Birthmark
By Connect Mason News Director Elizabeth Alida Stern
My best friends and I would run, breathless, through the streets, skipping school and running from the police. We pole-danced on buses as we sped down to Georgetown, our high-pitched laughter grabbing the attention of the old, scraggly bus driver who would leer at our nubile, 14-year-old bodies through the rear view mirror. We sat precariously on the ledge by the aqueducts, a mere push from a 100-foot fall into the Potomac. We spent hours on the waterfront, Fort Reno, the diners book-ended between Water Street and the Maryland border, the 4000 Wisconsin Avenue movie theater, and the woods behind the theater where we shared our first cigarettes and gulped down cheap liquor. As precocious as we were, it would take me years to realize I was still very much a little girl at 14, sleeping with my childhood stuffed animal at night, braiding my hair in pigtails, doodling Xs and Os in the margins of my notebooks. Even now, at age 20, I still call my father Daddy.
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In September of my freshman year of high school, I am raped. I call my mother to pick me up from his house, where my friends had left me napping hours before. It is Thursday, a school night. I sit next to her and think, So this is what sex smells like. Salty. Thicker than sweat. Almost stale: something left over from a moment of heat that I did not, in fact, feel. My nerves are numb. I think I might even be able to smell the numbness, too. I’m cold, but I don’t roll the window back up, in case the smell on me has fortunately evaded my mother. “He’s a senior?” she asks, trying to sound nonchalant. I nod. She asks a couple more questions, and then she lets her unusually quiet daughter be, though I can tell she doesn’t think anything is actually wrong. I silently pour myself out of the car when we’re home, forgetting to thank her for the ride, as my politeness has been quite spent.
My lips might be paralyzed, I think. Then, upstairs, they tremble, they quake, and I sob. That night, I do not shower, because I still don’t know if I want to report to the police. I never wash the long-sleeve gray shirt, the black Calvin Klein pants and the black cotton bikini briefs. When he saw me standing in his room that night, after I’d pulled my underwear back on, he had turned away and spit at me, “Put on some fucking clothes.” At the time, I had not wanted to think of the way his bare dick scraped at the walls of my dry vagina — I wanted to know why he didn’t want it, anymore. I still did not understand what had happened to me — I was in disbelief.
I start to drink, not because I like the taste, but because it’s a kind, warm emptiness that I can measure by the glass and, later, the bottle. I decide that I like to measure. The pain itself is far too messy and viscous to measure, impossible to corner or shut away like how I stash liquor bottles in my closet. I never do tell the police. I go back to him two years later, after he has dropped out of college, and I let him fuck me again. I tell myself that I do not know this girl or this boy I vaguely remember, from a cool, September night, buried in a foreign subconscious I won’t acknowledge as my own. I try to erase the memory of him raping me by replacing the beast I see him as in my own head with someone who is little more than a stranger with whom I have casual sex. Years later, a friend studying psychology will tell me it is surprisingly common for rape victims to return to their rapists.
Because the fragments of my story do not add up, because I know I will never be able to remember everything that happened that night, because I was forgetting it as I was going along, I simply hope and try to forget the rest of it.
If only I could stop crying. If only I could stop shaking violently when I cry. If only I could stop clenching my thighs with every breath I inhale. If only I could put down the glass of my mother’s cooking wine. If only I could say something, besides crying, wailing and sobbing like an animal, clawing for mercy.
When people ask me how I am, I’m never really sure what to say besides, “Fine. I'm fine.” Hello, fine, I say to myself, rhythmically, in pace with my steps down the school hallways. Fine, fine, fine. I yawn my body open to a few men for a couple years, trying to get used to the idea, trying to accustom my body to the way a dick thrusting inside me feels like I am being stabbed repeatedly with a serrated knife. I think I am supposed to. I think this must be like an acquired taste, like the alcohol I have come to love, the alcohol that is the only thing I feel thankful for at the end of the week. Alcohol lets time pass, the way time does not.
For years, I cry and try to forget, arbitrarily switching from one to the other. I look for the rites of passage to womanhood, deciding, one by one, that it’s not my first period, which comes a few months after that first September. It’s not drinking or Marlboro Lites or parties or mini-skirts. It’s not when I get a job the summer after 10th grade, when I open a bank account or cut off my hair. During those formative years, I play carelessly with my own life as if I am lining up a trail of dominoes, and I find myself falling just as easily, with a mere tap of the fingers, a person’s touch catching me off guard. A flashback lasting a mere second will push me over the edge into a catatonic state of despair, caged in my room for days.
A light switch clicks when I fall suddenly, perilously in love, at age 17, right before my senior year begins, when the man I fall in love with is in love with me, too. It blindsides me, utterly and completely. My eyes flutter open, a gloomy Sleeping Beauty awakened. This is what I did not know I was allowed to hope for: the warmth of his touch and the way the scraping and thrashing inside me are muted to the soft, fluid movements of a memory’s. The way my own recklessness becomes a deep and steady courage. The way he fits inside me and brings me pleasure. The way he knows my body and where it has been and how he shows it to me: this frightened, shivering little girl I had left for dead so long ago. I try to recognize her and slowly, over time, I do. Slowly, I begin to learn forgiveness—not for my rapist, but for myself.
My eyes stop shifting, at least during moments, which gradually grow longer and fuller, connecting to one another. I am not sure when I began to become a woman exactly, but I know that I have, somewhere along the thin string of yarn, the life that I have continued to weave over the past few years, minding the patches that lay misshapen and crudely stitched together. There is no way to measure how many of my memories I have lost, buried, and locked away, permanently sealed in a vast sea of gray matter. Brief flashes of my own sad, weary eyes haunt me in dreams sometimes, images of a prematurely jaded showgirl shouting off-the-shoulder remarks across a bar she is far too young to be in, teetering in very high heels.
I didn’t want to look at my own body. I did not want to see the smallest curve of my body or any other indication that I was not sexless, safe and hidden. In the mirror, I saw something foreign and shapeless instead of myself, perhaps out of sheer will. When my boyfriend tells me I am the most beautiful woman he has ever known, I shout back, “I’m not a woman” and burst into tears in an Ophelian heap on my bed.
Confirming beauty or femininity would somehow confirm the raping of these things, these sacred and inherently fragile properties of a woman’s soul. “Rape” sounds exactly like what it is, like what that boy did to me, but speaks no truth of the slow, deliberate, and violent shredding of my insides, like a thin layer of silk pulled thread by thread. Even I am surprised at the ease with which my wounds reopen without warning. To this day, I can shatter like spun glass when I least expect it. To this day, there are pieces of me just as broken as they were almost seven years ago that night. Nebulous fears and a sense of unbearable isolation follow me constantly. Everyday, I wonder who I would be if I had never been raped.
The untangling of the patchwork I had superimposed over my memory of that September night in 2001 does not suddenly give way like a glowing apparition or a sacred miracle, like in obeah tales or the pages of the Bible. Recognizing womanhood — selfhood — was not the pretty, demure act of repose deified by Hollywood’s notion of women that I had tried to make my own. Finding womanhood had something to do with myself — with finally looking at myself, rather than the reverse. I didn’t want my worth to be based on touting myself as a decorated commodity. I wanted to speak and be heard after years of bearing the effects of rape and the way it had so cruelly silenced me.
When I finally speak, I say it almost so quietly, even my own ceiling can’t hear. I wonder if God can hear. “Get out,” I whisper. “Get out, get out, get out,” I repeat like a prayer. “I want him out.” I wonder how I will ever be a woman because the hideous shape of him is still inside me, even after so many years. It is indelible, like a birthmark.
It’s hard and permanent like a rock, a boulder, a mountain. An infinite scar that does not heal alone, that spreads like a cancer.
Every time I break, there is, at least, a moment of recognition and clarity. I come out of hiding, piece by broken piece. One day, during the summer before I leave for college, I rise from under my covers and walk down the upstairs hallway in my house, and look out the window in the laundry room, directly across from my bedroom door. I see myself, trapped behind the glass that bears my reflection. There are trees and azaleas blooming between the white and red brick houses in my neighborhood. The French diplomat’s children are playing basketball in their driveway across the street. A hummingbird pauses briefly in their front garden before flitting over their halos of blonde hair. A lone, older woman walks along the sidewalk, slowly but deliberately. A faint smile appears across her face as she bends down to pluck a white rose from the bush outside her home, and she regards it carefully, touching its petals one by one.
Suddenly, she looks up at me, standing behind the window. Her smile widens slightly and she nods in my direction, almost imperceptibly, before she turns to continue along her way. Though her hair is almost white, there is something girlish and playful about the way she places the flower behind her ear. And, for a moment, I see in my reflection something as delicate as purity, that is inimitably and unmistakably my own. Briefly, the separation between me and my reflection softly melts away, and I am almost whole again.