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.