you wait for most of your life to say that one thing, the one thing that you have lived your life to say; to put it into words, to say it as you write it, to free it, to be free of it. those words will come to you through other words, by the saying and listening and writing of words that have nothing and everything to do with what you have longed to say, since the first words came to you, into your life, into the world, that before, you had no words for.
and it is not the waiting that breaks you, it is the attempt to find the very words that will break the wait, the need, the silence of what has to be said; that the series of attempts you will make, are merely attempts, and nothing close, or even in the same room, of which you long to break out of: words that you haven’t gotten a hold of, to speak of that one thing. at least once.
if only you could speak of its silence, what would the words matter? if only the room in which the silence of all that it is, was distant enough as to not be said, or written, as a room that you can not, at the present moment, come even close to, in the attempts that you will make of your life, of that thing that refuses to be silent within you.
but there are words. never quite the right words, or word, it will not be clear until you speak or write that one thing onto the page, will you realize which words that one thing consisted of. to have said what you have struggled with words to say for so long, finally. waiting for that one time: to speak or write of that one thing that has driven you to speak and write for much of your life, of the one thing that you have failed, in attempting, to speak of.
at least once to all you can speak of it, to no longer fiddle with the accuracies of it, to bring forth that one thing with the very words that it had eluded, because of the inaccurate arrangement of the words before the words that trapped it, and freed you from it. for at least one moment, to say as you write that which you’ve needed to say, that which demanded to speak, within you, from you, of you speaking at last.

(It is at the end of it, as the pulse fades, hot water almost scalding at the back of my neck, that I think of him. I do not have his size, though that remains unclear. Everything appears much longer and taller and larger in memory than in reality. I have not seen, or heard from, him for almost two decades. I am sure that I do not possess the same duration, his potency to last. I further probe this comparison between my father and me, in the shower stall, my semen breaking up in the swirl of the drain, and I try to understand what evidence I have of this. What I pull from memory swells and encompasses everything that I am, and relieves me of what I am not.)
I am a child. It is night. (Was it? Or was it the normal time when my mother nestled me into bed, a kiss on the forehead, the house dark so that I would sleep easy?) I clearly see the clock, on a wall in the kitchen, across the living room, from my room. The kitchen light is the only light on in the house. My bedroom door is open. I cannot recall precisely the time, it is about eight. Staring at the clock, I listen, confused. What was I hearing? (It would not be until later, perhaps in junior high school, that I fully and truly understood. It is now that memory and knowledge melt, become clear to me, in this moment.)
My parents’ bedroom is next to my own, without doors, facing the living room. There are whispers. My mother does not want to, she is refusing. This much I understand. (Was it the same day that he had ripped the phone out of the wall? That he had struck her and her head snapped back, his thumb almost gouging out her eye? The same day that he had apologized to her as she checked the swelling in the bathroom mirror?) Through the wall: a repeating thud against it, she is whimpering, gentle squeaking of springs, (the sound of him bucking,) telling her to relax, whispering sweet nothings, ‘I love you’ mingled with her crying.
(This immediately calls forth: “I’m sorry,” he had said to her in front of the mirror, “I love you.” I cannot separate the two, the intonation in his voice is identical, though each was different.)
It is a long time. I do not exactly know for how long my mother has been crying, but the hands of the clock have moved a great distance. I hear a grunt and then, his body slumping onto the mattress, rolling over. (I can picture my mother stiff, face grimaced, eyes shut tightly, her tear-stained face hidden in the dark. But this is now, imagination, not then. I could not possibly imagine then. I cannot picture my father, or imagine his thoughts of what went on. However, I do understand custom. I am reminded of wedding vows that ask the groom, ‘..to honor and cherish..’ and the bride, ‘..to cherish and obey..’)
Then silence. (I assume that he had eventually fallen asleep when she finally moved again.)
Suddenly, through the wall: the quick feral movements of sheets unfurling, quick, sharp, desperate, her feet landing onto the bare floor, the sticky sound of skin on ceramic as she hurried out. I see her naked form cross the living room in the kitchen light, heading for the bathroom, darting, crouching. She disappears behind the kitchen wall. I hear the creaking of the shower knobs and the faucet hisses to life.
I think to myself (or was that later on, the glow of this memory trying to dawn upon me?):
mommy doesn’t want another me.
(Freud believed that by the age of three or four, children knew about the differences in the sexes. I always wondered if a child also knows about sex at such a tender age. What would become of that child if s/he did not know and suddenly found out through the rape of his/her mother?)
She is in the shower for a long time (I imagine now as I do the same, her scrubbing the same areas over and over). When she is done, she pads slowly into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. She stops. She looks toward my room. I close my eyes. Soon afterwards, I feel her lips on my forehead, her fingers brushing through my hair. I sleep.
(It is a number of days after my reminiscence in the shower that I confront her to test the accuracy of my memories. “Yes,” she says, “I do remember that, it was the same day that his thumb went in my eye, do you remember that?” I nod. Her face darkens, her deep brown eyes sharpen on my own. “But listen. He did not rape me. It’s not rape. Your father did not rape me. I didn’t want to because of what he did to me earlier. Sometimes, in a marriage, one does and the other doesn’t want to.” I am fearful of pushing the issue, to try and convince her otherwise. I feel as if she is lying.

I pushed her to start again, to tell it once more, all that she hadn’t told me that
night when we were in the car and it had been raining…
We had been on our way to Atlantic City when she had decided to tell me the truth. She had been lying for a number of months now, but it was plenty of time for her to have been naked on my couch in the blue living room where we had each other the most because she didn’t believe in bedrooms.
“They’re too idealistic,” she had said over and over. And it was so hard to convince her otherwise, but she had moved only as close as the shower. “And not a step more.”
But I still believed in her, in the turning of her back, it had an honest quality, and vulnerable. For most of my life there was a fear of anyone turning their back on me.
And it had been raining that night when I could barely see ahead of me, and she
had revealed much that I didn’t want to know, in the middle of nowhere, black and bumpy tarmac. Her words bouncing in my head and I couldn’t hold onto the wheel, the car kept sliding with each syllable. “Why are you telling me this? Why the fuck are you telling me this now?”
She had replied, “Oh, all right, I won’t say anything more. I just thought you had to know about it.”
Which left me to build pictures one atop the other, a carousal of positions.
Once we had gotten there, I had stared at her in the casino as if she had not one
reason left to be with me and I excused myself from the blackjack table and found the restroom, gurgling when I hit the stall. She waited for me outside and probably thought I had too much to drink but she didn’t leave it alone: “So, does this change anything?”
From that day I shied away from casinos and cloudy days and long rides. I wanted a tranquility in our affair, something domestic, it was still the routine of it: the sex and nagging, the arguments and foreplay, the friends and dinners. We had kept appearances even when apparently we still had sex, and her, with others also. But it had been quiet, between cracks.
…I had not brought it about again, her telling, until now. It might have been a twist in her neck, an inch of skin at a particular angle, just then, I don’t know. I grabbed hold of her from behind as she was washing dishes, “Tell me all of it, tell me all of it right now.”
And she laughed but she knew what I was talking about. When I came close enough to the point where she realized that I was about to break myself through the window, she spun around and faced me, a face so twisted with spit. “I haven’t told you anything in years and you want me to start this shit now?”
She had me right between stations, like a track, like rails across my teeth with her fingertip stabbed in my chest and I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t say anything. I had been pulling and for me to keep doing so when it was to her too fanciful an idea. As if there was a scab beneath the hem of what I was saying. Like it might have been a beautiful thing to see at one time.

her father ate her cherry
her mother beat her close to death
but she’d dream about sanctuary
up until her last breath.
her boyfriend raped her in a car
her daddy had nothing to say
but she only thinks about the scar
they’re cutting her open on her birthday.
her mother says, “hope you’ve learned your lesson.”
her friends gave her numbers to call
but she went and bought a Smith & Wesson
someone’s got to pay for it all.
but her tummy’s gotten rounder
and the priest tells her to keep it
she hates what’s eating inside her
and she can’t stop thinking that this is it
this is it
this is it-
-bang.

she reconfigures herself
just outside of my sight, as if i wasn’t
there or i would not notice that
her eye was no longer on me.
i could only shout
her name as if i was looking
when i was looking at her
but her eyes were closed
just like when i used to touch her,
but she knew it wasn’t
what she wanted
or so she said.
i had to laugh
because it was ridiculous
that she had me
there, when i couldn’t find her anymore
especially in my dreams, and now
she wasn’t dreaming.
maybe that’s why
the hurt was so big.

I had a dream of you
on me.
I was still
and you were not
nervous,
we planned on going
some where,
but somehow we ended
up, like this,
which was alright.
and when you were silent
I was
suddenly inside you
,your weight shifted
or it’s not exactly how
it happened,
but you remained, surprised
that I had it still
in me to want that
kind intimacy of your body.
you did not even breathe
because you didn’t want me
to leave.
I said, “I am,
I’m smiling..”
you replied,
“stop thinking so much,
you confuse the shit out of me..”
I woke up without you
anywhere,
I looked even underneath
the pillow and the phone
was ringing
it was you
getting married.

she has left
but still in this
room looking at me
wondering why I look
at her why she looks
at me.
her skin
the act the belief
in her desire
reached into
my mind
in me.
always to want
four brown walls
that room
with a mattress
without a frame
not asking for
the roundness
of her head
how perfect night
of the window
her leg lazy.
her voice,
“calling
to tell you
not
to come over”
ever again.
the lacking
the echo
the breathing
the sound
the gasps
we made
in between walls
of a room so small
in a short time ago.

that’s it
that’s all
i don’t want to hear anymore of it,
it ‘s over, she’s gone
don’t bring it up again,
she fucked me over
used me up
and that’s the story.
how could i chase her,
and make love to her
when she was a statue
to be admired and rubbed against
with no feeling?
do you understand what no feeling means?
nada zip cold & hard
she’d sit next to me
and we’d be talking
about two completely different things
and that was what she was,
a thing to be remembered
standing on your lawn
with her arms outstretched & breathing
while you drooled on yourself.
she’d only find it funny
when it was cruel
and i had to feel compressed
like i was under pressure to brighten her
by holding my dick in my hand
so that she could she laugh at it.

The needle was still in her arm where he put it. He said it was because of what had happened one time when I was wired. She dreamt of a very few things, one of which was her father, who had a high brow that she could never reach from his lap. Of course, soon enough, some idiot would bump into him who was all muscle and slicked hair, and he’d want to tear everyone’s heads off. She didn’t even know me and said, “So like, when are we going to fuck?”
The park was closed and the rest started to pitch up their tents. She told me, “It’s not your guilt, it’s her regret, and you don’t have the right to take it away from her.” They got used to a lot of things. I think I did it for her. He wanted to stay looking sick.
She believed that we were our own and only. I once said, “Keep your pussy to yourself, no thank you. I can’t do anything with it, and if I did do something that has never been done before to you it’s not the other night, it’s this: I fucked you over before I had the chance. I changed your life. Now go. Set off a trend.” “You’re not getting any less pregnant,” he said. She considered safe sex as the police horse entered the park. The bar at the corner of 7th and ave A looked exactly the same as the bar on 8th and ave B: same people, same layout, same jukebox, same bouncer asking for the same piece of id in the same way.
He didn’t ask for any of this. The needle was completely symbolic for something else. She had only touched it. I didn’t believe anyone. He remembered nothing of it except that he wasn’t where he started, and his clothes were wet, or missing, might not have been his own clothes, but he’s kept them since then.
Only this far to survive. He said, “everything has a way of resisting its own fracture.” I wanted to read as much as I could but I got bored. She told me that she actually preferred quickies, that it didn’t matter. He would scrape off his scabs because he didn’t want people to stop giving him change. Personally, I think it had to do with my mother sticking her tongue into my mouth when I was six.
He picked a pubic hair from his tongue and said, “I think you’re going bald dear.” They called it prostitution and she shot up in an alleyway. Some things are extremely vivid, but that’s expected. He would stare at her swollen belly as she would smoke one cigarette after another. I didn’t want anyone near me, I didn’t want to remember.
She let the needle stay as she leaned back. It was like walking on water. For days and days he fed upon himself. When I took off her clothes, I had one thing on my mind: “Fuck this bitch the right way for once.” She said that it had something to do with my father and intimacy.
Sometimes it smelled bad, or they would remember to smell it, the smell of it: a breeze would pass by and they know what it first smelled like before they got used to it. He tried to understand the jagged, suspended motions of the bag where he tied the end of it. Perhaps my one shining moment was when she was leaving. All those operations a failure, except the one that had scarred her womb, if I hadn’t been born my mother might have had other children by now. “Do you like it?” she said and that was the last thing on his mind.
“Look at her, man” he said, “she did this. I just helped her out when it got too hard on her own.” “I only wanted to live a little bit longer,” she would say. The suspense of total chaos should not be determined by ‘the thin blue line’. As she came onto him, he had the sudden urge to smash the glass across her mouth. As if I’ve grown sick of it, “I’m going to end up in shit so what’s the fucking point?”
Her mother had dated many men until she found the one that would eventually force her out. He would remember his father, but all he had now was the sensation that it was once hot, what he felt for his father’s abandonment, but it was tired now, and it could not be twisted for anything more. He told her that I write because there was a gun to my head. I was boning some other bitch. He said, “We have much too much time on our hands.”
She didn’t suck his cock, she pecked at it. I wouldn’t do it: I had yet a long way to go. She was falling apart, handing out pieces of herself in exchange for emptiness. “One more year”, he says, when deep inside his mind he feels that he will be doing this forever. She asked him to.

“And just what did you mean?”
She took a long time to answer, it was something she often asked herself. Unlike herself, the older woman wanted an answer right now.
“Well? Spit it out.”
“I didn’t mean the way I said it.”
“Oh no,” the older woman shook her head, “You meant it just the way you said it. Don’t bullshit me.”
The younger woman felt backed into a corner. Why did it always have to be like this? Why did she feel like a rat on the rails when the train comes in? She looked away from her fingers and stared at the older woman, “You don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand? Tell me. I’m asking you now to explain it all for me.” The older placed her hands on the younger woman’s face, holding it. Cold blue eyes piercing young brown ones. “I want to understand.”
On the spot and she couldn’t say a thing. It was right there, on the tip of her tongue, but the oncoming train in her head was barreling towards her and she flinched away. “No. Stop it, stop this.”
The older woman grabbed the younger’s chin and twisted it up. “No. You stop this. You cut this out right now.”
The younger woman slapped the older woman without thinking. Her mouth dropped open, the older woman’s face glowed red, four faint red leeches on her cheek. Cold blue eyes glistened as the older woman turned back towards her.
“I’m sorry… oh, I’m so sorry..”, the younger woman whispered, tears swelling out of her eyes and she hated them. She hated this, the position she was in. A part of her was screaming: ‘Fuck that bitch! She had no right to lay a hand on you. Who does she think she is, your mother?’
“I raised you. When they wanted you to leave, I held onto you, brought you into my home. Made you one of my own.” The older woman’s mouth was a tight line that cut her face into even halves, both pale and bony. Her chin jutted out as far as her nose. “Up until you met that boy, you called me momma.”
“Mom, I’m so sorry…” Through her mouth like spittle, full blown crying.
“Don’t you dare now.” The older woman closed her eyes, opened them, resolved, “You reminded me that I’m not, so don’t you twist it back around. It’s gone and I guess for you it never really was there.”
She could hear the brakes squealing, her heart loud in her chest, the younger woman was finding it hard to breathe. Everything that she had to say was caught somewhere between her throat and teeth, ready to burst out, but she couldn’t. The words always came out stupid and wobbly, stilted. All she wanted to do was hug the older woman, to set things right. She didn’t want what was happening now. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not like this.
“So go. You go and do whatever you think is right for you. I won’t have anymore say in it.” The older woman turned her back and walked away, shutting off the light in the hall.
“No.” The younger woman was shaking. There was some finality to all this that terrified her. A knowing that if she didn’t somehow rectify all this, she would always be as she was now: in the dark with only a vague memory of where everything should be, being in between things, rooms, she couldn’t see. But it was too late, she could hear the older woman close the door to her bedroom, the gentle turn of the lock.
As much as she wanted to run to that door and bang on it, as much as she wanted to lean against the wall and slide down its surface, curling into a question mark of flesh and tears, another part of her dried her eyes, stiffened. It filled her with a silence that was solid and real and sturdy. ‘Forget it, it’s done, you’re on your own’. She turned towards her room, the echoes of the conversation lingering in the walls, haunting her as well as strengthening her every step. In her room, she didn’t turn on the light. She sat on the corner on the bed, wringing her hands, shuddering and catching herself. ‘Forget it.’
She lied down, staring into the dark. Rolling over she picked up the phone and dialed his beeper. She left her number and tacked on a 9-1-1. She hung up and waited. The phone rang a minute later.
“Hey, what happened?”
She couldn’t bring it right out, still sniffling. “Nothing. Had a huge fight with my mom.”
“About me again?”
“No, not really.” She tried to make light of it, “It’s not always about you.”
Static on the line, car horns close, swish of tires in the rain, him just listening, waiting.
She asked, “Where are you anyway?”
“I’m on..,” paused, probably looking about for a street sign, “Thirty seventh and sixth.”
“Are you going home tonight?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He sounded shaky, uncomfortable. Not the kind of thing he wanted to get into. “Did you tell her?”
Immediately she wanted to hang up. “We didn’t even get to it.”
“Are going you to at any time in the near future?”
“You still haven’t told me if you want me to have it or not.”
“It’s not my body.”
“It’s our baby.” She felt like screaming it. Not just into the phone, but to the world. Felt like running through the hall, into the streets, right back to the Group Home for Girls, stand at the top of the steps and shout: ‘I’m a fuck up just like the rest of you..’
“What do you want me to say? That I can’t handle it? Or that I can’t wait, that I’ll make everything okay?”
She yelled, “Yes! That’s exactly what I want you to say! I want you to tell me that everything is going to be okay and that you’ll take care of it!” She was crying again and didn’t try to stop it. “I want you to tell me ‘Fuck you bitch, it ain’t mine’, or, or, ‘Pregnant? Best kill that shit’! Just something!” She felt as if she was choking, stopped herself. She then whispered, “Something so I’d know what to do…”
Engines purred, probably at a red light, the sound of him feeding coins into the pay phone, a car door opening, him not talking, just listening.
She sighed. “I’m sorry..” Stared up at where her ceiling would be. “I’m out to just turn everybody off today..”
She heard cars taking off, the light changed, him at the corner, imagined hundreds of cabs passing a few feet away from him. Sniffled, laughed, maybe he walked away from the phone. Imagined the receiver dangling by a wire as he went and hailed a cab, or grabbed a hot dog. “Are you there?”
Long silence, maybe a part of him did leave and she would never see it again, the rest of him now wondering what to say.
“I’m here,” he said and added slowly, the only thing he could say and mean, “I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.”
“I didn’t mean-” and she stopped, remembered the older woman turning off the light in the hallway.
“Don’t.” He said. “Don’t ever take anything back. You can’t. Don’t live in that. You’d be lying to yourself.”
Rubbing her palm against her forehead, eyes closed, held onto some of the words before they left her. “It comes out all fucked up..”
“It’s okay,” repeated it in a whisper with the cars somewhere behind him, “…s’okay.”
She opened her eyes, looked at the doorway. Everything that had warmed up in her, chilled and wanted to crawl. Cold blue eyes, head leaning on the door frame, listening.
The younger woman shot up, sitting straight. “I have to go.”
“Did I say something-”
“No.” Careful, her eyes pinned on the older woman, “My mom just walked into the room.”
“Shit..” Car horn blaring behind him. “Did she catch anything?”
“I don’t know.” She replied.
“I know,” the older woman’s lower lip trembled, she looked at the floor, hand to her chin. Looked back up and sighed. “…I know.”
“She knows.”
“Talk to her. No matter what happened before, she’s your mother. Talk to her.”
“I will.” she said, afraid, looking down, whispered good-bye and hung up. Slowly, looking up at the older woman again, cold blue eyes softer now, wet. The younger woman’s hands went first to her stomach, felt awkward, shifted them onto her lap.
Her back straight, steps sure, but slow and soft, the older woman came into the room. She didn’t want to scare her daughter away. Not now more than ever.