Five days after she mails the letter, her father calls. She sits on her bed with Emily, still her roommate, as they listen to his voice on the answering machine, alternately begging and commanding her to call him back. In his fifth message he threatens to fly out to Concord to get her away from whatever has brainwashed her. After that she sees him everywhere — outside her dorm at night, in the crowd at a lecture, at the other end of the cafeteria. She avoids walking alone.
Whenever she sees his handwriting on an envelope in her campus mailbox, she drops it unopened into the recycling with the catalogues and the varsity sports schedules. He sends one with a printed address, to trick her. Inside are two articles about “false memory syndrome.” My daughter was brainwashed by a feminist cult! She starts checking the postmarks on her mail.
She wonders if he’ll cut off her tuition. She almost wants him to: she can’t bear that her existence here — her presence in classes, the food she eats at the refectory, the room she shares with Emily — is dependent on him. Her therapist offers to help her declare herself independent of her father so she can negotiate financial aid. She finishes college on scholarships, loans, and a work-study job manning a cash register at the college bookstore. She tells the bursar’s office to tear up her father’s checks, although she suspects that he keeps sending them and they keep cashing them.
The panic attacks diminish in frequency and intensity. For much of her junior year she takes every opportunity to talk about the abuse, and about the epidemic of child abuse in America, and the connection between the silence surrounding that epidemic and society’s attitude toward women in general. It thrills her, for a while, to force her past into people’s faces like a gun. But by graduation it has started to feel juvenile, and to remind her of the way she used to provoke people by mentioning her mother’s death. She stops talking about it so much, so loudly, although she doesn’t deny it. She particularly dislikes talking about it with boyfriends. She wants to keep her whole dark childhood as far as possible from her sunlit sex life; she finds that telling drains the simplicity from sex, which is a loss for her and a victory for the feelings she considers her enemy. She never gets comfortable with the word survivor, the term of art used in books and on message boards and by the Berkeley therapist she briefly sees after her move to San Francisco: it seems too obviously to have been chosen as a substitute for victim, as though you could absolve yourself of victimhood by refusing the word.
By now she hasn’t spoken to her father in more than five years. From her aunt she has heard that he is remarried, to a younger woman.
I don’t know much about the recovered-memory debate of the 1990s, and what little I have gleaned from magazines does not come to mind as we lie beneath her comforter in the afternoon light and talk, occasionally giving each other reassuring little strokes and squeezes. Much later I will read Susan L. Reviere’s scrupulously evenhanded survey Memory of Childhood Trauma: A Clinician’s Guide to the Literature, with its assertion that “no particular attributes of a given memory can be used to determine its veracity, and the ability of even professionals to make such distinctions is demonstrably poor.” But I am in love with Maya, and her command over her autobiography is near total, and she evinces no doubts about what has happened to her, and neither do I.
We lie on her bed and kiss gently. She squirms against me in an unfamiliar way, and it’s clear that things are different. The first time you have sex with someone it’s all about mirroring. When she introduces a particular kind of tenderness or friendliness or roughness, you respond in kind. With enough calculations per second you can generate the impression of spontaneous compatibility, the way a grid of tiny pixels becomes a photograph. (If you pick up on certain types of passivity or submissiveness from her, obviously, you want to put an inverter in the signal path so that your response is complementary rather than imitative.) But this abuse thing changes the equation. Is it possible that by some defensive maneuver she transmutes her awful history into pleasure? If so, is that a triumph or a capitulation? It’s a lot to factor in. Any sudden moves and the memories she’s been blocking for so long could come rushing back. My hand is on her ass now, a great ass, everything I’d hoped it would be. I want to stop and ask her about the abuse thing and how I should be factoring it in, but she seems like she’s doing fine. It would be weird for me to be the one to freak out. Plus she’d probably feel stigmatized. She’s kissing the underside of my chin. She doesn’t seem like a person who’s about to have a breakdown. Maybe that’s exactly the kind of person who’s the closest to a breakdown. Maybe she’s brittle. My hand is under the back of her shirt, and the natural thing would be to undo the clasp of her bra. Is that too rapist? Is there a way to manifest male desire that doesn’t, in the wrong light, look like brutality? I move to stick my tongue in her ear; that can work wonders. Unless her dad used to wake her up that way or something. In which case I’ll just have to apologize.
She’s unbuttoning my shirt. This is a crucial bit of data. I start unbuttoning hers, and then her bra is off, and I run my hand over her breasts, which are small and pretty, and all I can see is her father doing the same thing, and he’s so much bigger than her, and he probably loves her, but he loves her the wrong way. And she’s kicking off her jeans with this gorgeous little writhe of her hips. She’s beautiful. I want to keep her safe. Our chests are pressed up against each other and the contact feels strange and intense, the way it always does the first time and then never does again. She’s reaching down and undoing my pants, and everything’s starting to speed up, and now we’re fucking, and in my head I am me and her dad and her nine-year-old self all at once. It’s awful. Fortunately, she can’t tell, and she seems to enjoy it.
I’m roused by the throbbing and rattling of my cell phone on the nightstand. Maya doesn’t move, but I don’t know if she’s a deep sleeper or if she’s strategically pretending. The phone’s screen says MOM. The words I love you, Mom did not enter my head once last night. I answer the phone and slip out into the living room in my underwear. When I get there, my mom is already talking.
“Come home for my birthday, Eric,” she says. “I need you here. I’m lonely, and it isn’t working out with Wade.” The sound carries in here, so my end of the conversation consists largely of murmured Mmms and Uh-huhs. “It’s not like my standards are so unrealistically high. I’ve given up on looks entirely at this point. I’ll go on a date with the ones who don’t put a photo up on the website, that’s how ready I am to settle. But Wade — in his first email he said he runs his own business, doing digital photo printing or something. Turns out he makes fake IDs for the kids at the high school. A real prize, I’ll tell you. It’s going to take me forever to get my profile back up there again! You remember, we spent hours on that profile, making sure all the descriptions of me were good.”
I do remember this project, as you’d remember a severe bout of food poisoning. “You didn’t just deactivate it?” I say, leaping, as I so often do with my mom, to the single least important point. “You actually deleted it?”
“Eric, I’m forty-nine years old,” she says. “I don’t know the difference. And plus, yes, I deleted it. That was the arrangement Wade and I had, to take down our profiles. And now my birthday is coming up, and he’s not going to be there, so it’s going to be just Stacey and Victoria from work, and I told Stacey you were coming.”