates me about her, her fairytale vibe.
Now, Angelica turns to her, alerted by me. I’m smashing barbie heads together in a trance, she simply — as a caring woman with six children— says to my mother that they can set up a playdate “one day…” it wouldn’t be a problem. She just sees a child who needs a little amusement, even if my mother doesn’t seem to notice me. Angelica is just there, by chance, because a friend asked her to pick up a tax return. To her shock, my mother throws me onto her in a state of strange jubilee:
“Here! Take her!” Like, wee! Suddenly.
“What did you think?” I wondered at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. “What did you think when she did that…?”
“Was she joking?”
You never knew with Dr. J. But I’m not seeing a lie in this condition, that she didn’t know the difference between a lie, truth, joke? I’m seeing truth in it. She seemed to have cracked on a particular line.
She said, “can you imagine someone lying about that?”
So you’ll find out, as the reader, that she lied about my father… being abusive, at this point in the story.
“Can you imagine lying about your own husband? Saying that? That you husband is raping your daughter?”
“But isn’t it already a lie?”
I start interrogating my father in the car, not knowing what to do with him. He reveals that he only knows ONE thing about his wife, of 9 years. “She was shipped around to different family members for the first ten years of her life when she was two…because her sister beat her.”
I can’t help but notice that I was sent away for a few years, as if this present situation I was in held fragments of a real past, as it was a touch too traumatic to not sense a real past. Was that true, a lie, a cover up?
Then, I take my investigation to Pennsylvania. My father’s uncle and wife had gone to Dr. J’s house when I was a newborn to welcome me to the world, though she was beaten a couple years later here to the point of needing to send her away. So her statement wasn’t received as real.
The first impression they got of Dr. J’s family’s house? “Creepy.” That’s what I mean about her reflecting the truth. She was creepy at the first interaction, not the second. That’s exactly what she’s reflecting… her house. So i’m seeing truth, actually.
Mirror mirror mirror on the walls… she covered her tax law office walls with mirrors. The last, the only two left, were on my sliding closet doors. It was one of her symbols. It began in little suggestions on her silk antebellum wedding ballgown (she’s not southern) and it took over… she reflected the truth. That was my working hypothesis.
She ran into church every Sunday to accost, according to an eye witness, the priest with her rapes. In her white mink, her sequins, dressed in haute couture, she’s reflecting in putting on this outrageous peformance in front of the priest, a scandal that’s happening behind the scenes: a billion dollar lawsuit over child abuse in the Catholic Church. She reflected the truth.
“What did you think when Dr. J threw me onto you?” Back at the club.
“Did she just make love?” It’s the only reason that she could have been so unusually happy? Like she had just made love… and it had blown her brains out. She wasn’t too sure there. She could have, as “she slept with her clients upstairs,” my father said.
Outside my house that day, her car was parked out front with a license plate that read IRSHELP. She’s getting pulled over almost nightly, according to my father’s divorce file for “drinking, driving, looking for sex downtown…” like, she was engaging in prostitution or looking for sex, generally?
Did this happen to her, once upon a time? That’s what I wanted to know, as I had to conclude when I was four that she might have been raped, younger than my age. I knew what rape was, conceptually, at four.
In church, on Sundays, I thought about child abuse exclusively, in a room where only the craziest stories were being diffused—men rising from the dead, Jim trying to sell me this as literal truth. And, since I flicked my wrist at him, “that’s not true,” come on, Jim, and the congregation laughed uncomfortably… I was struck that they believed this to be literally true, but it waivered, do they actually believe in its literal truth? Another one of these psychological lines that my mother illuminated: is it true, not true? Literally speaking. I contemplated “pure regards” at the time, it was my first field of study, as my mother had a “pure regard” which struck me, because she was so “impure,” which she advertized. I got that picture. And, I got, gathered that these Catholics believed sex was impure, but I was four, so I was pure, and I came from this act, so why am I pure if it is impure? I’m confused, thinking about Dr. J’s lunacy. And the pure regards field work I was conducting brought a man in my church to my attention. I watched him. I wondered if “this” happened to him, too, as I was four at the time, so I was limited in my ability to engage in complex thought, seeing Dr. J as a victim, not the threat, exactly. It was in that moment that I saw…this can happen to boys too. So this happens to boys and girls. I understood that in looking at him. A man with a “pure regard.” I tested his reflexes, just to see what was going on in there, which I could not determine. I did not come to any conclusion other than “pure regard.” Skipping away. I would find out later that he had sexual problems that leaned towards underage girls. An illness is an illness, to be understanding about it in his case.
So that’s me, at four. I’m contemplating sexual abuse. I don’t really have any body awareness, not at that age. I didn’t, personally. I had a strange cognitive experience, sometimes, that I could notice, however, but I don’t know if that’s me being FOUR or — since I don’t know anymore if it was a lie, you understand — I don’t know, the sign that this might have been happening to me. It’s hard to imagine that you could block that out. But that’s what I was told was possible. I’ll leave that. I don’t know what to do with my musings…
So Angelica Leibowitz goes, “okay?” She didn’t know how to respond. I mean, she wasn’t doing anything later…? So she takes me home for one day that becomes four years.
“And I started living with you…just like that?”
She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
For a while Dr. J called every day, but she never asked for me. Not once.
So I’m sensing the game, that there’s a psychological game we’re playing, but what?