volume 7
Beneath the Sand
by Sara Atkins
All of my life, I've gone to windows. Over time, I have stood solitary, arms wrapped firmly around my middle or pressed hard against the sill, and looked out through sheets of glass at what lay before me. The view always changed depending on whatever apartment it was we were living in at the time. If I was in the living room, I generally looked out at trees stapled to ragged squares of grass scattered along the gray-flecked pavement. There were often muddy brown or canary yellow clapboard houses with the paint peeling off the sides and bright flower beds resting in front. Rows of weathered cars were lined up and down the block. Occasionally, there was the random passer-by on his way to somewhere or another.
If I were in my bedroom, I'd stare out at a sky deep in its darkness, a film of hazy gray reflecting on its surface from the city lights below, waving to me over a neighbor's rooftop; or perhaps I'd see a star barely bright enough to make out and wish upon if wishing was still a thing I did at the time. I can remember being five years old and home sick from school, standing at our front window, feeling sad for no reason that is apparent to me now. I was twelve and terrified of losing my best friend who would be moving just before the start of the seventh grade. I was twenty and had just received a call that my Granny had died. I was in my bed as a child and as a young woman staring out at a space I could talk to in the dark as though there were something beyond the window that was listening or would respond to me. I went to windows when there was something to let go of or to retrieve; when the world, or maybe just its circumstances all balled tightly together and working as a fist, would take a swing at me and knock me down; when a part of me, some grand emotion, grew too big for its own shell and started to swell inside of me until I thought I might tip over from the pull of its growing body. It was then, at those moments, that I went to windows.
When I recall what happened that winter, I recall standing at a window with my arms limp at my side with shame, my eyes wet and full with worry. That is what comes to me before any other memory I have of the time. It swims sharply to the surface and hovers there before allowing the rest of it all to follow and reveal itself to me. It is as though it were my being at the window that hung just over the fat brown couch in our small Chicago living room that was the most important thing about what had taken place. As though something lay hidden in that moment, something so significant, so heavy in its truth, that a part of myself leads me back there in the hopes that I will see it, address it, and press its weight into my palm.
I was born to parents who were deeply in love and anxious to have children. I like to think of it as being delivered into a soft, warm bed. They began trying to conceive within a year of meeting one another, but it wasn't as easy a process as they had hoped it would be. With medical help and many, many attempts (of which I try my best not to think about), they wound up with a baby girl. But there would be no more children despite their yearning for others, and so I became the center of their lives, the focus of all of their energy and all of their attention. I floated in it.
I felt completely safe and completely enamored with my momma and daddy. We told silly jokes only we understood, we read books, and we gave each other nicknames only we knew about. On Friday nights we would bake brownies, lay on the pullout couch in the living room, and watch “Star Search”together. I could never keep secrets from them. It was as though being loved that much and that closely made hiding anything from them a nearly impossible task. We waved our emotions like brightly colored flags and talked about everything that needed talking about just as soon as it came to our attention. We made fun of one another. We explored. They provided answers to all of my questions like magic, and I wore my pride at being their one and only child like a crown atop my head or a smile across my heart.
Despite my glow from being smack dab in the middle of all that warmth and affection, I came to want brothers and sisters desperately. Perhaps the attention became a bit too much at some point, and I wanted someone to share it all with, or maybe it was just a natural urging that nips and nags at all or most children early on in life, but for whatever reason, at about the age of ten, I formed an intense attachment to the one-year-old daughter, Rachel, of two of my parents'closest friends and Rachel's then-unborn sister, Lauren. All I wanted to do was be around Rachel and, within the year, the new baby girl. I wanted to play with them and take care of them, to change their diapers, make their bottles and blow kisses against their proud, round bellies.
Their family had four children in altogether; aside from Rachel and Lauren, there was Michelle, about my age, and a boy, Jason, who was five years older than myself. I found every excuse I could to get Gina, the girls'mother, to invite me over. This family was loud and colorful in a way that mine wasn't. They stayed up later than we did, watching television shows my mom wouldn't let me watch or playing music that my parents didn't listen to. The kids all tore through the house with complete abandon and recklessness. At Michelle's tenth birthday party, Gina sang “Like a Virgin”into the tiny plastic microphone of Rachel's Fisher Price tape recorder and we were allowed second helpings of sickeningly sweet sheet cake and Neapolitan ice cream scooped out of a huge plastic tub. There was always noise in their home, the kind that fills each room with the sense of being lived in and of being completely used and enjoyed. While my home was steady and quiet and calm, theirs was pulsing with some kind of current I didn't understand or recognize but was drawn to just the same.
I began spending every free moment I could at their house, babysitting for the two girls while Gina ran errands or sat at the kitchen table with stacks of papers to go through for the organization she helped to run. On those days that I spent there looking after one or both of the babies, their father, Jim, was never home and Michelle, just a year younger than myself, would often be with friends, astonished and disgusted that I would actually stay at home with her two bratty sisters by choice –as opposed to some kind of punishment handed down by their mother.
In the midst of my obsession with the family and my newly, self-appointed role as big sister to Rachel and Lauren, I rarely, if ever, paid much attention to their older brother Jason and his whereabouts. For the most part, I ignored him, my eleven-year-old attention span falling just short of registering his presence during my visits. I have no specific memory of him before that day. He was just there, like wallpaper or a piece of furniture in their cramped, second-floor apartment. I wonder now if it wasn't his own manner and the way he carried himself that prevented me from noticing him and forming some memory of him other than the one I would be left with.
Jason walked into a room as though he already knew he didn't belong there. He stood with a slouch, unable to summon the energy needed to set his shoulders upright or straighten his spine. He had a face that looked too old for his lanky, caramel colored sixteen-year-old body. His thick black hair sat like a frizzy bowl atop his head. His eyes were a deep brown and shifted in such a way that you couldn't be sure what part of you he was looking at, at any given moment. He appeared to be looking up and out at all times, peering at everything from a distance that became unnerving after a while. He had a mustache that sat above his lip in thin, greasy strings which, at certain angles, gleamed with sweat and resembled some kind of long, skinny insect.
He kept quiet most of the time so that when he spoke, every word came out like a plea to be noticed and invited into some circle that didn't include him. More often than not, his pleas for attention went overlooked, and he was left to stoop in a corner or stroll uneasily across the room, his brown, shifty eyes peeping out from beneath the black cape of his hair, his mustache seeming to twitch with every step.
On one particular cold, blue winter day, Gina stepped out for a couple of hours, taking Rachel and Michelle with her and leaving me to care for the baby, Lauren. Jason stayed home to keep an eye on things as Lauren was only about five months old at the time, making Gina weary of trusting her care to an eleven-year-old girl, no matter how mature or responsible she thought I was for my age. It made no difference to me either way, and I went about my usual routine with Lauren, making silly faces, cuddling endlessly and changing the occasional diaper while Jason entertained a friend he had invited over.
At one point during the afternoon, I sat on the couch with Lauren tucked into the crook of my arm, my wrist cradling her bottle, and feigned interest in the wrestling match that Jason and his buddy were completely engrossed in. From time to time, Jason would say something silly and meaningless to include me in their conversation while his friend sat by and looked at me with the kind of disinterest a teenage boy has for any girl five years his junior. I smiled and agreed with whatever was said, glad that Jason seemed happy to have me there instead of irritated at the presence of a fifth grader as his friend seemed to be.
The sky hung low over the apartment, bleeding a powder blue light through the windows and onto the hardwood floors. Cold air pounded at the door and pushed heavily against the cracks in the windowpane that seemed to moan with the weight of it. Eventually, Gina and the girls returned and, not quite ready to go home, I asked to spend the night, and she and my mother agreed it was okay. I would sleep on the couch in the living room, go to bed at a decent hour, and be picked up the following morning.
I settled in, Michelle and I playing with the baby girls, Gina fixing a batch of Mexican rice in a large pot on the stove, filling the whole apartment with the smells of sazon and adobo. Off in the corner, the radiator, painted a dull, pasty white, made chugging noises and shot out heat from between its metal teeth. Family portraits and various political posters lined the walls, the eyes of the people in them seeming to follow you as you moved from room to room. Real and fake plants were scattered along coffee tables and shelves with their long arms draping a waxy green over everything. The night crowded in around us, and soon it was time for bed.
Gina gave me an oversized t-shirt to wear, a soft cotton pillow, a blanket covered in chunks of fuzz, and strict instructions to switch the television off within the hour before she turned the lights out in the apartment and left Jason and myself to fight for room on the couch as we watched the end of some show. Within moments, I began to drift off into sleep. I was lying on my side, the t-shirt in bunches at my thighs, my knees curled slightly towards my chest, and my feet poking out from underneath the cover, resting just next to Jason who sat upright at the other end of the couch.
It was at the moment between sleep and awake that it happened. Just as the room began to fade and swirl with the tan wicker chair blending into the red clay of a nearby flowerpot, I felt a rush of cool air burrow beneath the blanket and tickle my calf. I pulled at the lumpy cover with my eyes more closed than open and tried to once again give in to the sleep that was tugging at me gently. But the same chill returned again, and suddenly, the layer of fog caused by oncoming dreams lifted from me and I saw him. I saw him pulling back the blanket ever so lightly and begin to move his hand toward my leg and then upward toward my thigh. I froze, and a part of me began to cry from fear and confusion, but not the part he could see or hear, for I wasn't sure yet if he knew I was awake or what he would do upon thinking I was.
I shifted ever so slightly as though I were trying to shake a bug from my skin. He let me be for a moment, and in my stunned silence, I tried to figure out what had just happened or was still in the process of happening. Then the blanket moved again, and this time there was the hotness of his breath as he leaned in and kissed the fold of skin just below my butt. His fingers crawled up my backside and toward the edge of the fabric of my underwear, pulling and reaching for the part of me that lay quiet and hidden underneath. Out of sheer terror, I lifted my leg up and back down again in an effort to push him away from me and in doing so, I caught his eye.
If there had been some glimmer of something else there –playfulness, innocence even, something softer and less aware –then maybe I could have moved from him quicker than I did; maybe I could have sat upright and yelled for an explanation, demand that he go to his room and leave me be or I would tell on him; maybe I could have screamed for help. But there was nothing there. His eyes were hard and blank and stared back at me with fierce concentration, his face lit with the crass light of the television set. And so I remained there while he tried touching me and kissing me again and again, my fear growing thick and sticky atop my skin and against the grainy polyester of the couch cushions below me.
I don't know what it was, but at some point, just as his slim, bony fingers reached the top of my panties and began to jerk them lower and lower, something stirred within me and I rose from the couch, running into the nearby bathroom and closing and locking the door behind me. I stood there, my stomach turning like a bowl of thick batter, my legs shaking uncontrollably, as I tried to decide what to do next. The bathroom floor was lined with pale, white tile and the grout that divided them into rows of tiny ceramic squares was a muddy brown that I focused on for what felt like hours as my body slowly began to return to me. My feet grew cold and I moved to the shaggy pink bathmat, my own calm pink shelter, like an island in the middle of a cool, murky sea. I contemplated staying there forever.
Eventually, however, I chose to leave and, throwing the door open, marched fiercely through the living room, past Jason still perched on the couch, and into Gina's and Jim's bedroom where I shook her awake. She sat up slowly, wiping dreams from her wrinkled eyes, and asked me what was wrong. Jim lay next to her, huge and naked like some sleeping giant I didn't want to wake. I thought of what to tell her and glanced around the room, noticing the way the glow from a nightlight lay in strips across the floor, cutting the dark into uneven pieces.
As I turned from Gina then, I saw him standing just outside the room, listening and watching with the same firm look in his eyes and the same slouch in his stance as usual. Only this time his careless, aloof demeanor was snake-like in its knowing, still and harmless as it waited for the right moment to unleash its hurt like a deep, dark secret. Suddenly, hovering at the edge of the bed next to Gina's tired body, I felt shame fill me for the first time, like a balloon, and I wavered before telling her I'd had a nightmare and needed help getting back to sleep. The rest of the night has escaped from me. I don't remember lying back down on that couch, Jason tucked away in his room, and closing my eyes against the dark.
I wouldn't tell my parents until the following evening as I sat, head down, before a plate full with Cornish hen, peas, and potatoes; and when I did, I would pull my mother into the bathroom and make her turn on the faucet full blast so that my father couldn't hear my cries. I begged her not to tell him, my embarrassment forming rings around my heart like dirty water in a tub before a good cleaning. She explained with a tender voice that she had to and left me in the kitchen while she sat him down and relayed my story.
“She's not going over there anymore, period,”I heard him say in his angry voice.
I sat on the hard, wooden bench in our small kitchen filled with cooking smells and all things familiar, and buried my soiled face into the creases of my daddy's sweatshirt as he rubbed my back. It was a Sunday.
I wouldn't go to school the next day. I would stay home and tell my friends I wasn't feeling well. I would pace the house once my parents had left for work and find myself at our front window. I would stare out from within, my arms wrapped around my belly, and hold myself there like a question waiting to be answered.
Everything else becomes a blur. At some point, my mother told me that she had gone to Gina with what had happened and why I wouldn't be coming over any longer for my usual visits. My momma said that Gina hadn't been all that shocked or surprised at my news and that she understood my needing space from the family completely. Promptly after this discussion, the entire matter was dropped. Just like that, it was treated as though it had never happened until it became a memory like any other from childhood, washed out by time, with its corners faded and details melted into one another like raindrops that find each other on a pane of glass until there is nothing left but streaks and streaks of water.
There was one other instance where it all resurfaced not too long after it happened. My mother and I were talking about an upcoming party or event and she mentioned that Jason was going to be there. When I said that I didn't want to go and why, my momma replied, “That was a long time ago. He's a nice guy now, really.”And with that her face closed up like a cupboard.
After that, I wouldn't really go back to that time and what it meant to me until some years later when, as I lay beside the body of someone I cared for and felt his breath at my neck, a flash went off and I was at the window of our then apartment, crying and holding myself upwards. Then, without warning, Jason's face appeared and our eyes met the way they did that night, and I was eleven years old again and very, very afraid. I realized then –and when the flashes happened again as I kissed someone or when I lay in the dark in a bed next to a man's body –no matter how hard I tried, I could not find safety anywhere in the room or inside of myself. There was some part of that experience that needed to be revisited if I was going to find peace and carry it around with me from then on.
Jason hurt me. He took something from me: a sense of innocence and a way of looking at the world that comes to those with a trusting heart instead of some nagging, open wound. That is not to say that I didn't continue to love with all of my might because I did and do. But for years, I had to be drunk to be close to a man, to let go enough to enjoy myself, and even then I felt pressed for air and space. He did that to me.
And yet there was something else there, something other than a sixteen-year-old boy's fumbling in the dark that frightened me so. For the longest time I thought of myself gazing out of the window of our apartment when it all happened, something hard and round resting in the pit of my stomach, growing larger and larger the longer I stood there, until it reached my throat and lay there waiting for me to swallow and push it back down to begin all over again.
My parents, my momma and daddy, for the first time in my life had let me down. Maybe it was the stickiness of the situation with Jason being the son of such good friends of theirs. Maybe it was their wanting to keep it from spreading like fire amongst their small community of friends and co-workers. Maybe they thought they were protecting me from unnecessary attention or opinion or a world that would be harsh or less than understanding. But, in the end, I don't think it was any of those things that made my parents decide to have me pack that night away in some closet or drawer of my memory that I needn't use or go back to. I am certain that their concern for their friends was a factor, but that is not what made my momma look me in the eye that day and hush the pain she must have seen in my face with one swift slap of indifference. It is not what made my daddy never once mention or make it possible for me to mention what happened that winter day all those years ago. It is not what led them to leave me on my own to sort it through.
I think now that it must have been shame in some form or another. They did not blame me for what happened with Jason but, in part, they must have blamed themselves; and it was that blame and grief and frustration that caused them to drive the entire day from our home and our family as though it were an intruder. Or perhaps this is what I want to tell myself because the alternative is too much to hold and acknowledge as truth; that for some reason they chose to believe that it wasn't all that big of a deal. I don't know the answer to this, and I am still too afraid to ask. I do know, however, what their decision did to me. By never allowing me the space and the right to talk about what happened, they reinforced my own shame and embarrassment. They made me feel as though I had no right to feel sad or scared or angry because, in our home, we talked about everything that floated in and out of our lives that was of importance and so, if we weren't talking about this, then I, too, needed to let it go regardless of whether I was ready to or not, or if I even knew where to put it.
My momma and daddy made a mistake, and it is that realization that brought me to the window that day and brings me here now. I stood there at eleven years old and knew this and let it fill me up with the sour taste of otherwise. I tried to understand why they weren't there for me as crazed images of men in the dark spread their roots and rested their branches against my chest and mind and heart. Worse things have happened in this world, I know. The guilt I have for the pain I still feel over Jason's hands and lips at my skin is deep and overwhelming. I do not tell people about what happened that day for fear that they will think I am overreacting or being dramatic. I still had parents who loved me immensely. I still had a happy childhood and a healthy home. But then I realize that, in my life and in my world, this all matters tremendously. It was one more thing that shaped my being and made me who I am, and so it deserves and demands to be addressed just as anything does, and maybe then it would fade in its urgency. What becomes so difficult is that, despite this fact, it is not to be talked about with the two people closest to me in my life.
There are years now between me and my parents and Jason and that winter, and they sit like layers and layers of sand that refill whatever hole of discovery I try to make about what happened. I don't know that I have accepted that completely. But I will not let my momma and daddy read this, nor will I go to them in the near future and demand a discussion about why they turned from me in that moment, leaving me to draw conclusions that would burn deep and wide. I leave it for myself to turn over and over in my hands as though the feel of it will offer something to me that wasn't there before. As though it were no longer a window to stand before but one for me to open