Eventually I’ll have to reconcile this with the sex abuse. Every month (probably hormonal) I get horny, masturbate, then feel extraordinarily degraded and ashamed. Bad.
Not good.
I’ve taken to writing violent pornography which offends my feminist sensibilities, but for some reason (Bye-Bye Blackbird?) keeps coming up. I read porn too, and it shames me.
Ten thousand dollars in therapy bills later, the love I gained through sex, or free love, is nonexistent.
The cost of ‘free’ love? Self-esteem. Happiness.
A few things have changed. The Beatles are still gods, but my mother has had plastic surgery. And I am slowly healing from my parents’ fling with free love. I guess the pendulum had to swing to the other extreme for me to achieve balance. I’m learning that not everything is black or white. I can grab the grays and define them. I just hope I recognize the happy medium when it hits.
When I come out of my promiscuity backlash, my own little frigid movement, I hope to feel safe and powerful and sexual. Something I can almost imagine. But not quite.
I am learning that I am free to choose. I can choose whom to kiss, whom to embrace, whom to love. Just because someone likes the looks of me doesn’t mean I have to jump in the sack. I can decide how it’s going to go. And it’s not an all or nothing proposition. I can explore a few feet down that path, then stop and turn around.
My parents, happy practitioners of free love, didn’t teach me safety, or boundaries. But I am teaching myself these things. Out of love-the real stuff.
Carin Clevidence
When they fished the dead man out of the Rio Hondo we were surprised that he was yellow. One of the fishermen from the village saw him floating in the river; by the time they brought him to shore, at the far end of San Antonio where the houses gave way to jungle, most of the village had turned out to look. My mother, the only one with a camera, was asked to photograph the body. My little sister Shelly and I tagged along, but at the edge of the field we hung back, peering out from behind a banana tree. The man was naked. He’d died from machete wounds to the groin, a fact we learned much later. The men from the village carried the body past us on a sheet of canvas. He had been in the river long enough for the water to bleach him yellow. ‘Look at his ears,’ Shelly whispered. His ears were nearly gone, chewed away like his nose and his fingertips by the same fish that nibbled our feet when we played in the shallows.
They buried the yellow man in my uncle’s experimental field. Shelly and I had helped to plant corn there with our cousins, one of us making a hole with a stake, the other following behind and dropping in the kernels. Now the corn was up to our knees. The men dug a hole in an open corner of the field. They lowered the body into it on the canvas sheet. Some of the women crossed themselves. Then the men patted down the soil and marked the grave with a stick. Afterwards everyone milled around and exchanged theories about who the dead man was and what had happened. A drug deal gone bad, people thought. Maybe an escaped convict.
I was seven, Shelly five, when we spent five months in the village of San Antonio, Belize. The year was 1974. My mother had been there before, during the summers that Shelly and I spent with our father. My uncle, her older brother, was doing research on Mayan agriculture and she’d helped construct and plant his experimental raised-field system.
Little is conventional about my mother. Before I was a year old she’d taken me to a march on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. By the time I was in second grade and Shelly in kindergarten, we’d stayed in a Canadian commune, an apartment in Greenwich Village, a tree house, a tepee and a white Dodge van named Hippo. My mother thought nothing of taking us out of school to go to Belize for the winter.
What I remember of this time lodged itself in my mind without the help of a journal. At seven I still had trouble writing my last name; it would never have occurred to me then to try to burn a moment into my memory, to catalog events. What I remember is free of logic and of chronology. I remember that my uncle and his family were with us for Christmas, that we decorated a tree branch with red construction paper, that my aunt made donuts. In February, at Carnaval, young men with their faces covered in charcoal and sacking ran through the village throwing stones. In April, Shelly had a birthday party and cracked her pinata open with a stout stick.
San Antonio was a grid of dirt roads lined with small, whitewashed houses. The river, the Rio Hondo, ran along the east side and jungle bordered the rest. My uncle’s field stood at the south end. To walk home from the field, Shelly and I took a path through the jungle, where we sometimes saw leaf-cutter ants, each hefting a scrap of bright green. Out in the sunlit front yards little boys stood in their underpants and waved machetes as tall as they were. Behind the houses women in bright cotton dresses hung laundry out to dry by size, the underthings always farthest from the street. Inside, some of the houses had pages of magazines plastered up for wallpaper. Our friend Ruby lived near the south end of town, in a house with faded turquoise trim and a yard full of red hibiscus.
Up a low hill sat the general store where you could buy bottles of Coke and orange Fanta, cans of sweetened condensed milk, green mosquito coils, girls’ frilled underpants with the days of the week embroidered on the bottom, pigs’ tails cured in brine. Below the store, to the right, was the ferry across the Rio Hondo. It ran on underwater cables and had to be cranked by hand. In the shallows by the ferry dock we trapped minnows in empty liquor bottles baited with raw tortilla.
To the north of the store was the schoolhouse, the largest building in San Antonio. Bats nested under the eaves, and I had seen boys knock them down with broomsticks and beat them to death. Further along, to the left, stood the house of Dona Dominga, who made a candy called coco brut, which she sold from her living room. At the end of her street we had once watched a man process chicle, gum gathered from trees in the jungle. He cooked it outside in a huge pot, stirring it with a wooden paddle. Down a low hill, in the opposite direction, was our house, the last before the river.
The house we stayed in had been made for the schoolteacher. It became vacant when he built his own just across the street, a modern building with cement block walls and a tin roof. The old house stood on stilts. It had an old-fashioned palm roof that let in the breeze: My mother said it was like sleeping in a tree. On hot days the schoolteacher’s wife would come over to sit on the steps with us and list the disadvantages of a tin roof: hot in the sun, noisy in the rain. Our roof never leaked, even during the rainy season when mud washed through the streets in waves and people ran about with pieces of cardboard held over their heads.
Nearly everyone in San Antonio kept pigs. In the morning we’d see blood on the pigs’ ears where vampire bats had fed during the night; everyone slept with their windows closed. The pigs at our end of the village ran loose during the day, rooting through the garbage and corn husks in the gutters along the street and getting into people’s gardens. At night, and in the heat of the day, they slept under our house, the only one on stilts in that part of the village. We could hear them snuffle and grunt below us. Shelly and I came in one day and found our cousin Cedric lying face down on the floor. He’d found a knothole and was peeing through it. We were thrilled: The path to the outhouse was overgrown and I had seen snakes there and once, I swear, a bumblebee the size of my fist. Why use the outhouse when we could pee through the floor? Our mother put an end to this plan.