Today started out like any Wednesday, taking care of my 89-year-old father so my 87-year-old mother could get out of the house for the afternoon.
Dad was a little “off” today: he wasn’t happy with his omelette for lunch. He would rather have had one more piece of toast but preferred to grumble about it rather than ask for it. I didn’t mind. After all, he’s 89 and very disabled, in pain all the time, and it amazes me that he manages to get through most of his days in mild-to-moderately good spirits.
Mom came in from shopping, bringing the mail that she picked up at the post office. There was a package from LL Bean for me. She wanted to see what was in it; I demurred, because the gift for her upcoming birthday was in it. She got demanding and insistent. There was a bit of a tussle until I finally remembered that there was something in that package for me, too, and I cagily extracted it. That satisfied her.
I looked at my mail; nothing but “begging letters.” I have specific charities I give to regularly, so I threw them all in the recycle bin.
The conversation turned to politics, and somehow got onto someone whose past as a prostitute had recently been revealed.
Mom reacted acidly. How could anyone sink so low? What in the world would cause anyone to do THAT? She’d rather die.
“I did that,” I said quietly.
“YOU DID NOT!” She shouted, staring at me blinking out of her little birdy eyes as if I was the world’s biggest liar.
“Come OFF IT” shouted my father, several decibels softer than he would have in his prime, but doing the best he could muster.
“You were never a prostitute,” stated my mother matter-of-factly.
“Unfortunately, I was, when I ran away.”
“Then you deserved what you got! You’re lucky you didn’t pick up some disease! Maybe you DID pick up some disease,” she said thoughtfully. ”Why in the world did you do that?”
“I did it because I was cold and hungry, I needed food and shelter and safety from the streets.”
“You never told us that. You never told us anything. You just left us all of a sudden. You robbed us of raising you! You robbed us of our only child!”
I robbed them of their only child. That was all they could think of. They didn’t ask me why I ran away to California, or why, when they flew me back East for a family event, I ran back to California as soon as it was over. Even if they had asked me then, I wouldn’t have told them.
I was scheduled for an abortion. I needed to get back to California.
It’s been forty-four years since I bought that one-way ticket to San Francisco. Forty-four years since the bullying at school, my mother’s frequent unpredictable rages, and the vicious rape that took my virginity rolled up into critical mass. I knew I had to either kill myself or get out of there. I chose the latter.
I hit the streets in California broke, disoriented, and from my perspective now, unbelievably vulnerable. Nowhere to stay, nothing to eat. The weather was cold that spring, and I was dressed for California sunshine, not cold fog.
The first night I stayed with a friend I had met at a summer camp. Her parents had a party that very night, and I went to bed early, exhausted from the trip. The bedroom door opened and closed, and suddenly a man’s body was on top of mine. A voice hissed in my ear, “Don’t make any noise and you won’t get hurt.”
It was the same thing my first rapist had hissed. That first time.
Many more rapes, and finally it dawned on me that I could get food and places to stay and maybe a little money to buy a new toothbrush. Nothing big-time: I didn’t even know what I was doing. Just surviving, that’s all.
Why didn’t I give up and go home?
Because the streets and the rapes and the johns were better than the screaming and the “silent treatment” and the rapist there who watched me like a hawk, trying to get me to “be nice” to his friends in exchange for some Panama Red….and the school principal who regularly lectured me on the fact that I was a weirdo and would never amount to anything. At least this bad scene was MY bad scene. I chose it over being a one-girl shooting range at “home.”
“Home is where the heart is.” There was only one heart, and it was beating in my chest. Now, as then.
“You deprived us of raising you! You robbed us of our only child!”
And yet…and yet what? You only thought of yourselves? You still, forty-four years later, think only of yourselves and not why I ran away, let alone what happened to me out there?
“You deserved whatever you got. You chose it. You deprived us of our only child!”
God help us.
