I launch an undercover investigation into what just happened to me

The only mirror left after the destruction was on my sliding closet doors, floating in soft focus in the corner of my eye. I stood on a pink carpet and stared out my pink blinds. I launched my undercover investigation in a pink room, which makes me laugh, now, because pink isn’t exactly the color of a mastermind. “I will launch an undercover investigation…” My father picked out the color. I didn’t want pink. But to Nick, girl = pink. It infuriated me, but the man was a Great Depression baby. Blue was reserved for a boy, which is what I wanted, but it was his house, his money, so he decided what to paint the walls. I rolled my eyes at him because I said blue, knowing there was also yellow.

Looking back on it all these years later, you’d think, given what I went through, and I still deal with an old framework that tells me I didn’t go through anything, so I bump up against it, still, so I usually ask it, meaning, Angelica—if your child was in this situation, what would you say? I had to unlearn a lot.

You’d THINK that he would have set up a room for me before I came home, or at least let me pick out my own room, as I didn’t have a room in this house. Instead, he brought me home to mirrors being smashed on the walls, and I ran downstairs afterward and ripped his face off —I tried to, at least.

The way I ordered these pieces, called memories, changed, so sometimes, I still don’t know how to order them because I don’t know how they add up. I ordered them, unconsciously, in the past, with large holes. I do not have the same understanding of it now because I came to understand that the premise was ridiculous to begin with. I was in a sex scandal. I was not “given away to someone else because she lied about him being a child molester,” which is what I used to say, which doesn’t even make any sense as a sentence. I said that to those who approached me, wanting to discuss it. The question: “wait what, when did it become a lie?” That changed my life.  

At the time, I understood it to be a lie. I came out of this situation — clueless. I came home, at the end of all that, to mirrors being smashed off the walls. I had no idea what the hell just happened. I thought I did, but I also knew that I couldn’t know. I was a child, so I knew I was automatically at a disadvantage in a world of adults, which put me at risk, and that felt so true, the deafening silence in my room. Adults weren’t going to tell the truth because they didn’t necessarily.

“Didn’t they, Dr. J?”

I regarded my reflection in the mirror. My mother opened a door onto the world that I could not unsee, and it was psychology, and I was obsessed with it. I wanted to study it, that’s how I responded to the sex scandal I was in, that I didn’t really know I was in, because I saw so many reflections in it. She reflected the truth. That was my working hypothesis.

Dr. J ran into Catholic mass every Sunday, according to an eyewitness I secured, “every Sunday.” She “accosted,” in her words, “the priest with her rapes” right before he was about to process for Mass. In other words, he was about to begin a holy holy performance with eucharist ministers around him, which, came into stunning focus next to Dr. J’s outrageous performance — of running into church to “accost him,” and people heard, so I don’t know where to begin, firstly. What differentiated a genuine performance from a fake performance? She was “out of the box” thereby illuminating the structure that contains us. It’s not that it isn’t real, it’s a construct. There was a structure, and it fascinated me.

She reflected the truth in a fascinating light because —which performance was more outrageous and offensive considering the Catholic Church’s billion-dollar lawsuit over child abuse building behind the scenes — totally ignored? In her blue blue eyes as clear as the summer day she was born, she was even a buffoon. “Just erase it.” Every sentence she uttered didn’t have substance, it was flimsy—wee. “My degree is in,” her wrist like a flimsy hanky, flopping around, “in Economics, Arts, History of Tax Law,” depends. And she acted like the MOST sincere person in the WORLD. Next to the priest, it looked like performance art, even in how richly dressed they both were. And Dr. J would tell you, despite her shoving affairs in our faces, that she hardly ever even had sex. She was chaste, even, just like the Catholic priest, but to an operatic pitch as if she were mocking the concept.

Was she provoking the system? Was she searching for sympathy? She appeared even starved. A very hungry woman, Dr. J. Could she have hit on the priest in this way? I wouldn’t put it past her, and still, even still, it would be more appropriate than a grown man luring a child, and yet, she’s shocking. Reflections. Fascinating. Even useful. In other words—good, you should be shocked. In which direction was “it,” whatever “it” was, believable?

I didn’t need to be five to know that child abuse was more common than I might think. I had to conclude that my mother had been raped younger than my age, at four. At four, I was already aware of what rape is, that’s the conclusion I made about her. That impaled me with some spear that I could not let go of. That my mother might have been a victim of it, that my mother could lie about it, but the Catholic Church did—lie about it. Her theatrics discredited her because she appeared so fake, but in the Catholic Church’s case, their theatrics of normalcy were fake. She reflected the truth.

I wondered if it was true, evidently, but it was hard not to consider that it might have been true.

I did not know, I kept coming back to that phrase. But I was a kid, so I even said to myself, “maybe it’s my biggest strength, that I do not know,” for I was already over “knowledge.” I was already frustrated with the “I know.” I know, you know, everyone thinks they know. But Dr. J taught me — you might not know, you really might not know what’s going on.

I couldn’t trust adults, necessarily, Dr. J taught me that. It wasn’t even their fault, in a sense, for I saw it as a structural problem, in that, we’re probably going to try and protect ourselves. I was a child, but that was sort of laughable at that point. Haha, my mother hit that note. I was going to have to take these adults in. They might deliver information to me as truth. They might even believe it to be true, and I saw Dr. J in everyone and everything. In the mirror, it was the subject of psychology that gripped me. I had so many questions. What was the truth even? Contemplating “the biggest liar on earth,” she reflected so many true things about the world. That fascinated me. What the truth is.

Once, I approached the dinner table, suspicious already. Dr. J made me food. Climbing onto my chair, Dr. J left me a lone burger patty on a plate. No bun. No tomato. Just the patty. I didn’t even need to lean. My nose might have been sensitive, I was four, but I paused, stared at this burger. I turned to her. “There’s alcohol,” I did not stutter, “in DIS.” I knew that word, and I was pissed about it. She didn’t look at me; she gave me a quick flash of her hand in the kitchen. “Only a little for the flavor…” and she put a bouquet of parsley into her mouth. You see, even I peer into these memories, like I have to come closer, is that a bouquet of parsley?” She could carry one, pick at its leaves, but garlic cloves were “Mama’s candy” so I wondered if it was related to that.

I looked back at this burger, confused. I had my wits, even if I was four. I knew I was four. This wasn’t “my flavor.” Why would I want alcohol in my food? Moments like this—I wondered, where did she come from? Was she given alcohol when she was four? She stunned me. Didn’t that sound like a line from Arsenic and Old Lace? “Just a pinch of cyanide.” I didn’t trust this burger. I didn’t eat it. I just got out of my chair and left. That’s where my memory ends.

She lied wildly, normally. She told my aunt, I think the only Christmas she fraternized with my father’s family in a side ponytail, that she dumped all the Christmas presents at LAX airport because she was going to miss her flight, imagining a trail of brilliant paper and bows down the domestic corridor like a fairytale. It’s impossible in reality, but not in the mind, so did she have a particular condition outside the drugs? She really did evoke every fairytale — like, fireworks, she was the GRAND FINALE, reaching for the stars. This woman delivered this speech to my aunt, for real, who was so confused. My mother was unreal— it made you want to steer clear, and that’s the problem when it comes to the mentally ill.

I had to even “put myself away,” because my mother wasn’t appropriate for children, but that’s where I lived. A universe that wasn’t for kids. I wasn’t going to understand everything that I was going to hear either. I had to listen, absorb, and maybe one day, I will reopen this as an adult, or with an adult, and it will begin to make sense. I just wasn’t prepared for the day I did. Angelica was even going to try to hurt me, which really fascinated me. Some situations don’t tend to “bring out the best of the species.”

The question I received, a lot, from people was—did she know what she was doing? Do you think she knew? Does anybody? Reflections. Not everyone receives that benefit of the doubt. And yet, the people who asked that question couldn’t make connections — even Dave Chappelle asked, “how old is fifteen really?” Because “we always get tried as adults.” The justice system rings in the question. And there were “meta-structures,” one of my working phrases, that we might not be aware of.

And speaking of, as I was thinking about it, criminality and civilization, and madness and civilization, what was the relationship between them? The question underlying my investigation was “how do we become who we are?” Because how did she become this? And I put intention — I intend, I said it out loud even, and how did I know all this? I don’t know, I cannot answer that question. I repeated it many many times, to study this, remember it. “I intend to.” Now, how will the world factor into the equation? I had different files — so-to-speak—that I was studying, in a drawer labeled by a fourth grader: undercover investigation. “Intention” was one of them. Incest, another. It had to be ugly.

And Dr. J was — reflecting through mirrors — ugly.

The only thing my father knew, truly, the only thing he knew about his wife, which was already telling, was that she was beaten when she was two by her sister to the point that her family sent her away for the first ten years of her life. And why did I just get “sent away” for four years? As if the story held real glimmers, fragments, of her past. That hooked me. I would hear later in trauma circles that the past repeats itself. Did it? Was that a cover-up? Beaten at two. Or just a crazy person? Wasn’t it already crazy? I was searching for a real girl back there. Did this really happen to her, once upon a time? Was she a victim of this crime, even in her family, as her behavior signaled—maybe—to become some cruel, hysterical reflection of it? I held the possibility that it was a lie, at the same time—that really made me want to go in for Dr. J— as a child. I was lit on both ends.